But the heart loved luxury and soft, silken refinements, and Grecian philosophers in their palaces refused to let their slaves go.
Wide, indeed, the gulf separating our age of kindness from Cicero's age of cruelty! The difference is almost wholly a difference of heart.
This age has oratory and wisdom, and so had Cicero's; this age has poetry and art, and so had that; but our age has heart and sympathy, and Cicero's had not.

Caesar's mind was the mind of a scholar, but his hands were red with the blood of a half-million men slain in unjust wars.

Augustus loved refinement, literature and music.

He assembled at his table the scholars of a nation, yet his culture did not forbid the slaying of ten thousand gladiators at his various garden parties.
We admire Pliny's literary style.

One evening Pliny returned home from the funeral of the wife of a friend and sat down to write that friend a note of gratitude for having so arranged the gladiatorial spectacle as to make the funeral service pass off quite pleasantly.