"Saturnalia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... slaves was the hideous misuse Christian masters allowed them to make of Chrismas Day and week. It was then they danced the bamboula, incessantly. All through the year this Saturnalia was prepared for in meetings held at night by their leaders. The songs to which they danced were made of white society's scandals reduced to satirical rhyme; and to the rashest girl or man there was power in the ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... darning it until Christmas to get it mended! The health of a great many people makes an annual visit to some mineral spring an absolute necessity; but, my dear people, take your Bible along with you, and take an hour for secret prayer every day, though you be surrounded by guffaw and saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they denounce you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand off from those institutions which propose to imitate on this side the water the iniquities of Baden-Baden. Let your moral and your immortal health keep pace with your physical ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... keep them as pledges of his reconciliation with Pompey. For there was then a common report that Pompey was on his way homeward from his great expedition. The night appointed for the design was one of the Saturnalia; swords, flax, and sulphur they carried and hid in the house of Cethegus; and providing one hundred men, and dividing the city into as many parts, they had allotted to every one singly his proper place, so that in a moment, many kindling the fire, the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... to thy Catullus, Just to kill him upon a day, the festive, Saturnalia, best of all the season. 15 Sure, ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... stand before this magnificent monument; it is found in Thorwaldsen's "Christ;" in Franklin Simmons's "Angel of the Resurrection,"—in such works as those that have a language for the soul, rather than in a "Saturnalia." ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... they must be silenced for the moment. She hoped to avoid a conversation between the woman and Helen. She rang the bell for a servant, but no one answered it; Mr. Wilcox and the Warringtons were gone to bed, and the kitchen was abandoned to Saturnalia. Consequently she went over to the George herself. She did not enter the hotel, for discussion would have been perilous, and, saying that the letter was important, she gave it to the waitress. As she recrossed the square she saw Helen and Mr. Bast looking out of the window of the ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... back?" said the martyr. The fact is, she was well aware that this was a case of quid pro quo; and that Gwen was entitled, by treaty, to a perfect Saturnalia of sweet-hearting till after Christmas, in exchange for the six months of penal servitude to follow. But she preferred to indicate that the terms of the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... common meaning of the phrase; since for the most part they desire for themselves, consciously or unconsciously, absolutely unlimited freedom, which must inevitably degenerate into something resembling the saturnalia of barbaric times, and which the sacred hierarchy of nature will never grant them. They were born to serve and to obey; and every moment in which their limping or crawling or broken-winded thoughts are at work shows us clearly out of which clay nature moulded them, and what trade mark ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... revolution took place in Italy, in consequence of the French war, and Paris sustained two sieges; the first by the German army; the second and most bitter by the French themselves, fighting against a mob of fanatical revolutionists and ending in a frightful saturnalia of murder, ruin ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... nothing to threaten—nothing. It's all that comical dream—curse it! What tricks the brain plays us! 'Tis fair it should though. We work it while we please, and it plays when it may. The slave has his saturnalia, and flouts his tyrant. Ha, ha! 'tis time these follies were ended. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... among the Hungarians two hundred years ago.[69] To this day certain religious sects of Russia and Hungary are in the habit of holding orgies at which all the ceremonies of the ancient Liberalia, Floralia, and Saturnalia are duplicated. These devotees claim that, when they have reached the acme of religious enthusiasm, the spirit of God directs them, hence their licentious and lustful ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... finance, by all signs and omens, a serious reaction from the saturnalia of the last few years was already over-due. He had felt it, without alarm at first, for the men of the West laughed him to scorn and refused to shorten sail. They still refused. Perhaps they could not. One thing was certain: he could scarcely manage to take in a single ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... reminiscent of the Saturnalia; with hundreds of strangers from distant villages and a few gipsies and tramps, it is not possible to enforce strict discipline, for it is very necessary to keep the people in good-humour. On the final day of the picking they expect to be allowed to indulge in ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... splinter or lose a chip to any bar for a week. Them's Jack Rainey's commands. A sport orders his forty drops, an' the barkeep pricks it onto a tab; at the end of a week Jack Rainey settles all along the line, an' the "saturnalia," as historians calls 'em, is over. I might add that Jack Rainey gives way to these yere charities once a year, an the camp of Lido is plumb ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... on the Bed, has already revealed certain means of discerning the thought of a woman; but we make no pretence in this book of exhaustively stating the resources of human wit, which are immeasurable. Now here is a proof of this. On the day of the Saturnalia the Romans discovered more features in the character of their slaves, in ten minutes, than they would have found out during the rest of the year! You ought therefore to ordain Saturnalia in your establishment, and to imitate Gessler, who, when he saw William Tell shoot ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... must think the natives the most religious people upon earth; but if chance lead him among her western villages, he will rarely find either churches or chapels, prayer or preacher; except, indeed, at that most terrific saturnalia, "a camp-meeting." I was much struck with the answer of a poor woman, whom I saw ironing on a Sunday. "Do you make no difference in your occupations on a Sunday?" I said. "I beant a Christian, Ma'am; we have got no opportunity," was the reply. It occurred to me, that in a country ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... date of this catastrophe she separated herself almost entirely from her blood-stained husband, and spent her life in the recesses of the harem, praying as a Christian both for the murderer and his victims. It is a