"Athenian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... interpret and carry out laws, because we make them." The conclusion was right, but the minor premise was disputable. The retort can be made: "True, you can interpret and carry out laws because you make them, but perhaps you have no business to be making laws." Be that as it may, the Athenian people not only interpreted and applied its own laws, but it insisted on being paid for so doing. The result was that the poorest citizens sat judging all day long, as all others were unwilling to sacrifice their whole time for a payment of six drachmas. This plebeian tribunal ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... to me recently that, for Rosina's riddle in his episode of the masks in Samson, he had dipped in the stream of children's games current to-day in Palermo; he did not appear to know that Plato had dipped in his own Athenian stream for the riddle quoted by Glaucon towards the end of the fifth book of the Republic. The riddles are similar not because Rosina had read the dialogue, nor because Glaucon had seen the play, but because the two ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... But enough is left over. In the beginning of the play Socrates expressly declares that no gods exist. Similar statements are repeated in several places. Zeus is sometimes substituted for the gods, but it comes to the same thing. And at the end of the play, where the honest Athenian, who has ventured on the ticklish ground of sophistic, admits his delusion, it ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... here inside me may stop any moment like a broken clock. Here is Euripides writing better than I: and here in my body, under my hand, is the mechanism upon which depend all those masterpieces that are to blot the Athenian from the reckoning, and I have no ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... bear the present cost, gasp for breath before the promised goal is reached. Pericles, by laying out huge sums on the public buildings of Athens, earned the undying gratitude of artistic posterity. Whether his action was in the true interests of his Athenian contemporaries is perhaps rather more doubtful. The recent history of Argentina is an instance of a country in which, as subsequent events have proved, the plea for lavish capital expenditure was perfectly justifiable, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... listening in the forlorn streets of a Puritan city—when for one day the cheating tradesmen leave their barbarous shops—to the wailing of unlovely hymns, empty of everything except a degraded sentimentality that would make an Athenian or a Roman slave blush with shame, is enough to cause one to regard the most scandalous levity of Voltaire as something ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... account of the greatness of our love the days ever appear to us to be few. There are delightful libraries in cells redolent with aromatics, there flourishing greenhouses of all sorts of volumes, there academic meads, trembling with the earthquake of Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, there the promontory of Parnassus and the Porticoes of the Stoics." The Duke of Roxburghe and Earl Spencer, two gallant sportsmen whose spoils have enriched the land; Monkbarns also, though we will not let him bring any antiquities with ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... of an old man, whose name was Egeus, who actually did come before Theseus (at that time the reigning duke of Athens), to complain that his daughter Hermia, whom he had commanded to marry Demetrius, a young man of a noble Athenian family, refused to obey him, because she loved another young Athenian, named Lysander. Egeus demanded justice of Theseus, and desired that this cruel law might be put in force against ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... they cannot endure the solid truth. The echoes, whereby what is done in part of the kingdom, is heard all over. They are like the mushrooms, sprung up in a night, and dead in a day; and such is the greediness of men's natures (in these Athenian days) of new, that they will ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... girls, were sacrificed; "but reform supervened, and now the victims were bound as before to the stake, but afterwards amid litanies to the immolated (god) Narayana, the sacrificing priest brandished a knife and—severed the bonds of the captives." (3) At the Athenian festival of the Thargelia, to which I referred in the last chapter, it appears that the victims, in later times, instead of being slain, were tossed from a height into the sea, and after being rescued ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... climates in the open air, usually in the market-place,—the Roman forum, the Greek agora. The government carried on in them was a more or less qualified democracy. In the palmy days of Athens it was a pure democracy. The assemblies which in the Athenian market-place declared war against Syracuse, or condemned Socrates to death, were quite like New England town-meetings, except that they exercised greater powers because there was no state government ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... of Constantinople—and to the gradual but steady progress of Western Europe in arts and letters, which made it a welcome refuge for the imperilled learning of the East—Greek letters came like a fertilizing flood across the Continent into England. The philosophy of Plato, the power of the Athenian drama, and the learning of the Stagyrite, were a new impulse to literature. Before the close of the fifteenth century, Greek was taught at Oxford, and men marvelled as they read that "musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... had been anticipated in 1690 by John Dunton's Athenian Society, which replied to all questions submitted by readers in his paper, the Athenian Mercury. This was succeeded by the Scandal Club of Defoe's Review, and the well-known club of the Tatler, which met at the Trumpet; [Footnote: Tatler 132] but the plan of arranging the ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... disputed the passage of Kambyses into Egypt. The first revolt of Egypt had saved Greece from the impending invasion of Darius, and postponed it to the reign of his feebler son, and during its second revolt Athenian ships had sailed up the Nile and assisted the Egyptians in the contest with the Persians. If Egypt could not be free, it was better that its ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... the moment of victory has always been the commonplace of human desire. When the antique sage was asked to select the happiest man in history, his choice fell on one whose destiny resembled that of the Member for Crewe; for Tellus the Athenian had lived a full and well-contented life, had seen fine and gentlemanly sons and many grandchildren growing up around him, had shared the honour and prosperity of his country, and died fighting at Eleusis when victory was assured. Next in happiness to Tellus came the two Argive boys, who, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... over of raw material, but the more stimulating absorption of methods and processes and even of artistic ideals. The Sicilian Gorgias had for a pupil the Attic Isocrates; and the style of the Athenian was imitated by the Roman Cicero, thus helping to sustain the standard of oratory in every modern language. The 'Matron of Ephesus' of Petronius was the great-grandmother of the 'Yvette' of Maupassant; and the dialogs of Herondas and ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... sphere-descended maid, 95 Friend of Pleasure, Wisdom's aid! Why, goddess! why, to us denied, Lay'st thou thy ancient lyre aside? As, in that loved Athenian bower, You learn'd an all commanding power, 100 Thy mimic soul, O Nymph endear'd, Can well recall what then it heard; Where is thy native simple heart, Devote to Virtue, Fancy, Art? Arise, as in that elder time, 105 ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... That philosopher was very well qualified to convey the first shock of the ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always thought instinctively of civilisation as modern. This is not due merely to the daring splendour of the speculations and the vivid picture of Athenian life, it is due also to something analogous in the personalities of that particular ancient Greek and this particular modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much affinity to Plato—in his instinctive elevation of temper, his courageous pursuit of ideas as far as they will go, his civic idealism; and ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... think, or to hope, that he was a poet, and wrote Pindaric Odes to Temple, to the king, and to the Athenian Society, a knot of obscure men, who published a periodical pamphlet of answers to questions, sent, or supposed to be sent, by letters. I have been told that Dryden, having perused these verses, said, "Cousin Swift, you will never be a ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... Tocqueville's