Why Rome Fell
Edward Lucas White
Number of quotes: 28
Book ID: 343 Page: 170
Section: 3A4C,4B
The Tatars under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane could win battles and campaigns, and did. They expressed their joy after victories by pinioning prisoners, burying them up to the neck, and then bashing out their brains by bowling stone balls or spheroidal rocks at these living ninepins. Also they erected huge cairns of newly severed heads of sculls.The Assyrians won battles and campaigns. Their delight was to peg out their warrior prisoners, stripped naked and face down, each ankle and wrist lashed to a tent pin, and when they had them fast and helpless, to split their skins down the spine from nape to crotch and flay them at leisure, as hunters with us take the pelt off a dead deer. A strong man flayed, except head, hands, and feet, might be two days and nights before death released him ….
….
The Carthaginians won battles and campaigns and gloated at rows of stakes or crosses, each supporting an impaled or crucified prisoner.
There never existed conquerors more efficient than the Turks from 1365 to 1665. They won battle after battle, campaign after campaign, war after war. Resistance they overwhelmed. All surviving non-Mohammedan inhabitants of subjugated regions they, as had the Saracens before them, dubbed “ra’iyah,” which Arabic word means “flock,” “herd,” “human cattle”; and they reduced them to the condition of peasant serfs.
Quote ID: 7937
Time Periods: 07
Book ID: 343 Page: 171
Section: 3A4C,4B
Far otherwise was it with the Romans. After genuine submission they treated subject populations not merely fairly, but with sedulous care for their material and social welfare.….
Probably no soldiery on earth was ever so acutely dreaded by adversaries as were the Romans. They did not paint their faces, nor stick feathers in their hair, nor jump up and down and whoop, nor chant what they meant to do with their victims.
….
Campaigning was a nuisance to be gotten through with so as to get back home. Winning battles was the visible means of getting back home. Finding and killing enemies was their vocation. When they found the enemy they went out to kill with the impersonal efficiency of a modern mowing machine harvesting alfalfa.
Quote ID: 7938
Time Periods: 07
Book ID: 343 Page: 172/173
Section: 3A2A,3A4C,4B
The Romans, not only the Senators and nobles, but the commonalty, the townsfolk, the rustics, the legionaries, had an hereditary inborn feeling that there were universal principles of equity applicable to all men of all races. They dealt with beaten foemen according to their innate instincts of equity and, in general, won the respect and esteem of subject peoples everywhere at all periods of their domination.Virgil, in setting forth the high destiny of Romans in line 853 of the Sixth Book of the Ǣneid, uses the words, “Parcere subjectis et debellare superbis” (To spare those made subjects and to war down the haughty”).
….
Any people felt to be potentially dangerous to the Roman Commonwealth and its Empire was ruthlessly annihilated.
….
But such cases were rare and few in comparison with the many instances of Roman clemency.
…conquered populations mostly developed a heartfelt and abiding loyalty to the Roman Commonwealth.
….
Creating such a state of mind among populations long their foemen, beaten only after hard fighting, and instilling it into them and their descendants, was perhaps Rome’s greatest achievement.
Quote ID: 7939
Time Periods: 07
Book ID: 343 Page: 174/175
Section: 4B
Government did not exist in Spain before the Romans introduced it. There was nothing there before them except internecine strife. And never, since the Roman power collapsed, has the Iberian Peninsula been so populous, and well governed as it was under Roman rule.Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine, and the other lands which Rome wrested from the descendants of Alexander’s successors were never, while independent communities or while kingdoms under Greek dynasties, as prosperous, populous, happy, and well governed as they became under the Romans, especially from 27 B.C. to A.D. 193. Nor have they ever been as well governed since.
Quote ID: 7940
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 343 Page: 175
Section: 3A1,4B
In 133 B.C. Attalus III, King of Pergamum in western Asia Minor, died, leaving no heirs. He bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman Commonwealth on the ground that his people would be better off as subjects of Rome than if independent, and were certain to be better governed than they could hope to be by any native of his realm.Thirty-seven years later, in 96 B.C., Ptolemy Apion. King of Cyrene in north Africa, on the coast of the Mediterranean west of Egypt, made a will of like tenure.
And in 74 B.C., fifty-nine years after the death of Attalus and twenty-two after the death of Ptolemy Apion, Nicomedes Philopator, King of Bithynia in northwestern Asia Minor, did precisely what Attalus and Ptolemy had done, and for like reasons.