relief, in the midst of this atrocious saturnalia to encounter this noble and gentle character, which like a desert oasis, affords a rest to eyes wearied with the contemplation of so ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... war. From an ignorant and sensual soldiery, excited to madness by a prolonged resistance, and by one of the most sanguinary conflicts recorded in the history of sieges, forbearance could hardly be expected. The horrible saturnalia, in which murder and rape, pillage and intoxication, are pushed to their utmost limits, are the necessary condition of a successful assault on a desperately defended fortress; and supposing them prohibited, and that such prohibition ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... countries the name given to a season of feasting and revelry immediately preceding Lent, akin to the Saturnalia of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... quiet of his winter quarters, however, was not unbroken. Oroeses, king of the Albanians dwelling beyond the Cyrnus, made an expedition against them just at the time of the Saturnalia. He was impelled partly by a wish to do a favor to Tigranes the younger, who was a friend of his, but mostly by the fear that the Romans would invade Albania, and he cherished the idea that if he should fall upon them in the winter, when they were not expecting ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... of several hundred thousand ladies desiring to revel and possibly riot in the saturnalia of equal franchise, the unnamed lakes in that vast and little known region in Alaska bounded by the Ylanqui River and the Thunder Mountains were now being ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... to the stern old Roman with his Saturnalia, when for once in all the year the slave and the plebeian might speak their minds ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous. In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed to rant and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity. And it is difficult to say whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil is the more effective instrument. The mere illustrations of the subject-matter are in themselves irresistible. They reach at once and directly the instinctive ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Louis XIV., in the latter years of his reign, had permitted Scarron's widow to make religion fashionable, by cloaking France with the mask of hypocritical piety—a mask soon, however, to be torn aside by Philippe of Orleans in the wild saturnalia of the Regency. The Abbe de Bernis was also a constant visitor at the house of Madame d'Etioles; he was, in the parlance of the time, the Abbe de la Maison—it is true he had no other benefice—but little thought then, either the abbe ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... skull. Has it not an obvious connection with the 'hobby-horse' of the middle ages, and such mock pageants as the one described in Scott's Abbot, vol. i. chap. 14.; the whole being a remnant of the Saturnalia ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... was about the time of the winter solstice and the turn of the year. The Christians had, at this period, just begun to celebrate the birth of Christ, and had adopted certain Roman customs from the Saturnalia, the feast in honour of Saturn. Julian, irritated by the challenge of the Nazarenes, began to arm himself for resistance and attack. Now he determined to use his power to give back to heathendom what belonged to it, and to show the Christians whence they had derived their knowledge ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... carnival of empiricism prevailed. Quack was king. A spurious leaven of charlatanism was traceable in politics, in science, in religion—pervaded all things indeed. The world was mad to cheat or to be cheated. The mountebank enjoyed his saturnalia. Never had he exhibited his exploits before an audience so numerous and so sympathetic—so eager to be swindled, so liberal in rewarding the swindler. Gravely does Miss Hannah More address Mr. Horace Walpole, concerning what she terms the 'demoniacal mummery'—'the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... perplexity which used to beset us in our childhood on thanksgiving day. Having been kept all the year within the limits which prudence assigns to well-regulated children, came at last the governor's proclamation, and a general saturnalia of dainties for the little ones. For one day the gates of license were thrown open, and we, plumped down into the midst of pie and pudding exceeding all conception but that of a Yankee housekeeper, were left to struggle our way out as best ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... except in general terms. As we shall see, the calendar is based on the life and work of an agricultural folk, and we may by all means guess that its many agricultural rites existed beforehand in the earlier social life; but into detail we may not venture. As Varro, however, has mentioned the Saturnalia in the same sentence with the Compitalia, we may guess that that famous jovial festival was a part of the rustic winter rejoicing. And here, too, I may mention another festa of that month, of which a glimpse ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... things, which were not likely to meet the approbation of his family, Walter was silent. Not a word about that Saturnalia, or the omission of grace at a "warm meal"! Nor did he mention the liberties that were allowed the children, or the freedom with which they joined in the conversation. Perhaps it was a superfluous precaution. That bearskin would have been ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... for encouraging this, I see other advantages in it. Trade is languishing; Fouche tells me that there are great complaints. This will set a little money in circulation; besides, I am on my guard about the Jacobins. Everything is not bad, because it is not new. I prefer the opera-balls to the saturnalia of the Goddess of Reason. I was never so enthusiastically applauded as ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... pagans seem to have had a glimpse of the Divine unity over the multiplicity of their idols, and of the rays of the Divine holiness across the saturnalia of their Olympi. It was a Greek who wrote these words: "Nothing is accomplished on the earth without Thee, O God, save the deeds which the wicked perpetrate in their folly."