Laudator Temporis Acti

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 1.7 (among things owed to Quintus Junius Rusticus; tr. C.R. Haines):

...to read with minute care and not to be content with a superficial bird's-eye view...

...καὶ τὸ ἀκριβῶς ἀναγινώσκειν καὶ μὴ ἀρκεῖσθαι περινοοῦντα ὁλοσχερῶς...

Peter Stewart, "The Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius," in Marcel van Ackeren, ed., A Companion to Marcus Aurelius (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 264-277 (at 266):

The horse is caught in movement. Its raised front-right leg recalls the attitude of a highly trained parade horse on display, but this is misleading: according to the 12th-century Mirabilia Urbis Romae — an anonymous description of Rome's sights — the elevated hoof originally rested on the cowering body of a barbarian — a motif shared with the earlier, lost equestrian statue of the emperor Domitian, whose horse stepped on a personification of the River Rhine (Statius, Silvae 1.1.50–51). This detail is important for our perception of the statue and its place in the mythology of Marcus Aurelius. Without the submissive enemy he appears, to be sure, as a powerful ruler, but he is in civilian clothes, his expression is impassive — one might say 'philosophical' – and his gesture is more pacific than oppressive. If we restore in our imagination a barbarian figure, even an allegorical one, then the statue becomes a rather more typical representation of Roman victory through violence.

There is a copy of this statue at Brown University. Some students want the statue to be removed as a hated symbol of "white civilization."