"Tacitus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enriched it, after the manner of Sallust, with various characters of ancient worthies, drawn at full length and faithfully colored. I have seasoned it with profound political speculations like Thucydides, sweetened it with the graces of sentiment like Tacitus, and infused into the whole the dignity, the grandeur and magnificence ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... of the present age may be extinguished, and our several classes of great men represented under their proper characters. Some eminent historian may then probably arise that will not write recentibus odiis, as Tacitus expresses it, with the passions and prejudices of a contemporary author, but make an impartial distribution of fame among the great men ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... has been accused of want of patriotism only by those short-sighted persons who cannot see beyond their own parish. Dante's want of faith in freedom was of the same kind with Milton's refusing (as Tacitus had done before) to confound license with liberty. The argument of the De Monarchia is briefly this: As the object of the individual man is the highest development of his faculties, so is it also with men united in societies. But the individual ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... read Plutarch come upon us with parallels drawn from the Greeks and Romans, who ungratefully dealt with I know not how many of their most deserving generals: while the profounder politicians, have seen pamphlets, where Tacitus and Machiavel have been quoted to shew the danger of too resplendent a merit. Should a stranger hear these furious outcries of ingratitude against our general, without knowing the particulars, he would ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... of the Kings of France and Portugal, majesties still living in spite of Damien and the Jesuits, and the dethronement and murder of the Czar, have restored some credibility to the annals of former ages. Tacitus recovers his character by ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... of the red-headed banditti of Mawddwy, Tacitus states in his Life of Agricola, ch. xi., that there were in Britain men with red hair who he surmises were of German extraction. We must, therefore, look for the commencement of a people of this description long before the twelfth century, and ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... even from a very superior chronicler like Livy, who in his account of even so great an event as the Second Punic War plunges straightway into narrative of what happened, without concerning himself why it happened. Tacitus had begun his Histories with remarks upon the condition of Rome, the feeling of the various armies, the attitude of the provinces, so that, as he says, 'non modo casus eventusque rerum, qui plerumque fortuiti sunt, sed ratio etiam ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... when women are going out into the world to compete with men it is highly important that they be physically strong if they are to stand the stress successfully. It was from rough barbarians, the rude war-loving Teutonic men and women described by Tacitus, that the Anglo-Saxon race inherited those splendid qualities of mind and body that have made their descendants masters ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... monstrato ab eo postulavit ut regnum sibi traderetur; Pelias enim pollicitus erat, si Iason vellus rettulisset, se regnum ei traditurum. Postquam Iason quid fieri vellet ostendit, Pelias primo nihil respondit, sed diu in eadem tristitia tacitus permansit; tandem ita locutus est: "Vides me aetate iam esse confectum, neque dubium est quin dies supremus mihi appropinquet. Liceat igitur mihi, dum vivam, hoc regnum obtinere; cum autem tandem decessero, tu mihi succedes." Hac oratione adductus Iason respondit se id facturum quod ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... years since Poland first was quartered by a nefarious act of combined royalty, which the Swiss Tacitus, John Mller, well characterized by saying that "God permitted the act, to show the morality of kings;" and it is twenty-four years since down-trodden Poland made the greatest—not the last—manifestation ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... however, be said, that Marshal Brune was just the man to accomplish such a transformation without friction; in him the frankness and loyalty of an old soldier were combined with other qualities more solid than brilliant. Tacitus in hand, he looked on at modern revolutions as they passed, and only interfered when the voice of his country called him to her defence. The conqueror of Harlem and Bakkun had been for four years forgotten ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... self-same ideas, merely altering their position. This must arise from early habits and prejudices, from having been taught to regard with veneration vast collections of common-places, under the titles of this or that man's works. Tacitus may be carried about in one's pocket, while it will very shortly require a wagon to remove Sir Walter Scott's labours from place to place. Voltaire's facility was his greatest fault; better he had elaborated his periods, like Rousseau; who, notwithstanding, wrote ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... far-reaching suggestions, which suddenly light up a whole range of distant thoughts and sympathies within us; which in an instant affect the sensibilities of men with a something new and unforeseen; and which awaken, if only for a passing moment, the faculty and response of the diviner mind. Tacitus does all this, and Burke does it, and that is why men who care nothing for Roman despots or for Jacobin despots, will still perpetually turn to those writers almost as if they were on the level of great poets ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... that, compared to them, "merely as vehicles of thought and passion, all modern languages are dull, ill-contrived, and barbarous." He thought that even the most accomplished of modern writers might still be glad to "borrow descriptive power from Tacitus; dignified perspicuity from Livy; simplicity from Caesar; and from Homer some portion of that light and heat which, dispersed into ten thousand channels, has filled the world with bright images and illustrious thoughts. Let the ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... about the constitution of the Roman Empire than they do about the Teutonic customs from whence in due time Feudalism was to be born. Still, they do often illustrate these Teutonic usages; and when we remember that the writer to whom after Tacitus we are most deeply indebted for our knowledge of Teutonic antiquity, Jordanes, professedly compiled his ill-written pamphlet from the Twelve Books of the Gothic History of Cassiodorus, we see that indirectly his contribution to the history of the German ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... age he had read Vergil, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid, Juvenal and Catullus. He had also mastered trigonometry, surveying, navigation, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... of the Caledonians in the first century were, according to Tacitus, long, large, and blunt at the point, and hence in all probability made of iron, whence came the sharp-pointed leaf-shaped bronze swords so often found in Scotland, and what is the place and date of their manufacture? Were they earlier? And what is the real origin of the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... loved indeed in those quaint times, and authors were actually authorities. Gentlemen appealed to Virgil or Lucan in the Courts or the House of Commons. What said Statius, Juvenal—let alone Tully or Tacitus—on such and such a point? Their reign is over now, the good old Heathens: the worship of Jupiter and Juno is not more out of mode than the cultivation of Pagan poetry or ethics. The age of economists and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and Albucius retired in shame to the more comfortable shades of the declamation schools, where figures were appreciated.[100] But in spite of the ridiculous performance of the professors of the schools when they did come out into the sunlight, in spite of the protests of Tacitus who complained justly that debased popular taste demanded poetical adornment of the orator,[101] style continued to be loved for its own sake, extravagant figures of speech were applauded, and verbal cleverness and point were strained for. As Bornecque ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... national songs—among others, the famous Chant du depart; odes, Sur la mort de Mirabeau, Sur l'oligarchie de Robespierre, &c.; tragedies which never reached the stage, Brutus et Cassius, Philippe deux, Tibere; translations from Sophocles and Lessing, from Gray and Horace, from Tacitus and Aristotle; with elegies, dithyrambics and Ossianic rhapsodies. As a satirist he possessed great merit, though he sins from an excess of severity, and is sometimes malignant and unjust. He is the chief tragic poet of the revolutionary period, and as Camille ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... fountain of creative power; like the ancient Persians who, according to Herodotus, considered the whole circle of the Heavens to be the great ruling power of the universe, to which they also sacrificed on high mountains. Thus Tacitus, in speaking of the practice of worshipping the gods on high mountains, observes, that the nearer mortals can approach the heavens, the more distinctly will their prayers be heard; and on the same principle, Seneca says, that the people always strove for the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... sword. The exergue is Ugonotorum strages, that is, Massacre of the Huguenots. (The word strages may be translated by carnage or massacre, a sense which it possesses in Cicero and Livy; or again by disaster, ruin, a sense attributed to it in Virgil and Tacitus.) ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... great soldier's words were worthy both of his genius and of the occasion. He had treated the German nobility with haughtiness; this plain scholar he treated as an equal. Speaking of the ancients, and defending the Caesars against Tacitus, he discussed the rise of Christianity and emphasized the value of all religions in conserving morals. The poet replied, when needful, in broken French, but soon felt at his ease, for the Emperor seemed disposed to engross the conversation, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... by service, tho it be of the best rise, yet when they are gotten by flattery, feeding humors, and other servile conditions, they may be placed amongst the worst. As for fishing for testaments and executorships (as Tacitus saith of Seneca, testamenta et orbos tamquam indagine capi,[32]) it is yet worse; by how much men submit themselves to meaner persons than in service. Believe not much them that seem to despise riches; for they despise them that despair ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the style of "Tacitus," pray add, de moribus Germannorum;—this last was a piece of barbarous silence, and could only be taken from the Woods, and, as such, I attribute it entirely to your sylvan sequestration at Mayfield Cottage. You will find, on casting up accounts, that you are my debtor by several sheets and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... eclipse of the Moon as having happened soon after the death of Augustus. This has been identified with the eclipse of September 27, A.D. 14. Tacitus says:—"The Moon in the midst of a clear sky became suddenly eclipsed; the soldiers who were ignorant of the cause took this for an omen referring to their present adventures: to their labours they compared the eclipse of the planet, and prophesied 'that if to the distressed goddess should ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... be a great Genius required to Write a History perfectly, it is nevertheless not requisite that a Historian shou'd always make use of all his Wit, nor that he shou'd strain himself, in Nice and Lively Reflexions; 'tis a Fault which is reproach'd with some Justice to Cornelius Tacitus, who is not contented to recount the Feats, but employs the most refin'd Reflexions of Policy to find out the secret Reasons and hidden Causes of Accidents, there is nevertheless a distinction to ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... in Tacitus that the Romans found silver in Sardinia; and it occurred to him, that, as the ancients were not learned in extracting metals, silver might still be found among the lead which was turned out of the mines as ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... to be proved that an ancient god or hero of the Germani was called Herman, Arimanius or Irminius. Tacitus relates that the three tribes which composed Germania, the Ingaevones, the Istaevones and the Herminones or Hermiones, were thus named from the three sons of Mannus. Whether that be true or not, he wished in any case to indicate that there was a hero named Herminius, from whom he was told the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... They defeated the Roman armies sent against them, and, turning to the south and west, went on their way along the north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now France. They had no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they could neither read nor write: "Literarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant." Very little is to be found concerning them in the Roman writers. The books of Pliny which treated of this time are lost. It was toward the middle of the century before ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... legislator is identified with the Cretan Minos, as progenitor of mankind with the German Mannus: "Celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae et annalium genus est, Tuisconem deum terra editum, et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque." TACITUS, Germania, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... gazing mournfully at the seething mass of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity. Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory VII, could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the Caesars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment of a national ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... of England: called by Tacitus, Londinium; by Ptolemy, Logidinium; by Ammianus Marcellinus, Lundinium; by foreigners, Londra, and Londres; it is the seat of the British Empire, and the chamber of the English kings. This most ancient ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... to do, then the murderer, however high his rank may be, must be delivered up to torture and death, to prevent the quarrel spreading wider through the nation. This custom of making compensation also prevailed among European nations in their earlier and more uncultivated ages. In the time of Tacitus, the relations of the maimed or murdered person, among the Germans, were obliged to accept of a compensation, and restrain the spirit of revenge. During the Anglosaxon period in England, laws were made to determine the various fines for murder, man-slaughter, wounds and other ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... engagement, especially one where many thousand combatants were pent and whirled together in a narrow and uneven area, the necessary manoeuvres were impracticable; and though many companies still fought on desperately, wherever the moonlight showed them the semblance of a foe, [THUC. vii. 44. Compare Tacitus's description of the night engagement in the civil war between Vespasian and Vitellius: "Neutro inclinaverat fortuna, donec adulta nocte, LUNA OSTENDERET ACIES, FALERESQUE." —Hist. Lib. iii. sec. 23.] they fought without ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... in a more legitimate study, that of Tacitus, I stumbled upon this passage in the speech of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... her landscape, homely and sentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; and we must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And therefore it is from our governesses that we learn (with dimmer knowledge of mysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"—"Tacitus's Germania," supposed by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars" of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... to convey his meaning, harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished elements in a general effect. But the first class of writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the stone which marks Mrs. Ripley's grave in the beautiful cemetery at Concord, her children placed an inscription containing a part of the passage with which Tacitus ends his Life of Agricola. "It was a passage which was specially dear to her," says her biographer; "many of her friends will recall the fine glow of feeling with which she read or quoted it; and to these it will always be associated with her memory. I cannot better close this imperfect sketch ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... [Footnote 1: Tacitus, Dialogus, 13: Malo securum et quietum Vergilii secessum, in quo tamen neque apud divum Augustum gratia caruit neque apud populum Romanum notitia. Testes Augusti epistulae, testis ipse populus, qui auditis in theatro Vergilii versibus surrexit universus et forte praesentem spectantemque ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Wendish; and the multitude of such terminations will show him how extensively this people was spread over those countries. Itzenplitz, the name of a family once of great consequence in the Mark of Brandenburg is ultra-Wendish. It will, therefore, excite no wonder that we find, even in Tacitus, Veneti along their coasts and Ptolemy, who wrote about a century and a half later than Strabo or Livy, seems to have improved the terminology of the ancients in the interval; for, speaking of the Sarmatian tribes, he ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... which the subject is illustrated by the most apposite quotations from the works of different travellers and historians. It is the writer's opinion that in uncivilized life, the degradation of woman, though common, is not universal. The celebrated passage in Tacitus is quoted in support of this position; and among other less interesting extracts, is the following account of Galway by Hardiman, a country which, so great is the blessing of a paternal and judicious government, may