During the most flourishing times of Sidon and Tyre, the land of the Phoenicians was a perpetual apple of contention between the powers that ruled on the Euphrates and on the Nile, and was subject sometimes to the Assyrians, sometimes to the Egyptians.

Theodor Mommsen

Categorized in : Apple Sometimes Land Nile

History is neither written nor made without love or hate.

Theodor Mommsen

cynical hate history

The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd.

Theodor Mommsen

simplicity evil mean

Without passion, there is no genius.

Theodor Mommsen

passion genius

History has a Nemesis for every sin.

Theodor Mommsen

nemesis sin historical

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

Theodor Mommsen

scholar artist

The Phoenicians are entitled to be commemorated in history by the side of the Hellenic and Latin nations; but their case affords a fresh proof, and perhaps the strongest proof of all, that the development of national energies in antiquity was of a one-sided character.

Theodor Mommsen

fresh development character history

The defeat of the Augustan policy, as the peace with Maroboduus and the sufferance of the Teutoburg disaster may well be termed, was hardly a victory of the Germans.

Theodor Mommsen

disaster defeat victory peace

About the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, the Etruscan power had reached its height.

Theodor Mommsen

height rome power time

For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna, the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there on the surface.

Theodor Mommsen

generation calm ripple battle

The Mediterranean Sea with its various branches, penetrating far into the great Continent, forms the largest gulf of the ocean, and, alternately narrowed by islands or projections of the land and expanding to considerable breadth, at once separates and connects the three divisions of the Old World.

Theodor Mommsen

great ocean sea world

The ancient boundary of Italy on the north was not the Alps but the Apennines.

Theodor Mommsen

boundary italy north ancient

We have no information, not even a tradition, concerning the first migration of the human race into Italy. It was the universal belief of antiquity that in Italy, as well as elsewhere, the first population had sprung from the soil.

Theodor Mommsen

migration tradition information race

Individual tribes or, in other words, races or stocks, are the constituent elements of the earliest history.

Theodor Mommsen

other words individual history

When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians.

Theodor Mommsen

last contact existence age

The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having ever been in public use under the Arsacids.

Theodor Mommsen

empire been language land

Under the Julian and Claudian emperors, the Parthians seem to have been the leading power at the mouth of the Indus.

Theodor Mommsen

seem mouth been power

If it was in the interest of Rome to extend her conquests towards the East, and to enter on the inheritance of Alexander the Great there in all its extent, the circumstances were never more favourable for doing so than in the year 716.

Theodor Mommsen

doing never great circumstances

The Dalmatian tribes and the Pannonians, at least of the region of the Save, for a short time obeyed the Roman governors; but they bore the new rule with an ever increasing grudge, above all on account of the taxes, to which they were unaccustomed, and which were relentlessly exacted.

Theodor Mommsen

save short new time

The battle of Varus is an enigma, not in a military but in a political point of view - not in its course, but in its consequences.

Theodor Mommsen

consequences view political battle

If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted.

Theodor Mommsen

mouth obedience ocean time