"Eumenides" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which was going on, and noted the extraordinary precautions against any interference with the secrecy of the ballot. Also to the Cavendish physical laboratory, which, like the mechanical laboratory, was far inferior in equipment to ours at Cornell. In the evening to the Greek play,—the "Eumenides" of Aeschylus,—which was wonderfully well done. The Athena, Miss Case of Girton College, was superb; the Apollo imposing; the Orestes a good actor; and the music very effective. I found myself seated next Andrew Lang, so ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the children. These stories belong to a period of transition. In ancient Greece, as we have seen, the paternal family succeeded the maternal clan. In his Orestia, AEschylus puts in opposition before Pallas Athene the right of the mother and the right of the father. The chorus of the Eumenides, representing the people, defends the position of the mother; Apollo pleads for the father, and ends by declaring, in a fit of patriarchal delirium, that the child is not of the blood of the mother. "It is not the mother who begets what is called her child; she is only the nurse ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... They were induced by the archon Megacles, one of the illustrious family of the Alcmaeonidae, to quit the altar on the promise that their lives should be spared; but directly they had left the temple they were put to death, and some of them were murdered even at the altar of the Eumenides or Furies. ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... and stimulate them to madness until death comes. The ancient and mysterious mythical tradition of the strife between the old gods and the new was astutely used by AEschylus to teach us how the terrible vengeance of the Eumenides gradually gave place to a gentler and more humane law; just as the primitive despotism of Zeus was gradually transformed into a providential and moral ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... its leaves with melody of woe, And dared the grave to keep me from thine arms; I flow'd away upon a stream of song, E'en to dark Pluto's grimly guarded throne, Melting the cruel Cerberus himself, The Parcae, and snake-lock'd Eumenides, To pity of my measureless despair. I sang thy beauty, O Eurydice! I sigh'd my love forth, O Eurydice! With tears and weary sighs, Eurydice! And at thy name the pains of Hell grew light; Ixion's wheel stopp'd in its weary rounds, The rock of Sisyphus forgot to roll, And draughts ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... list. Necromancers have had private interviews with visitors who had no right to be seen this side the Styx. The Witch of Endor and the raising of Samuel were literal facts. Above all others, the Nemesis and Eumenides were facts not to be withstood. And, philosophize as we may, ghosts have been seen at dead of night, and not always under the conduct of Mercury;[6] even the Salem witchcraft was very far from being a humbug. They are all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... came of Lambesc's charge on the Tuileries Garden: no striking of salutary terror into Chaillot promenaders; a striking into broad wakefulness of Frenzy and the three Furies,—which otherwise were not asleep! For they lie always, those subterranean Eumenides (fabulous and yet so true), in the dullest existence of man;—and can dance, brandishing their dusky torches, shaking their serpent-hair. Lambesc with Royal-Allemand may ride to his barracks, with curses for his marching-music; then ride back again, like one troubled in mind: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Night's Dream," and other music, this work to dictation was very worrying, and one cannot think without impatience of the annoyances to which he was subjected. The king could not understand why he shrank from writing music to the choruses of AEschylus's "Eumenides." Other composers would do it by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... little learning, as you know; but I read yesterday in an encyclopaedia that the Eumenides are ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... woman-cult of priestesses and prophetesses among the peoples from whom our culture is derived is evidenced in literature and religion. That there had been cults of ancient mothers who exerted moral influence and punished crime is shown by the Eumenides and Erinyes of the Greeks. The power of old women as law-givers survived in Rome in the legend of the Cumaean Sibyl.[5] An index of the universality of the sibylline cult appears in the list of races to which Varro and Lactantius say they belonged: Persian, ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... at Athens.—According to one legend Orestes was finally purified of his guilt by a trial at the Areopagus, in which Apollo championed him, and Athena, as President, gave a casting vote for mercy. (This is the story of Aeschylus' Eumenides.) By another, he was healed when he had brought this Image of Artemis to Attica. Euripides combines the two.—It must often have happened in a blood-feud that some of the kindred of the slain man would accept the result of a trial and obey the law, while ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... where, as already stated, the mother-right made earliest room for the father-right, but, as it seems, under strong opposition from the women, the transition is portrayed touchingly and in all the fullness of its tragic import, in the "Eumenides" of Aeschylus. The story is this: Agamemnon, King of Mycene, and husband of Clytemnestra, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, upon the command of the oracle on his expedition against Troy. The mother, indignant at the sacrifice of her daughter, takes, during her husband's absence, Aegysthos ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... over to the wealthy few the power of selecting from the many poor, and vice versa. (5) The most important body in the state was the Nocturnal Council, which is borrowed from the Areopagus at Athens, as it existed, or was supposed to have existed, in the days before Ephialtes and the Eumenides of Aeschylus, when its power was undiminished. In some particulars Plato appears to have copied exactly the customs and procedure of the Areopagus: both assemblies sat at night (Telfy). There was a resemblance also in more important ...
— Laws • Plato
... kindness, even of veneration, till these so indomitable beings are unable to withstand the charm of her mild eloquence. They are to have a sanctuary in the Athenian land, and to be called no more Furies (Erinnys), but Eumenides—the well-conditioned—the kindly goddesses. And all ends with a solemn procession round the orchestra, with hymns of blessing, while the terrible Chorus of the Furies, clothed in black, with blood-stained girdles, and serpents ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... from my heart the frailest, the most utterly fallen of her sex, when once the social Nemesis hands her over to the chorus of the Eumenides. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... AEschyli Eumenides. The Greek Text with English Notes and an Introduction, containing an Analysis of Mueller's Dissertations. By BERNARD DRAKE, ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... cruel and cowardly deed. The labored apology of Dr. Zimmermann and the swift action of the Kaiser in pardoning those who were condemned with Miss Cavell indicate that the Prussian officials have heard the beating of the wings of those avenging angels of history who, like the Eumenides of classic mythology, are the avengers of the ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... historic wonder of beauty, that "burnt the topless towers of Ilium" for the smile of Helen, and fired the palaces of Babylon by the hand of Thais, but the beauty which springs up in all times and places, and carries a torch and wears a serpent for a wreath as truly as any of the Eumenides. Paint Beauty with her foot upon a skull and a dragon coiled ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the charm would be broken if I were seen, but I heard the music of her voice and was happy. I gave to each heroine of whom I read, her beauty and matchless excellences—such was Antigone, when she guided the blind Oedipus to the grove of the Eumenides, and discharged the funeral rites of Polynices; such was Miranda in the unvisited cave of Prospero; such Haidee, on the sands of the Ionian island. I was mad with excess of passionate devotion; but pride, tameless ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Eumenides, which signifies the "well-meaning" or "soothed goddesses;" This appellation was given to them because they were so feared and dreaded that people dared not call them by their proper title, and hoped by this means to propitiate ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... be one also, who was the daughter of Asteria, Latona's sister? Certainly she is one, if we may judge by the altars erected to her in Greece. And if Hecate is a Goddess, how can you refuse that rank to the Eumenides? for they also have a temple at Athens, and, if I understand right, the Romans have consecrated a grove to them. The Furies, too, whom we look upon as the inspectors into and scourges of impiety, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... square bricks-up the Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic tribulation-bell. Fenellan's graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons—abominations of emptiness—to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the one most wretched light is Inebriation's nose; and of the vegetarian violoncello's horror at his vision of the long procession of the flocks and herds into his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rose; and changing his place, he bent over, or rather threw himself upon, a geographical map of Europe. There he found all his fears concentrated. In the north, the south, the very centre of the kingdom, revolutions appeared to him like so many Eumenides. In every country he thought he saw a volcano ready to burst forth. He imagined he heard cries of distress from kings, who appealed to him for help, and the furious shouts of the populace. He fancied he ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... daughter was missed, and the aloe had budded; I told how he watched it grow large and more large, And wondered how much for the show he should charge,— She had listened with utter indifference to this, till I told how it bloomed, and, discharging its pistil 1390 With an aim the Eumenides dictated, shot The botanical filicide dead on the spot; It had blown, but he reaped not his horrible gains, For it blew with such force as to blow out his brains, And the crime was blown also, because on the wad, Which was paper, was writ ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... true romantic magic, something darkly and inexplicably fatal. I think it is necessary that one should hear the rush of the flight of the Valkyries and the wailing upon the wind of the voices of the Eumenides. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... flung against our names. We play, but we do not know our parts; we are Oedipus, who has committed unwitting sin, and yet must reap his reward; we are Prometheus who is to be chained to the rock forever, for offending the gods; we are Orestes whom the Eumenides pursue, chasing him down for his guilt. And all the time we vainly imagine that we are some victorious hero, some Perseus, especially favoured by the gods to fare scatheless over land and sea, and bear away the Medusa's head, and live renowned and happy forever." The reverie ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... euphemistic. It means propitious and, like Eumenides, is used as a deprecating and complimentary title for the god of terrors. It is not his earliest designation and does not occur as a proper name in the Rig Veda where he is known as Rudra, a word of disputed derivation, but probably meaning the roarer. Comparatively ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... will be remembered, on being reproached with her origin, and in another on being asked how she became a nightmare; and the lady in the Esthonian tale warns her husband against calling her Mermaid. In this connection it is obvious to refer to the euphemistic title Eumenides, bestowed by the Greeks on the Furies, and to the parallel names, Good People and Fair Family, for fays in this country. In all these cases the thought is distinguishable from that of the Carnarvonshire sagas; for ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... She thought with a shudder of the murdered Roman, and remembered the moment when Eulaeus had told her that her Bithynian lover had been killed by wild beasts. She rushed from one door to another—the victim of the avenging Eumenides—shrieked from the window for rescue and help, and in that one hour lived through a whole year of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... into each other, which we all remember in Rachel, indicated a common origin. It needed not the added eloquence of words and the sombre music of the voice to tell the tragic story of the victim of the Eumenides. After listening to the recitation, I was not surprised to learn that the young student was to appear, under the auspices of his teacher, at the Theatre Francais, during the approaching winter,—an honor never before conceded to any foreigner. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... the pitiless one. She, feeling proud of the preference, grew so arrogant as to swear by Pluto that the whole of the human brood should soon people his domains. But Jupiter did not approve of the vow this member of the Eumenides had sworn, and he sent her back to Hades. At the same time he launched a thunderbolt upon one particularly perfidious race of men. This, however, being hurled by a father's arm, mercifully fell in a desert, causing less ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... far wrong. Talk of knouting indeed! which we did at the beginning of this paper in the mere playfulness of our hearts—and which the great master of the knout, Christopher, who visited men's trespasses like the Eumenides, never resorted to but in love for some great idea which had been outraged; why, this man knouted his way through life, from bloody youth up to truculent old age. Grim idol! whose altars reeked with children's blood, and whose dreadful eyes never smiled except as the stern goddess of the Thugs ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... not girls. They were the terrible and ancient Eumenides, black with the curdled blood of Uranus. They were the inexorable Furies, who were wont to fawn about my feet, with the adders quivering in their tresses, tormenting me for the spoils of victory. What ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... vengeance of an offended God, Nemesis came to be regarded as the goddess of retribution, relentlessly pursuing the guilty until she has driven them into irretrievable woe and ruin. The Erinyes or Eumenides are the deities whose business it is to punish, in hades, the crimes committed upon earth. When an aggravated crime has excited their displeasure they manifest their greatest power in the disquietude ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the third piece of the trilogy (the Eumenides), and out of Aeschylus himself, no existing tragedy presents so striking an opening—one so terrible and so picturesque. It is the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The priestess, after a short invocation, enters the sacred ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Schiller to the great advantage of the poem. The Greek legend does not explain, or explains variously, just why the murderers in the theater call out the name of Ibycus when they see the cranes flying over. Schiller supposes that the spectacle just then going on was a solemn chorus of the Eumenides. Thus the unaccountable exclamation of the murderers is connected with the mysterious power of the avenging Furies. It is this use of the nemesis idea that makes the merit of ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the bosom friends of Antigone and Ismene; and you shall enter the wood of the Eumenides without shuddering, and leave it without the trace of a tear. Never did you appear so graceful to me, O Ternissa—no, not even after this walk do you—as when I saw you blow a fly from the forehead of Philoctetes in the propylea. The wing, with which Sophocles and ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... him from whom you unjustly took it. But to hide their malice, they change the name usury into milder words, calling it interest or moderate profit, like the heathens, who called their furies by the soft name Eumenides." He relates that a rich usurer of Nyssa, so covetous as to deny himself and children necessaries, and not to use the bath to save three farthings, dying suddenly, left his money all hid and buried where his children could never find it, who by that means were all reduced to ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... to the goad of grief, Her steps, now fast, now lingering slow, In varying motion seek relief From the Eumenides of woe. ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... and in that respect makes the nearest approach of all English tragedies to the Grecian model;) he does not fear to introduce, for the same appalling effect as that for which Aeschylus introduced the Eumenides, a triad of old women, concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque peculiarity in the popular creed of that day,—that although potent over winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, they yet stood in awe of the constable,—yet relying ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... landmarks of their dwelling have the Sphinx's children haunted Earth. Poets have sung them under myriad names; History has chronicled them in groups; Painting and Sculpture have handed down their aspect to a gazing world. From them sprung the Eumenides, pursuers and destroyers of men. They wore the garb of Roman legionaries, when Ramah wept for her children dashed against the walls of the Holy City, and not one stone stood upon another in Zion. They crowded the offices of the Inquisition, and tested ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... brow, Rose through the gaping earth, and from her tomb Erect (1), in form as of a Fury spake: "Driven from Elysian fields and from the plains The blest inhabit, when the war began, I dwell in Stygian darkness where abide The souls of all the guilty. There I saw Th' Eumenides with torches in their hands Prepared against thy battles; and the fleets (2) Which by the ferryman of the flaming stream Were made to bear thy dead: while Hell itself Relaxed its punishments; the sisters three With busy fingers ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan |
