Romans

The Rhodian deputies said, “You Romans profess to believe that your wars are successful, because they are just:

” Indeed the form which was prescribed for the Roman heralds to use in declarations of war, bears exactly the same import.

And with no less propriety the Romans asked the Galli Senones if it were right to demand lands already possessed, and to threaten to take them by force.

For most of them are Romans, and who would lay hands on these?

For if your faith from so long a time, and goodwill toward their people, and partnership in every fortune, cannot make your constitution secure — nor Mithridates being overthrown, nor Antiochus, nor the rule of the sea handed over through many dangers and toils, nor the oaths of friendship from so many years ago, nor the monuments lying beside Zeus himself until now, nor the power that shared dang …

For do not think the Romans so dull and ignorant as to choose nothing of what is under them to be free and noble, but to wish rather to rule over slaves.

We never know the Romans except as subject to one of the strongest of central governments, which armed the law courts with the force at its command.

It is impossible to determine how much new law there was in the Laws of Solon, or in the Twelve Tables of Rome, or in the Laws of Alfred and Canute, or in the Salic Law which is the oldest of the so-called Leges Barbarorum, but in all probability the quantity was extremely small.

The enormous importation of slaves into the central territories of the Roman Commonwealth, and the wholesale degradation of the free cultivating communities of Western Europe into assemblages of villeins, seem to be expedients of the same nature as restrictions on the alienation of the ox and on its consumption for food, and to have been alike suggested by the same imperious necessity of procuring …

From these corruptions the Romans were protected by their code.

The rules of Intestate Succession, which the Romans must at this period have practised, account, I think—and more than account—for that vehement distaste for an Intestacy to which Roman society during so many ages remained constant.

I regard, therefore, the Roman horror of Intestacy as a monument of a very early conflict between ancient law and slowly changing ancient sentiment on the subject of the Family.

Fustel de Coulanges was the first modern writer to bring into full light, in his brilliant book ‘La Cité Antique,’ the hitherto little observed importance of the private or family worship of the Greeks and Romans.

On the other hand, the comparatively scanty Roman evidence concerning the sacra privata would seem to show that they dwindled in importance and popular respect.

We know in fact that at Rome a Slave could perform the family sacrifices on his master’s death;

These truths were known to the Roman legislators, amongst whom, as I have already observed, slaves, only, who were not considered as citizens, were tortured.

and which the Romans, in many respects barbarous, and whose savage virtue has been too much admired, reserved for the slaves alone.

Among the Romans, we see that many, accused of very great crimes, and afterwards declared innocent, were respected by the people, and honoured with employments in the state.

As for Thamūd, it is mentioned repeatedly in the books of the Greeks and the Romans;

and what non-Arabs have related of their ancient condition in the books of the Greeks and the Romans, to say nothing of the Torah;

the emperor of the Romans whom Hārūn al-Rashīd made war upon is called by some historians Yaʻfūr, by others Naʻfūr, and by others Naqfūr, which is the correct form, since his Roman name is nicephorus.

But it is by superstition that we are reckoned a third race, not by nation, so that there are Romans, Jews, and then Christians.

But since all the substitution is now not of the philosophers nor of the poets nor of the peoples, by whom it was handed down, but of the dominant Romans, by whom it was seized, by whom it built up authority for itself, another breadth of human error must now be entered by us — nay, a forest is to be cut down, which on every side, from the conceived seeds of superstitions, has overshadowed the boyhood of vice.

you demand from heaven I know not what shades, incorporeal, lifeless, and names from things, and you sanction them, dividing the whole state of man among single powers, even from the very conception in the womb:

when the people has been bereft of a just king, 'a longing holds their hearts for long,' as Ennius says, 'after the death of the best of kings';

"Then you see also this—of which, as my discourse goes on, I think I shall say more—that, Tarquinius expelled, the people exulted with a certain wondrous arrogance of liberty;

But as that man who sails, when the sea suddenly begins to grow rough, and that sick man, when his disease grows heavy, implore the help of one—so our people in peace and at home commands and threatens its very magistrates, refuses, appeals, calls them to account;

The Romans long resisted the avarice of the senate, vainly depended upon elective tribunes to abolish frauds in which they participated, and at length fled from the avarice of many, to the avarice of one.

