It is a crime to put a Roman citizen in chains, it is an enormity to flog one, sheer murder to slay one: what, then, shall I say o...f crucifixion? It is impossible to find the word for such an abomination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Greeks were the classicists of antiquity and they are still today the preeminent classicists. What marked all they did, the cl...assic stamp, is a direct simplicity in expressing the significance of actual life. It was there the Greek artists and poets found what they wanted. The unfamiliar and the extraordinary were on the whole repellent to them and they detested every form of exaggeration. Their desire was to express truthfully what lay at hand, which they saw as beautiful and full of meaning. But that was not the Roman way. When not directly under Greek guidance the Roman did not perceive beauty in every-day matters, or indeed care to do so. Beauty was unimportant to him. Life in his eyes was a very serious and a very arduous business, and he had no time for what he would have thought of as a mere decoration of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Uprises there A mother's form upon my ken,... Guiding my infant steps, as when We walked that ancient, thoroughfare, The Roman Road.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between the Christian and Roman ideals of the early centuries A.D. there is a disjunction which is perfect. Rome stands for corpor...ate civic strength, Christianity (at least in its early stages when the Second Advent was a daily possibility) abominates all that is secular; Rome stands for a disciplined society in which tolerance allows all sorts to live together in peace, Christianity is a narrowly exclusive sect which shrinks apart. When Rome was doing all she could to hold together society and civilization, Christianity was becoming chief of the forces of disintegration. In the end Christianity triumphed but who shall say that the enemy was Rome? No doubt it shed (as unfeelingly as any fledgling) the shell which had fostered it; but the shell had been cracked from outside. Now it is a momentous happening that the beginnings of the Christian and the Roman imperial eras nearly coincide in time. The two were enemies from birth. The Roman Empire is dead, the Christian Church lives on. The Empire began in pride and splendor, the Church in humility and insignificance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a word, the Roman lacked the humanitas (the sure sense of human values and of the part played by man in the universe) which mad...e the Greek civilization great. The Greek saw life steadily and saw it whole; the Roman saw it steadily, but his vision was strictly limited, and it did not occur to him to ask whether he saw life whole. He saw life in terms of action and action in terms of his own needs; he never attained by himself to con sciousness of the world of thought and to the vision of the ideals by which all right action must be governed. It is true and fortunate for posterity that he was inspired by Greek idealism to much of his greatest work, but in himself he remained the realist of the Western world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the custom of the Roman Church which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye t...o some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »