Thread by @danielcjonas

Volume III. Caesar and Christ

Covering the interwoven histories of Rome & Christianity up until the time of Constantine, it's a narrative masterpiece. The brainpower needed to construct such a synthesis and with such prose, is commendable.

amazon.com/Caesar-Christ-…

2/ The rise of the plebs.

An underlying current of Rome's lasting achievements is their contribution to the legal system.

The Twelve Tables consolidated Rome's old customary law into written form and presented in them in Forum for all to see.

Here was the situation before:

3/ A friendly reminder to all students of history

"No nation is ever defeated in its textbooks."

4/ Carthage, from trading post to an empire.

In the 3rd century BC, Carthage brought in twenty times the annual revenue of Athens at her peak! 👀

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_C…

5/ Ever wonder why the ring is placed on the fourth finger of the left hand?

The Romans believed that there was a nerve that ran from that finger to the heart ❣️

6/ Family & the home, not war, was the symbol of Roman society.

"War was the most dramatic feature of a Roman’s life, but it did not play so absorbing a role as in the pages of Rome’s historians. Perhaps even more than with us his existence centered about his family & his home."

7/ Cato, new wealth, & the exploitation of the Roman Senate

“He who steals from a citizen,” said Cato, “ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who steals from the community ends them in purple and gold.”

8/ The coming of philosophy 🌊

"This is the central stream in the history of European civilization; all other currents are tributaries. “It was no little brook that flowed from Greece into our city,” said Cicero, “but a mighty river of culture and learning.”"

9/ Lucretius, speaking over 2,000 yrs ago on restlessness, is no less true today.

"There is a weight on their minds, and a mountain of misery lies on their hearts...For each, not knowing what he wants, seeks always to change his place, as if he could drop his burden."

10/ Durant's finest words on Lucretius & his passion for nature's beauty 🌱

"he was stirred by the forms and sounds, odors and savors, of things; felt the silences of secret haunts, the quiet falling of the night, the lazy waking of the day."

11/ Cicero's beautiful style

"His ideas are those of the upper classes, but his style aims to reach the people; for them he labors to be clear, toils to make his truisms thrilling, and salts abstractions with anecdote and wit."

12/ The suave, seductive, & royal Cleopatra

"With these qualities went an Oriental sensuality, an impetuous brutality that dealt out suffering and death, and a political ambition that dreamed of empire and honored no code but success."

13/ 🔄

"Rome had completed the fatal cycle known to Plato and to us: monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchic exploitation, democracy, revolutionary chaos, dictatorship. Once more, in the great systole and diastole of history, an age of freedom ended and an age of discipline began.

14/ Silence speaks louder...

"Augustus was so grateful for the caution that he begged Athenodorus to stay another year, saying, “No risk attends the reward that silence brings.”"

15/ Heir to Caesar at the age of 18 & ruler of the world at 31, Augustus's advice remained notably practical.

"He advised young men to enter soon upon an active career, so that the ideas they had learned from books might be tempered by the experience and necessities of life."

16/ The Augustan stimulus, where verse & wealth poured into Rome

"A quiet life does not make great ideas or great men; but the compulsions of crisis, the imperatives of survival, weed out dead things by the roots and quicken the growth of new ideas and ways."

17/ The gentle & lovely Virgil

"But thou, O Roman, must the peoples rule.
Thine arts shall be to teach the ways of peace,
To spare the humbled, and throw down the proud."

18/ 😢

“the nightingale mourning beneath the poplar’s shade the loss of her young ones, whom some hard plowman has seen and torn unfledged from their nest; all night long she cries, and perched on a spray, renews her pitiful song, filling the woods with her sad lament.”

19/ Horace & the glorification of our past

"“praiser of times past”—that “if some god were for taking you back to those days you would refuse every time”; the chief charm of the past is that we know we need not live it again."

20/ Horace & the pleasures of the countryside

"“My stream of pure water, my few acres of woodland, my sure trust in a crop of corn, bring me more blessing than the lot of the dazzling lord of fertile Africa.”"

& these lines 🌱

21/ Horace & his timeless advice on how to write

"beware of laboring like a mountain and producing a mouse."

"he who has mingled the useful with the pleasant wins every vote”

"Be as brief as clarity allows"

@david_perell feel free to shamelessly steal 😇

22/ Domitian - jealousy, conspiracy, & the roots of his eventual demise

"He might have been happier had not Titus been his brother; but only the noblest spirits can bear with equanimity the success of their friends."

