Fabius Maximus Quotes

One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, “the Procrastinator.” He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement.

dictatorship and selected a man named Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus as their supreme leader

And so at one point he has Cato say of Quintus Fabius Maximus: "I was so fond of hearing him speak [that] I ... feared that when he was taken from us, I should never find another [such] man to improve by.

My heroes have a lot in common. Fabius Maximus, who is mocked to this day as a cunctator, or delayer, but who saved Rome from Hannibal’s Carthaginian army; Hercules Seghers, a painter of the early Rembrandt era who was barely noticed but is considered the father of modernity and made paintings of a kind that would not be seen for several centuries. Or Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa, who composed music fully three hundred years ahead of its time—I’m thinking here principally of his sixth book of madrigals—not until Stravinsky, who went on pilgrimages to Gesualdo’s castle, did we hear such sounds again. Also included is Pharaoh Akhenaton, who introduced an early form of monotheism half a millennium before Moses.