Important Claudius Quotes

On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word.

…A story that was the subject of every variety of misrepresentation, not only by those who then lived but likewise in succeeding times: so true is it that all transactions of preeminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsays, others turn facts into falsehood; and both are exaggerated by posterity. TACITUS

The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times. The formula for telling a powerful story has remained the same: create a strong character, a person of great strengths, capable of deep emotions and decisive action. Give him a weakness. Set him in conflict with another powerful character -- or perhaps with nature. Let his exterior conflict be the mirror of the protagonist's own interior conflict, the clash of his desires, his own strength against his own weakness. And there you have a story. Whether it's Abraham offering his only son to God, or Paris bringing ruin to Troy over a woman, or Hamlet and Claudius playing their deadly game, Faust seeking the world's knowledge and power -- the stories that stand out in the minds of the reader are those whose characters are unforgettable. To show other worlds, to describe possible future societies and the problems lurking ahead, is not enough. The writer of science fiction must show how these worlds and these futures affect human beings. And something much more important: he must show how human beings can and do literally create these future worlds. For our future is largely in our own hands. It doesn't come blindly rolling out of the heavens; it is the joint product of the actions of billions of human beings. This is a point that's easily forgotten in the rush of headlines and the hectic badgering of everyday life. But it's a point that science fiction makes constantly: the future belongs to us -- whatever it is. We make it, our actions shape tomorrow. We have the brains and guts to build paradise (or at least try). Tragedy is when we fail, and the greatest crime of all is when we fail even to try. Thus science fiction stands as a bridge between science and art, between the engineers of technology and the poets of humanity.

There had always been a tradition for emperors to display themselves at public ceremonies, particularly the Roman games. In the stands of the arena the emperor was, at least theoretically, accessible to the people. It was important that he be seen, and contemporary writers were quick to criticise emperors who misplayed their part: Augustus who signed letters, Claudius who had a penchant for topless women gladiators. There were occasions on which the emperor was heckled, and wise emperors accepted this with restraint, though some, like Domitian, responded by throwing members of the audience into combat in the arena, and it was recorded that people pretended to die just so they could escape Nero’s interminable recitations.

It is clear that Bhu Mandala, as described in the Bhagvatam, can be interpreted as a geocentric map of the solar system out ot Saturn. But an obvious and important question is: Did some real knowledge of planetary distances enter into the construction of the Bhu Mandala system, or are the correlations between Bhu Mandala features and planetary orbits simply coincidental? Being a mathematician interested in probability theory, Thompson is better equipped than most to answer this question and does so through computer modelling of a proposed 'null hypothesis' -- i.e., 'that the author of the Bhagvatam had no access to correct planetary distances and therefore all apparent correlations between Bhu Mandala features and planetary distances are simply coincidental.' However, the Bhu Mandala/solar system correlations proved resilient enough to survive the null hypothesis. 'Analysis shows that the observed correlations are in fact highly improbable.' Thompson concludes: 'If the dimensions given in the Bhagvatam do, in fact, represent realistic planetary distances based on human observation, then we must postulate that Bhagvata astronomy preserves material from an earlier and presently unknown period of scientific development ... [and that] some people in the past must have had accurate values for the dimensions of the planetary orbits. In modern history, this information has only become available since the development of high-quality telescopes in the last 200 years. Accurate values of planetary distances were not known by Hellenistic astronomers such as Claudius Ptolemy, nor are they found in the medieval Jyotisa Sutras of India. If this information was known it must have been acquired by some unknown civilization that flourished in the distant past.