Just finished this. Keenly anticipating the third in this trilogy. Looking forward to getting my hands on IMPERIUM.
"What is great oratory, after all, except the distillation of emotion into exact words?"A chilling account of the fall of Republican Rome. Such a pity Cicero cannot be interviewed on the Today Programme and asked if he would have done anything differently.
"But sometimes in politics a great weakness can be turned into a strength."
"But I fear there is in all men who achieve their life's ambition only a narrow line between dignity and vanity, confidence and delusion, glory and self-destruction."
" ... in politics, how things look is often more important than what they are."
"My worldly, meretricious friendships may make a fine show in public, but in the home they are barren things. My house is crammed of a morning, I go down to the forum surrounded by droves of friends, but in all the crowds I cannot find one person with whom I can exchange an unguarded joke or let out a private sigh." Cicero
" ... you cannot oppose illegality by illegality and hope to command respect. Hard times lie ahead, gentlemen, and although you may not feel you need Rome any more, Rome has need of you. Preserve yourselves for the battles yet to come rather than sacrificing yourselves uselessly in one that is already lost." Cicero
"I did not know where to begin. There were so many errors: they stretched back like islands behind us, an archipelago of folly. Or perhaps 'errors' was the wrong word. Perhaps it was more accurate to call them consequences: the ineluctable consequences of a deed done by a great man for honourable motives - is that not, after all, how the Greeks define tragedy?"
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