Daily Inspiration Quote by Goldwin Smith

“The Romans, we are told” is doing more work than the rest of the sentence. Goldwin Smith isn’t just passing along a textbook platitude about an ancient people; he’s quietly putting that platitude on trial. The passive framing signals skepticism: who is doing this telling, and what motives sit behind the story of Roman “nature”? By the time Smith is writing, Victorian Britain is both obsessed with Rome and anxious about its own imperial self-image. Calling Romans “peculiarly warlike” can function as flattering lineage (empire as destiny) or as moral alibi (conquest as instinct rather than choice). Smith’s opening phrase suggests he’s about to pry that alibi loose.

The key term is “by nature.” It compresses centuries of politics, economics, and contingency into a racial temperament, the kind of explanation nineteenth-century historians and public intellectuals reached for when they wanted history to sound inevitable. Smith’s phrasing implies resistance to that determinism. Rome’s expansion can be read as strategic opportunism, a set of institutional incentives, a brutal security logic in a competitive Mediterranean world - not a biological itch to fight. “Race” in his era carries both ethnographic confidence and ideological danger; it’s the vocabulary that lets empires narrate themselves as expressions of character rather than systems of power.

So the sentence works as a historian’s throat-clearing: beware inherited narratives. Smith cues the reader to notice how easily “Rome was warlike” becomes a mirror for modern nations hunting in the classical past for permission slips.