"..As Salmanezer and Nebuchadnezzar had formerly carried the Jews to Babylon, so now from all the frontier provinces of the new kingdom - from Corduene, Adiabene, Assyria,Cilicia,Cappadocia - the inhabitants, especially the Greek or half-Greek citizens of the towns, were compelled to settle with their whole goods and chattels in the new capital, one of those gigantic cities proclaiming rather the nothingness of the people than the greatness of the rulers, which sprang up in the countries of the Euphrates on every change in the supreme sovereignty at the fiat of the new grant Sultan. the new 'city of Tigranes", Tigranocerta, situated in in the most southern province of Armenia, not far from the Mesopotamian frontier, was a city like Nineveh and Babylon, with walls fifty yards high, and the appendages of palace, garden and park that were appropriate to sultanism In other respects, too, the new great king proved faithful to his part. As amidst the perpetual childhood of the East the childlike conceptions of kings with real crowns on their heads have never disappeared, Tigranes, when he showed himself in public, appeared in the state and costume of a successor of Darius and Xerxes, with the purple fagtan, the half white half-purple tunic, the long plaited trousers, the high turban, and the royal diadem - attended moreover and served in slavish fashion, wherever he went or stoood, by four "kings."

“It is true that to one who was a rustic and a soldier the political proceedings of the capital were strange and incongruous: he spoke as ill as he commanded well, and displayed a far firmer bearing in the presence of the lances and swords of the enemy than in presence of the applause or hisses of the multitude; but his inclinations were of little moment. The hopes of which he was the object constrained him.”

“Fate is mightier than genius. Caesar desired to become the restorer of the civil commonwealth, and became the founder of the new military monarchy which he abhorred; he overthrew the regime of aristocrats and banks in the state, only to put a military regime in their place, and the commonwealth continued as before to be tyrannized and turned to profit by a privileged minority. And yet it is a privilege of the highest natures thus creatively to err. The brilliant attempts of great men to realize the ideal, though they do not reach their aim, form the best treasures of nations.”

“Once more Rome stood on the verge of that abyss, into which the despairing debtor drags his creditor along with him. But since that time the simple civil and moral organization of a great agricultural city had been succeeded by the social antagonisms of a capital of many nations, and by that demoralization in which the prince and the beggar meet; now everything had come to be on a braoder, more abrupt, and fearfully grander scale. When the social war brought all the political and social elements fermenting among the citizens into collision with each other, it laid the foundation for a new revolution.”

“The history of the Jewish land is as little the history of the Jewish people as the history of the States of the Church is that of the Catholics; it is just as requisite to separate the two as to consider them together.”

“..personal credit was guaranteed in the most summary and extravagant fashion; for the law entitled the creditor to treat his insolvent debtor like a thief, and granted to him in sober earnest by legislative enactment what Shylock, half in jest, stipulated for from his mortal enemy, guarding indeed by special clauses the point as to cutting off too much more carefully than did the Jew.”

“Mankind have infinite difficulty in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms as sacred heirlooms.”