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“... dukes of Ferrara derived from Carolingian knights was no more fanciful than the idea that Augustus Caesar derived from Trojan exiles.) The prestige of Orlando Furioso is enhanced by analogy with the Aeneid; the prestige of the house of Este is enhanced by comparison with Augustus, the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the Roman Empire. But the analogies involved ...”

“... 180s, Severus commanded a legion in Syria, where he encountered Heliogabalus’ great-grandfather Julius Bassianus of Emesa – modern Homs – in the upper Orontes valley. Originally an Arab foundation, Emesa had a long history of friendly relations with Rome under its native dynasty and, after its absorption into the empire, remained the hinge between the ...”

“... and disbanded, or wiped out in the field, in the battles that brought the Republic down. In 30 BC, Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew Octavian, having eliminated every one of his rivals, inherited an exhausted world gasping for peace. He also inherited hundreds of thousands of men still under arms, not least his own and Mark Antony’s praetorian cohorts. He ...”

“... the inscriptions that record them provide a narrative that runs in parallel to the histories of Caesar, Tacitus and their successors. They document the lives of ordinary people, slaves and centurions, potters and graffiti writers. Roman tombs have given us the first named face in Britain, the first named woman and the first self-proclaimed Londoner. The ...”

“... From 1930 on came a great rash of prison movies and a new genre of gangster movies such as Little Caesar (1930, with Edward G. Robinson) and Public Enemy (1931, with James Cagney), in which the Capone-like celebrity gangster was the star and the Police were depicted as impotent or simply absent: Hollywood morality insisted that the gangster got killed, but ...”

“... teacher who assured me that if I did what in fact I never did, and applied myself thoroughly to Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico (‘Concentrate, Hitchens’), I would discover that most of the great general’s lauded victories were the anxious outcome of self-inflicted defeats. Since Caesar relied so heavily on ...”

“... limited repertoire of forenames (praenomina) such as Gaius, Lucius, Marcus; then a family name, Julius, Aemilius, Tullius; and finally a cognomen, Caesar, Paullus, Cicero. With Roman citizenship Greeks acquired Roman names, often using a form of the name of the reigning emperor, sponsor or benefactor while retaining their ...”