Historians From Italy

"It is perhaps very difficult to find in all of Roman history a political man who, like Hadrian, encloses in his thoughts a meaning and a concept of life, in which together, and almost organically and perfectly, the the ideal of Greek life and that of Roman life, the pagan soul and the Christian soul, the spiritual tendencies of the old age and those of the new age; a man who has equally united in himself the multiplicity of the most varied talents. (chap. 3, pp. 124-125)"

"But the characteristic imprint that Nero's government left in the history of public education cannot be found in primary schools or in those of rhetoric or philosophy. The originality of his government consisted instead in the introduction of a new form of physical education in the general plan of Roman education and life, the decisive triumph of the cult of musical education: two facts, which reacted against traditional tendencies, underwent lively discussions and contrasts, and were all personal work of the prince. (chap. 1, pp. 61-62)"

"The love and search for works of art dates back to Rome for many years, and since Caesar we have noticed what will be the characteristic of the empire: the transformation of temples from places of religion into places actually intended for the public cult of art, whose monuments could be known and admired by anyone. (chap. 1, p. 19)"

"Agrippa, although Pliny calls him a man for whom the rough life was preferable to the triumphant softness of his century, he was one of the most exquisite lovers of the fine arts in the history of the civilized world. He purchased many artistic masterpieces in the East; to his aedility Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was elected aedile in 33 BCE </ ref> was responsible for the reconstruction of a large part of Rome, which he had found in bricks and left in marble. (chap. 1, p. 19)"

"Augustus continued [in public education] Caesar's concept and policy. For him, as for his great predecessor, the teachers of elementary, middle and high schools were, in the life of the state, not cumbersome quantities, but elements of strength and social well-being. (chap. 1, p. 12)"

"[Hadrian]] Poet and prose writer, Latinist and Greek scholar, painter and enthusiast of plastic arts, philosopher and orator, artist and scientist, mystic and realist, superstitious and sceptical, generous and implacable, man of thought and man of action, he set his foot on all fields of knowledge, welcomed and underwent all the suggestions of which the great human soul is capable, and from every discipline, from every inspiration, he struck a spark for his ingenuity, he detected a trait for his complex personality. (ch. 3, p. 125)"

"Corrado Barbagallo, The State and public education in the Roman Empire, Francesco Battiato editore, Catania, C.E.1911."

"Papal anti-Masonic pronouncements are numerous: according to Pauline cleric Rosario Esposito, as many as 586."

"The freemason 'by his condition' is bound to obey the moral law, it is true, however, that the moral law to which the freemason refers is that established by the 'brothers' in the lodges themselves."

"The Pope Clement XII intends to spare the population the "very serious damage" that the new association [Freemasonry] can cause on both the spiritual and temporal levels."

"The only great prose writer of the age of Augustus, Titus Livy [...], is the only man of letters who truly makes the ideals of Romanism the center of his art. He is moved to write the history of Rome by love for the traditions and institutions of the republic; his republican ideals did not prevent him from fully sharing the Augustan program of moral and religious restoration. It is above all to Livy that we owe the idealization of the ancient history of Rome and its characters as models of moral and political virtues."

"All the Protestant and Masonic nations of the world in the 19th century - but also the United States, which had just been born - participated with great zeal in financing, in advising those who went to make the unification of Italy, why? Because making the unification of Italy had an objective, apart from making those liberals, the 1% of the population, who stole the goods of the Church, that is, of 99% of the population, enormously rich, forcing the Italians to become a people of emigrants, who no longer had a lira. We have always been a very rich population, because we were Catholic."

"These [the Masonic and Protestant nations] had the objective - apart from personal enrichment and power - an ideological objective for which they were aided by the liberal Freemasons all over the world, was to transform Rome from caput mundi to caput Italiae, for it is evident that Rome as the capital of Italy had ceased to be Rome. In fact, this is said in a way, at a time more or less contemporaneous with the events, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was a genius, describes this feat of Cavour who had succeeded in transforming a spiritual power like Italy into a colony, and we since then are colonies of whoever has more power moment by moment: it may be England, it may be France, it may be Germany, always colonies we are."

"In the field of religion the Romans have a tradition that is completely different from the mythological one of the Greeks; the divine is a dark and impersonal force that is present in nature and objects and which presides over all human activities; the sphere of the sacred is taboo, it is clearly distinct from thatof the profane, and when faced with manifestations of the divine man feels a shiver of religious horror. Religion is aimed at warding off the harmful influences of divine forces with rituals and magical formulas, at interpreting their will through wonders. This dark and mysterious conception of faceless and figureless gods makes its influence felt even on writers of cultured and skeptical ages, through the typically Latin feeling of horror."

"The rhetoric of the Third Rome, was the perverted fantasy of one called Mazzini, who theorised the Third Rome, no longer imperial Rome, no longer Christian Rome, but the Third Rome that was to bring light to the whole world, which was the Masonic light, without thinking, poor man, that those who had made it were simply clowns moved by other Freemasons."

"Ḫumbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest, placed there by the gods, is not truly a god but a demon with a monstrous appearance, with a frightening face, cruel and ferocious like his master Enlil. Someone wanted to see in this demonic figure, sometimes invoked to scare children, the personification of a volcano. (p. 117)"

"Whoever compares the style of theEnûma eliš with that of our epic will certainly notice a great difference. The Epic is written in a less solemn and toga style than the first and seems less ancient precisely because of its style. From many parts of the two writings it emerges that they had as authors two poets who were quite different in mentality and artistic ability. In both compositions there are also rather down-to-earth songs. However, from an aesthetic point of view theEpic is superior. (p. 118)"

"In her relations with Gilgamesh she is the prostitute goddess, a true slut, ferocious, passionate, while in the story of the universal flood, in the eleventh table, she is a merciful goddess, who takes the fate of humanity to heart and deplores the way of acting of the cruel Enlil, provocateur of the destruction of men with the exception of a few survivors. (p. 117)"

"This epic, which we could call the MesopotamianOdyssey, tells us it goes back a long way in time. It paints us with incisive and sometimes very eloquent features the social and spiritual conditions of southern Mesopotamia around 2800 BCE. and in part certainly from an even more ancient era, since the Sumerian epic and mythical texts on which the Babylonian language versions that constitute our poem are based should have arisen during the era of the third dynasty of Uru, therefore during the period from 2028 to approximately 1920 BCE., but they are certainly at least partly older. (p. 111)"

"This poem is a true hymn to the most intimate and profound friendship, all 'ibru-talīmūtu, between Gilgameš, king of Uruk, and his companion Enkidu, both unparalleled heroes, of which the first however is the hero in the true sense of the word, the one hundred percent hero, without confusion, inflexible and intransigent, whose heroism can be concisely expressed in his own words: I don't care at all about life and I am ready to die, as long as I accomplish great works, bringing universal and imperishable fame. This was therefore the heroic ideal of the ancient Mesopotamians, Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians, not at all dissimilar to the later one of the Greeks. (p. 113)"

"No one will be able to deny that in some points, in some episodes the text is highly poetic, capable of dragging even the modern reader, to whom at first many things will certainly seem quite foreign to his way of seeing and feeling, as well as bizarre. Everyone will have to admire the simplicity of the means with which the poet was able to achieve surprisingly profound effects. Who will not be moved when he reads Gilgamesh's pathetic lament over the fate of his friend? Who won't be amazed when they read the dialogue between Ištār and Gilgameš? Who will not smile and at the same time be amazed when he reads the speeches between the king and the elders of Uruk? He will not think that humanity has not changed at all in certain sentiments since the beginning of the third millennium BCE. up to the present day? (p. 119)"

"Marduk redeemed the gods following Tiāmat from slavery, he freed them from slavery by creating men and making them carry the burden of serving the gods. That is, Marduk, to spare the vanquished gods from serving the other victorious gods, forms humanity which is therefore destined by original and natural disposition to serve the gods, to religion. Humanity is therefore the subject of redemption, it is not to be redeemed, but a part of the gods is redeemable: men redeem the gods. (p. 104)"

"Ea is the great advisor of the gods, and it is therefore natural that he is the first to be aware of the evil that Tiāmat was preparing. (p. 83)"

"According to the Babylonian concept, men are, compared to the gods, immensely stupid and ignorant. (p. 98)"

"The Mesopotamians conceived the generation of the gods in perfect agreement with the human one through the work of a male god and a female goddess. Even the primitive gods were therefore procreated by a couple. (p. 77)"

"Since in the epic no mention is made of the name of the national god of Babylon, Marduk, raised to his pre-eminent position precisely by the first dynasty mentioned above, it is clear that it must be prior to the advent of this dynasty. Or it could be contemporary with this dynasty, but arose in a state independent of the Babylon of the kings of that dynasty. (p. 121)"

"In a cylinder from the British Museum, a cylinder dating back to around 800 BCE., Tiāmat has the exact shape of a serpent, as long as the seal itself. [...] In addition to some other similar cylinders, with Tiāmat in the form of a serpent, we also have cylinders with Tiāmat in the guise of a lion-griffin or dragon. This depiction of the monster is very common in the last period, but it is nothing more than an artistic variant of the first. (p. 30)"