The senate of Rome was converted into a despicable body of men by uniting legislation and patronage.

and these, instead of being units like those of Lacedemon, are above ten times as numerous as were the sovereign conscript fathers of Rome.

Yet, since the mention of the Roman name in particular has come up, I will not omit the encounter to which that presumption invites — of those who say that the Romans, for the desert of their most diligent religiosity, have been raised to such a height of greatness as to have seized the world, and that the gods are so truly gods that those flourish beyond the rest who do their service beyond the rest.

We injure the Romans, and are not held to be Romans, because we do not worship the god of the Romans.

And yet the Romans dedicated not so much honour to the fates that delivered Carthage to them, against the destiny and the vow of Juno, as to that most prostituted she-wolf Larentina.

[22] 6) The Epistle of Saint Būlus to the Romans 1:

[22] 8) The Epistle of Saint Būlus to the Romans 2:

and everywhere proclaiming that I have become unworthy of the empire of the Romans.

Indeed, since by my labours, toils, and perils in public life I think I have not deserted the post in which the Roman people stationed me, I surely owe it, so far as I am able, to labour at this too:

For who is so hostile, almost, to the very name of Rome as to scorn or reject the Medea of Ennius or the Antiopa of Pacuvius, on the ground that, though he delights in the same plays of Euripides, he hates Latin letters?

In many respects, Brutus, I am wont to admire the talents and virtues of our countrymen, but most of all in those studies which, sought very late, they carried over into this state from Greece.

For since they knew the teaching and institutions of Pythagoras, and had received from their ancestors the equity and wisdom of that king, but were ignorant of the ages and times on account of antiquity, they believed that he who excelled in wisdom had been a hearer of Pythagoras.

Who, while they committed other things to writing — some the civil law, some their own speeches, some the monuments of their ancestors — pursued this most ample of all the arts, the discipline of living well, by their life rather than by their writings.

and the Romans sacrifice to Heracles the Fly-averter, and to Fever and to Fear, whom they too enroll among the company of Heracles.

And the Romans, ascribing their greatest successes to Fortune, and reckoning her the greatest goddess, carried her into the privy and dedicated her there, assigning the latrine to the goddess as a fitting temple.

And among the Romans the things done over wills have their order — those scales and asses and acts of redemption and the touchings of the ears that are done for justice' sake — some that they may be done justly, some for the apportioning of the honour, and one that the bystander, as though some weight were laid upon him, may stand and hear and take the rank of a witness.

Again, as we read in Tacitus, the Germans accused the Romans of ‘preventing all intercourse between them and of closing up to them the rivers and roads, and almost the very air of heaven’.

And have not the Romans described for us in the most exact way the greater part of Ceylon?

Neither can the Portuguese by any possible means claim to have discovered India, a country which was famous centuries and centuries ago!

What appears to be the case is that it was among the effects of natural heresy (zandaqah) that the common people of the Latins imagined that a man has two satans, and this so that they might settle the question of good and evil as they pleased:

The people in Rome used to worship the personal satans and the local satans:

Then, when the dawn of the second and third centuries broke and the age of Arab-Islamic civilisation came, the Muslims turned their resolve to the translation of the books of philosophy which the advanced nations had composed, such as the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians and the Indians;

Come, give to those bodies, to those minds that know nothing of dainties, luxury, and riches, give them reason, give them discipline—to say nothing more, we shall certainly need to recall the Roman character.

any such variation was to early Roman ears not only futile but almost blasphemous.

As the Romans put it, imperitia culpae adnumeratur.

In whom have the nations believed — the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, and those who dwell in Mesopotamia, Armenia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and those who inhabit Pontus and Asia and Pamphylia, those who reside in Egypt, and those who inhabit the region of Africa beyond Cyrene, Romans and resident foreigners, and then the Jews in Jerusalem, and the other nations — as now the various tribes of the …