Sublime

“But by our deaths here with honor, in the face of these insuperable odds, we transform vanquishment into victory. With our lives we sow courage in the hearts of our allies and the brothers of our armies left behind. They are the ones who will ultimately produce victory, not us. It was never in the stars for us.

When a series of revolutions had produced an equality among men, and there was no longer occasion to fight for principles and rights, men began to make war for interests.

It was only when Scipio Aemilianus had cut the town off from the sea, and so from its access to supplies, that after two years of siege operations the Romans managed to starve the enemy into submission and storm the place.

The military impact of Rome by the end of the fourth century BCE was so great that Livy felt it worthwhile to compare Roman prowess with that of the world-conquering Alexander the Great, who between 334 and 323 BCE had led his Macedonian army on a spree of conquest from Greece to India. Livy wondered who would have won, the Romans or the Macedonian

Unlike Pericles, Octavian never tried to forge, from contingent events, causal chains.33 Instead he seized opportunities while retaining objectives. He saw next steps where Antony stumbled. Octavian stuck to his compass heading while avoiding swamps: it’s almost as if Antony sought out swamps, sank into them, and then got bored with them.

Signs of life in the towns, villas and forts of late Roman Britain are increasingly visible to archaeologists, despite a paucity of convincingly dated material. But describing the lives of the bulk of fifth-century Britons is by no means straightforward; and the picture is complicated by the arrival, in the second quarter of that most obscure centu