and admit with him that "a democracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are forced to do so. But then comes the inevitable second thought that a democracy must needs have other things than meditation to attend to. Athenian and Florentine and Versailles types of political despotism have all proved highly favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers and men of letters who enjoyed the despot's approbation. For that matter, no scheme of life was ever ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... modern lynching laws. Wessex, early laws of. Westminster I, first statute of. Westminster III, statute of quia emptores. Wharves, charges regulated in early times. Wheat, price of, regulated, Athens. Whistles, laws against. Whitaker, Dr. F.E., on Athenian corn laws. Wholesale and retail selling recognized as lawful, but not forestalling. Wight, Isle of, to be repeopled with English people. Wilgus, Horace L., on Federal incorporation. William the conqueror, charter ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... cut-up. As a piece of delicate Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter. That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, tax-paying, art-despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter, carried his professional ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Astor, the son of the rich American merchant. He was thus learning and teaching at the same time, and he acquired by his daily intercourse with his pupil a practical knowledge of the English language. While at Goettingen he carried off, in 1812, a prize for an essay on "The Athenian Law of Inheritance," which attracted more than usual attention, and may, in fact, be looked upon as one of the first attempts at Comparative Jurisprudence. In 1713 he ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the tributes of her contemporaries show reverence not less for her personality than for her genius is sufficient answer to the calumnies with which the ribald jesters of that later period, the corrupt and shameless writers of Athenian comedy, strove to defile her fame. It is sufficient, also, to warrant our regarding the picturesque but scarcely dignified story of her vain pursuit of Phaon and her frenzied leap from the Cliff of Leucas as nothing more ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... with, don't you? Ah!" He looked into the back shop before he returned to his paste and his slips. "That was Mr. Potts, the great Queen Anne collector, sir. Most notorious book-snatcher in all London, and the most barefaced. Wanted our fourth volume of the 'Athenian Oracle.' I saw his eyes reached out this way, and that way, and always resting on that volume. I saw him edging along to the shelf. Got another odd volume just like it in his wicked old hand, ready to change it when I ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... by the very purity of motive and intention with which our American Manhood took up its burden, led us nationally unto those heights of moral perspective and spiritual vision known only to him who toils upon the hill of Sacrifice. No Spartan of Athenian fields, no Regulus of Rome or Nathan Hale, was nobler, higher motived or less afraid than ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... every detail of a Greek temple was adjusted to its position and expressed its office, so the building itself was made to fit its site and to show forth its purpose, forming with the surrounding buildings a unit of a larger whole. The Athenian Acropolis is an illustration of this: it is an irregular fortified hill, bearing diverse monuments in various styles, at unequal levels and at different angles with one another, yet the whole arrangement seems as organic and inevitable as the disposition ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... sense of beauty, and an ingrained love of what is noble and hatred of all that is the reverse. He would be more cultivated and human than the best type of young Spartan, more physically vigorous and reverential, though less intellectually developed, than the best type of young Athenian—a nascent soldier and servant of the state, not, like most young Athenians of ability, a nascent orator. And as he would be only half way through his education at an age when many Greeks had finished ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... drugs potent o'er death from the basilisk won, Odorous Phoenix-nest, and spice of a sunnier sun:— Butts of Malvasian nectar, Messene's vintage of old, Cyprian webs, damask of Arabia mazy with gold: Sendal and Samite and Tarsien, and sardstones ruddy as wine, Graved by Athenian diamond with forms of beauty divine. To the quay from the gabled alleys, the huddled ravines of the town, Twilights of jutting lattice and beam, the Guild-merchants come down, Cheapening the gifts of the south, the ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Periclean Athens with the funds of the League, and the source as well as the destination of these surplus funds. Out of it all came the works on the Acropolis, together with much else of intellectual and artistic life that converged upon and radiated from this Athenian center of culture. The vista of Denkmaeler that so opens to the vision of a courageous fancy is in itself such a substance of things hoped for as should stir the heart of all humane persons.[8] The cost of this subvention of Culture would doubtless be appreciable, but those grave men who ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... the first things that might be attempted in the legislative way is Smoke Prohibition. It is exactly a matter for the interference of the state. The Athenian in the comedy, wearied of war, concludes a separate peace with the enemy for himself, his wife, his children, and his servant; and forthwith raises a jovial stave to Bacchus. Now all sensible people would not only be glad to enter into ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... Greek rather than the Englishman. Dr. Francis Lieber wrote: "To test Webster's oratory, which has ever been very attractive to me, I read a portion of my favorite speeches of Demosthenes, and then read, always aloud, parts of Webster; then returned to the Athenian; and Webster stood the test." Apart from the great compliment which this conveys, such a comparison is very interesting as showing the similarity between Mr. Webster and the Greek orator. Not only does the test indicate the merit ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... whose principal orations I read several times over, and wrote out, by way of exercise, a full analysis of them. My father's comments on these orations when I read them to him were very instructive to me. He not only drew my attention to the insight they afforded into Athenian institutions, and the principles of legislation and government which they often illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the orator—how everything important to his purpose was said at the exact moment when he had brought the ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, was chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded on Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but Design: and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Virgin-worship are both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these great deities rank, in power over the national mind, Dionysus and Ceres, the givers of human strength and life: then, for heroic example, Hercules. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Christian's cross in the beginning of a work, as there is in a continual, hearty, conscientious practice thereof. Therefore Christians have need, as to be pressed to do good, so to continue the work. Man, by nature, is rather a hearer than a doer, Athenian like, continually listening after some new thing; seeing many things, but observing nothing (Acts 17:20; Isa 42:20). It is observable, that after Christ had divided his hearers into four parts, he condemned three of them ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... success and triumph began to suffer dissolution; each separate interest became a prominent centre of a distinct political crystallization; and it was in this way that certain elements of barbarism, inherent in Spartan civilization, now for the first time arrayed it in direct opposition to the Athenian. It was this defection, on the part of Sparta, from the cause of freedom, which cut the world off from those benefits that it was in the power of Greece to confer. Athens, whatever other faults she may have had, stood ready to extend these benefits. As she alone had awakened for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... much for either one or the other. I have been in various parts of France in the most critical periods of the revolution—I have conversed with people of all parties and of all ranks—and I assert, that I have never yet met but with one man who had a grain of real patriotism. If the Athenian law were adopted which doomed all to death who should be indifferent to the public welfare in a time of danger, I fear there would be a woeful depopulation here, even among the loudest ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... in the same place, was gradually forming from those who came up from time to time. Cyrus, riding by at a moderate distance from his army,[64] surveyed from thence both the lines, looking as well towards the enemy as to his own men. 15. Xenophon, an Athenian, perceiving him from the Grecian line, rode up to meet him, and inquired whether he had any commands; when Cyrus stopped his horse, and told him, and desired him to tell everybody, that the sacrifices and the appearances ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... advice as to what he should read, mine should be exceedingly simple—Read anything bearing on a definite object. Let him take up any imaginable subject to which he feels attracted, be it the precession of the equinoxes or postage stamps, the Athenian drama or London street cries; let him follow it from book to book, and unconsciously his knowledge, not of that subject only, but of many subjects, will be increased, for the departments of the realm of knowledge are divided by no octroi. He may abandon the ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... must be denied to animals or children, because they do not know the danger. Against this inversion of the ordinary use of language Laches reclaims, but is in some degree mollified by a compliment to his own courage. Still, he does not like to see an Athenian statesman and general descending to sophistries of this sort. Socrates resumes the argument. Courage has been defined to be intelligence or knowledge of the terrible; and courage is not all virtue, but only one of the virtues. ...
— Laches • Plato
... keeping Mount Pentilicus on the left, the travellers came in sight of the ever-celebrated Plain of Marathon. The evening being advanced, they passed the barrow of the Athenian slain unnoticed, but next morning they examined minutely the field of battle, and fancied they had made antiquarian discoveries. In their return to Athens they inspected the different objects of research and fragments of antiquity, which still attract travellers, and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the Boeotians were the largest; they carried 120 men each; those of the Philoctetae were the smallest, each carrying only fifty men. Agamemnon had 160 ships; the Athenians fifty; Menelaus, king of Sparta, sixty; but some of his ships seem to have been furnished by his allies; whereas all the Athenian vessels belonged to Athens alone. We have already mentioned that Thucydides is contradicted by Homer, in his assertion that the Greek ships, at the siege of Troy, had no decks; perhaps, however, they were only half-decked, as it would ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... Willoughby was uncomforted. His themes in public were those of an English gentleman; horses, dogs, game, sport, intrigue, scandal, politics, wines, the manly themes; with a condescension to ladies' tattle, and approbation of a racy anecdote. What interest could he possibly take in the Athenian Theatre and the girl whose flute-playing behind the scenes, imitating the nightingale, enraptured a Greek audience! He would have suspected a motive in Miss Dale's eager attentiveness, if the motive could have been conceived. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... O my brethren, hers is the glory which must shine forever in perfected letters, by which He we go to find and proclaim will be made known to all the earth. The land I speak of is Greece. I am Gaspar, son of Cleanthes the Athenian. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... When the Athenian law debarring all but freemen from the exercise of art was enacted, Creon was at work trying to realize in marble the vision his soul had created. The beautiful group was growing into life under his magic touch when the cruel edict struck the chisel ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... Housman, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and others which would in the nineteenth century have stood rather less chance of production at a London theatre than the Dialogues of Plato, not to mention revivals of the ancient Athenian drama and a restoration to the stage of Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, was made economically possible solely by a supply of theatres which could hold nearly twice as much money as it cost to rent and ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... Moldo-Wallachian (in a word, a Parisian—a Parisian of the Danube, if you like), who fell in love with a young Greek, or Turk, or Armenian (also of Paris), as dark-browed as the night, as beautiful as the day. The great lord was of a certain age, that is, an uncertain age. The beautiful Athenian or Georgian, or Circassian, was young. The great lord was generally considered to be imprudent. But what is to be done when one loves? Marry or don't marry, says Rabelais or Moliere. Perhaps they both said it. Well, at all events, the great lord married. It appears, if well- informed ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... noble to allow any modest Modern to think of improving upon it. But whether executed on a Greek type or no, it is to be presumed that, as there are sixty-six of them alike, and on so important a building as that which is to contain your school of design, and which is the principal example of the Athenian style in modern Athens, there must be something especially admirable in them, and deserving your most attentive contemplation. In order, therefore, that you might have a fair opportunity of estimating ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... 80: Mopsopian.—Ver. 661. This very uneuphonious name is derived from Mopsopus, one of the ancient kings of Attica. It here means 'Athenian.'] ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the 12th May. I have since heard from him, at sea and at Malta; and I have lately understood that he was off Cape Spartavento, where he may have heard of Gantheaume's squadron; but his ultimate orders are for Mahon, at which place he must now be with seven ships of the line. The Athenian must now be ready to join, from Malta. Should the enemy sail up the Mediterranean, Carthagena or Toulon must be their first rendezvous, where you will be able to observe them, when joined to Sir John; and, from all information, their objects of attack must be confined to three,—Egypt, Turkey ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... immediate occasion of the hostilities, which in time involved so many states, was the opportunity offered by the conflict between Corinth and Corcyra of increasing the sea-power of Athens. Hitherto the Athenian naval predominance had been virtually confined to the AEgean Sea. The Corcyraean envoy, who pleaded for help at Athens, dwelt upon the advantage to be derived by the Athenians from alliance with a naval state occupying an important situation 'with respect to the western regions towards which the ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... provided so well for the revision of his constitution, without breach of continuity or loss of stability, that for centuries after his death the Attic orators attributed to him, and quoted by his name, the whole structure of Athenian law. The direction of its growth was determined by the fundamental doctrine of Solon, that political power ought to be commensurate with public service. In the Persian war the services of the Democracy eclipsed those of the Patrician orders, for the fleet that swept the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... elevated without alarming me! What had Marcelle and I to fear? Was not our departure on the voyage of life like that of Athenian Theori for the island of Delos, sailing to the sound of harps and songs while crowned with flowers? Did not our hearts beat responsive to the chorus of ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... the beauties of a foreign language. No one accused Euripides of plagiarism for having imitated in one of the choruses of "Iphigenia" the second book of the Iliad; on the contrary, people were very grateful to him for this imitation, which they regarded as a homage rendered to Homer on the Athenian stage. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... the influence of the place descended upon him. He felt quieter. He began to look absently at the tombstones with which the room was lined. They were the work of Athenian stone masons of the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ, and they were very simple, work of no great talent but with the exquisite spirit of Athens upon them; time had mellowed the marble to the colour of honey, so that unconsciously one thought of the bees of Hymettus, and ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... this evil, which he saw in the plays of the great Athenian poets, by saying: "The action is the first and most important thing, the characters only second;" and, "The action is not given unity by being made to concern ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... of Immortals, aweful Maid ATHENIAN PALLAS. Venerable Powers! Hearken your hymn of praise! tho' from your rites Estranged, and exiled from your altars long, I have not ceased to love you, HOUSEHOLD GODS! In many a long and melancholy hour Of solitude and sorrow, has my heart With earnest longings prayed ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... consuming emotion not quite of this world nor of the next. The barren rebellion which stirred Botticelli's bosom never quite assumed the concrete. His religious subjects are Hellenised, not after Mantegna's sterner and more inflexible method, but like those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended Dante. Yet the illustrations show us a different Dante, one who would not have altogether pleased the gloomy exile. William Blake's transpositions of the Divine Comedy seem to sound the depths; Botticelli, notwithstanding ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... pleasantries loved of the populace; especially when they are formulated by the shameless genius of an Aristophanes or a Plautus. What merriment over a simple allusion to the sonorous bean, what guffaws from the throats of Athenian sailors or Roman porters! Did the two masters, in the unfettered gaiety of a language less reserved than our own, ever mention the virtues of the haricot? No; they are absolutely ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... sages knew; They gave our sires the honour due: They weigh'd the dignity of fowls, And pry'd into the depth of Owls. Athens, the seat of earned fame, With gen'ral voice revered our name; On merit title was conferr'd, And all adored th' Athenian bird." "Brother, you reason well," replies The solemn mate, with half-shut eyes: "Right: Athens was the seat of learning, And truly wisdom is discerning. Besides, on Pallas' helm we sit, The type and ornament of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... than the dead. Clearly, mankind would sustain some loss of good sense, were all the dullards and fat-wits taken away; and Sancho Panza, with his hearty, "Blessings on the man that invented sleep!" here ekes out the scant wisdom of sages. The talking world, however, of our day takes part with the Athenian against the Manchegan philosopher, and, while admitting the present necessity of sleep, does not rejoice in its original invention. If, accordingly, in a computation of the length of man's life, the hours passed in slumber are carefully deducted, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... the pay of that inconsiderable number. Nor did the other towns of Sicily confide in him, overpowered as they were with violence and outrage, and embittered against all that should offer to lead armies, by the treacherous conduct chiefly of Callippus, an Athenian, and Pharax, a Lacedaemonian captain, both of whom, after giving out that the design of their coming was to introduce liberty and depose tyrants, so tyrannized themselves, that the reign of former oppressors seemed to be a golden age in comparison, and the Sicilians began ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... become their prey—and no faculty is more unintelligible to such men than just this historical sense, with its truckling, plebeian curiosity. The case is not different with Shakespeare, that marvelous Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of taste, over whom an ancient Athenian of the circle of AEschylus would have half-killed himself with laughter or irritation: but we—accept precisely this wild motleyness, this medley of the most delicate, the most coarse, and the most artificial, with a secret confidence and cordiality; we ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... now began to dazzle his judgment and to inflame his passions. He became a slave to debauchery, and his caprices were as cruel as they were ungrateful. In a fit of drunkenness, and at the instigation of Thais, an Athenian courtesan, he set fire to Persepolis, the wonder of the world, and reduced it to a heap of ashes; then, ashamed of the deed, he set out with his cavalry in pursuit of Darius. Learning that Bessus, the Bactrian satrap, held him a prisoner, he hastened his march, in the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... latitudes and halcyon seas of Asia and the Mediterranean had failed to develop the sneeze, save that the immortal Montaigue, a friend in need to every reader, will point you that Aristotle told why the people bless a man who sneezes. "The gods bless you!" said the Athenian. "God bless you!" says the Irishman or ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... Greeks. His capital Sardis became the largest in western Asia, and one of the most luxurious cities known to antiquity, whither resorted travellers from all parts of the world, attracted by the magnificence of the court, among whom was Solon himself, the great Athenian law-giver. Croesus continued the warfare on the Greek cities of Asia, and forced them to become his tributaries. He brought under his sway most of the nations to the west of the Halys, and though never so ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... man eloquent" is Isocrates, the Athenian orator, whose patriotism made him refuse to survive the defeat of the Athenians and Thebans by Philip of Macedon at Chaeroncia, This comparison of the lady's father to the famous Greek is perhaps the most poetical turn in the Sonnet. For the rest, it tells us ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... devote we to the infernal gods the memory of the Athenian republic—the first keeper of a circulating library. Every tyro is aware that this Sams or Ebers of antiquity lent out to Ptolemy of Egypt, for a first-rate subscription of fifteen talents, the works of Euripides, Eschylus, and Sophocles; thereby affording a precedent for the abominable practice, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... manners, customs, and dialect.[1] The climate and the scenery, the forms of contour and relief, the geographical position and relations of Attica, and, indeed, of the whole peninsula of Greece, must be taken into our account if we would form a comprehensive judgment of the character of the Athenian people. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... which is the fruit of intellectual or social exclusiveness. With men of this temper the call to love all men as fellows could only provoke anger and derision. What possible relation could exist between an Athenian philosopher and a helot, a Roman noble and a slave, a Pharisee proud of his meticulous knowledge of the law, and the common people who were unlettered? The gulf that yawned between such lives was as wide as that ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... have no small pretensions to beauty, and the colours of almost all are still wonderfully bright and fresh. In the great hall at the end of the courtyard we find on one side the Farnese Hercules, and on the other the Bull, both works of the Athenian Glycon. These two antiques, particularly the latter, have been in a great ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... scalps; not for you, dancing Spaniard, with your eternal castagnets, whispering just one word to your dark-eyed senorita, as you hand her another perfumed cigarette; not for you, lounging Italian, hissing intrigues under the shadow of an Athenian portico, or stealing after your veiled incognita, as her shadow flits over the place where the blood of Caesar dyed the floor of the Capitol, or where the knife of Virginius flashed in the summer sun—not for one of you, for I have seen and despise you all. To you all love ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... divert you, especially the baroness in the right-hand corner—so ugly, and so satisfied: the Athenian head was intended for Stewart; but was so like, that Hogarth was forced to cut ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... pueris. This custom of throwing nuts, such as walnuts or almonds, is of Athenian origin; some say it was meant to divert the attention from the raptures of the bride and bridegroom, when in bed, by the noise they, and the scrambling boys, made on the floor. For nuces, referring to the use of boys, see Verg. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... from the bottom of a high bank and is otherwise hidden by trees. But it's only a short distance, and in good weather we have the guests walk it, because it gives them a better chance to admire the gardens and the Athenian columns and things. But Monday, which dawned bright and still and warm, and was just as typical of May in Westchester as was the snow-and-wind storm, we drove them down in a bus because the roads and paths were horribly muddy. Of course, none of the women wanted to take ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... education of eye and ear; it was a training that sprang from reverence for nature, as a whole, for an ideal of complete life, in body and mind and soul; and not only for complete individual life, but also for the city, the nation. It was a consummate perfection of life that was ever leading the Athenian upward, by a life-long education, to strive for a certain grace and finish in every one of his faculties. And we see to what splendid results in literature and art and civic and personal beauty ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... general. Concerning the rapidity and the paucity of words with which prices are settled in that country, where business men do not even salute their customers, nor customers the business man, see C. G. Simon, Observations recueillies en Angleterre, 1835, I, 129 f. The Athenian laws (?), that fixed prices should be asked, and that sellers should not sit down that that they might sell more rapidly, points to something similar. (Athen., VI, 226 f. Plato, De Legg., XI, 916 f.) Athenian ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the schoolmaster, who is bullying poor trembling little boys, was a fine scholar when he was a sizar, and a ruffian then and ever since. Where is the great poet, since the days of Milton, who has improved the natural offshoots of his brain by grafting it from the Athenian tree? ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... occupied somewhat the same position as Olympia Morata and Tarquinia Molza later in Italy during the Renaissance, or like some of the celebrated Frenchwomen, such as Madame de Stael. Seneca addresses a Dialogue on Consolation to one Marcia; such an idea would have made the hair of any Athenian gentleman in the time of Socrates stand on end. Aspasia was obliged to be a courtesan in order to become educated and to frequent cultivated society[184]; Sulpicia was a noble matron in good standing. The world had not stood still since Socrates had requested some one to take Xanthippe ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere. Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the ancient Greeks. Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... my own, I gained such an ascendant over all my opponents that, having first procured the banishment of Cimon by ostracism, and then of Thucydides, another formidable antagonist set up by the nobles against my authority, I became the unrivalled chief, or rather the monarch, of the Athenian Republic, without ever putting to death, in above forty years that my administration continued, one of my fellow-citizens; a circumstance which I declared, when I lay on my death-bed, to be, in my own judgment, more honourable to me than all ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... short story is written for the sake of that which the French call pointe. When one has finished the reading of "Zeus's Sentence," for a moment the charming description of the evening and Athenian night is lost. And what a beautiful description it is! If the art of reading were cultivated in America as it is in France and Germany, I would not be surprised if some American Legouve or Strakosch were to add to his repertoire ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... Popish savage, of whom there was very little to know, and that little hardly worth knowing. Our feeling towards Gray in this matter is much the same as our feeling towards Mitford in the matter of Greek history. We are angry with Mitford for misrepresenting Demosthenes and a crowd of other Athenian worthies, but we do not forget that he was the first to deal with Demosthenes and his fellows, neither as mere names nor as demi-gods, but as real living men like ourselves. It was a pity to misrepresent Demosthenes, but even the misrepresentation was something; it ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... of that style is found in Leigh Hunt's Feast of the Poets and in Edward Fitz-Gerald's Chivalry at a Discount. Other writers of satire in the earlier decades of the present century were Peacock, who in his novels (Crotchet Castle, &c.) evolved an original type of satire based upon the Athenian New Comedy. Miss Austen in her English novels and Miss Edgeworth in her Irish tales employed satire to impeach certain crying social abuses, as also did Dickens in Oliver Twist and others of his books. Douglas Jerrold's comedies and sketches are full of titbits of gay and brilliant banter and ...
— English Satires • Various
... so much resembles Confucius in doctrine as Socrates. But Confucius does not suffer from the comparison. He had a beauty, dignity and grace of person which the great Athenian did not possess. Socrates was more or less of a buffoon, and to many in Athens he was a huge joke—a town fool. Confucius combined the learning and graces of Plato with the sturdy, practical commonsense of Socrates. No one ever affronted or insulted him; many did not understand ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... instance was the God of the sea, and as such worshipped by the very people who enlisted him among their kings. This may be proved from Athenagoras. [1272][Greek: Athenaios Erechthei Poseidoni thuei.] The Athenian sacrifices to Erectheus the same as Poseidon. Strabo seems to think, that most of the antient names were foreign; [1273]such as Cecrops, and Codrus, and Arclus, and Cothus: and he is certainly ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... with such ability that Socrates and Alcibiades gathered wisdom from her lips, and so marked was her genius for statesmanship that Pericles afterward married her and allowed her to govern Athens, then at the height of its glory and power. Numerous examples might be cited in which Athenian women rendered material ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... with him, and being instructed by her now to use it so as to conduct him through the windings of the Labyrinth, he escaped out of it and slew the Minotaur, and sailed back, taking along with him Ariadne and the young Athenian captives. Pherecydes adds that he bored holes in the bottom of the Cretan ships to hinder their pursuit. Demon writes that Taurus, the chief captain of Minos, was slain by Theseus at the mouth of the port, in a naval combat, as he was sailing out for Athens. But Philochorus gives us the story ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... at London; shall the rage abate Here, where it most should shine, the muses' seat? Where, mortal or immortal, as they please, The learn'd may choose eternity, or ease? Has not a (66)royal patron wisely strove To woo the muse in her Athenian grove? Added new strings to her harmonious shell, And given new tongues to those who spoke so well? Let these instruct, with truth's illustrious ray, Awake the world, and scare our owls away. Meanwhile, O friend! indulge me, if I ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... willingly let die. A rush of stirring glorious memories swept over her mind as she gazed on the lofty summit of the Acropolis, covered with memorials of the ancient art, and associated with the great events of Athenian history. The Parthenon, or Temple of Pallas; the Temple of Theseus; that of Olympian Jove; the Tower of the Winds, or so-called Lantern of Demosthenes; and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates,—all these she saw, and wondered at. But they have been so frequently described, that ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... associated with special excellences and defects. Thus, Grote keeps attention more by the intelligence of his comments than by the flow of his narration; he is far more political than picturesque; and while he gives a masterly analysis of the Athenian system of government, so as to place it in a new light even to the scholar's apprehension, he discusses the arts and the literature so inspiring to most cultivated minds, when describing Greece, with comparative indifference. Those who would examine English annals unbiased ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... here, and conduce to our salvation hereafter. Had it been essential, the Allwise One would not have selected humble fishermen for the teachers of his doctrine, instead of culling his disciples from Roman portico or Athenian academy. And this, which distinguishes so remarkably the Gospel from the ethics of heathen philosophy, wherein knowledge is declared to be necessary to virtue, is a proof how slight was the heathen sage's insight into the nature ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... contending with the waves, and supposing him to be a man (whom he is always said to befriend), came and placed himself under him, to convey him on his back in safety to the shore. When the Dolphin arrived with his burden in sight of land not far from Athens, he demanded of the Monkey if he were an Athenian, who answered that he was, and that he was descended from one of the noblest ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... was an Athenian by birth, and educated in all the useful and ornamental literature of Greece. He then travelled to Egypt to study astronomy, and made very particular observations on the great and supernatural eclipse, which happened at the time ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... the panic and incompetence, yet with a sword of Damocles, as he believed, hanging over his head also. "I fear that Caesar will be a very Phalaris, and that we may expect the very worst," he wrote to his intimate friend Atticus, who, safe from harm and turmoil, was dwelling under the calm Athenian sky. A great fraction of the Senate departed; only those stayed who felt that their loyalty to the advancing Imperator was beyond dispute, or who deemed themselves too insignificant to fall beneath his displeasure. In the hour of crisis the old ties of religion ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... the Ionians were very angry at thus being driven away from home; and those who had gone to live in Athens soon asked Co'drus, the Athenian king, to make war against ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... to the lettered wealth Of ages adds the lore unpriced, The wisdom and the moral health, The ethics of the school of Christ; The statesman to his holy trust, As the Athenian archon, just, Struck down, exiled like him for truth alone, Has he not graced my home with beauty all ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... culture of conversation, as the earliest queen of the drawing room. Her house was the centre of the highest literary and philosophical society of Athens. Socrates himself was a constant visitor there. There too, as Plutarch asserts, many of the most distinguished Athenian matrons were wont to go with their husbands for the pleasure and ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... and unanswerable retort that "when St. Paul was at Athens, the very source of dramatic poetry, he said a great deal publicly against the idolatry of the Athenians, but not one word against their stage. At Corinth he said as little against theirs. He quoted on one occasion an Athenian dramatic poet, and on others Aratus and Epimenides. He was educated in all the learning of the Grecians, and could not but have read their dramatic poems; and yet, so far from speaking a word against ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... doesn't ache, and holds out for a few pages more, she is comforted to find that her aspirations have a philosophic character. She is able to tell the heavy Guardsman who takes her down to dinner and parries her observations with a joke that they have the sanction of the deepest of Athenian thinkers. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... peculiarly fitted, if but placed in a commanding sphere, for ministering to some of the intellectual wants, and for withstanding with singular efficiency some of the more perilous tendencies, of the religious world in the present day. That Athenian thirst for the new so generally abroad, and which many have so unhappily satisfied with the unwholesome and the pernicious, he could satisfy with provision at once sound and novel. And no man of the age had more thoroughly studied the prevailing theological errors of the time ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... family was consecrated to the State. The fulfilment of so exalted a function involved a certain austere dignity which excluded wayward inclination or passionate emotion. These might indeed occur between a man and a woman outside marriage, but putting aside the very limited phenomena of Athenian hetairism, they were too shameful to be idealized. Some trace of this classic attitude may be said to persist even to-day among the so-called Latin nations, notably in the French tradition (now dying out) of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... open, a nature so trained and poised, could not be otherwise than self-contained and calm even in the presence of changes so vast and manifold as those which have transformed society since the days of the great Athenian; but even he could not be quite unmoved if brought face to face with a life so unlike that with which he had been familiar; there must come, even to one who feels the mastery of the soul over all conditions, a certain sense of ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... pretty Estate; but I prefer my second-floor in Madame du Chatelet's here. He assures me of his favor, of the perfect freedom I should have;—and I am running to Paris [did not just yet run] to my slavery and persecution. I could fancy myself a small Athenian, refusing the bounties of the King of Persia. With this difference, however, one had liberty [not slavery] at Athens; and I am sure there were many Cidevilles there, instead of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... is deceived as to his own merit is to do him as bad a turn as that done to the Athenian madman who was happy in believing that all the ships touching at the port ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... be confined to the bald, antique model, nor drawn out in sounding speeches like Talfourd's "Ion," nor yet too much infused with the mingled Gothic elements of our own drama; but warm with sunlight, magical with the grace of the young Athenian feeling, and full of a healthful action which would display the fairest endowments of his mind and person. As Lear or Shylock, he will certainly grow in power as he grows in years, and may even gain upon his masterly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... The words bite; the abandonment of the satirist is complete. He puts into the mouth of the man who is down a whole acrid and scurrilous philosophy of success and failure; and there is not a passage in Swift which can equal for venom and emphasis the ferocious words of the Athenian misanthrope. We know nothing of Shakspere's mood while he was writing this cruel piece, but I should imagine he must have been ready to quit the world in a veritable ecstasy of wild passion ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... client. The criminal and disgraceful offence of taking fees of two adversaries, of allowing himself to be approached corruptly, whether directly or indirectly, with a view to conciliation, ought, like parricide in the Athenian law, to be passed over in silence in a code of professional ethics.[24] All considerations of self should be sunk by the lawyer in his duty to the cause. The adversary may be a man of station, wealth, and influence; his good will may be highly valuable to him; his enmity may do ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... servants, and, if they offended, their ears were cut off. Are we, in brave America, returning to the days when they tossed an actor in a blanket or gave a poet a hiding? Shall we stifle an art which is the purest inspiration of Athenian genius? The law prohibits our performing and charging admission, but it does not debar us from taking a collection, if"—with a bow in which dignity and humility were admirably mingled—"you deem the laborer worthy ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... direction, now in that, as their passions changed, almost as the sea heaps the waves now one way, now another, according to the winds which trouble it. You will seek in vain in Macedonia, which was a monarchy, for as many examples of tyranny as Athenian history will afford.'' ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... of the Burgundian government, as to cause the societies to be prohibited. It was, however, out of the sovereign's power permanently to suppress institutions, which already partook of the character of the modern periodical press combined with functions resembling the show and licence of the Athenian drama. Viewed from the stand-point of literary criticism their productions were not very commendable in taste, conception, or execution. To torture the Muses to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thy claims are justly great: Thy milder virtues could my muse relate, To thee alone, unrivall'd, would belong The feeble efforts of my lengthen'd song. Well canst thou boast, to lead in senates fit, A Spartan firmness with Athenian wit: Though yet in embryo these perfections shine, Lycus! thy father's fame will soon be thine. Where learning nurtures the superior mind, What may we hope from genius thus refin'd! When time at length ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... was formerly called Pelasgia. The Athenians expelled the Pelasgians from Attica (whether justly or unjustly, Herodotus does not undertake to say), where they were living under Mount Hymettus; whereupon the Pelasgians of Lemnos, in revenge, carried off a number of Athenian women, and afterward murdered them; as an expiation of which crime they were finally commanded by the oracle at Delphi to surrender that island to Miltiades and the Athenians. Herodotus repeatedly informs ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... has enjoyed the peculiar advantages of travel, and is a man of vertu and fine taste, has selected a design of beautiful simplicity and chastity of style. The entrance-hall is protected by a hexastyle (six column) portico of that singular Athenian order, which embellishes the door of the Tower of the Winds. The roof is Venetian, with projecting eaves; and the wings are surmounted by spacious glass lanterns, which light the upper rooms. The buildings and offices are on a larger scale than any other in the park, and correspond ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... thine—a ruthless band Hath ravaged all her loveliness. How Athens spoiled thy prosperous land Athenian lips with shame confess. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... ancient story. Above the shouting, furious Persian mass, Millions arrayed in pomp of Orient powers, Rings the wild war-cry of Leonidas Pent in his rugged fortress of the rock; And o'er the murmurous seas, Compact of hero-faith and patriot bliss, (For conquest crowns the Athenian's hope at last), Gome the clear accents of Miltiades, Mingled with cheers that drown the battle-shock Beside the wave-washed ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... lodge, to bestow my little Athenian owl. I brought it all the way in my pocket, or on my hand, and I put him in Tom Fowler's charge while I am here. I could not think what fashionable young lady you had here. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Masters of Pylos and Sphacteria, the Athenians had brought home the three hundred prisoners taken in the latter place in 425 B.C.; the Spartans had several times sent envoys to offer peace and to demand back both Pylos and the prisoners, but the Athenian pride had caused these proposals to be long refused. Finally the prisoners had been given up in 423 B.C., but the ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... his famous funeral oration over those who fell in the Peloponnesian war, thus addresses the Athenian women: "To the wives who will henceforth live in widowhood, I will speak, in one short sentence only, of womanly virtue. She is the best woman who is most truly a woman, and her reputation is the highest whose name is never ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... his merciless rasping, was called Blue-Skin—seized him by his long beard, and at one fell stroke cut it off and tossed it out of the port-hole behind him. This forecastle-man was ever afterwards known by a significant title—in the main equivalent to that name of reproach fastened upon that Athenian who, in Alexander's time, previous to which all the Greeks sported beards, first submitted to the deprivation of his own. But, spite of all the contempt hurled on our forecastle-man, so prudent an example was soon followed; presently all the ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... or to hope, that he was a poet, and wrote Pindarick odes to Temple, to the king, and to the Athenian society, a knot of obscure men[96], who published a periodical pamphlet of answers to questions, sent, or supposed to be sent, by letters. I have been told that Dryden, having perused these verses, said, "Cousin Swift, you ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... see a man taller than any one among them at the nearest dime museum. We had handsome women among us, of high local reputation, but nowadays we have professional beauties who challenge the world to criticise them as boldly as Phryne ever challenged her Athenian admirers. We had fast horses,—did not "Old Blue" trot a mile in three minutes? True, but there is a three-year-old colt just put on the track who has done it in a little more than two thirds of that ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... faulty repetition of a conventional type of poem, but by a poetical ambition for new forms. Codex Regius is an imperfect monument of a time of poetical energy in which old forms were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Athenian dreamer builded better than he knew. That phantom which perpetually attends and perpetually evades us,—the inevitable guest whose silence maddens and whose sweetness consoles,—whose filmy radiance eclipses all beauty,—whose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the readers of that language whose studies have not reached into the musical Romaic. It is called The Wedding of Kutrulis, an Aristophanic Comedy, by Alexandros Rhisos Rhangawis. The form used by the great Athenian satirist is perfectly reproduced, and an original and hearty wit is not wanting. The Aristophanic dress is justified by the poet in some lines which we thus render into the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... unwittingly lights upon it the spirits are not angry. He adds that the people of Marathon worship the men who fell in the battle as heroes; and who could be more worthy of such honour than they? The battle itself was not without its marvellous side. Epizelus, the Athenian, used to relate how a huge hoplite, whose beard over-shadowed all his shield, stood over against him in the thick of the fight. The apparition passed him by and killed the man next him, but Epizelus came out of the battle blind, and remained so for the ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... A term used in the elaborate tables placed at the beginning of the Prayer Book for the finding of Easter. The Golden Number of a year marks its place in a cycle, called the Metonic Cycle (from Meton, an Athenian astronomer B.C. 432), of nineteen years. The year A.D. 1 was fixed as the second year of such a cycle. Hence the rule given to find the Golden Number, viz., "Add one to the year of our Lord, and then ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... reared this structure. First was the unknown who gave to the world the treatises ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite. It was unhesitatingly believed that these were the work of St. Paul's Athenian convert, and therefore virtually of St. Paul himself. Though now known to be spurious, they were then considered a treasure of inspiration, and an emperor of the East sent them to an emperor of the West as the most worthy of gifts. In the ninth century they were widely circulated in western ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Hermocrates of Syracuse, advocating the policy of thwarting the Athenian expedition against his city (B.C. 413) by going boldly to meet it, and keeping on the flank of its line of advance, said: "As their advance must be slow, we shall have a thousand opportunities to attack them; ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... high character and princely generosity. When quite young he was made administrator of the free cities in Asia, nor is it surprising to find that he made bitter enemies there; indeed, a just ruler was sure to make enemies. The end of it was that an Athenian deputation, headed by the orators Theodotus and Demostratus, made serious accusations against his honour. There is no need to discuss the merits of the case here; suffice it to say, Herodes succeeded in defending ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... but a slight acquaintance, albeit a pleasant one, with Vittoria. This was partly because my purse was but leanly provided, and partly because I had ever in mind with regard to such creatures the wise saying of the Athenian concerning the girl Lais, that it was not worth while to spend a fortune to gain a regret. Moreover, I was too much occupied with my own very agreeable love-affairs, that were blended with poetry and dreams and such like sweetnesses, as well as with reality, to make me feel ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that {124} which marks the position of any given year in the Lunar Cycle, which is a period of nineteen years. Meton, an Athenian philosopher, discovered that, at the end of every such period, the new moons take place on the same days of the months whereon they occurred before its commencement. This discovery was considered to be so important, it became the custom to inscribe the ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... confessedly 'strange'. What Schiller wished was to produce upon a modern audience, by an original treatment of a medieval theme, a tragic effect similar to that which, as he supposed, must have been produced upon an Athenian audience by a play of Sophocles,—more especially ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek—the contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... from eight cents to forty-five cents; a little more in the afternoon; and from seventeen cents to $1.15 in the evening. At the performance I attended the house was crowded and attentive. I was not enough of an Athenian to attend all three. Even at the Music Hall in Berlin, where, as in other cities, the thinly covered salacious is ladled out to the animal man, there was a capital stage caricature of Oedipus, which atoned for the customary ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... replied Solon, after a pause, "that Tellus, an Athenian citizen, was the most fortunate and happy man I ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... imagine ourselves the gigantic and sublime theatre of chivalry, as we have a right to do; we raise up heroes of war and statesmanship, compared with whom your Napoleons, Mirabeaus, and Marats-yes, even your much-abused Roman orators and Athenian philosophers, sink into mere insignificance. Nor are we bad imitators of that art displayed by the Roman soldiers, when they entered the Forum and drenched it with Senatorial blood! Pardon ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... man you must be then, he said; you are not an Athenian at all if you have no ancestral gods or temples, or any other mark ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... of himself. Poor Whiston, who believed in every thing but the Trinity, tells us gravely that the single person whom William touched was cured, notwithstanding His Majesty's want of faith. See also the Athenian Mercury ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sounded by the Earl, but hardly so with the others. Mrs. Hart was most trying to her patience in this respect; and it needed all Zillah's love for her to sustain her while listening to the old nurse as she grew eloquent on her favorite theme. Zillah felt like the Athenian who was bored to death by the perpetual praise of Aristides. If she had no other complaint against him, this might ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... black-glazed Greek (mainly Athenian) wares spread widely for table use, and were imitated locally from the fourth century onwards. The clay is pale or reddish (genuine Greek fabrics are usually quite red within) and the glaze thick, black, and of a brilliant glassy ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... carried a blasphemy law, to the effect that unbelievers and those who taught theories about the celestial world might be impeached. It was easy to prove that Anaxagoras was a blasphemer who taught that the gods were abstractions and that the sun, to which the ordinary Athenian said prayers morning and evening, was a mass of flaming matter. The influence of Pericles saved him from death; he was heavily fined and left Athens for Lampsacus, where he was ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... of perfume, — if violets blue That hint of heaven with odor more than hue, — If perfect roses, each a holy Grail Wherefrom the blood of beauty doth exhale Grave raptures round, — if leaves of green as new As those fresh chaplets wove in dawn and dew By Emily when down the Athenian vale She paced, to do observance to the May, Nor dreamed of Arcite nor of Palamon, — If fruits that riped in some more riotous play Of wind and beam that stirs our temperate sun, — If these the products be of love and pain, Oft may I suffer, and ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... "Demades, the Athenian, condemned a fellow-citizen, who furnished out funerals, for demanding too great a price for his goods: and if he got an estate, it must be by the death of a great many people: but I think it a sentence ill grounded, forasmuch as no ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... in writing this sentence, forget Mr. Gladstone's finely scholastic enthusiasm for Homer; nor Mr. Newton's for Athenian—(I wish it had not been also for Halicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself—through her death—and to his own; while the subsequent refusal of England to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, has always been held by ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... Athens, we hear no more of the Athenian libraries, but the seat of ancient learning was transferred to Alexandria, where were gathered under the liberal sway of the Ptolemies, more books than had ever been assembled together in any part of the world. Marc Antony presented to ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the name of the phratry. Since the latter, like the Grecian, was a social and religious rather than a governmental organization, it is externally less conspicuous than a gens or tribe, which were essential to the government of society. The name of but one of the twelve Athenian phratries has come down to us in history. Those of the Iroquois had no name but that of ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... specially reserved for war-chariots in the games of the Athenian hippodrome; being heavier than the chariots generally used, they doubtless had to cover a lesser number of laps, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... The present evening would be the third and last in a certain town of Lancashire, one of those remarkable centres of industry which pollute heaven and earth, and on that account are spoken of with somewhat more of pride than stirred the Athenian when he ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... The courtly Festus, as he settled his purple tunic, declared he could make nothing of the matter, only a dispute about one Jesus, who was dead, and whom Paul affirmed to be alive; and perchance some Athenian, as he reclined on his ivory couch at dinner, after the sermon on Mars Hill, may have disposed of the matter very summarily, and passed on to criticisms on Samian wine and marble vases. Yet in spite of their disbelief, this story of Christ has outlived them, their age and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... [30] Areopagus.—This was the Athenian Court of Justice at Mars Hill. It is said to have been called Areiopagos (the Hill of Mars) because, according to tradition, the first trial there was that of Mars for the ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... distinction; and under its influence he wrote a paper that appeared in the Spectator. Blackstone's entrance at the Temple occasioned his metrical 'Farewell' to his muse. In his undergraduate days at Cambridge Lord Chancellor Charles Yorke was a chief contributor to the 'Athenian Letters,' and it would have been well for him had he in after-life given to letters a portion of the time which he sacrificed to ambition. Thurlow's churlishness and overbearing temper are at this date trifling matters ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... face of the great Athenian philosopher's namesake looked glum and discontented. He was not satisfied with the order; but not being a free agent, he was cruelly deprived of the luxury of grumbling. Roaming in the cane-brake, or sunning himself on a log like the juvenile alligators, while ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... loathingly reject Pompilia's pale Poison my hasty hunger took for food. A strong tree wants no wreaths about its trunk, No cloying cups, no sickly sweet of scent, But sustenance at root, a bucketful. How else lived that Athenian who died so, Drinking hot bull's blood, fit for men like me? I lived and died a man, and take man's chance, Honest and bold: right will be done to such. Who are these you have let descend my stair? Ha, their accursed psalm! Lights at the sill! Is it ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... foremost. In the hall there was a slight odor of violets; the lamps burned in Alexandrian glass of various colors. At the couches stood Grecian maidens, whose office it was to moisten the feet of guests with perfumes. At the walls cithara players and Athenian choristers were waiting for ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... earnest consideration to what she had said that Miss Langham felt an uneasy sense of remorse. And, moreover, the young man's profile, as he sat looking away from her, was very fine, and the head on his broad shoulders was as well-modelled as the head of an Athenian statue. ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Brutus, by the example of these his great ancestors, to dissolve the tyranny of Caesar. General Fairfax made a collection of engraved portraits of warriors. A story much in favour of portrait-collectors is that of the Athenian courtesan, who, in the midst of a riotous banquet with her lovers, accidentally casting her eyes on the portrait of a philosopher that hung opposite to her seat, the happy character of temperance and virtue struck her with ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Teach yourself first, and every one around you afterwards, not the doctrines, nor the formulas-though he had none- but the habit of mind which Socrates tried in vain to teach the Athenian youth. Teach them to face all questions patiently and fearlessly: to begin always by asking every word, great or small, from 'Predestination' to 'Protection,' what it really means. Teach them that 'By ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... idiosyncrasy. The fine arts, as well as every other department of mental activity, reveal the effect of that social instinct which is so much more powerful in France than it is anywhere else, or has ever been elsewhere, except possibly in the case of the Athenian republic. Add to this influence that of the intellectual as distinguished from the sensuous instinct, and one has, I think, the key to this salient characteristic of French art which strikes one so sharply and always as so plainly French. As one walks through ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... I believe you are too candid to counterfeit. Your easy solution of that great human riddle given the world, to find happiness. The Athenian and Alexandrian schools dwindle into nothingness. Commend me to your 'categories,' O Queen of Philosophy." She withdrew her searching eyes, and fixed them moodily on the fire, twirling the tassel of her ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans |
