"Thucydides" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the events and mutual relation of nations, than upon his universal acquaintance with general literature and the sister arts of politics and philosophy. It was for the treacherous and elegant Bolingbroke to reduce the noble art of Thucydides from the height of sublimity and grandeur to the parlor level of the conversations of the Hotel de Rambouillet, to introduce into the most serious political disquisitions, concerning perhaps the welfare of society, an imperceptible yet ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... vivement, franchement, tourner le dos au moyen age, a ce passe morbide, qui, meme quand il n'agit pas, influe terriblement par la contagion de la mort. Il ne faut ni combattre, ni critiquer, mais oublier. Oublions et marchons!—MICHELET, La Bible de l'Humanite, 483. It has excited surprise that Thucydides should speak of Antiphon, the traitor to the democracy, and the employer of assassins, as "a man inferior in virtue to none of his contemporaries." But neither here nor elsewhere does Thucydides pass moral judgments.—JOWETT, ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... Iste iste rhetor, namque quatenus totus Thucydides, Britannus, Attice febris! Tau Gallicum min et sphin ut male illisit, Ita omnia ista ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... friend of mine, a clergyman, tells me that in Hesiod he finds a peculiar grace that he doesn't find elsewhere. He's a liar. That's all. Another man, in politics and in the legislature, tells me that every night before going to bed he reads over a page or two of Thucydides to keep his mind fresh. Either he never goes to bed or he's a liar. Doubly so: no one could read Greek at that frantic rate: and anyway his mind isn't fresh. How could it be, he's in the legislature. I don't object to this man talking ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... specimen passage of Mr. Bosaw's sermon, I shall not take the liberty which Thucydides and other ancient historians did, of making the sermon and putting it into the hero's mouth, but shall give that which ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... usual of the mysterious physical agency concerned in earthquakes, and also for the awful human tragedy [Endnote: 5] Of this no picture can ever hope to rival that hasty one sketched in the letter of the chaplain to the Lisbon factory. The plague of Athens as painted by Thucydides or Lucretius, nay even the fabulous plague of London by De Foe, contain no scenes or situations equal in effect to some in this plain historic statement. Nay, it would perhaps be difficult to produce a passage from Ezekiel, from Aeschylus, or from Shakspeare, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... half at 5 per cent stock 92 1/2. Portugal a million and a half at 87. Austria three millions and a half at 82 1/2. Denmark three millions and a half at 3 per cent stock 75 1/2. Then came a bonne bouche. The subtle Greek had gathered from his western visitors a notion of the contents of Thucydides, and he came to us for sympathy and money to help him shake off the barbarians and their yoke, and save the wreck of the ancient temples. The appeal was shrewdly planned. England reads Thucydides, and skims Demosthenes, though Greece, it is presumed, does not. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... songs and Annals, the latter being the earliest written records which belong to the history of the island, while the former were more easily remembered, from the construction of the verse. Much passes for history in other lands on far slighter grounds, and many a story in Thucydides or Tacitus, or even in Clarendon or Hume, is believed on evidence not one-tenth part so trustworthy as that which supports the narratives of these Icelandic story-tellers of the eleventh century. That with occurrences ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... and one Greek. It was the Greek that we feared most. Mellish had a sort of genius for picking out absolutely untranslatable passages, and desiring us (in print) to render the same with full notes. This term the book had been Thucydides, Book II, with regard to which I may echo the words of a certain critic when called upon to give his candid opinion of a friend's first novel, 'I dare not say what ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping guard over a commonplace book, or a papyrus, are all predestined. So great is their abstraction or their ecstasy, that nothing that goes on around them strikes their attention. Their unhappiness ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... an Edinburgh Professor, who used the form of one of Lucian's dialogues, "Lexiphanes," for an assault of ridicule upon pretentious sentence-making, and helped a little to get rid of it. Lucian laughed in his day at small imitators of the manner of Thucydides, as he would laugh now at the small imitators of the manner of Macaulay. He bade the historian first get sure facts, then tell them in due order, simply and without exaggeration or toil after fine ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... would ensue, and the mind of the learned sufferer would rest under a perpetual nightmare until charitable oblivion dulled the memory of the enormous mass of talk. Sir John thinks we should read Confucius, the Hindoo religious poetry, some Persian poetry, Thucydides, Tacitus, Cicero, Homer, Virgil, a little—a very little—Voltaire, Moliere, Sheridan, Locke, Berkeley, George Lewes, Hume, Shakspere, Bunyan, Spenser, Pope, Fielding, Macaulay, Marivaux—Alas, is there any need to ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... absurd to attack Froude on the ground that he was biassed. No man has ever yet written a living history without being biassed. Thucydides detested the radicalism of Cleon as heartily as Gibbon hated the Christianity of Rome. It was once the fashion of the Oxford school to decry Froude as being unworthy of the name of historian. Stubbs, indeed, did pay public tribute ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... who dealt with politics, and he assimilated what he read, Mr. Morley says that it was as true of Florence in the Sixteenth Century as of Athens, Corinth, Corcyra in the Fifth Century before Christ, as set forth in Thucydides, that it was a prey to intestine faction and the ruinous invocation of foreign aid. "These terrible calamities," says Thucydides, "always have been and always will be, while human nature remains the same. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... "Butler's Analogy." In the Classics course selections from Homer, Virgil, Euripides and Horace were read in the first year; selections from Cicero, Horace, Demosthenes and Sophocles in the second year; and selections from Herodotus, AEschylus, Thucydides, and Tacitus in the third year. In the first and second years the students were "exercised in Greek and Latin Composition, and they were also given a few lectures in Ancient History and Geography." In the third or final year they were exercised in ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... Theodorus with me; nor have they any dictionaries but Hesichius and Dioscerides. They esteem Plutarch highly, and were much taken with Lucian's wit and with his pleasant way of writing. As for the poets, they have Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles of Aldus's edition; and for historians, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Herodian. One of my companions, Thricius Apinatus, happened to carry with him some of Hippocrates's works and Galen's Microtechne, which they hold in great estimation; for though there is no nation in the world that needs physic so little as they ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... best-founded hopes." "Rather a well-worn theme," said the Dean, with a half-smile. "But not, sir," I said, "as you handled it. You told us, at the end of the sermon, that you remembered a summer afternoon when you were an undergraduate at Christ Church, and were sitting over your Thucydides close to your window, grappling with a long and complicated passage which was to be the subject of next morning's lecture; and that, glancing for a moment from your book, you saw the two most brilliant young Christ Church men of the day going down to ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... were substituted. The mythologists explained this by the story of Hermes finding two serpents thus knotted together while fighting; he separated them with his wand, which, crowned by the serpents, became the symbol of the settlement of quarrels (Thucydides i. 53; Macrobius, Sat. i. 19; Hyginus, Poet. Astron. ii. 7). A pair of wings was sometimes attached to the top of the staff, in token of the speed of Hermes as a messenger. In historical times the caduceus was the attribute of Hermes as the god of commerce and peace, and among ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Baldock's time probably belongs the reference to twelve scribes, no doubt retained for business purposes as well as for book-making. They were bound by an oath to be faithful to the church and to write without fraud or malice. Aeneas Sylvius tells us he saw a Latin translation of Thucydides in the sacristy of ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... After this Xanthippus was the leader of the people, and Miltiades of the upper class. Then came Themistocles and Aristides, and after them Ephialtes as leader of the people, and Cimon son of Miltiades of the wealthier class. Pericles followed as leader of the people, and Thucydides, who was connected by marriage with Cimon, of the opposition. After the death of Pericles, Nicias, who subsequently fell in Sicily, appeared as leader of the aristocracy, and Cleon son of Cleaenetus of the people. The latter ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... I had afterwards proof to the contrary, a coward; and matching myself against him I knew I would do the king's navy more credit than he. But I kept my thought to myself—and next day made a sad bungle, I remember, of my construe of Thucydides' account of the sea ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... letters and in affairs, and endued with such moderation in the exercise of public offices, that to him would be awarded by the consenting voice of Englishmen the four-fold praise attributed to Pericles by his rival Thucydides—'To know all that is fitting, to be able to apply what he knows, to be a lover of his country, and superior ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... The passage Thucydides, II. 15, is the authority deemed most weighty for the placing of the Limnae to the south of the Acropolis. The question of the location of this section of Athens is so intimately connected with the whole topography of the ancient city, that ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... determine the precise sources from which the historical part of the work is derived. Among these sources are unquestionably Herodotus (for the tyranny of Peisistratus, and for the struggle between Cleisthenes and Isagoras), Thucydides (for the episode of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and for the Four Hundred), Xenophon (for the Thirty), and the poems of Solon. There is now among critics a general consensus in favour of the view that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... liberty, nor such reflections on experience as are implied in the saying of Artabanus, that the transitoriness of human life is the least of its evils. And in what modern writing is more of the wisdom of life condensed than in the History of Thucydides? It is surely more true to say of Greek literature that it contains types of all things human, stamped with the freshness, simplicity, and directness which belong to first impressions, and to ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... poetry, next to Shakspeare, than that of Aeschylus and Sophocles, not to speak of Euripides?' Herodotus he thought 'the most interesting and instructive book, next to the Bible, which had ever been written.' Modern discoveries had only tended to confirm the general truth of his narrative. Thucydides he ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... inform the world of its magnitude and its place in the heaven of"—not poetry in this instance, but that serene and unclouded region of the firmament where shine unchanging the names of Herodotus and Thucydides. Those who had always believed in their brilliant schoolmate and friend at last felt themselves justified in their faith. The artist that sent this unframed picture to be hung in a corner of the literary gallery was equal to larger tasks. There was but one voice ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... than a geographical character. The first of those is the cut made by Xerxes through the rock which connects the promontory of Mount Athos with the mainland; the other, a navigable canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. In spite of the testimony of Herodotus and Thucydides, the Romans classed the canal of Xerxes among the fables of "mendacious Greece," and yet traces of it are perfectly distinct at the present day through its whole extent, except at a single point where, after it had become so choked as to be no longer navigable, it was probably ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... Erewhon) wrote The Authoress of the Odyssey (Longmans, 1897) in support of his view that the Odyssey was written by a woman who lived at Trapani and upon the mountain, and who in the poem described her own country. In Chapter XII. he quotes Thucydides (vi. 2), to show that the Sicans had inhabited this corner of the island from a very remote period, having come probably from Spain. After the fall of Troy, some of the Trojans, who had escaped the Greeks, migrated to Sicily, ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... indeed, a strong compliment, but no defence; and Casaubon, who could not but be sensible of his author's blind side, thinks it time to abandon a post that was untenable. He acknowledges that Persius is obscure in some places; but so is Plato, so is Thucydides; so are Pindar, Theocritus, and Aristophanes amongst the Greek poets; and even Horace and Juvenal, he might have added, amongst the Romans. The truth is, Persius is not sometimes, but generally obscure; and therefore Casaubon at last is forced to excuse him by alleging that it ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... the management of the clumsy dray and the eight heavy-yoked, lumbering beasts dragging it. Wonderful tales are told of cultivated men in the wilderness, Oxonians disguised as station-cooks, who quoted Virgil over their dish-washing or asked your opinion on a tough passage of Thucydides whilst baking a batch of bread. Most working settlers, as a matter of fact, did well enough if they kept up a running acquaintance with English literature; and station-cooks, as a race, were ever greater ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... simply in hearing the student repeat from memory the dates from "Ptz's Ancient History.'' How a man so gifted as Hadley could have allowed any part of his work to be so worthless, it is hard to understand. And, worse remained behind. He had charge of the class in Thucydides; but with every gift for making it a means of great good to us, he taught it in the perfunctory way of that period;—calling on each student to construe a few lines, asking a few grammatical questions, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... similar shelves. About the room, over or by the shelves, stand portrait busts or medallions of great authors, both Greek and Roman, the "blind" Homer being represented in traditional form, but the majority, from Aeschylus and Thucydides down to Virgil and Livy, being authentic and excellent likenesses. In the picture-gallery would be found paintings either