“What seems epochal to later generations, Bruegel seems to suggest, may have been trivial to actual witnesses.”
“Anyone who wants more evidence for Steven Pinker’s claim that the world has gotten kinder will find it here. Ancient Rome was a brutal world, and Spiró does not hide its depredations. Monsters of particular virulence, like Caligula, are exaggerations of the general trend of abuse by the powerful, submission and cunning manipulation by the weak, and a sense of powerlessness on the part of the vast majority of people.”
“To see the Jewish predicament in this world is to understand anew why Judaism took the spiritual revenge of which Nietzsche spoke, insisting that wealth, power, and beauty were not favored by God, but that instead poverty, humility, and contrition were the ultimate weapons. Spiró’s account shows Christians adopting these ideals because they thought a new faith might escape the vengeance wreaked on the Jews. Despite the early persecutions it endured, when Christianity adopted and universalized this idea, it paradoxically acquired the very wealth and earthly power that it initially opposed. Showing the first steps of that conquest gives the novel some of its contemporary resonance.”