Roman Holiday Quotes

In Rome, I really wanted an Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday experience, but the Trevi Fountain was crowded, there was a McDonald's at the base of the Spanish Steps, and the ruins smelled like cat pee because of all the strays. The same thing happened in Prague, where I'd been yearning for some of the bohemianism of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But no, there were no fabulous artists, no guys who looked remotely like a young Daniel Day-Lewis. I saw this one mysterious-looking guy reading Sartre in a cafe, but then his cell phone rang and he started talking in aloud Texan twang.

Well, life isn't always what one likes.

The baby boom produced a fresh batch of American youngsters -- teenagers they were called -- and they were suddenly coming of age. But until Roman Holiday, it was hard for them to see themselves in the movies. What Audrey offered -- namely to the girls -- was a glimpse of someone who lived by her own code of interests, not her mother's, and who did so with a wholesome independence of spirit.

As he hums the melody softly into my ear, I can feel the notes seep deep into my skin and bones, and birth an ache in my soul I never knew existed. What is this, if not impossible?

The truth is Christmas evolved from the Roman holiday Saturnalia, a winter festival where men gave gifts to each other. They also would get drunk, have sex with each other and beat their wives

Teenagers are inarticulate, acne-ridden lumps of inert matter. The only way you can ever induce movement is by trying to separate one from its mobile phone. And if you can do that then the only way you can stop it attacking is with rhinoceros tranquiliser.

He turns toward the voice. It is as though the darkness itself has spoken. But when he looks closer he can make her out - the very pale blonde hair first, gleaming in what little light there is, then the shimmering stuff of her dress.

Every culture has its own way of teaching the same lesson: Memento mori, the Romans would remind themselves. Remember you are mortal. It

Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord. —Romans 12:19

I had chosen the fifteenth day of July, the day that Roman Knights go out crowned with olive wreaths to honor the Twins in a magnificent horseback procession:from the Temple of Mars they ride through the main streets of the City, circling back to the Temple of the Twins, where they offer sacrifices. The ceremony is a commemoration of the battle of Lake Regillus which was fought on that day over three hundred years ago. Castor and Pollux came riding in person to the help of a Roman army that was making a desperate stand on the lake-shore against a superior force of Latins; and ever since then they have been adopted as the particular patrons of the knights.

Now as I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how rather glorious it was that in two thousand years of human activity the only thing that had stirred the notice of the outside world even briefly was the finding of a Roman phallic pendant. The rest was just centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused- and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things. Even Einstein will have spent large parts of his life thinking about his holidays o new hammock or how dainty was the ankle on the young lady alighting from the tram across the street. These are the sort of things that fill our life and thoughts, and yet we treat them as incidental and hardly worthy of serious consideration. I don't know how many hours of my school years were spent considering the Missouri Compromise or the War of the Roses, but it was vastly more than I was ever encouraged or allowed to give to the history of eating. sleeping, having sex and endeavoring to be amused.

In their emancipation women are losing what has always made them emotionally superior to men, their tenderness and essential warmth of heart. It’s happening, Jill girl. And men are getting so they don’t care, and when that attitude comes to full flower we’ll maybe have another Roman holiday on our hands, and another age of glory lost under a pall of ashes—

Stick a pea in my bed and far from having a bruised princess, you’d just have a squashed pea. All

Every culture has its own way of teaching the same lesson: Memento mori, the Romans would remind themselves. Remember you are mortal.

Groups of men stood around, discussing politics, finance, and their favoured chariot teams: all the things men talk about. You could easily substitute football for gladiators and business suits for togas: nothing changes.

The sensible thing to do would be to depart. Immediately. Therefore, we stayed. Actually, I don’t think wild horses could have dragged us out of that room. We’re historians. When it comes to sensible thinking, someone else has to do the heavy lifting.

I’m almost certain the assignment was simply to observe and document. I distinctly remember saying so.’ ‘Indeed you did, sir, but you know us. Always ready to go that extra mile.’ ‘If you only knew how often I pray that some of you would go those extra miles.

A few days later, Peterson and I were called to his office, handed the familiar file folders, and told to get on with it. And to take Mr Markham with us. I didn’t enquire, but I definitely got the impression that bringing him back was a bit of an optional extra.