furnish, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... am not at present concerned with the specific question of classical education; else, I might reasonably question the justice of calling an intellectual discipline, which embraces the study of Aristotle, Thucydides, and Tacitus, which involves Scholarship and Antiquities, imaginative; still so far I readily grant, that the cultivation of the "understanding," of a "talent for speculation and original inquiry," and of "the habit of ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... correction of Mme. de Stael's "L'Allemagne." That very celebrated book was the result of the distinguished lady's residence in Germany, and of her determination to reveal Germany to France. It has been compared in its purpose to the "Germania" of Tacitus, in which the historian held up the primitive virtues of the Teutonic race as a lesson and a warning to corrupt Rome. Mme. de Stael had arranged to publish her book in 1810, and the first impression of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... PETRONIUS ARBITER, which is a rum work, not so immoral as most modern works, but singularly silly. I tackled some Tacitus too. I got them with a dreadful French crib on the same page with the text, which helps me along and drives me mad. The French do not even try to translate. They try to be much more classical than the classics, with astounding results of ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his two expeditions were a number of natives carried as hostages to Rome, a long train of captives destined to be sold in the slave markets, and some promises of tribute which the Britons never fulfilled. Tacitus, the Roman historian, says Caesar "did not conquer Britain; he only showed it ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Old Izaak would have abhorred the very thought of casting a line for such prey: sickening thoughts of cannibalism would have filled him with horror. But C.P.C. consented to hunt one day, so he writes to Tacitus. Did he ride after the dogs, spear in hand, to kill the fierce wild-boar? Not he. He; sat down by the nets with tablets on his knee, under the quiet shade, and meditated and enjoyed the solitude, and scribbled to his heart's content. Here a doubt arises. Let us whisper it: Did he inherit the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... literature. There are very few writers of the first rank. Virgil is, of course, one; and Horace is a splendid craftsman, but not a high master of literature. There is hardly any prose in Latin fit for boys to read. Cicero is diffuse, and often affords little more than small-talk on abstract topics; Tacitus a brilliant but affected prosateur, Caesar a dull and uninspiring author. But to many boys the path to literary appreciation cannot lie through Latin, or even Greek, because the old language hangs ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... what of that? There—surely there, in Sleswick—had been discovered for us our august mother's marriage lines; and if the most of that bright assurance came out of an old political skit, the "Germania" of Tacitus, who recked at the time? For along followed Mr Stopford Brooke with an admirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct the meanest of us in our ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... When one of our former comrades returned to pay us a visit in uniform, and his arm in a scarf, we blushed at our books, and threw them at the heads of our teachers. Our teachers were always reading us bulletins from the grande armee, and our cries of Vive l'Empereur interrupted Tacitus and Plato. Our preceptors resembled heralds of arms, our study halls ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of the life of Saint Louis, whose personal friend he was. But Froissart of the fourteenth century, and Comines of the fifteenth, are greater names. Froissart, by his simplicity and his narrative art, was the Herodotus, as Philip de Comines, for his political sagacity, has been styled the Tacitus, of French historical literature. Up to the time of Froissart, the literature which we have been treating as French was different enough in form from the French of to-day to require what might be called translation in order ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... all seemly or dramatic. And even more extraordinary is the behaviour of the woodmen and the shepherd and the cowherds. Murder is being done within a yard or two of them, and they pay absolutely no attention. How Tacitus would have delighted in this example of the 'inertia rusticorum'! It is a great mistake to imagine that dwellers in quiet districts are more easily excited by any event than are dwellers in packed cities. On the contrary, the very absence of 'sensations' produces ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... had been favourite slaves of the Emperor, and so had won great power at court. At the date of this incident he had been for some five or six years the procurator of the Roman province of Judaea; and how he used his power the historian Tacitus tells us in one of his bitter sentences, in which he says, 'He wielded his kingly authority with the spirit of a slave, in all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... is a great thing in any one art or function, even though it were not a great one, to have excelled all the literature of all languages. And if the reader fancies that there lurks anywhere a collection of lives, or even one life (though it were the 'Agricola' of Tacitus), which as a work of refined art and execution can be thought equal to the best of Dr. Johnson's, we should be grateful to him if he would assign it in a ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Burschenschaft, that democratic-patriotic organization so gravely suspected by the reactionary governments, and made many friends. He duly studied history and law; he heard Ernst Moritz Arndt interpret the Germania of Tacitus; but more especially did he profit by official and personal relations with A.W. Schlegel, who taught Heine what he himself knew best, namely, the secret of literary form and the art ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... though they were not probable, yet carried no seeming impossibility in the