"From what we have explained about the depictions of the conflict between Marduk and Tiāmat, it can be seen that the monster was the famous dragon of Babel, represented countless times in Mesopotamian art, a dragon that could have either an elongated shape, almost like a serpent, or a shortened one of a lion. Originally, however, it must have been a snake. (p. 33)"

"The concept of the life-giving breath of the god seems to be of Egyptian origin and belongs to the prehistory or protohistory of the idea of ​​the spirit of the god. (p. 103)"

"The whole epic story, and in particular the conflict of Marduk and Tiāmat have an astral meaning, and certain traits in which we are not yet able to see it must also have it. Unfortunately we do not know exactly which events in the starry sky the poem depicts: we do not yet know its true astral meaning. However, since the Babylonian and Assyrian religion acquired this character to an ever greater degree only as time progressed, we must assume that originally the poem reflected a mythical event of a fundamentally different character, some natural, cosmic event. Behind the gods-people there should therefore be natural gods-phenomena, and especially behind the conflict between Marduk and Tiāmat, which is the central and culminating point of the mythical action. In other words: what physical event represents this conflict? A natural fact interpreted as a divine adventure and transferred to the origins? Here too the answer is not easy. One might suppose that it was a question of depicting the struggle of spring with winter or that of the sun and light with darkness, but Marduk was never truly a solar god, any more than Aššūr was, or that Tiāmat and his offspring would represent the fury of the elements, of the rain and the storm, the rainy and stormy season, which in a region like that of the Valley of the Two Rivers causes destruction, until in spring the sun triumphs over the bad weather: Marduk would therefore represent the sun of spring, and the world would begin this very season. Tiāmat instead represents winter and night and also disorderly chaos, according to the view of the various theological schools of the country and also of the Babylonians and Assyrians of different eras. (pp. 21-22)"

"LEnûma eliš had the same function during the New Year celebration that every hymn to the god had during ceremonies in the temple. The poem is also a grandiose hymn, in which abundant biographical passages of the god are included. They remind the god of his great deeds and invite him to do something grandiose again in favor of the one who recites the hymn. The god who saved his fellow gods from evil beings will certainly want to save his faithful now! (p. 4)"

"We cannot say anything about the author of the grandiose poem, since in the numerous Mesopotamian texts in cuneiform characters made public so far no information can be found about him, and probably never will be found, as the Babylonians have annexed very little or no importance to the property literature and the belonging of works of literature to this or that artist, just as they have never taken care to pass on to posterity the names of their most famous sculptors, carvers of bas-reliefs and seals, painters, and builders of palaces and temples. (pp. 6-7)"

"The purpose of the recitation was first of all this: to narrate, to make the great deeds of the god [[Marduk] well known to all ], to praise the way in which, as a young and insignificant son of Ea he had managed, through his great valor, to gain first place in the Babylonian pantheon, and thereby motivate in a certain sense the celebration of the festival. (p. 4)"

"The Arabs knew Aristotle's doctrines only through Arabic language versions. No Arab philosopher knew Greek. (p. 132)"

"The Babylonians and Assyrians had a large number of myths and legends, largely based on those of the Sumerian, a nation of southern Mesopotamia who preceded them in history and civilization, from which they drew heavily , so it can be said that the whole Babylonian and Assyrian civilization, and in the first place religion, stands on a rich Sumerian substratum. (p. xiii)"

"The fight between the gods and the monster or monsters certainly has an astral, and perhaps even cosmic, character, and could for example symbolize the succession or conflict of the seasons as it manifests itself in nature. (p. 14)"

"Arabic philosophy was [...] philosophy of foreign origin, Greek speculation, Aristotelian philosophy, and was introduced among the Arabs already done, it did not arise slowly in the country itself from uncertain and modest origins, it did not it has always developed through internal development, it has not always then divided into various currents according to the mental peculiarities of its different followers, as Greek speculation developed, to cite a luminous and almost paradigmatic example. (p. 129)"

"The cult of Marduk flourished again during the Persian lordship through the work of Cyrus, who with fine political understanding was able to make the powerful priests of the deity favorable, who remained even in the period of decline of the Chaldean empire- Babylonian the chief deity of Babylon. Cambyses, following his father's example, held the ancient god in great honor, whose city continued for a long time to be the capital of the new empire founded by Cyrus. The great sanctuary of Marduk was then sacked and destroyed by Xerxes; which marked the end of his cult. (p. 90)"

"Istar is, without dispute, one of the divinities of the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon about which we have the most information, but at the same time it is the one we know least: there were many secondary forms and contradictory aspects and its myth had such a broad and intricate development. (p. 93)"