done upon the stucco walls in a frame-like setting or upon panels of wood attached to the walls, very much as we hang our ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... abroad and see other countries, lest they should contract foreign manners, gain traces of a life of little discipline, and of a different form of government. He forbid strangers too to resort to Sparta, who could not assign a good reason for their coming; not, as Thucydides says, out of fear they should imitate the constitution of that city, and make improvements in virtue, but lest they should teach his own people some evil. For along with foreigners come new subjects of discourse; new discourse produces new opinions; and from these there necessarily ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... their neighbourhood; a nation of shepherds may. Nothing can be more contemptible than an Indian war in North America; nothing, on the contrary, can be more dreadful than a Tartar invasion has frequently been in Asia. The judgment of Thucydides, that both Europe and Asia could not resist the Scythians united, has been verified by the experience of all ages. The inhabitants of the extensive, but defenceless plains of Scythia or Tartary, have ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... wave of his hand. "But forgive me for disagreeing with you. Had I lived in that age, I should be lacking in reverence for what it accomplished. I should be too near to its life; unable, as you say, to see the forest for the trees. I should be like Thucydides, a most sensible person who, if I recollect aright, barely mentions Ictinus and the rest of them. How came it about? This admirable writer imagined they were building a temple for Greece; he lacked the interval of centuries which has allowed mankind to see their work in its true ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... heroic legends: 2. that of the writer who takes his stand on some moral point, and selects a series of events for the express purpose of illustrating it, and in whose hands the narrative of the selected events is modified by the principle of selection;—as Thucydides, whose object was to describe the evils of democratic and aristocratic partizanships;—or Polybius, whose design was to show the social benefits resulting from the triumph and grandeur of Rome, in public institutions ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... unhesitatingly place the work of Archibald Forbes, and that of several knights of the pen still living, far above the delusive tinsel of Marbot, Thiebault, and Segur. I will go further and say that, if we could find out what were the sources used by Thucydides, we should notice qualms of misgiving shoot through the circles of scientific historians as they contemplated his majestic work. In any case, I may appeal to the example of the great Athenian in support of the thesis that to undertake to write contemporary history ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the Just, and Melesias, the son of the elder Thucydides, two aged men who live together, are desirous of educating their sons in the best manner. Their own education, as often happens with the sons of great men, has been neglected; and they are resolved that their children shall ...
— Laches • Plato
... interesting as supplying an example of the manner in which the orators praised 'the Athenians among the Athenians,' falsifying persons and dates, and casting a veil over the gloomier events of Athenian history. It exhibits an acquaintance with the funeral oration of Thucydides, and was, perhaps, intended to rival that great work. If genuine, the proper place of the Menexenus would be at the end of the Phaedrus. The satirical opening and the concluding words bear a great resemblance to the earlier dialogues; the oration itself is professedly a mimetic ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... history," he writes to Pushkin. During his seven-year stay in St. Petersburg (1829-36) Gogol zealously gathered historical material and, in the words of Professor Kotlyarevsky, "lived in the dream of becoming the Thucydides of Little Russia." How completely he disassociated Ukrainia from Northern Russia may be judged by the conspectus of his lectures written in 1832. He says in it, speaking of the conquest of Southern Russia in the fourteenth century by Prince ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... which further guarantees them. It is remarkable how little of the adjective there is—no compliment, no eulogy, no heroic touches, no sympathetic turn of phrase, no great passages of encomium or commendation. It is often said about the Greek historian, Thucydides, that, among his many intellectual judgements, he never offers a criticism of any act that implies moral approbation or disapprobation; that he says nothing to show that he had feelings or that he cared about questions of right and wrong. Page after page of Thucydides ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... became a general favorite both in and out of France; and after all had been said in his praise that might be truly and properly said, each successive admirer tried to add a little more, till at last, as a matter of course, he was compared to Thucydides, and lauded for the graces of his style, the vigor of his language, the subtlety of his mind, and his worship of the harmonious and the beautiful, in such a manner that the old bluff soldier would have been highly perplexed and disgusted, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... The fact of Homer's blindness rests on a passage in the Hymn to Apollo, quoted by Thucydides as a genuine work of Homer, and which is thus spoken of by one of the most accomplished scholars that this country or this age has ever produced:—"They are indeed beautiful verses, and if none worse had ever been attributed to Homer, the Prince ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... [697] Thucydides, v, 11; Pausanias, i, 32. For other examples, and for the details of the cult, see Stengel and Oehmichen, Die griechischen Sakralaltertuemer, p. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... which were said by those who envied him, to smell of the oil, to imply that they were too elaborate. He rose very early, and used to say, that he was sorry when any workman was at his business before him. He copied Thucydides' history eight times with his own hand, in order to render the style of that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... kept during those years I find a record of the books that Shelley read during several years. During the years of 1814 and 1815 the list is extensive. It includes, in Greek, Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and Diogenes Laertius. In Latin, Petronius, Suetonius, some of the works of Cicero, a large proportion of those of Seneca and Livy. In English, Milton's poems, Wordsworth's "Excursion", Southey's "Madoc" and "Thalaba", Locke "On the Human Understanding", Bacon's "Novum Organum". ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... really. It's yours, Trevor. I'm only a spectator and camp-follower. It's your business. You'll find me in my study." And putting the poker carefully in its place, Clowes left the room. He went into his study, and tried to begin some work. But the beauties of the second book of Thucydides failed to appeal to him. His mind was elsewhere. He felt too excited with what had just happened to translate Greek. He pulled up a chair in front of the fire, and gave himself up to speculating how Trevor ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... the proofs of this paper arrived from the printers. The exercise consists of half a chapter of Thucydides. I had to read it over carefully, as the text must be absolutely correct. At four-thirty my task was not yet completed. I had, however, promised to take tea in a friend's rooms, so I left the proof upon my desk. I was absent ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a galaxy of great men: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Socrates, Thucydides, Phidias, Ictinus, and others. Greek government reached its culmination and society had its fullest life in this age. The glory of the period extended on through the Peloponnesian war, and after the Macedonian conquest it gradually waned and the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... see, I am short of material. Accordingly, I return to Callisthenes and Philistus, in whom I see that you have been wallowing. Callisthenes is a commonplace and hackneyed piece of business, like a good many Greeks. The Sicilian is a first-rate writer, terse, sagacious, concise, almost a minor Thucydides;[589] but which of his two books you have—for these are two works—I don't know. That about Dionysius is my favourite. For Dionysius himself is a magnificent intriguer, and was familiarly known to Philistus. But as to your postscript—are you really going in for writing history? You have my blessing ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... government. Withal he banished from Lacedaemon all strangers who could not give a very good reason for their coming thither; not because he was afraid lest they should inform themselves of and imitate his manner of government (as Thucydides says), or learn any thing to their good; but rather lest they should introduce something contrary to good manners. With strange people, strange words must be admitted; these novelties produce novelties in thought; and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... walking alone in the woods and roads of Concord and the neighboring towns, went back to the office at seven, read a little geometry and algebra, reviewing the slender mathematics which I had studied in college, and then spent two hours in reading Greek. I read through Thucydides, Homer and Xenophon's Hellenica and some other Greek books in that year. Sundays I went to church twice, but shut myself up in a room at home the rest of the day and read a great quantity of English literature, including Milton, Spencer, Chaucer, George Herbert, South's Sermons and ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... been pressed a good quart. Another was lying on the ground from a surfeit of mulberries. The effect of this irrational excess will be conceived by the judicious reader. Calcutta itself never suffered from a cholera morbus half so fearful. Thousands were dying. Were I Thucydides or Boccaccio, I would write pages on this plague. The commonwealth itself must soon have yielded its ghost, for all order had ceased throughout the island ever since they had deserted pine-apples. There ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... that, Trevannion?" asked Salisbury. "Are we to be prepared with a choice quotation from Thucydides, or is it a hint that we are to remember ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... war-horse, or David tell how the mountains skipped like lambs. Do you want logic? Go and hear Paul reason until your brain aches under the spell of his mighty intellect. Do you want history? Go and see Moses put into a few pages stupendous information which Herodotus, Thucydides, and Prescott never preached after. And, above all, if you want to find how a nation struck down by sin can rise to happiness and to heaven, read of that blood which can wash away the pollution of a world. There is one passage in the Bible of vast tonnage: ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... world? After a lengthy period of peace there usually arises a craving for battle. Nearly fifty years of peace followed the defeat of the Persians in Greece, and at the end of that time, just before the Peloponnesian War, which was to bring ruin on the country, Thucydides tells us that all Greece, being ignorant of the realities of war, stood a-tiptoe with excitement. It was the same in England just before our disastrous South African War, when readers of Kipling ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... century, have the books of Greece as a perpetual memorial; and copies there have been, since the time that they were written; but you need not go to Athens to procure them, nor would you find them in Athens. Strange to say, strange to the nineteenth century, that in the age of Plato and Thucydides, there was not, it is said, a bookshop in the whole place: nor was the book trade in existence till the very time of Augustus. Libraries, I suspect, were the bright invention of Attalus or the Ptolemies; I doubt whether Athens had a library till the reign of Hadrian. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... a mere common-place fellow; Plato, a discourser; Thucydides and Livy, tedious and dry; Tacitus, an entire knot: sometimes worth ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... when no long time afterwards it was doubled, and subsequently trebled. The money which Aristeides proposed to raise amounted to four hundred and sixty talents; to which Perikles added nearly a third part, for Thucydides tells us that at the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, the Athenians received six hundred talents a year from their allies. After the death of Perikles, the popular orators gradually raised the sum total to thirteen hundred talents. It was not so much that the money was required for the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... country holds you back. Upon a wise view of it, we find in the distinctive qualities and defects of youth and age the elements of a felicitous combination. The father of the philosophy of history, Thucydides, has attributed to Alcibiades a great truth: "Consider that youth and age have no power unless united; but that the lighter and the more exact and the middle sort of judgment, when duly attempered, are likely to ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... The Lacedaemonians professed greater regard for autonomy. A little ingenuity, a good deal of hardihood, might multiply such futilities indefinitely. In fact, it would be possible to write the story of our Peloponnesian war in phrases of Thucydides, and I should not be surprised if such a task were a regular school exercise at Eton or at Rugby. Why, it was but the other day that Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a passage from Lowell's Biglow ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... husbandry, lived on the spontaneous produce of a rich soil, and dwelling in mountain caves, devoted themselves entirely to the pleasures of a pastoral life. He says that they were men of monstrous stature, and had but one eye, in the middle of their forehead. Thucydides supposes them to have been the original inhabitants of Sicily. As their origin was unknown, it was said that they were the offspring of Neptune, or, in other words, that they had come by sea, to settle in Sicily. According to Justin, they retained possession ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... telling of the story, in our modern sense, is so. Homer (in the Odyssey at any rate), Herodotus (in what was certainly not intentional fiction at all), and Xenophon[5] are about the only Greek writers who can tell a story, for the magnificent narrative of Thucydides in such cases as those of the Plague and the Syracusan cataclysm shows all the "headstrong" ethos of the author in its positive refusal to assume a "story" character. In Latin there is nothing before Livy and Ovid;[6] of whom the one falls into the same category ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... in descriptive poetry, and in certain styles of music and painting, and even in sculpture. But she will never write an Iliad or a Paradise Lost, or tragedies like those of Aeschylus. She will never rival Demosthenes in producing a political oration, nor a massive philosophic history like Thucydides. She will not paint a Madonna like Raphael, nor chisel an Apollo Belvedere. The logic of Aristotle, the polemics of Augustine, the prodigious onsets of a Luther, the