picturing." By the time Flamsteed was fifteen years old he had embarked in still more serious work, for he had read Plutarch's "Lives," Tacitus' "Roman History," and many other books of a similar description. In 1661 he became ill with some serious rheumatic affection, which obliged him to be withdrawn from school. It was then for the first time that he received the ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... fine morning, he declares, by decree, Greek and Latin to be under suspicion, and, so far as he can, forbids all intercourse with the ancient poets and historians of Athens and of Rome, scenting in AEschylus and in Tacitus a vague odour of demagogy. With a stroke of the pen, for instance, he exempts all medical men from literary qualification, which causes Doctor Serres to say: "We are dispensed, by decree, from knowing how to read ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... will have to go to Tacitus to find the equal of that passage. No more is heard of the excursion. 'We leave Luz by the Barege road,' the text goes on to say. Reflections and picturesque word- painting are left for Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Strabo conjectured the Mountain to be an extinct volcano, in which surmise he was destined to be proved partly in the right and partly in the wrong; whilst Vitruvius, the famous architect of the Emperor Augustus, "who found Rome of brick and left it of marble," as well as Tacitus the historian, shared the same opinion. About a century and a half before the first recorded eruption in 79, Mons Summanus figures prominently in Roman history as the scene of a curious incident ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... and the Mamertine dungeon, holding no more apostolic prisoners; and the arch of Titus, and Basilica of Constantine, and the Pantheon, lift up a nightly chorus of "Dead! dead!" Dead, after Horace, and Virgil, and Tacitus, and Livy, and Cicero; after Horatius of the bridge, and Cincinnatus, the farmer oligarch; after Scipio, and Cassius, and Constantine, and Caesar. Her war-eagle, blinded by flying too near the sun, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... intention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something that comes not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus, Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the past, each, after his own sense, modifies—who can tell where and to what degree?—and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper. For just in proportion ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... brothers, took possession of all the country from the river Euphrates to the Red Sea, and called it Nabathaea. Pliny the Elder and Strabo speak of the Nabataei as situated between Babylon and Arabia Felix, and call their capital Petra. Tacitus, in his Annals (Book ii. ch. 57), speaks of them as having a king. Perhaps the term 'Nabathaea regna' implies here, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... quantity of information which his strong memory ever placed at his disposal, the far greater proportion must have been accumulated now. He made himself a first-rate mathematician; he devoured history—his chosen authors being Plutarch and Tacitus; the former the most simple painter that antiquity has left us of heroic characters—the latter the profoundest master of political wisdom. The poems of Ossian were then new to Europe, and generally ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... before him. But so practical and thorough was he in all his proposals and means, that ere half-an-hour was gone, he had begun to go over his Rudiments again. He now wrote a version, or translation from English into Latin, five times a week, and read Caeser, Virgil, or Tacitus, every day. He gained permission from his grandmother to remove his bed to his own garret, and there, from the bedstead at which he no longer kneeled, he would often rise at four in the morning, even when the snow lay a foot thick on the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... that if you search the history of the world, you will not find an act of tyranny and fraud to surpass this; if you read all past histories, peruse the Annals of Tacitus, read the luminous page of Gibbon, and all the ancient and modern writers, that have searched into the depravity of former ages to draw a lesson for the present, you will not find an act of treacherous, deliberate, cool cruelty ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Bonaparte hated Tacitus. He was an aristocrat, he said, and lied in his history. He had blackened the character of Nero merely because he was a republican. "That may be, sire," said ——, "but it is not the generally received ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... look upon her as a prostitute, an adulteress, a murderer. Thus the English have memorials of the several reigns, but no such thing as a history. There is, indeed, now living, one Mr. Gordon (the public are obliged to him for a translation of Tacitus), who is very capable of writing the history of his own country, but Rapin de Thoyras got the start of him. To conclude, in my opinion the English have not such good historians as the French have ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... barditus of Tacitus, or the "din" made by the Norse "bards" (skalds) on shields and with shouts as they rushed into battle. It is not in Molbech, but Snorro frequently uses it in his Chronica, 1633.