Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Livy

Quote by Livy

Work

The History of Rome, Books 1-5: The Early History of Rome

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Livy
Livy

Livy, full name Livius Annius Sextus Tullius Livius, lived from 59 BC to 17 BC. He was one of the most renowned historians of ancient Rome, and his work 'The History of Rome' is an important historical document that has had a profound impact on the study of ancient Roman history. more

You May Also Like

“It is no surprise that the only woman in antiquity who could be the subject of a full-length biography is Cleopatra. Yet, unlike Alexander, whom she rivals as the theme of romance and legend, Cleopatra is known to us through overwhelmingly hostile sources. The reward of the ‘good’ woman in Rome was likely to be praise in stereotyped phrases; in Athens she won oblivion.”

WomenRomeAntiquityWilliam ShakespeareAntony And Cleopatra
Book:Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
Create image

“Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise precisely because he was “pure”: there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago. To him he was a consolation, a living proof that today’s triumph was not yet total; he personified Stenham’s infantile hope that time might still be halted and man sent back to his origins.”

ProgressCivilizationColonialismAntiquityHuman DevelopmentWestern CivilizationBoyhoodInfantileOriginsCultural HegemonyDomesticationFrench Morocco
Book:The Spider's House
Create image

“His concept of allochrony - initially introduced shyly as 'untimeliness', then later radicalized to an exit from modernity - is based on the idea, as suggestive as it is fantastic, that antiquity has no need of repetitions enacted in subsequent periods, because it 'essentially' returns constantly on its own strength. In other words, antiquity - or the ancient - is not an overcome phase of cultural development that is only represented in the collective memory and can be summoned by the wilfulness of education. It is rather a kind of constant present - a depth time, a nature time, a time of being - that continues underneath the theatre of memory and innovation that occupies cultural time.”

TimeAncientModernityAntiquityFriedrich NietzscheAllochronyCultural Time
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
Create image

“The ascetic planet he sights is the planet of the practising as a whole, the planet of advanced-civilized humans, the planet of those who have begun to give their existence forms and contents under vertical tensions in countless programmes of effort, some more and some less strictly coded. When Nietzsche speaks of the ascetic planet, it is not because he would rather have been born on a more relaxed star. His antiquity-instinct tells him that every heavenly body worth inhabiting must - correctly understood - be an ascetic planet inhabited by the practising, the aspiring and the virtuosos. What is antiquity for him but the code word for the age in which humans had to become strong enough for a sacred-imperial image of the whole? Inherent in the great worldviews of antiquity was the intention of showing mortals how they could live in harmony with the 'universe', even and especially when that whole showed them its baffling side, its lack of consideration for individuals.”

AntiquityNietzscheAsceticismFriedrich NietzschePractisingAscetics
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
Create image