Quote ID: 7941
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 343 Page: 175/176
Section: 3A1,4B
In fact, in general, A Roman provincial governor was a marvel and prodigy to alien races and peoples. They were used to government by caprice of an individual despot or of the leaders of a dominant oligarchy. A Roman proconsul or proprætor was a novelty, was a ruler of a kind of which they could not have conceived, was a portent.
Quote ID: 7942
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 343 Page: 177
Section: 3A1,4B
Throughout the more than three and a quarter centuries between A.D. 43 and A.D. 375 the Romans maintained peace and created and conserved prosperity from the Euphrates to Anglesea, from the Rhine, Danube, and Caucasus to the Cataracts of the Nile.They had brought about peace over most of this vast expanse of territory as early as 61 B.C. and they protected much of it until as late as A.D. 442, when the Vandal’s war fleet swept the Mediterranean and ended maritime traffic.
Quote ID: 7943
Time Periods: 01234
Book ID: 343 Page: 180
Section: 4B
In some form, every city, every town, and many districts and villages had genuine local self-government, and there existed in the Empire at its acme an amazing diversity of local religious cults, customs, usages, and laws, with which the Romans never interfered or thought of interfering. They respected and even deferred to local religious peculiarities and national traditions….
Quote ID: 7944
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 343 Page: 181
Section: 3A1,4B
…much has been written about the despotism of the Roman Emperors and little about the genuine freedom of most of their subjects.During the six hundred years of its domination, the Roman Senate enacted fewer than two hundred laws affecting personal conduct and behavior.
Quote ID: 7945
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 343 Page: 181/182
Section: 4B
Mating was a matter largely ignored by the government and mostly left to the individuals or families concerned.Everyone was free to worship according to any racial tradition, national custom, family habit, just as each had been brought up, following the usages of any cult.
Any inhabitant of any part of the Empire might go anywhere, and anywhere had the right to buy and sell, lease or buy a house or piece of land or estate, settle, and marry.
Persons who aroused no suspicion of being dangerous to the government were never interfered with if they did not misbehave according to local expectations as to conduct.
Quote ID: 7946
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 343 Page: 191
Section: 3A1
…the preponderant factor among those which brought about Rome’s progress, invincibility, grandeur, and supremacy was the religion of the Romans and its relation to their scheme of government and of their government to their religion. That was what made the Romans’ miraculous achievements possible and actual.
Quote ID: 7948
Time Periods: 012347
Book ID: 343 Page: 202
Section: 4B
The Romans, from the earliest times until the forcible suppression of paganism, thought and spoke of the “genius loci,” the spirit of a place….….
The words “genius loci” are found in many Latin inscriptions of all periods. Native tablets, altars, shrines, and chapels were dedicated “genio hujus loci” (“to the genius of this place”).
….
…the genius of a place was sometimes depicted in stone carvings and bas-reliefs’ in the semblance of a serpent.
Quote ID: 7949
Time Periods: 01234
Book ID: 343 Page: 203
Section: 4B
…for any polytheistic city, or other organized community, the favor of its gods was its most valued asset, and that the definition of a Greek city-state, “A religious and military confraternity encamped round a church,” applied more or less aptly to any city-state of the Mediterranean world….
Quote ID: 7950
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 343 Page: 205/206
Section: 4B
…no polytheistic city-state, least of all Rome, ever had any inkling of the possibility of government apart from religion or of religion apart from government.For all of them, for the Romans, for Rome, religion was government and government was religion.
Quote ID: 7951
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 343 Page: 219
Section: 2B2
The Romans were by nature domineering and overbearing, bluff, blunt, direct, downright and forthright, not in any way considerate of the feelings of aliens and notably devoid of tact and finesse; yet, as overlords, they had amazingly sound governmental intuitions. Instinctively, after conquest, subjugation, or negotiations, they did everything possible to reconcile to their domination, suzerainty, or supremacy their allies and vassals, and inhabitants of their municipia, præfectures, colonies, and provinces.One of the most efficient means was through the identification of the ancestral local gods of subjected populations with the gods of Rome.
Quote ID: 7952
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 343 Page: 220
Section: 2B2
At some stage of their contact with the Etruscans the Romans came to regard their deities as counterparts of or identical with their own….….