—43. Kalevala: Title ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... disbelieve the matters related by the Bible authors (Moses for instance) as we disbelieve the things related by Homer, there remains nothing of Moses in our estimation, but an imposter. As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus to Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible, and no further: for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which Tacitus relates were performed by Vespasian, that of curing a lame man, and a blind man, in just the same manner as ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... educational tradition has been already mentioned. And our histories of the early Church are too often warped by an unfortunate bias. Christianity has been judged at its best, paganism at its worst. The rhetorical denunciations of writers like Seneca, Juvenal, and Tacitus are taken at their face value, and few have remembered the convention which obliged a satirist to be scathing, or the political prejudice of the Stoics against the monarchy, or the non-representative character of fashionable life in ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... thoughtfully on German characteristics, and one of his remarks surprised me: it was that the besetting sin of the Germans is envy (Neid); in which remark one may see a curious tribute to the tenacity of the race, since Tacitus justified a similar opinion. He seemed rather melancholy; but he had a way of saying pungent things very effectively, and one of these attributed to him became widely known. He was publicly advocating a hotly contested canal bill, when ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... exception I recall to city life preceding country life is furnished by the ancient Germans, of whom Tacitus says that they had no cities or contiguous settlements. "They dwell scattered and separate, as a spring, a meadow, or a grove may chance to invite them. Their villages are laid out, not like ours [the Romans] in rows of adjoining buildings, but every one surrounds his house with a vacant ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... exodus of the Deity from the temple whose day of opportunity and usefulness was over. And it is curious to note how at the time not only the Christian but even the Jewish mind was big with this thought. There is a Jewish legend in Josephus, which is referred to also by the Roman historian Tacitus, that at the Passover some years after this the east door of the inner court of the temple, which was so heavy that twenty men were required to close it, and was, besides, at the moment strongly locked and barred, suddenly at midnight flew open; and, ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... roundness and fulness to his periods. He states in isolated independent sentences those ideas and thoughts which the orator distributes among leading and subordinate sentences; but he did all this consciously, as an artist, and with the conviction that it was conducive to historical animation. Tacitus was his imitator in this artificial historical style; and notwithstanding all his well-deserved praise, it must he admitted that the blame cast upon Sallust attaches in a still higher degree to Tacitus. It is a fact beyond all doubt, that Sallust introduced into the ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... favoured by the atomic character of our words, and the flat juxtaposition of our clauses. The art which was capable of making a gem of every prose sentence, — the art which, carried, perhaps, to, a pitch at which it became too conscious, made the phrases of Tacitus a series of cameos, — that art is inapplicable to our looser medium; we cannot give clay the finish and nicety of marble. Our poetry and speech in general, therefore, start out upon a lower level; the same effort will not, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a Senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen side by side the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... sixty. Strabo (iv. p. 292) included within the Hercynia Silva all the mountains of southern and central Germany, from the Danube to Transylvania. Later, it was limited to the mountains round Bohemia and extending to Hungary. (See Tacitus, 'Germania', 28, 30; and Pliny, 'Historia Naturalis', iv. 25, 28.) A trace of the ancient name is retained in the 'Harz' mountains, which are clothed everywhere with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... honourably descended, although his parents, through the fickleness of fortune, had fallen into great poverty. Those persons required me to prove that his ancestors descended from Junius Colomus, who, as Tacitus relates, brought Mithridates a prisoner to Rome, for which service he was raised by the Roman people to the consulate. They would likewise have induced me to give an account at large of the two illustrious Colomi his ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... incident I cannot guess. Or indeed, his whole life. Tacitus' account does not hang together at all; the contraditions trip each other up, and any mud is good enough to fling. Mr. Baring-Gould's version goes far towards truth; but the well is deep for his tackle, and only esotericism, I think, can bring up the clear water. Whether Augustus knew ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Thus he lit in Bayle's Dictionary, article 'Octavia,' upon the answer made by Pythias, one of the slaves of Octavia, to Tigellinus, when he was torturing the slaves of the Empress in order to convict her of adultery. The same answer occurs in substance in Tacitus' 'Annals,' book xiv. cap. 60. This Parr sent to Denman, and Denman used it in his speech. The fact is, therefore, that the quotation had been 'sought for and suggested' for the express purpose of saying something personally offensive to the King. The ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Magistrates and collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with their districts, bishops with their dioceses, or curates with their parishes. These new colonies of the rights of men bear a strong resemblance to that sort of military colonies which Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of Rome. In better and wiser days (whatever course they took with foreign nations) they were careful to make the elements of a methodical subordination and settlement to be coeval, and even to lay the foundations ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... keep way with antiquity usque ad aras; and, therefore, to retain the ancient terms, though I sometimes alter the uses and definitions, according to the moderate proceeding in civil government; where, although there be some alteration, yet that holdeth which Tacitus wisely noteth, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... returning to the statement of facts rather than their adornment, but these are not the most generally admired. This simplicity, however, to be truly effective must be unstudied; it will not do to write with affected terseness, a charge which, I think, may be fairly preferred against Tacitus; such a style if ever effective must be so from excess of artifice and not from that artlessness of simplicity which I should wish ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... her existing triumphs of technical knowledge and skill, from which a few, self-tutored, might glean the wisdom that is every one's to-day, and Germany will soon become the home of a savage race, as it was in the days of Tacitus and Caesar. Let Italy close her public schools, and Italy will become the same discordant jumble of petty states that it was a century ago,—again to await, this time perhaps for centuries or millenniums, another Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... professional diviners of Rome, cultivated the science. Many of these "Isiaci conjectores" and "astrologi de circo" were worthless charlatans, but on the whole the science seems to have attracted the attention of thoughtful men of the period. Garrod quotes the following remarkable passage from Tacitus: "My judgment wavers," he says, "I dare not say whether it be fate and necessity immutable which governs the changing course of human affairs—or just chance. Among the wisest of the ancients, as well as among their apes, you will ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... modern nations, from Chaucer through Tennyson; from Luther through Goethe; from Rabelais through Victor Hugo; from Bryant and Irving through Hawthorne and Longfellow! How much they will translate from Homer and Virgil and Tacitus; from Schiller, Racine, Fenelon, and Moliere! How much philosophy they will read from Darwin, Spencer, Huxley! How they will trace the stars in the heavens, and the marks of God's fingers on the rocks and sands! How they will separate into their parts water and air, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... hunting, looked to be forty years old. He had reached the last stages of the malady of which he died, the symptoms of which were such that many reflecting persons were justified in thinking that he was poisoned. According to de Thou (the Tacitus of the Valois) the surgeons found suspicious spots—ex causa incognita reperti livores—on his body. Moreover, his funeral was even more neglected than that of Francois II. The body was conducted from ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Ovid, Horace, Livy, and a host of others, have given his reign a brilliancy unmatched in time, which is rather enhanced than diminished by the fame of Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust, who preceded, and that of Tacitus, Seneca, and others, who followed; for they belong to an epoch in which Augustus stands the central figure in all which pertains to the arts ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... the first Protestant church was pulled down by order of the king after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rebuilt on the declaration of religious liberty by the National Assembly. Gazing on that inscription and the little crowd of worshippers, a sentence of Tacitus came into my mind. Recording how not only the biographers of good men were banished or put to death, but their works publicly burnt by order of Domitian, the historian, whose sentences are volumes condensed, adds: "They fancied, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of Tacitus[554], and I hazarded an opinion, that with all his merit for penetration, shrewdness of judgement, and terseness of expression, he was too compact, too much broken into hints, as it were, and therefore too difficult to be understood. To my great satisfaction, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... doubt that the vessels were often terribly overcrowded; one ship, it is said, brought no less than 1200 passengers from Alexandria. That on which St. Paul was wrecked had 276 souls on board, and one upon which Josephus once found himself had as many as 600. It is incidentally stated in Tacitus that a body of troops, who had been both sent to Alexandria and brought back thence by sea, were greatly debilitated in mind and body by that experience. On the other hand, as has been already stated, there was ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... city on the Rhine, frequently mentioned by Tacitus, older than Christianity, the scene of innumerable battles from Roman times up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, has much that is interesting about it, but is distinguished chiefly on account of having been Beethoven's birthplace. It was for five centuries (from 1268 to 1794) in the ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... experiments which he forms concerning them. Nor are the earth, air, water, and other elements examined by Aristotle and Hippocrates more like to those which at present lie under our observation, than the men described by Polybius and Tacitus are to those who now govern the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... which exists toward both these races, on the part of the Romans. I have yielded, with multitudes around me, to prevailing ideas, taking no steps to learn their truth or error. Our writers, from Tacitus to the base tools—for such they must have been—who lent themselves to the purposes of the bigot Macrianus, and who filled the city with their accounts of the Christians, have all agreed in representing your faith as a dark and mischievous superstition. ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... Romano-British.—Tacitus, in his characteristically concise style, introduces London into authentic history during the apostolic era and the reign of Nero.