[6] It was in a theatre at Athens that the chorus of a tragedy sang, more than two thousand years ago: "May destiny ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... the body of police and especially by the then chief; it was opposed by city officials; public sentiment made no especial demand for it, to say the least, and it was freely prophesied that the order would be followed by a saturnalia of crime and rapes. I am free to confess that even the honest doubters could advance many plausible arguments on the utter absurdity of trying to totally suppress this evil. But now, after a few months' trial, one of the most convincing (if somewhat amusing) tributes ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... together into spectral dimness, with no sound audible but the continued quarrel in the front room of the jail. Keith crept along to the end of the building from where he could perceive the lights of the town twinkling dimly through the intense blackness. Evidently the regular evening saturnalia had not yet begun, although there was already semblance of life about the numerous saloons, and an occasional shout punctuated the stillness. A dog howled in the distance, and the pounding of swift hoofs along the trail told of fresh arrivals. An hour ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... concentrated at Rome and in the legions. The most shameful and degrading scenes were daily enacted. The Roman aristocracy, which had conquered the world, and which alone of all the people had any voice in public business under the Caesars, had abandoned itself to a saturnalia of the most outrageous wickedness the human race ever witnessed. Caesar and Augustus, in establishing the imperial power, saw perfectly the necessities of the age. The world was so low in its political relations that no other form of government was possible. Now that Rome had ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... and thin, with hardly a breath in their bodies, as though just coming to life again. One of them when he saw the pettifoggers putting their heads together, and lamenting their sad lot, up comes he and says: "Did not I tell you the Saturnalia ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... but, like too many of his fraternity, he was seldom sober from Saturday night until Wednesday morning. His loving spouse 'rowed in the same boat'—and the 'little green-bottle' was dispatched several times during the days of their Saturnalia, to be replenished at the never-failing fountain of the 'Shepherd ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... had been so long accustomed to, and therefore they left them their swinging censers, their gold chalices, and their symbolic candles. Thus it is that Roman Catholicism became, and is still, merely a Christian form of Paganism which is made to pay successfully, just as the feasts and Saturnalia of ancient days were made to pay as spectacular and theatrical pastimes. I should not blame your Church if it declared itself to be an offshoot of Paganism at once,—Paganism, or any other form of faith, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... on board the schooner, that at one moment it looked very much as though they were about to throw off all the trammels of discipline and obedience, and proceed forthwith on board the Spaniard, to participate in the saturnalia still in progress there; and it was only by the production of a lavish allowance of rum, and a promise from the carpenter that they should all have their turn on board the doomed ship, that they could be restrained from heaving the cutter's cargo overboard—instead ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... windows," he continued. "Corsets, stockings, lingerie. Shop windows remind me of neighbors' bathrooms before breakfast. There's something odiously impersonal about them. See, all the way down the street—silks, garments, ruffles, laces. A saturnalia of masks. It's the only art we've developed in America—over-dressing. Clothes are peculiarly American—a sort of underhanded female revenge against the degenerate puritanism of the nation. I've seen them even at revival meetings clothed in the seven tailored sins and denouncing the devil ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... was now the leader's cry; And who dare answer "No!" to Mutiny, In the first dawning of the drunken hour, The Saturnalia of unhoped-for power? The boat is lowered with all the haste of hate, With its slight plank between thee and thy fate; Her only cargo such a scant supply As promises the death their hands deny; And ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... the old and legitimate sense of that word. It is very curious to observe how the strangers flock to Paris in order to enjoy the spectacle of themselves, reckoning the French for nothing save the ministers of their pleasures, et improbi turba impia vici. If, in the midst of these brilliant saturnalia, the pares were to rise, and another Commune spring from the kennel to the day, how many of the lords of the Philistines would be buried under the ruins of the temple of Dagon? But to revert to Germany, ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... was not dispelled by a solemn comicality in the scene of the study. There sat Colonel Adams, still unaffectedly dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed whalebone nodding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough to have sobered a Saturnalia. Sir Leopold Fischer was leaning against the mantelpiece and heaving with all the ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... firmly. "Bisley is to be more like Shoeburyness (where the Artillery set an excellent example to the Infantry) than the Surrey saturnalia." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... for several weeks guarded day and night against possible attacks by the populace, and on this occasion, as the mediator of a flowing hospitality, I celebrated among the most famous 'bloods' of the University the true saturnalia ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the well-known principle of safety first. We have had various and sundry experiences since writing, the most interesting being on Sunday, when we were taken into the country both to see the cherry blossoms and the merry-makers; the time is a kind of a carnival and mild saturnalia based on bright clothes, and wigs, and sake, about ninety per cent sake. There were a few besides ourselves not intoxicated, but not many. Everybody practiced whatever English he knew on us, one dressed-up fellow informing us "I Chrallie Chaplin," and he was as good an imitation as most. ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... was a woman—the eternal feminine," I said, sticking him to the point, for I was more interested in him than in the seething saturnalia, our common sobriety amid which seemed somehow to raise our casual acquaintanceship to the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... bills," as a genial satirist of their sex has phrased it—all these manifestations of la vie, so unutterably dull and sordid, are of small concern to the cultured traveller. The intimate charm and spirit of Paris will be heard and felt by him not amid the whirlwind of these saturnalia largely maintained by the patronage of English-speaking visitors, but rather in the smaller voices that speak from the inmost Paris which we have essayed to describe. Nor can we bid more fitting adieu to Lutetia than by translating Goethe's words to Eckermann: "Think ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... in the hall, beside him his case and hold-all—what belongings he had thrust into them anyhow. He was intending to see the couple into the cab and then go quietly away, for he was determined to avoid the loathsome saturnalia with which his colleagues were certain to signalize the debacle. When the two appeared, he started involuntarily. He had been prepared for violence, he had expected tears.... The vision of a blubbering idiot, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... that it is a thing of the past; but it was also accompanied with a degree of grossness and brutality much less pleasant to regard, and of which the occasional popular amusements of bull-running, cock-fighting, cock-throwing, the saturnalia of Plough-Monday, and such like, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... hideous saturnalia, and deafened by the brass and percussion instruments I tried to get away, but my neighbors protested and I was forced to sit and suffer. What followed was incomprehensible. The crazy amazons, the Walk-your-horses, and the disagreeable Wotan kept things ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... your anxious friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late. Disband these New England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors—the super-high-moral old iron-clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of Plymouth Rock—go home, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... strength beneath the Tudor's sway. And then a Northern Stuart wore their crown, Whose son, unmindful he was over men Truth-lovers, lied to them and lost his head; For Puritans held no respect for lies. Next flared Charles Satyr's saturnalia Of Lely Nymphs, who panting sang "More gold; We yield our beauties freely; gold, more gold." Hapless explosions, folly, frenzied plots; Till well coerced by Lowland William's craft. Then plans that ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... roseate and romantic revel, given over to joys of the flesh, to wine-drinking and confetti-throwing, overrun with hussies, gone mad with lascivious waltzes, reeking with Babylonish amours. He dreamed of Vienna as one continual debauch, one never-ceasing saturnalia, an eternal tournament of perfumed hilarities. His lewd dreams of the "gayest city in Europe" have produced in him a marked hallucinosis with visions of Neronic orgies, magnificently prodigal—deliriums of ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... for a grand saturnalia is best when Mr. Smith goes from home for a day or two. Then I can deny myself to visitors—take full license—set the hydrant running, and puzzle the water commissioners with an extra consumption of Schuylkill. My last exploit ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... the construction of early calendars. Primitive astronomy knew hardly anything of solstices and equinoxes, and where these are noted in the more advanced rituals, they appear to be attachments to observances founded on other considerations—so the Roman Saturnalia, celebrated near the winter solstice, and apparently the plebeian festival of the summer solstice attached to the worship of Fortuna; and the same thing is probably true of the Semitic and Greek festivals that occurred near ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... the fashion for our golden youth in the fifties to do so. Every night in the Haymarket there was a kind of noisy saturnalia, in which golden youths joined hands with youths who were by no means golden, to give much trouble to the police, and fill the pockets of the keepers of night-houses—"Bob Croft's," "Kate Hamilton's," "the Piccadilly Saloon," ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... madness and saturnalia of love into which I had these few weeks been plunged tapped, it seemed, my subliminal consciousness, maybe my memory of ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... therefore, if you must come at all, about the beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day, and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has five saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of these is Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime wind will be veering from ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... existence of the Press; the healthful proportions of kingdoms, neither too confined nor too vast, have created new hopes, which history cannot destroy. As a proof, look to all late revolutions: in England the Civil Wars, the Reformation,—in France her awful Saturnalia, her military despotism! Has either nation fallen back? The deluge passes, and, behold, the face of things more glorious than before! Compare the French of to-day with the French of the old regime. You are silent; ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Indian Explosive Substances Act and Summary Justice Act of 1908, together with the Press Act of the same year and the more drastic one enacted last February, have at last to some extent checked the saturnalia of lawlessness that continued, though with signs of abatement, into the beginning of this year. The Press Act of 1910, especially, seems to have really arrested the poisonous flow of printer's ink and with it the worst forms of crime to which it maddened ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... be paid to the peon at the end of the week, which debt, due for well-performed labor, was invariably paid in aguardiente, and the Indian made happy, until the following Monday morning, he having passed through another Saturday night and Sunday's saturnalia of debauchery and bestiality. Those thousands of honest, useful people were absolutely destroyed ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... of every degree are peculiarly captivated with it. Thus the inclination to laugh becomes uncontrollable, when the solemnity and gravity of time, place, and circumstances, render it peculiarly improper. Some species of general license, like that which inspired the ancient Saturnalia, or the modern Carnival, has been commonly indulged to the people at all times and in almost all countries. But it was, I think, peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church, that while they studied how to render their church rites imposing and magnificent, by ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... uniformed municipal band awoke the echoes of the venerable but bedizened fabric with its complimentary braying; and urchins were even permitted to scatter fire-crackers upon the floor in honour of the event. It was a real ecclesiastical Saturnalia of a most innocent and joyous description. All Amalfi spent the remaining hours of day-light in feasting, dancing and singing, and when at last darkness fell upon the merry scene, rockets and Roman candles ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... God are, then, sacrilege and rebellion. The emperor's head was the token of sovereignty and carried with it the obligation to pay tribute. Every fibre in your nature protests against the prostitution of itself to anything short of God. You remember the story in the Old Testament about that saturnalia of debauchery, the night when Babylon fell, when Bel-shazzar, in the very wantonness of godless insolence, could not be satisfied with drinking his wine out of anything less sacred than the vessels that had been brought from ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to death can only be likened to that of the lover in Heinrich von Kleist's poetically sublime, but morally atrocious, tragedy, Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The Duke killed Marie because doing so gave him the most damnable ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... slaughter of the Jews, and the muzhiks, obedient to the behests of the "little father," and smarting under the pain of disappointment, vented their venom on their Jewish compatriots. Before the new czar had been on his throne three months, Russia was drenched with Jewish blood. There began saturnalia of rape, plunder, and murder, the like of which had been witnessed nowhere in Europe. For half a year the pogroms which began in Yelisavetgrad (April 27, 28) swept like a tornado over southern Russia, visiting more than one hundred and sixty communities with fire and sword, ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... poetic, even to abbey churches; yea, dug up the very bones of ancient monarchs from the consecrated vaults where they had reposed for centuries, and scattered them to the winds; and then amid the mad saturnalia of sacrilege, barbarity, and blasphemy to proclaim the reign of "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," with Marat for their leader, and Danton for their orator, and Robespierre for their high-priest; and, finally, to consummate the infamous farce of reform by openly setting up a wanton woman ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... state of intoxication every night. This habit, and the obscene language that the man seemed to revel in when in such a condition, was so disgusting to me that not the least-prized advantage afforded by my convalescence was the ability to remain on deck until the nightly saturnalia was at an end and Lemaitre and his companion had retired to their cabins. On the particular night, however, of which I am about to speak, a slight recurrent touch of fever caused me to slip quietly below and turn in before the orgy began; not that I expected to get to sleep, but ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... passed within, and found the good old priest on his knees, a crucifix clasped to his breast, his white face upturned, shouting ave marias and pater nosters at the top of his aged voice as if fearful they would not ascend above the saturnalia on the roof. The Devil added to his distraction by loud bursts of ribald laughter; but the father, revolving his head as if it were on a pivot, continued to pray. Satan began to curse like ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... the formal and conventional dulness of term and its duties, they interchanged with us anecdote and jest, and mingled with the sparkling imaginations of youth the reminiscences of riper years—I am sure they will have no cause to regret their share in those not ungraceful saturnalia, even though they may remember that the hour at which we separated was not always what we used to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the double absence of Ruth and Mrs. Porter was being celebrated by a sort of Saturnalia or slaves' holiday. It was true that either or both might return at any moment, but there was a disposition on the part of the domestic staff to take ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... marching to the conquest of the sacred cabbage, the emblem of matrimonial fecundity, and this besotted drunkard is the only man who can put his hand upon the symbolical plant. Therein, doubtless, is a mystery anterior to Christianity, a mystery that reminds one of the festival of the Saturnalia or some ancient Bacchanalian revel. Perhaps this paien, who is at the same time the gardener par excellence, is nothing less than Priapus in person, the god of gardens and debauchery,—a divinity probably chaste ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... offensive missiles, and the bonbons plaster of Paris pellets, with an accompanying substitution of a spiteful desire to inflict injury for the old horse-play, it has become necessary to limit the duration of the Saturnalia to the briefest span, with the sure prospect of its being very shortly altogether prohibited. But at Florence on the first occasion, now several years ago, of an attempt to imitate the Roman practice, the conduct of the populace was such as to demand imperatively ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Belgium speedily resolved itself into a saturnalia that drenched the land with blood and roused the civilized world into resentful horror. As the tide of barbarity swept forward into Northern France, stories of the horrors filtered through the close web of German censorship. There were denials at first by German propagandists. ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... the eastern avenues, and the children of the foreign races who populate that quarter penetrate the better streets, blowing horns and begging of the passers. They have probably no more sense of its difference from the old carnival of Catholic Europe than from the still older Saturnalia of pagan times. Perhaps you will say that a masquerade is no more pagan than a football game; and I confess that I have a pleasure in that innocent misapprehension of the holiday on the East Side. I am not more censorious of it than I am of the displays of ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... the city walls, as within, bore witness to the graciousness of the Emperor in the prolonged holiday he had granted the people. It was as if the Saturnalia had arrived. Industry, such as there ever is, was suspended; all were sitting idle, or thronging some game, or gathering in noisy groups about some mountebank. As we advanced farther, and came just beyond the great road leading to Tibur, we passed the school of the celebrated gladiator Sosia, at ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... argues strongly and persuasively in favor of the identification of Purim with the Babylonian feast of the Sacaea, a wild, extravagant bacchanalian revel, which, in the old Asiatic world, much resembled the Saturnalia of a later Italy. The theory is plausible, though it is not quite proven by Dr. Frazer, but it seems to me that whatever be the case with Purim generally, there is one hitherto overlooked feature of the ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... eyes, hats on one side, pipe in mouth and tankard in hand, fondling and prosing, and singing maudlin songs over their liquor. Even the sober decorum of private families, which I must say is rigidly kept up at other times among my neighbors, is no proof against this saturnalia. There is no such thing as keeping maid-servants within doors. Their brains are absolutely set madding with Punch and the Puppet-Show, the Flying Horses, Signior Polito, the Fire-Eater, the celebrated Mr. Paap, and the Irish Giant. The children too lavish all their holiday money ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... in creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might; equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,—the final expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... dogs of war. What he did was to gather from all quarters an armed force, a motley crew, regulars and militia, sailors and landsmen, black and white, and permit them to hold for fourteen long days a saturnalia of blood. What he did was to summon the savage Maroon tribes to the