sejanuses

Updated: May 2, 2025

The prose historian may give us facts and names; he may catalogue the successions, and tell us long stories of battles, and of factions, and of political intrigues; he may draw characters for us, of the sort which figure commonly in such features of human affairs, men of the unheroic, unpoetic kind the Cleons, the Sejanuses, the Tiberiuses, a Philip the Second or a Louis Quatorze, in whom the noble element died out into selfishness and vulgarity.

James Anthony Froude - Short Studies on Great Subjects