14 February Valentine Day is also referred to as St. Valentine’s Day and holiday where lovers can express their love & affection with gifts and greetings. This holiday is held in mid-February with numerous origins of Lupercalia’s Roman festival. Visit our site travelnice.net

The Dying Gladiator I see before me the Gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand - his manly brow Consents to death, but conquers agony, And his drooped head sinks gradually low - And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now The arena swims around him - he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won. He heard it, but he heeded not - his eyes Were with his heart and that was far away; He recked not of the life he lost nor prize, But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, There were his young-barbarians all at play, There was their Dacian mother - he, their sire, Butchered to make a Roman holiday - All this rushed with his blood - Shall he expire And unavenged? - Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!

At a Roman triumph, the majority of the public would have their eyes glued to the victorious general at the front—one of the most coveted spots during Roman times. Only a few would notice the aide in the back, right behind the commander, whispering into his ear, “Remember, thou art mortal.” What a reminder to hear at the peak of glory and victory! In our own lives, we can train to be that whisper. When there is something we prize—or someone that we love—we can whisper to ourselves that it is fragile, mortal, and not truly ours. No matter how strong or invincible something feels, it never is. We must remind ourselves that it can break, can die, can leave us. Loss is one of our deepest fears. Ignorance and pretending don’t make things any better. They just mean the loss will be all the more jarring when it occurs.

July 19th FORGIVE THEM BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW “As Plato said, every soul is deprived of truth against its will. The same holds true for justice, self-control, goodwill to others, and every similar virtue. It’s essential to constantly keep this in your mind, for it will make you more gentle to all.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.63 As he wound his way up Via Dolorosa to the top of Calvary Hill, Jesus (or Christus as he would have been known to Seneca and other Roman contemporaries) had suffered immensely. He’d been beaten, flogged, stabbed, forced to bear his own cross, and was set to be crucified on it next to two common criminals. There he watched the soldiers roll dice to see who would get to keep his clothes, listened as the people sneered and taunted him. Whatever your religious inclinations, the words that Jesus spoke next—considering they came as he was subjected to unimaginable human suffering—send chills down your spine. Jesus looked upward and said simply, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That is the same truth that Plato spoke centuries earlier and that Marcus spoke almost two centuries after Jesus; other Christians must have spoken this truth as they were cruelly executed by the Romans under Marcus’s reign: Forgive them; they are deprived of truth. They wouldn’t do this if they weren’t. Use this knowledge to be gentle and gracious.

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

I don't know how to say goodbye.

Vienna's reputation as a city of luxury, merrymaking and indulgence actually lies much further in the past, in the time of the Babenbergs at whose courts the Minnesinger were prestigious guests, similar to publicity-seeking pop stars of today. the half-censorious, half-envious comments of foreigners often reflect the ambivalence that so many have felt about a city that was both seductive and dangerous. Such was indeed how Grillparzer described the city he loved and hated in his "Farewell to Vienna"(1843) though he had more in mind than simply the temptations of the flesh. But if Vienna was insidiously threatening under its hedonistic surface for a Grillparzer, others have simply regarded it as cheerfully, even shamelessly, immoral. 'lhe humanist scholar Enea Silvio Piccolomini, private secretary to Friedrich III and subsequently elected Pope Pius II, expressed his astonishment at the sexual freedom of the Viennese in a letter to a fellow humanist in Basel written in 1450: "'lhe number of whores is very great, and wives seem disinclined to confine their affections to a single man; knights frequently visit the wives of burghers. 'lhe men put out some wine for them and leave the house. Many girls marry without the permission of their fathers and widows don't observe the year of mourning." 'the local equivalent of the Roman cicisbeo is an enduring feature of Viennese society, and the present author remembers a respectable middle-class intellectual (now dead) who habitually went on holiday with both wife and mistress in tow. Irregular liaisons are celebrated in a Viennese joke about two men who meet for the first time at a party. By way of conversation one says to the other: "You see those two attractive ladies chatting to each other over there? Well, the brunette is my wife and the blonde is my mistress." "that's funny," says his new friend; "I was just about to say the same thing, only the other way round." In Biedermeier Vienna (1815-48), menages d trois seem not to have been uncommon, since the gallant who became a friend of the family was officially known as the Hausfreund. 'the ambiguous status of such a Hausfreund features in a Wienerlied written in 1856 by the usually non-risque Johann Baptist Moser. It con-terns a certain Herr von Hecht, who is evidently a very good friend of the family of the narrator. 'lhe first six lines of the song innocently praise the latter's wife, who is so delightful and companionable that "his sky is always blue"; but the next six relate how she imported a "friend", Herr von Hecht, and did so "immediately after the wedding". This friend loves the children so much "they could be his own." And indeed, the younger one looks remarkably like Herr von Hecht, who has promised that the boy will inherit from him, "which can't be bad, eh?" the faux-naivete with which this apparently commonplace situation is described seems to have delighted Moser's public-the song was immensely popular then and is still sung today.

The rules say you must wear the uniform, but nowhere does it say you cannot modify the uniform. Nor are there strict guidelines on how it should be worn, length, and so on. It is very rare for a student to get creative with her uniform; the last one who did so now has her own fashion label." Lady Beat smiled. "But your design is better.

What can you do with this? Can you remove it?" Roman showed his arm to the tatted-up lady behind the counter. "Remove your arm?" She reached behind the counter and pulled out a bone saw. "Sure, but it's gonna cost ya. And it's gonna hurt." Roman frowned. "I was thinking something less drastic. I just want the tattoo gone." "Oh. Right." She sounded disappointed and stowed the bone saw away.

December 20th FEAR THE FEAR OF DEATH “Do you then ponder how the supreme of human evils, the surest mark of the base and cowardly, is not death, but the fear of death? I urge you to discipline yourself against such fear, direct all your thinking, exercises, and reading this way—and you will know the only path to human freedom.” —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.26.38–39 To steel himself before he committed suicide rather than submit to Julius Caesar’s destruction of the Roman Republic, the great Stoic philosopher Cato read a bit of Plato’s Phaedo. In it, Plato writes, “It is the child within us that trembles before death.” Death is scary because it is such an unknown. No one can come back and tell us what it is like. We are in the dark about it. As childlike and ultimately ignorant as we are about death, there are plenty of wise men and women who can at least provide some guidance. There’s a reason that the world’s oldest people never seem to be afraid of death: they’ve had more time to think about it than we have (and they realized how pointless worrying was). There are other wonderful resources: Florida Scott-Maxwell’s Stoic diary during her terminal illness, The Measure of My Days, is one. Seneca’s famous words to his family and friends, who had broken down and begged with his executioners, is another. “Where,” Seneca gently chided them, “are your maxims of philosophy, or the preparation of so many years’ study against evils to come?” Throughout philosophy there are inspiring, brave words from brave men and women who can help us face this fear. There is another helpful consideration about death from the Stoics. If death is truly the end, then what is there exactly to fear? For everything from your fears to your pain receptors to your worries and your remaining wishes, they will perish with you. As frightening as death might seem, remember: it contains within it the end of fear.

If we can put our minds and hearts, all our differences can bond for greater joy. Pagan holiday, Jewish baby and Roman empire - the union of ideas, emotions and a reason to celebrate is the real story of Christmas day.

Pagan holiday, Jewish baby and Roman empire - the union of ideas, emotions and a reason to celebrate is the real story of Christmas day.

Two Valentines are actually described in the early church, but they likely refer to the same man — a priest in Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. According to tradition, Valentine, having been imprisoned and beaten, was beheaded on February 14, about 270, along the Flaminian Way. Sound romantic to you? How then did his martyrdom become a day for lovers and flowers, candy and little poems reading Roses are red… ? According to legends handed down, Valentine undercut an edict of Emperor Claudius. Wanting to more easily recruit soldiers for his army, Claudius had tried to weaken family ties by forbidding marriage. Valentine, ignoring the order, secretly married young couples in the underground church. These activities, when uncovered, led to his arrest. Furthermore, Valentine had a romantic interest of his own. While in prison he became friends with the jailer’s daughter, and being deprived of books he amused himself by cutting shapes in paper and writing notes to her. His last note arrived on the morning of his death and ended with the words “Your Valentine.” In 496 February 14 was named in his honor. By this time Christianity had long been legalized in the empire, and many pagan celebrations were being “christianized.” One of them, a Roman festival named Lupercalia, was a celebration of love and fertility in which young men put names of girls in a box, drew them out, and celebrated lovemaking. This holiday was replaced by St. Valentine’s Day with its more innocent customs of sending notes and sharing expressions of affection. Does any real truth lie behind the stories of St. Valentine? Probably. He likely conducted underground weddings and sent notes to the jailer’s daughter. He might have even signed them “Your Valentine.” And he probably died for his faith in Christ.

Helvidius Priscus spoke his mind; the emperor Vespasian killed him. In this effeminate age it is instructive to read of courage. There are members of the U.S. Senate and House who are terrified apparently if the president of the United States tells them, urges them, to vote a certain way that may be against their belief. So in this day of few men with great courage—relatively few—let us take a leaf out of Roman history and remember Helvidius Priscus.

In her 1939 novel about Christianity in ancient Rome, written as fascism was crushing religious minorities in Europe, Naomi Mitchison has a Stoic philosopher, Nausiphanes, attempt to explain this collision course between the Stoics and the Christians. “[The Christians] were being persecuted,” he says, “because they were against the Roman state; no Roman ever really bothered about a difference of gods; in religious matters they were profoundly tolerant because their own gods were not of the individual heart but only social inventions—or had become so. Yet politically they did and must persecute: and equally must be attacked by all who had the courage.

Meditations is not a book for the reader, it was a book for the author. Yet this is what makes it such an impressive piece of writing, one of the great literary feats of all time. Somehow in writing exclusively to and for himself, Marcus Aurelius managed to produce a book that has not only survived through the centuries, but is still teaching and helping people today. As the philosopher Brand Blanshard would observe in 1984: Few care now about the marches and countermarches of the Roman commanders. What the centuries have clung to is a notebook of thoughts by a man whose real life was largely unknown who put down in the midnight dimness not the events of the day or the plans of the morrow, but something of far more permanent interest, the ideals and aspirations that a rare spirit lived by.

Cato may have been Rome’s Iron Man, but in the end he was challenged by only one emperor. Thrasea was utterly fearless, but his friend Gaius Musonius Rufus was also unafraid, and, as it happens, endured a life so challenging as to make Thrasea’s ordeal under Nero seem fun. Born a member of the equestrian class, in Volsinii, Etruria, during the reign of Tiberius, Musonius Rufus quickly made his reputation as a philosopher and as a teacher. Even in a time and after a long history of brilliant Stoics, Musonius was considered above the rest. Among his contemporaries, he was the “Roman Socrates,” a man of wisdom, courage, self-control, and a marrow-deep commitment to what was right. It was fame that transcended his times, and we find Musonius mentioned admiringly by everyone from Christians like Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria to Marcus Aurelius.

As the historian Gerard Lavery points out, in the final 150 years of the Roman Republic only ten novi homines were elected consul. Between 93 and 43 BC, Cicero would be the only one.

It was a bad idea for him to be alone around this time. He’d planned on spending the holiday with Ashley, a lawyer with long legs and a fondness for light spanking, but Ashley was no longer around. He couldn’t really blame her. Sooner or later, they all ran.

He announced that every law passed since Sulla and Pompeius declared the holiday was null and void.

The Roman year consisted of 12 months and a smaller cycle of 8 days, equivalent to our week, which was marked throughout the year with the letters A through H. Every 8th day (H) was a market day, a nundinae. This was, by law, a business day and called a dies fastus. The root of fastus is fas, meaning “right or correct by divine law.” The letter F identified such a day on the calendar. The opposite of the 42 market days (dies fasti) were the 58 nonmarket days, the dies nefasti, which were labeled with the letter N. On these days, which were religious holidays, sacrifices were prepared in the morning and offered later in the day. Magistrates were not allowed to address public meetings, and citizens could not file lawsuits with the urban praetor.

Some other days were a combination of market days and holidays, which were indicated by the letter combination EN.6 There were also a 195 dies comitales, labeled with the letter C, on which assemblies could meet. Such meetings, however, could not take place on a market day or a holiday. Another letter combination, the ligature NP, seems to indicate public holidays. The German scholar Georg Wissowa proposed the reading dies nefasti publici. An NP-marked day was a public holiday on which everyday life was put on hold and religious ceremonies were performed (feriae publicae).

July 25th was a public holiday for the goddess Furrina. This goddess had her own priest, a flamen, and the festivities took place in a grove on the slope of the Janiculan hill. Cicero associated Furrina with Furia (fury) and also speaks of a shrine not far from his birthplace in Arpinum. Plutarch thought that she was a nymph.133 An inscription from Rome (CIL VI 36802) records Nymphae Furrinae and confirms Plutarch’s understanding. A temple of the Syrian god Jupiter Heliopolitanus was built in the grove sometime in the mid part of the first century CE.134 This Jupiter’s iconography (thunderbolts on his cloak, bulls flanking his throne, a basket [kalathos] on his head, and wheat ears and lightning bolts in his left hand) make him a god of weather and agriculture.

We don't mix with the great and good. We linger discreetly in the background, observing, documenting, and surviving.

Tonight, we take back what used to be our favorite holiday. Tonight, we rewrite our memory. Tonight … we take back us. “Merry Christmas, Noel.” “Merry Christmas, Roman.

Do you hear me?" Trivia pretended to wince and covered her ears. She rolled her eyes. Obviously. I'm mute, not deaf.

Are you robbing the bank?" "That's the general idea. So come on, make it snappy." "Shouldn't you have, like, a mask or something?

Long ago I decided I never wanted a sidekick," Roman said. "But then I met you." Neo spun and kicked him in his side. Caught by surprise, he flew across the room. "Okay, I deserved that," he said. "What I meant was: a partner in crime.

I did not understand that I was 'championing' multiculturalism simply by depicting it, or by describing it as anything other than incipient tragedy. At the same time I don't think I ever was quite naive enough to believe, even at twenty-one, that racially homogeneous societies were necessarily happier or more peaceful than ours simply by virtue of their homogeneity. After all, even a kid half my age knew what the ancient Greeks did to each other, and the Romans, and the seventeenth-century British, and the nineteenth-century Americans. My best friend during my youth--now my husband--is himself from Northern Ireland, an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument over land, government and national identity. Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.

The composite quality of Christmas has been part of the holiday…almost certainly long before there was a Christ owed a mas. There has been a mid December holiday to celebrate the winter solstice by appeasing the sun god and assuring the return of spring since people first noticed the sun’s retreat…and the festival is almost always a festival of supplementary light. The light’s going out in the heavens, so we light one here. The Roman Kalends festival of light, greenery, and gift giving. All were recycles by the early Judeo-Christian followers: the act of lighting candles, the practice of giving gifts, even the use of holly and ivy.

Dr Dowson stirred. ‘I think most of you already speak Latin, but I’ve put together an Idiot’s Guide for refresher purposes, plus, I’m available for private conjugation should anyone feel the need.’ Markham blinked. ‘Is that even legal?

Never speak if you can get a man to do it for you. It also serves as a useful basis for recriminations afterwards when it all goes pear-shaped.

joyful family holiday gatherings and outings, as well as experiences with siblings and friends. With time, however, many of the details of the life review have faded, but what remains with me to this day is that the life review was filled with happy events and human interactions shrouded in love. Back in the emergency room with all its

The historian E. P. Thompson said that history never happens as the actors suspect, that history is instead the “record of unintended consequences.” The assassination of Julius Caesar does not restore the Roman Republic, it leads to a brutal civil war and, at the end, another emperor. The Allied powers destroy Hitler and Germany but empower Russia and Stalin and create a new Cold War to follow the conclusion of the hot one. There is always something you didn’t expect, always some second-or third-order consequence. Peter Thiel’s conspiracy had achieved its intended outcome. A negotiated peace had been found. Gawker.com would cease to publish. A new leader was in charge of the rest of the sites, some of the offending articles would be removed. But what would the consequences, intended and otherwise, of it all be? What had this brilliant, independent mind neglected to see? What, if anything, would come as a surprise? His own power and strength for one.

let us take a leaf out of Roman history and remember Helvidius Priscus.

Scipio Africanus, the general who defeated Hannibal, would say that an army should not only leave a road for their enemy to retreat by, they should pave it. The Romans had a name for this road, the Gallic Way.