feast of death, that by their barbaric warfare they might add yet one more shade of gloom to the picture. The official accounts are enough ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... gestures. Egmont implored the prelate to retire, or at least not to take notice of a nobleman so obviously beyond the control of his reason. The Bishop, however, insisted—mingling reproof, menace; and somewhat imperious demands—that the indecent Saturnalia should cease. It would have been wiser for him to retire. Count Hoogstraaten, a young man and small of stature, seized the gilt laver, in which the company had dipped their fingers before seating themselves at table: "Be quiet, be quiet, little man," ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Theophilus Thoro, "if you consider the Fourth as a great national saturnalia, in which every boy in the land has the privilege of doing whatever is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... centre of modesty St. John's Eve, festival of Samoa Samoyeds, menstruation among Saturnalia Scarlet fever, periodicity of Schools, auto-erotic phenomena in Seasonal periodicity of sexual impulse Seduction and menstruation Seminal emissions during sleep Serpent in folk-lore Sewing-machine as a cause of sexual excitement Sexual anaesthesia ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was also part of the religious ceremonies attendant on the worship of Dionysos or Bacchus.[28] Along with the drinking of certain vegetable decoctions, dancing formed an important part of the witches' saturnalia during the medieval period. When in a state of frenzy, partly drug induced and partly the product of exhilaration caused by wild dancing, visions of Satan followed. In the dancing mania of the fourteenth century, the sufferers saw visions of heaven opened, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... pensiveness with him. Warm. Rows of arc lights. A shifting crowd. There are some streets that draw aimless feet. The blazing store fronts, clothes shops, candy shops, drug-stores, Victrola shops, movie theatres invite with the promise of a saturnalia in suspense. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... anticipate. While the bulk of the Orientals was still beyond the Himalayas and the Gobi, Europe indulged in a wild saturnalia to celebrate its own doom. All pretense of sexual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small illprinted newspapers carried advertisements promising the gratification of strange lusts. A new cult of Priapus sprang up and virgins were ceremoniously ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... into a Donnybrook fair, but so it was when I was a boy, and the tents and the shows and the crowds on the Common were to the promiscuous many the essential parts of the great occasion. They had been so for generations, and it was only gradually that the Cambridge Saturnalia were replaced by the decencies and solemnities of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was invited out to a Food Saturnalia at a Country Place. The Dinner was postponed until late in the Day because they all dreaded ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... to murder his brother at the Saturnalia, but he was not able to carry out his intention. The danger had already grown too evident to be concealed. As a consequence, there were many violent meetings between the two,—both feeling that they were being plotted against,—and many precautionary measures were taken on ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... Beaumarchais. There he was stopped by an immense crowd—always the same figures naked and bloodstained, but here their looks were those of enraged fiends. They shout, they scream, they sing, they dance—the saturnalia of hell. On seeing Albert's cabriolet, they redoubled their cries—'An aristocrat! give it him, give it him!' In a moment the cabriolet is surrounded, and from the midst of the crowd an object rises and moves towards him. His agitation perplexes his view—he perceives long fair tresses dabbled ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... If the damned AEdiles would only get what's coming to them. They graft with the bakers, scratch-my-arse-and-I'll-scratch-yours! That's the way it always is, the poor devils are out of luck, but the jaws of the capitalists are always keeping the Saturnalia. If only we had such lion-hearted sports as we had when I first came from Asia! That was the life! If the flour was not the very best, they would beat up those belly-robbing grafters till they looked like Jupiter had been at them. How well I remember ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... hall seemed to have donned strange carnival clothes, for a mystic Saturnalia. It was literally swaddled in bedquilts,— tumbler-quilts, rising-suns, Jacob's-ladders, log-cabins, and the more modern and altogether terrible crazy-quilt. There were square yards of tidies, on wall and table, and furlongs of home-knit lace. Dilly looked at this product ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... atrocities perpetrated upon them by the Government, and that the outlawed condition of the Jews bred the lawlessness and violence of the mob, which was fully aware of the anti-Semitic sentiments of the official world. The bloody saturnalia of Nizhni-Novgorod had, however, the beneficent effect that the Government, fearing the spread of the conflagration outside the Pale and even outside Jewry, took energetic steps to prevent all further excesses. As a matter of fact, the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... with difficulty restrained from seeking out in his hiding-place, an slaying with his own hand. His legions of slaves, and in particular a division of Ardyaeans,(7) chiefly served as his executioners, and did not neglect, amidst these Saturnalia of their new freedom, to plunder the houses of their former masters and to dishonour and murder all whom they met with there. His own associates were in despair at this insane fury; Sertorius adjured ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the signal for internecine strife, and such a saturnalia of blood and rapine as the world has never known; but were the question whether Britain should to-day accept India as a gift, and I had the privilege of replying, then, "Declined with thanks;" and yet it is the ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... circulating square faces, and dancing uproarious Virginia reels and old-country dances. The police, including the reserves, stood in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the governor was too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great. It was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was license; it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-rover along with all these other chesty sea-rovers among the paper ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... in abhorrence the festivals of the Jews, and who would deem strange and outlandish their Sabbaths and New Moons and other Holy Days erst loved of the Almighty, we deal familiarly with the Saturnalia and the Calends of January, with the Matronalia and the Feast of the Winter Solstice; New Year's gifts and foolish