Theodor Mommsen Quotes

For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna, the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there on the surface.

We have no information, not even a tradition, concerning the first migration of the human race into Italy. It was the universal belief of antiquity that in Italy, as well as elsewhere, the first population had sprung from the soil.

If it was in the interest of Rome to extend her conquests towards the East, and to enter on the inheritance of Alexander the Great there in all its extent, the circumstances were never more favourable for doing so than in the year 716.

History has a Nemesis for every sin.

When Sulla died in the year 676, the oligarchy which he had restored ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state; but, as it had been established by force, it still needed force to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes.

In the Roman commonwealth, even on the conversion of the monarchy into a republic, the old was as far as possible retained.

The Phoenicians are entitled to be commemorated in history by the side of the Hellenic and Latin nations; but their case affords a fresh proof, and perhaps the strongest proof of all, that the development of national energies in antiquity was of a one-sided character.

The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians.

Individual tribes or, in other words, races or stocks, are the constituent elements of the earliest history.

Without passion, there is no genius.

The battle of Varus is an enigma, not in a military but in a political point of view - not in its course, but in its consequences.

An independent state does not pay too dear a price for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them; a state which has lost its independence may find at least some compensation in the fact that its protector procures for it peace with its neighbours.

When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians.

If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted.

The order of things established by the Romans in Libya rested in substance on a balance of power between the Nomad kingdom of Massinissa and the city of Carthage.

The ancient boundary of Italy on the north was not the Alps but the Apennines.

To acquire possession of Latium was of the most decisive importance to Etruria, which was separated by the Latins alone from the Volscian towns that were dependent on it and from its possessions in Campania.

The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having ever been in public use under the Arsacids.

Little do we find any Phoenician architecture or plastic art at all comparable even to those of Italy, to say nothing of the lands where art was native.

Sertorius was far from being strong enough to renew the gigantic enterprise of Hannibal. He was lost if he left Spain, where all his successes were bound up with the peculiarities of the country and the people; and even there, he was more and more compelled to renounce the offensive.

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd.

During the most flourishing times of Sidon and Tyre, the land of the Phoenicians was a perpetual apple of contention between the powers that ruled on the Euphrates and on the Nile, and was subject sometimes to the Assyrians, sometimes to the Egyptians.