23/ Silver Age (18-133) - a time of literary achievement 2nd only to the cultural excellence of the Augustan age

"Tradition is the voice of time, and time is the medium of selection; a cautious mind will respect their verdict, for only youth knows better than twenty centuries."

24/ Durant's philosophical eloquence

"The first lesson of philosophy is that we cannot be wise about everything. We are fragments in infinity and moments in eternity; for such forked atoms to describe the universe, or the Supreme Being, must make the planets tremble with mirth."

25/ Can anyone synthesize & articulate philosophical arguments better than Durant?

"Philosophy is the science of wisdom, and wisdom is the art of living. Happiness is the goal, but virtue, not pleasure, is the road."

26/ Seneca, Stoicism, & trust in reason

27/ Seneca, the most lovable hypocrite in history

"There are few original ideas in him; but that may be forgiven, for in philosophy all truth is old, and only error is original."

28/ Pliny the Elder, author of 37 books on natural history & numerous other treatises, lawyer, administrator, traveler, naval commander.

Dare I say that he had the horsepower necessary to produce with the likes of Churchill?

This anecdote is spectacular.

29/ The excellent counsel of Rome's 1st professor of rhetoric, Quintilian - "Clearness is the first essential":

"Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute. . . ."

30/ De Re Rustica (AD 65) by Junius Columella, Rome's classic work on agriculture:

"Columella loved the soil, and felt that the physical culture of the earth is saner than the literary culture of the town; farming “is a blood relative of wisdom” (consanguinea sapientiae)."

31/ "For a generation the artists of Rome carved fountains, tombstones, arches, and altars with a refinement of feeling, a precision of execution, a quiet dignity of form, a measure of modeling and perspective, that rank Roman reliefs among the masterpieces of the world’s art."

32/ According to Durant 🧐

"The Colosseum is not a beautiful building, and its very immensity reveals a certain coarseness, as well as grandeur, in the Roman character. . . The Romans built like giants; it would have been too much to ask that they should finish like jewelers."

33/ Tombstones & the erosion of Rome's ancient faith

"and a somber Lucretian writes of the buried flesh:

“The elements out of which he was formed take possession of their own again. Life is only lent to man; he cannot keep it forever. By his death he pays his debt to Nature.”"

34/ The essence & lasting spirit of Rome, law. At it's heart, was the law of persons:

"finally it [the word persona] came to mean the man himself—as if to say that we can never know a man, but only the parts he plays, the mask or masks that he wears.

35/ Rome's legal heritage

"It was natural that the Romans should create the greatest system of law in history: they loved order and had the means to enforce it; upon the chaos of a hundred diverse nations they laid an imperfect but sublime authority and peace."

36/ Hadrian, the brilliant builder

"He had a hundred edifices repaired or restored and inscribed his name on none of them. Rome in all quarters benefited from his rare union of wisdom with power. Si jeunesse savait et vieillesse pouvait was in him a riddle solved."

37/ His reconstruction of the magnificent Pantheon 🏛️

& little did you know:

"The ceiling of the portico was of bronze plates so thick that when they were removed by Pope Urban VIII they sufficed to cast 110 cannon and to form the baldachin over the high altar in St. Peter’s."

38/ Philosopher king

“If, a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius."

39/ A stoic, before he was a man

"Never was a boy so persistently educated."

"But seventeen tutors in childhood are a heavy handicap. Four grammarians, four rhetors, one jurist, and eight philosophers divided his soul among them."

40/ Meditations

"This glimpse of a frail and fallible saint, pondering the problems of morality and destiny while leading a great army in a conflict on which the fate of the Empire turned, is one of the most intimate pictures that time has preserved of its great men."

41/ The brilliant historian Tacitus, "accuser of times past, and excoriated a century with his pen."

42/ Splendor & concise rapidity of Tacitus's style ✍️

"more economical of words than of men, this scorn of the props of syntax, this passion of feeling and clearness of visualization, this tang of a novel vocabulary and murderous pungency of unhackneyed phrase..."

43/ The satirical & grim, Juvenal

"Our forefathers complained, we complain, and our descendants will complain, that morals are corrupt, that wickedness holds sway, that men are sinking deeper and deeper into sinfulness, that the condition of mankind is going from bad to worse.”

44/ Pliny, the graceful Roman gentleman, & his love for his homes 🌱

"There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing. He loves his gardens, and the mountain scenery behind them; he did not have to wait for Rousseau to make him enjoy nature."