Tacitus

Quotes

1. The Jews’ other customs, which are at once perverse and disgusting, owe their strength to their very badness. The most degraded out of other races, scorning their national beliefs, brought to them their contributions and presents. This augmented the wealth of the Jews, as also did the fact, that among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to shew compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies. They sit apart at meals, they sleep apart, and though, as a nation, they are singularly prone to lust, they abstain from intercourse with foreign women; among themselves nothing is unlawful. Circumcision was adopted by them as a mark of difference from other men. Those who come over to their religion adopt the practice, and have this lesson first instilled into them, to despise all gods, to disown their country, and set at nought parents, children, and brethren. Still they provide for the increase of their numbers. It is a crime among them to kill any newly-born infant.

2. 

   Indeed, when a ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him.

3. 

   He upbraided Macro, in no obscure and indirect terms, "with forsaking the setting sun and turning to the rising".

4. 

   For I deem it to be the chief function of history to rescue merit from oblivion, and to hold up before evil words and evil deeds the terror of the reprobation of posterity.

   • History

5. 

   Some might consider him as too fond of fame; for the desire for glory clings even to the best men longer than any other passion.

6. 

   The name [Christians] was derived from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judæa. By that event the sect, of which he was the founder, received a blow, which, for a time, checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigour, not only in Judæa, the soil that gave it birth, but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which every thing infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world.

   • Religion
   • History

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