Anthony Everitt Quotes

#1. It was about such people that he complained to Atticus: I will only say this, and I believe you know I am right: it was not enemies but jealous friends who ruined me.

Anthony Everitt

#2. From his childhood on he had had an obstinate nature and his name became a byword for virtue and truthfulness. "That's incredible, even if Cato says so," was a common expression.

Anthony Everitt

#3. The Oracle at Delphi contained three maxims emblematic of Greek life. "Know yourself." "Nothing in excess." and, "Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens.

Anthony Everitt

#4. Cicero had lived through terrible times and his fundamental aim was to make sure that they never returned. He stood for the rule of law and the maintenance of a constitution in which all social groups could play a part, but where the Senate took the lead according to ancestral tradition.

Anthony Everitt

#5. Either the future is subject to chance
in which case nobody, not even a god, can affect it one way or the other
or it is predestined, in which case foreknowledge cannot avert it.
Quintus Tullius Cicero

Anthony Everitt

#6. His biographer, Cornelius Nepos, a younger contemporary whom he knew personally, wrote that Atticus behaved so as to seem at one with the poorest and on a level with the powerful.

Anthony Everitt

#7. Victories in the field," he commented, "count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home.

Anthony Everitt

#8. Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome's ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens.

Anthony Everitt

#9. Victories in the field count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home (45) - Cicero

Anthony Everitt

#10. This found its classic expression in Homer's Iliad, in which Glaucus says to Diomedes that he still hears his father's urgings ringing in his ears: Always be the best, my boy, the bravest, and hold your head high above the others.

Anthony Everitt

#11. In the months that followed he brought a rapid succession of cases to court - as he recalled, smelling somewhat of midnight oil.

Anthony Everitt

#12. Cicero was nothing if not a genius at character assassination.

Anthony Everitt

#13. For most people bedtime was early, although Cicero admitted to writing speeches or books and reading papers at night (there was a Latin word for it, lucubrare - to work by lamplight).

Anthony Everitt