The Great Roman Writers echo down the ages. Wisdom and inner strength shine from these towering personas.

1. Latin Maxims
Set out in pursuit of Greatness

2. Julius Caesar
• I came, I saw, I
conquered
• Cowards die many
times before their
actual deaths.
• The die is cast.

3. Cicero
• If you have a garden
and a library, you have
everything you need.
• Where there’s life,
there’s hope.
• Times are bad. Children
no longer obey their
parents, and everyone
is writing a book

4. Lucretius
• The Swerve
• The greatest wealth
is to live content
with little, for there
is never want
where the mind is
satisfied

5. The Swerve
• Greenblatt tells the story of
how Poggio Bracciolini, a
15th-century papal
emissary and obsessive
book hunter, saved the last
copy of
the Roman poet Lucretius's
On the Nature of
Things from near-terminal
neglect in a German
monastery, thus
reintroducing important
ideas that sparked the
modern age

6. Marcus Aurelius
• Meditations
• Give thyself time to
learn something new
and good, and cease to
be whirled around
• Let your occupations be
few," says the sage, "if
you would lead a
tranquil life.

7. Epicurus

8. Horace

9. Horace

10. Ovid
• Amor Vincit Omnia

11. Seneca

12. Seneca

13. Suetonius
12 Caesars

14. Virgil
Aeneid, Georgics, Eclogues