Having done this, and feeling he ought to substantiate his suggestion that he was just on the point of putting salt on the tail of an unidentified samnite, or a finishing touch on the demolition of Bopsius, he folded his newspaper, which we suspect he had not been reading candidly from, and resumed his writing.
"Somehow Good"
William de Morgan
The tone of Tacitus is sometimes that of a man who should have lived in the age of the samnite or the Carthaginian wars, before luxury and factious ambition had sapped the moral strength of the great aristocratic caste, while his feelings are divided between grim anger at a cruel destiny, and scornful regret for the weakness and the self-abandonment of a class which had been once so great.
"Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius"
Samuel Dill
There are youths and maidens in the portrait-gallery of Pliny whose innocence was guarded by good women as pure and strong as those matrons who nursed the stern, unbending soldiers of the samnite and Punic wars.
"Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius"
Samuel Dill