presents fill all our thoughts; merrymakings and junketings are in every house. The Heathens guard ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... propaganda of the clerics, nursed frightful hatred against the Jews, not only as "infidels," but also as intellectual aristocrats. The rage of the populace was the combustible material in the terrific explosions that occurred periodically, in the bloody saturnalia of the Pastouraux (1320), in the Black Death riots (1348), in the massacre of ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... profession, under pain of infamy, or, what was more dreaded by those profligate wretches, of exile. The tyrants allured them to dishonor by threats and rewards. Nero once produced in the arena forty senators and sixty knights. See Lipsius, Saturnalia, l. ii. c. 2. He has happily corrected a passage of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... and wisdom united can not do. Esther is justly a favorite with the Christian and Jewish world; but Vashti, the proud queen who, with true woman's dignity, refuses to grace with her presence the saturnalia of an intoxicated monarch, is also entitled to our esteem, although she paid the penalty of disobedience; and the foolish edict which the king promulgated, that all women should implicitly obey their husbands, seems to indicate that unconditional obedience was ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... usages, merely changing their spirit. So that the Lord of Misrule who long presided over the Christmas games of Christian England was the direct descendant of the ruler who was appointed, with considerable prerogatives, to preside over the sports of the Saturnalia. In this connection the narrow Puritan author of the "Histrio-Mastix" laments: "If we compare our Bacchanalian Christmasses with these Saturnalia, we shall find such a near affinitye between them, both in regard to time and ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... you will hesitate before you accept the story of that saturnalia in its entirety, and before you believe that an old man of seventy, a priest and Christ's Vicar, was present with Cesare and his friends. Burchard does not say that he himself was a witness of what he relates. But the matter ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Central Railroad had spent upward of a half million dollars in buying laws at Albany and in "protecting its stockholders against injurious legislation." As one of the largest stockholders in the road John Jacob Astor, Jr., certainly must have been one of the masked parties to this continuous saturnalia of corruption. But the corruption, bad as it was, that took place before 1867, was rather insignificant compared to the eruption in the years 1868 and 1869. And here is to be noted a significant episode which fully reveals how the capitalist class is ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... He confessed, in the presence of Charles IX., and of the Marshals de Montmorency, De Retz, and the Sieur du Mazille, physician to the king, that he could perform the most wonderful things by the aid of a devil to whom he had sold himself. He described at great length the saturnalia of the fiends, the sacrifices which they offered up, the debaucheries they committed with the young and handsome witches, and the various modes of preparing the infernal unguent for blighting cattle. He said he had upwards ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... god of the Sabines, the god of beginnings, celebrated on the first of January, to which month he gave his name; also the feasts in honor of the Penates, of Mars, of Vesta, of Minerva, of Venus, of Ceres, of Juno, of Jupiter, and of Saturn. The Saturnalia, December 19, in honor of Saturn, the annual Thanksgiving, lasted seven days, when the rich kept open house and slaves had their liberty,—the most joyous of the festivals. The feast of Minerva lasted five days, when offerings ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... till at length one Narcissus was sent from Claudius, as it were to appease the souldiers, & procure them to set forward. But when this Narcissus went vp into the tribunall throne of Plautius, to declare the cause of his comming, the souldiers taking great indignation therewith cried, O Saturnalia, as if they should haue celebrated their ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (3 of 8) • Raphael Holinshed
... to the immorality which prevailed, and at last, when their former exalted significance had been forgotten, they were finally sunk into "the licentiousness of enjoyment, and the innocence of mirth was superseded by the uproar of riot and vice! Such were the Saturnalia." ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... friend, entreat you, my dear sir, at no time to forget that you are a Christian and a Protestant gentleman. Be sober and rational, and, if there be any truth in religion at all, do not make a mockery of it, by converting the Lord's day into a monstrous Saturnalia. Here is your letter." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... that gamblers, like dogs that bite a stone flung at them, have eaten up the cards, crushed up the dice, broken the tables, damaged the furniture, and finally 'pitched into' each other—as described by Lucian in his Saturnalia. Dusaulx assures us that he saw an enraged gambler put a burning candle into his mouth, chew it, and swallow it. A mad player at Naples bit the table with such violence that his teeth went deep into the wood; thus he remained, as it were, nailed to ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... years there was neither settled peace nor open war. The consuls were Q. Cloelius and T. Larcius. They were succeeded by A. Sempronius and M. Minucius. During their consulship a temple was dedicated to Saturn and the festival of the Saturnalia instituted. The next consuls were A. Postumius and T. Verginius. I find in some authors this year given as the date of the battle at Lake Regillus, and that A. Postumius laid down his consulship because the fidelity of his colleague was suspected, on which a Dictator was appointed. ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... they trap it, kill it, eat it and sell its skin. There is no doubt that this wild beast inspires more of the feeling which prompts worship than the inanimate forces of nature, and the Ainos may be distinguished as bear-worshippers, and their greatest religious festival or saturnalia as the Festival of the Bear.... Some of their rude chants are in praise of the bear, and their highest eulogy on a man is to compare him to a bear.'' They have no priests by profession. The village chief performs whatever religious ceremonies ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... over again. Each tried to surpass his neighbor. To hear these men of position boast of their gallantries with all classes, one would have thought that the entire canton underwent periodical changes and became one vast Saturnalia, where rustic satyrs courted their favorite nymphs. But nothing came of it, after all; once the feast was digested, and they had returned to the conjugal abode, all these terrible gay Lotharios became once more chaste and worthy fathers of