[1] Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britain, came in hot haste from Mona, suspending the slaughter of the Druid leaders in this their last fastness, to restore the Roman ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... hunted down; that the Germans were increasing in number, and becoming a thought less shaggy. These latter, tall Suevi Semnones, men of blond stern aspect (oculi truces coerulei) and great strength of bone, were known to possess a formidable talent for fighting: [Tacitus, De Moribus Germanorum, c. 45.] Drusus Germanicus, it has been guessed, did not like to appear personally among them: some "gigantic woman prophesying to him across the Elbe" that it might be dangerous, Drusus contented himself with erecting some triumphal pillar on his own safe ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... was a sacred animal among the Teutonic tribes from the first moment of their appearance in history, and Tacitus [Germania, 9, 10.] has related, how in the shade of those woods and groves which served them for temples, white horses were fed at the public cost, whose backs no mortal man crossed, whose neighings and snortings were carefully watched as auguries and ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... poems, might with more propriety have been termed political treatises than plays. Their author has strangely contrived to make passion, character, and interest, of the highest order, subservient to the expression of state dogmas and mysteries. He is in nine parts Machiavel and Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In this writer's estimate of the powers of the mind, the understanding must have held a most tyrannical preeminence. Whether we look into his plays or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... his interest in Greek, and in view of the fact that many of the chief Greek authors had been printed before his death. It seems likely that his Greek books had been dispersed. But the change is apparent in the excellent series of Latin classics, which included Tacitus and Lucretius, and in the number of books by Italian writers, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ficino, Filelfo, Lorenzo della Valle, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... ... and eyes of sapphire blue?]—The people of the south seem to have regarded, as a phenomenon, those blue eyes, which with us are so common, and, indeed so characteristic of beauty, as to form an indispensable requisite of every Daphne of Grub Street. Tacitus, however, from whom Juvenal perhaps borrowed the expression, adds an epithet to crulean, which makes the common interpretation doubtful. 'The Germans,' he says (De Mor. Ger. 4.), 'have truces et crulei oculi, fierce, lively blue eyes.' With us, this colour is always indicative of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... were in full possession of practice, and expended in their country a wealth they had honorably acquired. The first was altogether HIPPOCRATITE; he proceeded secundum artem; the second was almost monopolized by women, and had as his device, as Tacitus would ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... evening in June, memories that reached from Tacitus to Wordsworth, the embrasure that extends in front of the Egyptian obelisk for a standing place, and some children "swimming a dog";—that was the scene and circumstance of my first meeting with his father. A man of ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... not altogether compatible with marital ideas of quietude. A few passes of the hand ("in the way of kindness for he who would," &c. vide Tobin) will now silence the most powerful oral battery; and Tacitus himself might, with the aid of mesmerism, pitch his study in a milliner's work-room. Hen-pecked husbands have now other means at their command, to secure quiet, than their razors and their garters. We have experimentalised upon our Judy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... civilized, and powerful, which the Romans in the plenitude of their power, could not obtain, during a struggle of as many centuries, against the ignorant half-savages who then possessed it; of whom Tacitus remarks, that, up to his own time they had been "triumphed ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... enchantment at Rome, such as a magic mirror and statue. Caxton's so-called translation of the Aeneid was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Vergil's epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was an almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... through the mother as the sole, or chief, basis of blood-kinship, and all their family rights were governed by this principle." There is much conflict of opinion on this matter, and it would, perhaps, be rash to make any definite statement. We may recall what Tacitus says ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... he invented in French the words indolence and indolent, to describe a momentary languor, rather than that habitual indolence in which sense they are now accepted; and in translating Tacitus, he created the word turbulemment; but it did not prosper any more than that of temporisement. Segrais invented the word impardonnable, which, after having been rejected, was revived, and is equivalent to our expressive unpardonable. Moliere ridiculed some neologisms ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Aurora was written in a language, if writing and a language it can be called, that had never been seen written or heard spoken before, or has since, on the face of the earth. And as our students learn Greek in order to read Homer and Plato and Paul and John, and Latin in order to read Virgil and Tacitus, and Italian to read Dante, and German to read Goethe, so William Law tells us that he learned Behmen's Behmenite High Dutch, and that too after he was an old man, in order that he might completely master the Aurora and its kindred books. And as our schoolboys ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... 8vo. 1843), quotes from Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo, dec. 1. c. l., the words, "Una illis fuit spes salutis, desperasse de salute," applied to the Spanish invaders of Mexico; and he remarks that "it is said with the classic energy of Tacitus." The {102} expression is classical, but is not derived from Tacitus. The allusion is to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various
... only twenty-four lines from Jewish and Pagan writers referring to Jesus. These include a reference in Tacitus' Annals, and brief references by Suetonius and Pliny the Younger. These three references are considered spurious by many scholars, and even if they were all to be accepted it would mean that the total pagan ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks |
