Pax Romana Quotes

When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.

Eso es política, y la política es estúpida. Ante un problema, una conducta racional sería tratar de solucionarlo, pero la solución política siempre será negar su existencia.

Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.” Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.

La gente tiene miedo, teme por su seguridad y la de los suyos. Y está dispuesta a renunciar a cualquier cosa, incluso a su propia libertad, con tal de que alguien se la garantice.

People wanted to be Roman, and the Germanic tribes who carved up the Western Empire in the fifth century AD were desperate to share in the comforts and prosperity of Rome.

The security of Rome’s frontiers was based on dominating her neighbours, very much in keeping with the belief that peace came from Roman victory.

John exposes Pax Romana and Pax Augusta to be bald-faced lies. He does not allow his hearers to ignore the fact that a great deal of violence has gone into creating and sustaining empire, for example, in the brutal suppression of the Jewish Revolt. How is it truly a matter of “peace” if you use overwhelming force to subdue a country that never wished to be a part of your empire in the first place?

It is always the Germans who cause the trouble, what is it about Germans that they must molest and oppress?..." "They have never been civilized," said Sosthene..."They were never conquered by Roman. They remain barbarians." Phoebe stared at him. It was a viewpoint... "One is perhaps inclined to forget that even here in Britain that were four hundred years of the Pax Romana," he said gently. "In Germany, no -- only the Vandals and the Goths. Every so often they burst out. It is in the breed.

Julius Caesar was particularly ambitious even by the standards of the Roman aristocracy. When passing through a tiny village he is supposed to have remarked that he would rather be first man in that community than second anywhere else, including Rome.

Es el mito de la invulnerabilidad. ¿Hasta qué punto tener una espada puede garantizar que nuestras mujeres e hijos estarán a salvo? Las armas se han convertido en una especie de talismán cuya posesión nos alejará del peligro. Esa creencia más bien parece un acto de fe.

Christianity winding up on top was anything but inevitable. Its eventual emergence after a slow, painful crawl for three hundred long years was thanks to the collapse of Rome. During the centuries that Roman civilization enjoyed prosperity and security, Christianity had little to offer. As long as the Pax Romana held, followers of Jesus would never be anything more than just one more foreign cult among many. Chances are, Christianity would have been doomed to languish in obscurity, perhaps even slip quietly into extinction. Instead, Christianity owes its success to a century of bad fortune for the ancient Mediterranean.

Jesus had been born during the reign of the emperor Augustus (r. 31 BCE–14 CE), who had brought peace to a war-weary world by defeating rival Roman warlords and declaring himself sole ruler of the Roman Empire. The ensuing peace seemed little short of miraculous, and throughout his far-flung domains, Augustus was hailed as “son of God” and “savior.” But the Pax Romana was enforced pitilessly by an army that was the most efficient killing machine the world had yet seen; the slightest resistance met with wholesale slaughter. Crucifixion, an instrument of state terror inflicted usually on slaves, violent criminals, and insurgents, was a powerful deterrent.

ce qui (...) peut arriver de mieux à un individu c'est d' "avoir la chance d'être né au sein du peuple qu'il faut au moment de l'histoire qu'il faut" : grec et non barbare, aux siècles de Solon et Périclès ; romain et non pas grec, au temps d'Auguste et des débuts de la Pax romana ; chrétien et non pas juif, ensuite, quand l'Europe se christianise et que commencent les pogromes (...) le mieux qui puisse arriver à un sujet c'est de naître occidental ; le pire, la catastrophe irrémédiable, la figure même de l'infortune, du tragique, de la damnation, c'est d'être né burundais, angolais, sud-soudanais, colombien ou, comme la petite Srilaya, sri-lankais. (ch. 15 Arendt, Sarajevo : qu'est-ce qu'être damné ?)

Both the European Union and the United States are in some sense the heirs of Rome. Like Rome, the United States is founded on a republican myth of liberation from a tyrannical oppressor. Just as the Rape of Lucretia led to the overthrow of the last Etruscan king, so the Boston Tea Party led to the overthrow of the British crown. The Founding Fathers of the United States sought quite literally to create a New Rome, with, for instance, a clear separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government—with the legislative branch called, as in Rome, the Senate. They even debated whether the executive branch would not be better represented, as in Rome, by two consuls rather than the president that they eventually settled for. The extended period of relative peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War has been dubbed the Pax Americana [‘American Peace’], after the Pax Romana which perdured from the accession of Augustus in 27 BCE to the death of the last of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, in 180 CE. The United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union can be accounted for, in part, by the ghost of the nineteenth century Pax Britannica, when the British Empire was not merely a province of Rome but a Rome unto herself.

Copulating Cats and Holy Men The Story of the Creation of the Book of Kells   In the year 791 A.D an Irish monk named Connachtach brought together a team of the finest calligraphers the world has ever seen, on the island of Iona, a sliver of limestone rock off the northwest coast of Scotland. They came from Northumbria in England, from Constantinople, from Italy and from Ireland. All of them had worked on other illuminated manuscripts. But Connachtach, eminent scribe and abbot of Iona, as he is described in contemporary annals, wanted from them the most richly ornamented book ever created by man’s hand. It was to be more beautiful than the great book of Lindisfarne: more beautiful than the gospel-books made at the court of Charlemagne: more beautiful than all the Korans of Persia. It would be known as the Book of Kells. Eighth century Europe was in a state of cultural meltdown. Since the end of the Pax Romana, three centuries earlier, warring tribes had decimated the continent. From the East the Ostrogoths had blundered into the spears of the Germanic tribes to be overrun, in their turn, by the Huns. Their western cousins, the Visigoths, plundered along a confident north- east, southwest axis from Spain to Cologne. The Vandals did what vandals do. As though that wasn't enough, a blunt-faced raggle-taggle band of pirates and pyromaniacs came looting and raping their way out of the freezing seas of the North. For a Viking there was no tomorrow, culture something you stuffed into a hemp sack; happiness, a warm sword. Wherever they went they extorted protection money: the Danegeld. Fighting drunk on a mixture of animist religion and aquavit they threatened to plunge the house of Europe into total darkness. The Book of Kells was to be a rainbow-bridge of light thrown across the abyss of the Dark Ages. Its colors were to burn until the end of time.   #

We began with a warning that we must be careful not to read the book of Acts as a strict rule book for church planting. Yet our secular, urbanized, global world today is strikingly like the Greco-Roman world in certain ways. For the first time in fifteen hundred years, there are multiple, vital, religious faith communities and options (including true paganism) in every society. Traditional, secular, and pagan worldviews and communities are living side by side. Once again, cities are the influential cultural centers, just as they were in the Greco-Roman world. During the Pax Romana, cities became furiously multiethnic and globally connected. Since we are living in an Acts-like world again rather than the earlier context of Christendom, church planting will necessarily be as central a strategy for reaching our world as it was for reaching previous generations. Ultimately, though, we don’t look to Paul to teach us about church planting, but to Jesus himself. Jesus is the ultimate church planter. He builds his church (Matt 16:18), and he does so effectively, because hell itself will not prevail against it. He raises up leaders and gives them the keys to the kingdom (Matt 16:19). He establishes his converts on the word of the confessing apostle, Peter — that is, on the word of God (Matt 16:18). When we plant the church, we participate in God’s work, for if we have any success at all, it is because “God made it grow.” Thus, “neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow” (1 Cor 3:6–7).

Barabbas (“Son of the Father”) is a kind of Messianic figure. Two interpretations of Messianic hope are juxtaposed here in the offer of the Passover amnesty. In terms of Roman law, it is a case of two criminals convicted of the same offense—two rebels against the Pax Romana. It is clear that Pilate prefers the nonviolent “fanatic” that he sees in Jesus. Yet the crowd and the Temple authorities have different categories. If the Temple aristocracy felt constrained to declare: “We have no king but Caesar” (Jn 19:15), this only appears to be a renunciation of Israel’s Messianic hope: “We do not want this king” is what they mean. They would like to see a different solution to the problem. Again and again, mankind will be faced with this same choice: to say yes to the God who works only through the power of truth and love, or to build on something tangible and concrete—on violence. Jesus

«No dejes que lo complejo ahogue lo simple».

Julius Caesar once said of Brutus that ‘whatever he wants, he wants badly’ and nowhere is that more clear than in this episode – a shock to anyone familiar only with Shakespeare’s ‘noblest Roman of them all’.

Not only was war banished from the greater part of the world, but internally the provinces were safer and more settled because of the peace brought by Rome and its emperors.

One of the leaders of the great Pannonian revolt against Augustus complained that ‘You Romans are to blame for this; for you send as guardians to your flocks, not dogs or shepherds, but wolves.

The Jews had a sense of identity which long predated the arrival of Alexander the Great, let alone the Roman Empire.

When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God. After all, what is the point in calling anything God if it does not also hold sway in every part of one’s life—especially one’s politics?

Jesus not only appeared to individuals and small groups, but he also appeared to five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive at the time of his writing and could be consulted for corroboration. Paul’s letter was to a church, and therefore it was a public document, written to be read aloud. Paul was inviting anyone who doubted that Jesus had appeared to people after his death to go and talk to the eyewitnesses if they wished. It was a bold challenge and one that could easily be taken up, since during the pax Romana travel around the Mediterranean was safe and easy. Paul could not have made such a challenge if those eyewitnesses didn’t exist.

The Germans were the bad children of Europe, Jastrow argued: egotistic, willful, romantic, always poised to break up faltering patterns of order. Arminius had set the ax to the Pax Romana; Martin Luther had broken the back of the universal Church; now Hitler was challenging Europe’s unsteady regime of liberal capitalism, based on an obsolete patchwork structure of nations.

Pax Romana,

From these dimensions emerge the alternative identity and lifestyle or practices of these followers of Jesus: 1. Instead of looking to Abraham, Enoch, Moses, Baruch, Ezra, and Solomon, or to the synagogue's leadership, or to imperial ideology for revelations about acceptable teaching and praxis, this community looks to Jesus to manifest God's will. 2. Instead of commitment to the emperor as head of the empire, this community is to follow Jesus crucified by the empire (chs. 26-27). 3. Instead of embracing Pax Romana, this community encounters, proclaims and prays for God's empire (4:17; 6:10; 12:28; 24-25). 4. Instead of understanding the emperor as manifesting the will of the gods, this community finds God's saving presence and will manifested in Jesus, Emmanuel (1:23; passim; 18:20; 28:20). 5. Instead of gladly embracing imperial power, this community is to critique kingship and leadership (ch. 2; 14:1-12; 20:20-28; 27). 6. Instead of supporting imperial power as the sustainer of order, this community sides with the prophetic tradition (John the Baptist, ch. 3) in calling it to account.

The most important question for us humans is, "What is human?" "What is life?" "What is life?" If you can't answer this question, you can't live your life seriously. So Tolstoy, Russia's main gate, for a long time of 15 years I wrote my last book at the end of my career. What is life?It's 입니다. In this book, Tolstoy defines life like this. "Life is holding onto a thin arrowroot vine in a desperate situation where it doesn't know when it's going to break off." What do you think life is? Someone said that life is about luck. What is "WOON 7G3"? It means that luck is 70% and opportunity is 30%. Life is luck. Do you really think life is luck? Then you're lucky to live well, Is it bad luck not to be able to buy it? Being healthy is good luck, Is it bad luck to be sick? That's not true. Life is not luck. Victor Wigor thinks about what life is and then expresses it in one word. It's a voyage. Life is a voyage in which a boat floating on the sea plumped and sailed through a port. Ships floating in the sea of the world have calmness, rough waves, and scary typhoons. Life is not easy. So Job says life like this. "Isn't there hard labor in life on this land?" (Job 7:1) There is a theory of life in today's text. Section 13 of the body. "Those who say they will profit by doing business" (approximately 4:13) What is business and profit? Business is selling things to make money. What are the benefits? It's money from the business. Jews thought it was important to make money. So Jewish tactics are world-famous. The Jews were the geniuses of the tactics. In the old days, money was all coins. Our country also made money into a not. This is called Yupjeon. Heavy coins were very uncomfortable for traders. So the Jews made bills instead of coins, they made checks, they made bills. And the Jews thought about how to sell things without discounting them I made a department store in America. The Jews also taught their children this way. "The whole world is a business. Even white clouds become rain when squeezed." These people are Jewish. Trade was the best way to make money in the days of the First Church. Especially in the early church era, it was the best environment to make money from trade. In this era, it was Pax Romana.

An attack on the rich is not a disruption of peace but a step towards it. The rich oppress the poor daily by exploiting their misery and poverty. The poor are kept poor and beaten down continually by the greed of the rich and the systems of capitalist exploitation. Poverty is violence against the poor. Tax cuts for the rich, leading to budget cuts in social spending, are an act of class warfare. It is a mistake to call for “peace” when there is no peace for the poor, homeless, or disadvantaged under capitalism. One might argue that even Christ was crucified in the name of “peace” by the Roman Empire.20 But Pax Romana—or today’s Pax Americana—is never true peace. It is peace by oppression. The rich must be brought low, the powerful must be humbled, the lowly must be exalted, and good news must be proclaimed to the poor.

The concept of Christendom as a universal (in Greek, katholikos) community of shared values and ideals, living together in peace and harmony, had arrived.19 It comes about not through men obeying nature (as Aristotle would have framed it), but through obeying God. Or rather it will come about someday in the not-too-distant future, when all men everywhere follow His community. Until then arrives, Lactantius admits, men still need laws and a lawmaker, the emperor. But this political power in its new Christian form must be directed toward a higher end than simply maintaining public order and the Pax Romana. Constantine and his successors serve a higher constituency, namely all of humanity. Their task is to create a world fit for Christians to live in, and one that eventually they will take over.

Yet a relatively small number of aristocratic families supplied a disproportionately high number of consuls, both because of ties of obligation with many important voters, but also a tendency for the electorate to prefer familiar names.

When Rome collapsed Europe sank into the Dark Ages, literacy and learning all but forgotten, and there was warfare and violence of every sort where once there had been peace.

Most senior officers were like the men they led, citizens who interspersed spells of military service with normal civilian life.

«La neutralidad siempre favorece al opresor, y es la excusa del cobarde.»

Los antiguos valores romanos: parsimonia, dignidad, austeridad, frugalidad y sencillez.

las gónadas masculinas pueden generar un campo de fuerza capaz de repeler las lanzas enemigas, si cuentan con el tamaño apropiado, y por ello no hay que pensar en nada más.

Cuando una sociedad se muestra incapaz de gestionar su propia libertad, acaba dando la razón a quienes defienden la tiranía:

un buen líder debe contar con solodos virtudes: la capacidad para tomar decisiones rápidas y la seguridad para llevarlas a cabo.

—Después de una década recorriendo el mundo conocido, he llegado a la conclusión de que los monstruos siempre existen lejos del propio hogar

—Amigo mío, si esperas que en el mundo impere la justicia solo te vas a llevar una desilusión tras otra

Una comedia según la cual en Roma no había ninguna monarquía, y los miembros de la curia podían expresar libremente sus opiniones,

The security of Rome’s frontiers was based on dominating her neighbours, very much in keeping with the belief that peace came from Roman victory. Rome was to be feared, which meant that her might was paraded as a constant reminder of her strength, while attackers were dealt with ruthlessly and the communities believed to support them ravaged with fire and sword.

And thus, by the express appointment of the same God, two roots of blessing, the Roman Empire, and the doctrine of Christian piety, sprang up together for the benefit of men.