families. Nevertheless, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... one astride upon the banisters of the stairs, sliding down from top to bottom; another clinging now and then, in the pauses of the conflict, to the top of one of the doors, by which it swung back and forward. Terrible infants! there they all were in a complete saturnalia, the door of the parlour half open all the time, and no sound of Nettie's restraining voice. Only poor Mrs Smith standing helpless in successions of fright and exasperation, sometimes alarmed for life and limb, sometimes ready to give the little wretches over to all the penalties of poetic ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... S—— at 10 today. My head was not clear. Guess I had too much at Kempinsky's last night.... A saturnalia of spending on the theory that the Allies will pay.... Even the ride in the Grunewald this morning didn't clear the cobwebs away. I was constantly thinking of that girl at the Metropole with her long ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... went out, as it chanced, into the meadows that stretch up the hill behind Brackenhurst. Frida remembered it well afterwards. It was the day when an annual saturnalia of vulgar vice usurps and pollutes the open downs at Epsom. Bertram did not care to see it, he said—the rabble of a great town turned loose to desecrate the open face of nature—even regarded as a matter of popular custom; he had looked on at much the same orgies ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... squeak of the city exquisite learning how to laugh out loud, the splash of the brine, the cachinnation of a band of harmless savages, the stun of the surge on your right ear, the hiss of the surf, the saturnalia of the elements; while overpowering all other sounds are the orchestral harmonics of the sea, which roll on through the ages, all shells, all winds, all caverns, all billows heard in "the ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... conceive why the Dramatic Art in general was consecrated to Bacchus: it is the intoxication of poetry, the Bacchanalia of fun. This faculty will at times assert its rights as well as others; and hence several nations have set apart certain festivals, such as Saturnalia, Carnivals, &c., in which the people may give themselves altogether up to frolicsome follies, that when once the fit is over, they may for the rest of the year remain quiet, and apply themselves ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Roman drama, in respect of plan, were not perhaps more perfect than the so-called Commedia dell' Arte, in which, the parts being fixed and invariable, the dialogue is extemporised by masked actors. In the ancient Saturnalia we have probably the germ of the present carnival, which is entirely an Italian invention. The Opera and the Ballet were also the invention of the Italians: two species of theatrical amusement, in which the dramatic interest is entirely subordinate ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... leisure of mind to take note of any outrageous noise above, and for want of occupation was itching to get at old friends like Howieson. There are times, however, when even a savage forgets himself, and one spring day the saturnalia in Moossy's room reached an historical height. It had been discovered that any dislike which Moossy may have had to a puppy in his desk, and a frog in his top-cloak pocket, was nothing to the horror with which he ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... just to condemn the Negro for the education which he received in the early years after the war. That was the period of reconstruction, the saturnalia of misgovernment, the greatest possible hindrance to the progress of the freedmen.... The education was unsettling, demoralizing, [and it] pandered to a wild frenzy for schooling as a quick method of reversing social and political conditions. Nothing could have been ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... The saturnalia drew toward its close. Ash Wednesday, like a great gray-sailed ship, was seen coming large into port. The noise grew wild, license general. All available oil must be poured into the fire of the last day of pleasures. Ian ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... then be begun, and the Class Struggle will then display on the field of politics all its beneficent influence. Beneficent, I say, because the class struggle must be understood not in the contemptible sense of a Saturnalia of fist-fights and outrages, of malevolence and personal violence, but must be worthily conceived as a great social drama. With all my heart I hope that this conflict may be settled, for the progress of civilization, without bloody convulsions, but historical destiny has decreed the conflict, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... eccentricities, determined upon having a feast once a year, in imitation of the Saturnalia in ancient Rome. In this project he engaged several persons of rank, and his plan was put in execution at the deanery house. When all the servants were seated, and every gentleman placed behind his own servant, the Dean's footman, who presided, found fault ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... or fasting days, and their precidaneae, or vigils. The agonales were celebrated in January; the carmentales, in January and February; the lupercales and matronales, in March; the megalesia in April; the floralia, in May; and the matralia in June. They had their saturnalia, robigalia, venalia, vertumnalia, fornacalia, palilia, and laralia, their latinae, their paganales, their sementinae, their compitales, and their imperativae; such as the novemdalia, instituted by the senate, on account of a supposed shower of stones. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the feasts of the idolaters—the Kalends, and the Saturnalia, and the Quartesima, and the coronation day of their kings, and the day of their birth, and the day of their death." The words of R. Meier. But the Sages say, "every death anniversary in which there is burning of incense,(439) there is in it the worship of idols. But if there ...
— Hebrew Literature
... works steadily behind every incident which we may elect to call good or evil? He thought it must be so. This very festival—Christmas—how thoroughly he had been accustomed by an effete and degenerate "social set" to regard it as a "bore,"—an exploded superstition—a saturnalia of beef and pudding—a something which merely served as an excuse for throwing away good money on mere stupid sentiment. "Stupid" sentiment? Had he ever thought true, tender, homely sentiment "stupid"? Yes,—perhaps he had, when in the bold carelessness of full manhood he had assumed ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... salesmen had been marooned here, but since the beginning of this saturnalia they had not been in evidence beyond the ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... quarters, but when they saw how well the police did their dispersing work, and choked up with their clubs the protests of aggregated suffering, self-confidence came back, revelry was resumed, and the saturnalia ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers |
