Julius Caesar Important Quotes

What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends? … That,’ Frederick said, 'is where the tragedy is.

In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.

It is more important to have greatly extended the frontiers of the Roman spirit than the frontiers of the Roman empire. [Speaking of Cicero]

They often engage in resolutions concerning the most important matters, induced by these reports and stories alone; of which they must necessarily instantly repent, since they yield to mere unauthorized reports; and since most people give to their questions answers framed agreeably to their wishes.

Julius Caesar’s overthrow of the Roman Senate and Republic as an illustration of how important it is to make sure no one person is more powerful than the system.

She did not approach Caesar wrapped in a carpet, she was not a seductress, she did not use her charm to persuade the men in her life to lose their judgement, and she did not die by the bite of an asp…Yet other important elements of her career have been bypassed in the post-antique recension: she was a Skilled naval commander, a published medical authority, and an expert royal administrator who was met with adulation throughout the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps seen by some as a messianic figure, the hope for a future Eastern Mediterranean free of Roman domination.

There’s nothing more important than literary merit, and that’s why I not only created an award—the Julius Caesar Author of the Year Award—but I nominated myself as the first recipient. You can’t always wait for success to come to you. Sometimes you just have to create it out of nothingness. Just ask the Federal Reserve.

His advice has helped me in my planning for Bridgewater’s future. For example, when I asked him about checks and balances of power, he pointed to Julius Caesar’s overthrow of the Roman Senate and Republic as an illustration of how important it is to make sure no one person is more powerful than the system. I took his advice to heart as I set out to improve Bridgewater’s governance model.

A reflection on Robert Lowell Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that. To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called. A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage. Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials. Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers. “They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.” His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air. “You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.” “Do I?” “Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.” “He was a terrible man, just awful.” “Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.” That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself: “Well, he was a terrible man.” That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew.

Was it not said and written that give unto God what belongs to God and to Ceaser what belongs to him? Also, give yourself what belongs to you. That is important.

An oft-repeated tale recounts that a Christian mob destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria in 391 and burnt its books in the street. According to some versions, the repository in question was the original library in the Brucheium, while others state that it was a ‘daughter’ library located in the Serapeum. This tale has entered so deeply into the popular imagination that it even sometimes appears in otherwise respectable books of history. It is, however, a myth, originated in the late 18th century, when the great historian Edward Gibbon read an unwarranted meaning into a single sentence from the Christian chronicler Paul Orosius (fl. 414–17). The subtext of the legend is that the Christians of the fourth century were intensely hostile to the science, literature, and scholarship of classical culture, and that such matters were the special preserve of the pagans of Alexandria. This too is an 18th-century myth. The city’s scholarly and scientific class comprised Christians as well as pagans, and Christian scholars, rhetoricians, philosophers and scientists were active in Alexandria right up until the city fell to Arab Muslim invaders in 642. Regarding the library in the Brucheium – whose size, again, is impossible to determine – many ancient historians believed that it (or a large part of its collection) had already gone up in flames following Julius Caesar’s assault on the city in 48 or 47 BC, during his wars with Pompey. Some historians now also claim that, if any part of the original library remained, it vanished in 272, during the emperor Aurelian’s campaigns to reunite the empire. Whether either story is true, the Great Library of the Ptolemies no longer existed by the late fourth century. As for the ‘daughter’ library, it may have been situated within the enclosure of the Serapeum; there were, at any rate, library stacks in the temple. However, the Pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c.330–95) indicates that whatever library had once been there was long gone before the Serapeum’s demolition in 391. More importantly, none of the original accounts of the temple’s destruction mentions a library, not even the account written by the devout pagan Eunapius of Sardis (c.345–c.420), who despised Christians and who, as an erudite man, would have been enraged by the burning of precious texts. Later Medieval legend claimed that the actual final destruction of the ‘Library’ or libraries of Alexandria was the work of the Arab conquerors of the seventh century ad. Of this, however, no account exists that was written before the 12th century. Whatever the case, the scurrilous story of the Great Library’s destruction by Christians is untrue. It may tell us something about modern misconceptions regarding the past, but tells us nothing about Christian or pagan antiquity.

In ancient times, many great leaders, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, felt that they were descended from gods and part divine. Such self-belief would translate into high levels of confidence [... thus,] a self-fulling prophecy. You do not need to indulge in such grandiose thoughts, but feeling that you are destined for something great or important will give you a degree of resilience when people oppose or resist you. [...] You will continually try new things, even taking risks, confident in your ability to bounce back from failures and feeling destined to succeed.

No history, no biography, ever tells you everything. All history selects and arranges, not to falsify but to highlight what is significant. And when, in Greco-Roman biography, the death of the central figure is particularly important, it is given special treatment. Think of Socrates or Julius Caesar. The four gospels, then, are not merely “passion narratives with extended introductions,” as one of Bultmann’s predecessors had suggested. They are not merely reflections of the faith of the later church projected onto a screen that the earliest evangelists themselves knew to be fictional. They present themselves as biographies, biographies of Jesus. But they are biographies with a difference. One can imagine how this might work. Someone might write a biography of Abraham Lincoln that was at the same time designed to show the way in which the old America of the original revolution was passing away, never to return. Similarly, someone might write a biography of Winston Churchill that was at the same time designed to show the way in which the old British ruling class was having its final hurrah before the winds of change swept through the United Kingdom. You can read Michael Foot’s biography of the great Labor politician Aneurin Bevan not simply as a window through which to view the great man, but as the description of a key moment in a much larger story that Foot was anxious to tell, a moment when British society began to embrace a socialist vision that would (Foot hoped) bring new hope to millions of poor working people. A biography can be a biography and still be a vehicle for telling a much bigger story.

like that. Many of the mighty cities of North Africa like El Djem in what is now Tunisia were left to decay in peace. Even today they have massive ruins. El Djem has its vast Roman amphitheatre. Orange, in southern France, has a Roman theatre and an aqueduct. Athens has a vast Roman temple of Zeus and a library built by the emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138), who passed this way on his travels (see Chapter 17). Baalbek in the Lebanon has two colossal temples, and one of them – the temple of Bacchus – is still practically intact. Rome itself remained home to some of the most enormous ruins: The Colosseum, the city’s biggest amphitheatre, is still largely in one piece (see Chapter 8); the ruins of the imperial palaces still cluster across the Palatine Hill, and the baths of Caracalla look like a giant’s cave complex. The Aurelian walls of Rome, built in the 270s (see Chapter 19 for information on the emperor Aurelian), still surround most of Rome. The survival of Roman books Roman writers were all hugely influential in different ways, but it’s thanks to the survival of their texts that we know what we do about the Roman world. Consider these examples: Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (106–43 BC): Cicero was a great orator, lawyer, and statesman. Well aware of his importance, he published his speeches, treatises on government (De Re Publica), duty (De Officiis), the nature of gods (De Deorum Natura), and also a vast collection of his private correspondence. A great deal survives and he had a huge influence on thought and literature in early modern times. Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar) (100–44 BC): Caesar wrote his own account of his war in Gaul (Bellum Gallicum), and also part of his civil war with Pompey (Bellum Civile). The texts are famous for sounding objective (though they aren’t at all), and for their spare, terse style, but are exceptional historical resources for the time. To find out more about Julius Caesar, go to Chapter 14. Catullus