"Among all the gods of the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon he was the one who had the most widespread and long-lasting cult. It is already mentioned in the private documents of the ancient dynasties of Babylon, from which it appears that the god was venerated together with Sin and Samas. All the monarchs of the Babylonian empire competed in paying homage to him. (p. 88)"

"The deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon are deities of the living, who reward the good, i.e. pious men, and punish the bad, the impious, precisely during their lives. The reward consists, as appears from the prayers of many monarchs to their patron gods, above all in a long prosperous life not saddened by disease, in a happy old age and in numerous posterity; the punishment, in being deprived of these gifts of divine benevolence: the wicked was the mockery of the evil spirits, who tormented him with every sort of infirmity before giving him the mortal blow. But if the ideas of the Babylonian-Assyrians on the course of earthly life with respect to the condition of the good and the bad are, as can be seen, very simple and clear, the same cannot be said of their notions regarding the future life: about which the texts are silent almost at all. It was believed in the immortality of the soul, and that it felt the pain of separation from the body more, if it was mistreated or left unburied. However, there is no mention of the fate of the soul depending on the annihilation or the persistence of the body itself in the tomb. (pp. 154-155)"

"There was perhaps no great god of ancient Mesopotamia of whom it was not said that he had subjugated monstrous and terrible beings, just as it was said of every great god that he had performed acts of formation or creation and destined destinies. Creating, eradicating monsters and destining destinies were common traits of the great gods of the civilizations of the ancient East. (pp. 17-18)"

"We don't know exactly what Gilgameš's name means. It is not excluded that the name dates back to a Presumer language, and that the different ways of writing it represent different adaptations to the Sumerian language or attempts at explanation using the words of the Sumerian language. (p. 132)"

"Domenico Bassi, Oriental mythologies. I. Babylonian-Assyrian mythology, Ulrico Hoepli, 1899."

"In Arab culture, philosophy has occupied a rather conspicuous position. Philosophy, perhaps even only with the simple categories of Aristotelian and Porphyrian logic, pervades all the fields in which Arab thought expressed itself, it involves not only theological speculation - to varying degrees, however, according to the different schools and tendencies - to a certain extent law, but also all the sciences, astronomy no less than mathematics, medicine no less than musicology. Even the Arabic grammatical theory, which does not depend at all on the corresponding Greek doctrines, but is a completely indigenous product, fully reflecting the particular spirit of the Semitic languages, is affected, although to a very slight extent, by the action of some concepts of logic. Aristotelian. (p. 126)"

"Originally he was a solar god in general, in the local aspect the sun-god of Eridu, and his cult connected with the worship of the sun. Then when the concept of the sun in its entirety was concretized in Samas, then in Marduk the morning sun and at the same time the spring sun were seen. He later passed from Eridu to Babylon, rising to the honor of the local and tutelary god of the great metropolis. As the political and religious importance of this city grew, Marduk simultaneously rose higher and higher in the celestial hierarchy; until at the apogee of Babylon's power he appears as head of all the Mesopotamian gods. (p. 80)"

"As god of the waters, that is, of the ocean and of all the waters of the earth, whence his titles: «the master of the waters, the lord of the coasts, the sovereign of the sea, the king, the chief, the lord of the abyss », Sumerian Ea was the protector of fishermen and sailors, a character which he also preserved in Babylonian myth and in the Assyrian cult. (p. 47)"

"From his quality as king of the waters comes his wisdom, which makes him, as we read in various hymns, "the intelligent guide, the god of pure life, the lord of knowledge, of human glory". He was considered supremely good, indeed one of his ancient names was Dugga, "the good", and supremely beneficial, as he revealed himself at the time of the flood, providing for the salvation of Sitnapistim. He was also considered as the giver of the laws according to which princes and peoples must govern themselves, and therefore as a lover of justice: hence, again in the saga of the flood, the reproach that he leveled against Bel for not having made a distinction between good and bad, between innocent and guilty. (pp. 47-48)"

"Ea is the main god of the most ancient phase of the Sumerian religion, which then passed into the Babylonian-Assyrian pantheon, the god who in the magical spells of conjuration is invoked as "the spirit of the earth" and more precisely of the surface terraqueous. But Ea was not only the "lord of the earth", or In-ki, his ancient original name, but also the sovereign of the region of the atmosphere, within which life takes place in all its various and multiple forms. (p. 46)"

"Blacksmiths and goldsmiths, weavers, stone carvers, gardeners and farmers proclaimed him their patron and teacher; the scribes saw in him the source of their science; the doctors, that is, the magicians, spoke to the spirits in his name, using prayers that they had learned from him. (p. 49)"