Sublime

I brought a withered flower back to life. I banished flies from my house. I made the cherries blossom out of season and turned the fire vivid green. If Aeëtes had been there, he would have choked on his beard to see such kitchen-tricks. Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me. My powers lapped upon themselves like waves. I found I had a

virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private.

Credited with pioneering “God-men” theology, Lake’s bold claims teetered on self-apotheosis. “God intends us to be gods (John 10:34),” he argued. “There is a God-power and a soul-force in the nature of man that God is endeavoring to bring forth.… The man within is the real man. The inner man is the real governor, the true man that Jesus said was a

Cicero himself had large amounts of money invested in low-grade property and once joked, more out of superiority than embarrassment, that even the rats had packed up and left one of his crumbling rental blocks.

Dionysus, or Bacchus, was originally a Thracian god. The Thracians were very much less civilized than the Greeks, who regarded them as barbarians. Like all primitive agriculturists, they had fertility cults, and a god who promoted fertility. His name was Bacchus. It was never quite clear whether Bacchus had the shape of a man or of a bull. When the

The Roman commander at the siege of Pompeii in 89 BCE, where the teenaged Cicero served as a very junior officer, was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, meaning ‘lucky’ or, rather more imposingly, ‘the favourite of the goddess Venus’.

Temperance was a delicate wench.

What is more, if Attalus had left his kingdom to ‘the Roman people’ (populus Romanus), was it not up to them, rather than the senate, to determine how the bequest was used? Should not the profits of empire benefit the poor as well as the rich?