In the year A.D. 43 soon after the death of Jesus Christ 40,000 Roman soldiers descended on Britain intent on conquest. Bettany Hughes, The Roman Invasion of Britain I: Onslaught, History 2009
The Romans ruled Britain for the best part of 400 years. ibid.
Britain at that time wasn’t the unified country we know today. ibid.
The 800 or so ships that made up the invasion force ... They failed to spot any armed warriors at all ... The Romans formed a battle line and waited for the Britons to attack. ibid.
Claudius derived great kudos from the fact that he had conquered Britannia. ibid.
At least eleven tribes submitted to Roman rule without so much as raising a sword. ibid.
There was plenty of fighting spirit left in Britain. ibid.
Boedica: her uprising was cataclysmic in its scope; it claimed the lives of thousands of Roman settlers. ibid.
In the first century A.D. a massive Roman invasion force descended on British shores. The guerrilla war that followed dragged on for seventy years. Bettany Hughes, The Roman Invasion of Britain II: Revolt
They reckoned without a force of Nature: an extraordinary woman called Boedica. ibid.
The Iceni were Boedica’s clan. ibid.
In the land we call Scotland fierce tribesmen known to the Romans as Pics ... would frustrate every attempt that would be made to subdue them. ibid.
Seventy-three miles and twenty-feet high in places the Wall ... functioned as an instrument of social control. ibid.
Roman Britain wasn’t the idyllic era it’s sometimes cracked up to be. ibid.
Grand country houses, villas, sprang up all over southern Britain during the Romano-British era. Bettany Hughes, The Roman Invasion of Britain III: Dominion
The Romans turned taxation into a fine art. ibid.
We simply don’t know what percentage of Britain’s population was taken into slavery during the Roman era. ibid.
The city was a Roman alien thing. ibid.
More than two million squares miles was under Roman control. ibid.
Britannia Superior which had its capital in London and Britannia Inferior which was governed from York. ibid.
The British people finally made a stand ... Around 408 A.D. there was a mini-revolt. ibid.
Their long fierce dominion over this country paved the way for Britain’s emergence as a unified nation state. ibid.
The triumph and the tragedy of Cyprus under Roman rule … Some of the very finest antiquities here do date from the time of the Roman Empire. Bettany Hughes’ Treasures of the World s2e3: Cyprus, Channel 4 2023
People all across the empire are celebrating the peace and the prosperity that Rome brought them, and they celebrate that by worshipping the Roman emperor as divine. He is called God, he is called son of God, he is called Lord, Redeemer, and all of those of course titles that are given to Jesus by the first Christians. Jonathan L Reed & John Dominic Crossan
They say when in Rome do as the Romans do. But in the history of the ancient world what exactly did the Romans do? Professor Richard Miles, The Ancient World V: Republic of Virtue, BBC 2010
What Rome managed to achieve had never been done before: it created a civilisation for export. ibid.
Rome didn’t merely conquer the world: it transformed it. ibid.
The legend of Romulus and Remus is revelatory. Romans clearly liked to see themselves from the School of Hard Knocks. ibid.
In 485 B.C. the Senate and the people had a falling out. ibid.
Law was one of the great building blocks of the Roman civilisation. ibid.
In this fluid social world everything is possible. ibid.
The Romans were armed lawyers whose instinct was to get and to hold territory. ibid.
Nothing could save Carthage; it took three years of brutal siege and in the end the city fell to Scipio. ibid.
The Romans were now the master of their universe. ibid.
The murder of the Gracci [brothers] was the original sin of the Roman Republic. ibid.
The burglars who came after – the ones we know so well – Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar – these would be the Republic’s undertakers. ibid.
Rome was now far more than just a Republic – it also had a huge empire. The complex system that was SPQR was as out of date as Cicero’s coalition of good men. The problem was the Roman Republic simply wasn’t designed to manage the great empire. ibid.
Julius Caesar was the one who saw most clearly what Rome needed – a benign autocrat aided and abetted by a tame Senate. But he famously crossed the Rubicon. ibid.
There was another solution: autocracy hidden beneath the thin veneer of a restored Republic. But to convince Roman people to give up many of their political freedoms in exchange for peace was going to take every ounce of Octavian’s political genius. With the help of a change of name the Emperor Augustus, formally known as Octavian, would transform Rome from a republic into the greatest empire the world had ever known. It would dominate the Western World for another five hundred years, only to be challenged by a new religious cult: Christianity. ibid.
The Roman Empire was the most successful the world had ever known. With its peak in the Second Century A.D. it covered five million square miles. From Hadrian’s Wall in the north to ancient Mesopotamia in the east. All of it run by a system of remarkable efficiency and stability. They called it Pax Romana – the Roman Peace. And its benefits were enjoyed by sixty million people. Professor Richard Miles, The Ancient World VI, City of Man, City of God
This mighty Empire would endure some mad, bad, dangerous emperors. ibid.
Emperors: and as you can see they come in various shapes and sizes. One of the interesting things about the Empire is that it often didn’t seem to matter what the man at the top was like – he could be mad, bad and dangerous – the Empire just carried on regardless. ibid.
The system was remarkably efficient and streamlined. The whole of the Empire was administered by just ten thousand of these bureaucrats. Modern Britain has half a million. ibid.
When it came to Religion the Romans were not fundamentalists ... In spiritual matters the Empire was like a sponge, absorbing foreign gods as readily as it had gobbled up foreign territory. ibid.
This weakness would be exposed and exploited by an obscure Jewish sect that began in the Roman province of Judea, and the execution of an unorthodox religious leader ... Christianity would go on to become the official religion of Rome and a major contributor to its downfall. The cult’s extraordinary growth began after the Jewish revolt of 66 A.D. and the destruction of the High Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, the son of the Roman emperor. ibid.
Constantine – always ready to give God the benefit of the doubt – showed his gratitude a year later by passing an edict of toleration granting Christians freedom of worship throughout the Empire. A decade later when Constantine emerged as sole Emperor the obscure messianic cult from Judea really came in from the cold. Constantine demonstrated his commitment to Christianity with hard cash. ibid.
In many ways the Roman Empire represents the zenith of ancient civilisation. It’s values had taken route throughout its far-flung territories. ibid.
Rome’s death sentence on one of the most dazzling empires of the ancient world. Professor Richard Miles, Carthage – The Roman Holocaust, Channel 4 2012
The Roman army broke through the gates of the city ... Death had come to Carthage. ibid.
Rome wanted Carthage completely and permanently erased. ibid.
149 B.C. when 85,000 troops had sailed from Rome to Carthage. ibid.
By 500 B.C.: Carthage was the richest metropolis the Mediterranean world had ever seen. ibid.
Carthage was the lord of the western Mediterranean. ibid.
The Carthaginians had created a flat-pack Navy. ibid.
Cato reserved his most venomous hatred for Carthage. ibid.
Cold-blooded pragmatism sealed Carthage’s fate. ibid.
Without Carthage, Rome would never have sharpened itself into a super-power. ibid.
Carthage has been branded as foreign, decadent, perverted, cruel and treacherous. ibid.
When the Romans destroyed Carthage they didn’t just help themselves to useful know-how about olives and ship-building, they took the whole idea of empire and Romanised it. They stole the secrets of Carthage’s success. ibid.