Even in dealing with their dreaded and implacable foes, the Carthaginians, the Romans thought they discerned analogies between their gods and their own….
….
It came to be assumed that the gods of Greece and of Rome were the same and the identification came to be universally recognized and universally accepted. This created a religious atmosphere, diffused over the entire Mediterranean world as early as 170 B.C., constituting the spiritual background of all social and political activities therein for more than five and a half centuries.
Quote ID: 7953
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 343 Page: 222
Section: 2B
Other divinities regarded as nearly or quite Major Divinities were:….
{20} Helios—Sol, the Sun-God.
Pastor John’s note: It is remarkable that Helios blended with Apollo, etc., and became for many, including Constantine, the supreme (or only) god.
Quote ID: 7954
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 343 Page: 224
Section: 2B2
…the Egyptian Ammon was identified with Zeus and came to be worshipped later in the Greco-Roman world as Jupiter-Ammon.
Quote ID: 7955
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 343 Page: 225
Section: 2E5
…Bubona, goddess of cattle breeding; Epona, goddess of horse breeding; Pales, goddess of sheep breeding; Vertumnus, god of the changing seasons; Pomona, goddess of fruits; Terminus, god of boundaries, frontiers and boundary stones; Forculus, god of doors….
Quote ID: 7956
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 343 Page: 232
Section: 2E5
…positively and without question, every Roman family conceived of all the Manes of all its ancestors as kindly minor deities watching over the family’s destinies and solicitous for their descendants’ welfare. And the less important the human-being had been in life, the less valuable to his clan was his aid after death; the more prominent the living individual had been, the more precious to his posterity would be his favor and help.
Quote ID: 7957
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 343 Page: 235
Section: 4B
As a slave might become a free man, as a freeman might become a citizen, as an ordinary free-born man might become a noble, even a Senator, so it was believed that a mere human being might become a god by manifestly deserving such exaltation.
Quote ID: 7958
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 343 Page: 247
Section: 4B
The gods of any community were sedulous and responsive partners of men while properly reverenced, invoked, propitiated, and thanked. But any infraction of ritual, any dereliction by the priesthood, any indifference among the commonalty might incur their unmeasured wrath. What was more, the impiety of any one citizen or denizen of any country, of any member of or visitor to any community, might bring down upon the entire nation of people the disastrous indignation of its gods.
Quote ID: 7959
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 343 Page: 255
Section: 4B
The pagan conception of right and wrong was definite and intelligible. Any action which conduced to the good of the state was right, and, in its degree, commendable, praiseworthy, or mandatory. As, at need, to die for one’s fatherland. Any action harmful to the state was wrong and to be frowned upon, decried, and refrained from by any self-respecting person.….
Pagans conceived of right and wrong conduct on the part of any individual as being approximate conformity or nonconformity with what was expected of that person by the general opinion of the community of which he or she was a member.
Quote ID: 7961
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 343 Page: 257
Section: 4B
Being remembered by the living was mostly achieved by deserving it, usually by earning the respect and gratitude of one’s family, associates, fellow citizens, and of the community at large. In earlier times the community was one’s city; for Romans, the Commonwealth, and that, in later days, included all Rome’s Empire and all beings therein.….
Paganism impelled its votaries not to concern for life after death, but to concern for esteem among mankind, specifically for service to the state.
Quote ID: 7962
Time Periods: 017
Book ID: 343 Page: 262
Section: 1A
(D) The paramount internal cause.The weakening of military and civic morale by the spread of Christianity.
Quote ID: 7963
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 343 Page: 263
Section: 3E
He was as mistaken as was Justinian when he thought that his code would end lawmaking for all time and would never be added to nor modified in any manner whatever, till the end of the world.
Quote ID: 7964
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 343 Page: 275/276
Section: 4B
On the other hand, they did not possess the qualities which went with Roman stamina, Roman level headedness, Roman self-reliance, Roman directness, and Roman courage; nor the Italic and Roman instinct for the Appreciation of the value of the Commonwealth, of the community at large, its welfare, its peace, and its Empire; nor the Roman instinct for even-handed justice to all men, Romans and aliens alike.
Quote ID: 7965
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 343 Page: 296
Section: 2A3
O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not, neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.
--“Hymn to Proserpina”
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Quote ID: 7966
Time Periods: 4567
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