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On the annual Remembrance Day of ancient Athens, Pericles rose to remind the people of the City that grief alone was not the best way to honour the fallen.
In the winter of 431 BC, their annual Remembrance Day had a special resonance for Athenians: war had broken out with Sparta, a city felt to stand for crushing State control, even as Corinth stood for licentious ruin. Rising to deliver the keynote address, Pericles asked Athenians not just to grieve for the dead, but to cherish a City founded on liberty and self-control as a living monument to heroes.
Aeschines paid tribute to the oratory of his greatest rival — whether he meant to or not.
Aeschines (389-314 BC) and Demosthenes (384-322 BC) were lawyers and statesmen of Athens, and rivals. Cicero, a Roman lawyer of a later generation, knew of their competitive relationship, and told this story to illustrate both their strength of feeling and also, hidden deeper than even Aeschines realised, their mutual respect.
When Julius Caesar entered the Senate that day, a note warning him of treachery was clutched in his hand — unread.
On March 15th, 44 BC, Julius Caesar, the most powerful man in Rome, was due in the Senate to receive yet more honours from the Republic. But last night his wife Calpurnia had dreamt she held his murdered body in her arms, and her fears had frankly unsettled him. Brutus told him that he must not look weak, and steered him out of the door.
Rudyard Kipling believed that a better appreciation of ancient Greece and Rome could help the English be less insular.
As the twentieth century progressed, more and more people asked why English schools taught Latin and Greek. Rudyard Kipling was one of those who resisted the trend. The value, he said, lay not in ‘intellectual training’, which can be acquired in other ways, but in the development of humility and respect — like playing cricket long enough to realise just how good Ranjitsinhji was.
The Nika Rebellion drew a rising Roman general against some rioting sports fans, and it was a tense game.
In a brilliant but turbulent career, Flavius Belisarius (?505-565) would recover North Africa from the Vandals and Rome from the Ostrogoths, and he would save Constantinople (the imperial capital) from the Huns. But before all this happened, he was involved in quite a different kind of campaign, the Nika Rebellion of 532, which began as a brawl amongst sports hooligans.
The Romans did bring some blessings to Britain, but none so great as the one they did not mean to bring.
In his Child’s History of England Dickens was consistently severe on the abuse of power. The Romans, who ruled here from the first century to the start of the fifth, did not escape his censure. He admitted they had exercised a degree of civilising influence, but in his judgment the most civilising influence in their time had been Christianity, for it exposed the frauds of Britain’s indigenous pagan elite, the Druids.
As Rome’s grip on Gaul tightened, one man still dared to defy them.
In 55 BC, the Roman general Julius Caesar paid a brief and not altogether satisfying visit to Britain, and on his return to Gaul found everything in uproar there too. Slowly he restored order, but in 52 he was confronted with an especially stubborn rebel whom he named simply Vercingetorix, ‘the Commander’. That September, however, Caesar had the Gauls pinned down in Alesia, now Alise-Sainte-Reine.