Daily Inspiration Quote by Titus Livius

Ambition, Livy implies, isn’t a noble flame so much as a solvent: offer “great rewards” and the usual limits on behavior dissolve. The line is blunt on purpose. By saying “nothing man will not attempt,” Livy doesn’t flatter Roman daring; he exposes its elasticity. “Attempt” is the pivot word - it covers courage and recklessness in the same breath, the kind of moral ambiguity Rome liked to dress up as destiny.

As a historian of the late Republic and early Empire, Livy writes with the aftertaste of civil war and the new calm of Augustus. That context matters. Romans had watched “great enterprises” (conquests, political reforms, power grabs) justify extraordinary acts, from heroic endurance to convenient brutality. Livy’s sentence works as a diagnostic for how empires narrate themselves: the bigger the project, the easier it becomes to treat normal constraints as obstacles, not principles.

The subtext is quietly accusatory. “Great enterprises” sounds public-spirited, almost patriotic - roads, wars, laws, expansion. “Great rewards” is the private calculus hiding inside the civic rhetoric: glory, wealth, office, immunity. Livy compresses an entire political psychology into a single conditional statement: scale amplifies permission.

It’s also a warning about historians’ raw material. If rewards can make people attempt anything, then history will always be crowded with leaders who mistake appetite for virtue - and with citizens who cheer the enterprise until they’re asked to pay its costs.