Theodor Mommsen Quotes

He accustomed the people to the fact that one man was the foremost in all things, and threw the lax and lame administration of the senatorial college into the shade by the vigour and dexterity of his personal rule.]]

... in truth Publius Scipio was one, who was himself enthusiastic, and who inspired enthusiasm. He was not one of the few who by their energy and iron will constrain the world to adopt, and to move in, new paths for centuries, or who grasp the reins of destiny for years till its wheels roll over them.... a wide interval separates such a man from an Alexander or a Caesar. As an officer, he rendered at least no greater service to his country than Marcus Marcellus; and as a politician, although not perhaps himself fully conscious of the unpatriotic and personal character of his policy, he injured hi country at least as much, as he benefited it by his military skill.

It is a dreadful picture—this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned—the more frequently, amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more completely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the germ and core of all nationality—in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a— hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.

The Romans of this epoch still remained strangers to rhetoric and philosophy. The speech in their case lay too decidedly at the very heart of public life to be accessible to the handling of the foreign schoolmaster; the genuine orator Cato poured forth all the vials of his indignant ridicule over the silly Isocratean fashion of ever learning, and yet never being able, to speak. The Greek philosophy, although it acquired a certain influence over the Romans through the medium of didactic and especially of tragic poetry, was nevertheless

...public opinion justly recognized in both, above all things, the bankruptcy of the government,which, in its progressive development placed in jeopardy first the honour and now the very existence of the state.People just as little deceived themselves then as now regarding the true seat of the evil, but as little now as then did they make even an attempt to apply the remedy at the proper point. They saw well that the system was to blame; but this time also they adhered to the method of calling individuals to account.