Institutes of a Calvin, the Novum Organum of Bacon, the Principia ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... hundred years later the Greeks under Nicias before Syracuse were so disconcerted by the appearance of an eclipse, which was interpreted as a direct omen and warning, that Nicias threw away the last opportunity to rescue his army. Thucydides, it is true, in recording this fact speaks disparagingly of the superstitious bent of the mind of Nicias, but Thucydides also was a man far in ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... various readings, for the first time, from thirteen MSS. not before submitted to the public eye. The French version, in four volumes, with the critical notes of the Editor, may be had separately. The VELLUM 4to. copy of the Thucydides consists of fourteen volumes; but as the volumes are less bulky than those of the Xenophon, they may be reduced to seven. The Xenophon was published in 1809, in seven volumes, 4to. The Latin version is that of Leunclavius; the French version and critical notes ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Schiller seemed to think that a professorial chair in a German university was a more honorable position than that of a poet. Dalberg writes: "Influence on mankind" (for this he knew to be Schiller's highest ambition) "depends on the vigor and strength which a man throws into his works. Thucydides and Xenophon would not deny that poets like Sophocles and Horace have had at least as much influence on the world as they themselves." When the French invasion threatened the ruin of Germany and the downfall of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... invidiously described as maintaining "the sufficiency of private judgment." Now we maintain the sufficiency of private judgment in interpreting the Scriptures in no other sense than that in which every sane man maintains its sufficiency, in interpreting Thucydides or Aristotle; we mean, that, instead of deferring always to some one interpreter, as an idle boy follows implicitly the Latin version of his Greek lesson, the true method is to consult all[17] accessible authorities, and to avail ourselves of the assistance ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... that name), upon his accession to the throne, after the death of his father, Lycastus, made several conquests in the islands adjoining Crete, where he reigned, and, at last, became master of those seas. The strength of his fleet is particularly remarked by Thucydides, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Lucian, Homer, Sophocles, AEschylus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the Works of Alexander the Great; the manners, habits, customs, usages, and the meditations of the Grecians; the Greek Digamma resolved, Prosody, Composition, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... from town, and was to get a steel-handled sword from Fentum's for Jack Maggot; and everything was proceeding with delightful success, when one morning, as Mr. Dallas was apparently about to take his departure, with a volume of Becker's Thucydides under his arm, the respected Dominie stopped, and thus harangued: "I am informed that a great deal is going on in this family with which it is intended that I shall be kept unacquainted. It is not my intention ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... every day from its meat and drink, and using those motions and alterations which are not always in the same time nor in the same order, should upon the various complications of all these be affected with new diseases? Such was the plague at Athens described by Thucydides, who conjectures that it was new because that birds and beasts of prey would not touch the dead carcasses. Those that fell sick about the Red Sea, if we believe Agatharcides, besides other strange and unheard diseases, had little serpents in their legs ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... THUCYDIDES, historian of the Peloponnesian War, born in Athens nine years after the battle of Salamis, of a wealthy family; was in Athens during the plague of 430 B.C.; was seized, but recovered; served as naval commander in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... have I endeavoured to copy the several beauties of the ancient and modern historians; the impartial temper of Herodotus, the gravity, austerity, and strict morals of Thucydides, the extensive knowledge of Xenophon, the sublimity and grandeur of Titus Livius; and to avoid the careless style of Polybius, I have borrowed considerable ornaments from Dionysius Halicarnasseus, and Diodorus Siculus. The specious gilding of Tacitus I have endeavoured to shun. ...
— English Satires • Various
... other.[23] There are no other identifications that seem at all certain in the strict province of religion, although in myth the form of Manus, who is the Hindu Noah, has been associated with Teutonic Mannus, and Greek Minos, noted in Thucydides for his sea-faring. He is to Yama (later regarded as his brother) as ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... and modern, on which the world has pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,—these every lover of letters will desire to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list of such classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, the tastes of men begin to differ very widely. An assortment ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... evenings—the paraffin lamp glaring beside him, the crackling of the coal in his own fire, the book on his knee! Ancrum had kept his promise, and was helping him with his Greek; but his teaching hardly kept pace with the boy's enthusiasm and capacity. The voracity with which he worked at his Thucydides and Homer left the lame minister staring and sighing. The sound of the lines, the roll of the oi's and ou's was in David's ear all day, and to learn a dozen irregular verbs in the interval between two customers was like the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exist in the third century B.C. {4} Diodorus and Pausanias, later, also cite "the poet in the Hymns," "Homer in the Hymns"; and the pseudo-Herodotus ascribes the Hymns to Homer in his Life of that author. Thucydides, in the Periclean age, regards Homer as the blind Chian minstrel who composed the Hymn to the Delian Apollo: a good proof of the relative antiquity of that piece, but not evidence, of course, that our whole collection was then regarded as Homeric. Baumeister ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... achievement of industry. He treats of the form and magnitude of the earth, and devotes eight books to Europe, six to Asia, and one to Africa. His great authorities are Eratosthenes, Polybius, Aristotle, Antiochus of Syracuse, Posidonius, Theopompus, Artemidorus Ephorus, Herodotus, Anaximenes, Thucydides, and Aristo, chiefly historians and philosophers. Whatever may be said of the accuracy of the great geographer of antiquity, it cannot be denied that he was a man of immense research and learning. His work in seventeen books is one of the most valuable which have come down from antiquity, both ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... wrong with a fellow who could conceive such a stupendous undertaking. Surely no one would think for a moment of putting it into execution! I also read with stolid indifference of the Herculean feats of labor performed by men known to history. For example, Demosthenes copied in his own handwriting Thucydides' History eight times, merely to make himself familiar with the style of that great man. An incident that appealed to me in a more ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... and wisdom, and even maintained that it was more wise than the assemblies of ancient Greece! He remarked:—"I must declare and avow, that in all my reading—and it has been my favourite study, and I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of the world—for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the way. The subject was suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like one of his own opium visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides's great chapter ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... literary productions, on the other hand, lies partly in their form and partly in their content, or in their content alone. It is quite a different question, therefore, whether one may derive a satisfactory pleasure and benefit from a translation of the Agamemnon of AEschylus or Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, of Lucretius or Tacitus, to say nothing of such books as Aristotle's Constitution ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... time of the composition of the Homeric poems. In Corcyra, on the other hand, the original barbarism lasted longer. Such, at least, is the way in which I interpret the passages in the Odyssey concerning the Phaeacians (who were certainly not Greek), and the later language of Thucydides respecting the relations of the Corinthian colonies of Epidamnus, and Corcyra. The whole context leads to the belief that, originally, the {apoikoi} were Greeks in contact with a population ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... classical literature printed, the MSS. {162} which present themselves of already known authors carefully examined, and the variations to the received text marked. How much this is wanted we experience in the corruptions of Sophocles, AEschylus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristoteles! In this way much that is valuable may be recovered; much that is matter of discussion set at rest. Let me instance the Babrian fables, and the discovery of Mr. Harris at Alexandria; who, it was remarked to me, might have discovered the whole, instead of a part, had proper ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... Dr. Arnold's skill as a teacher was unrivalled; he imparted a living interest to all he touched, to be attributed mainly to his habit of illustrating ancient events by "modern instances." Thus, Thucydides and Napier were compared almost page by page; thus the "High Church party" of the Jews was pointed to as a type of "the Tories." By means of his favourite topic, physical geography, he sought to bring the ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... between the methods of ancient and modern historians. The former, it has been said, were artistic, and the latter sociological. These terms, while aiming at the facts, are neither accurate nor happy. The ancient historians, as Herodotus and Thucydides, aimed at a pleasing narrative. To attain this end, neither an exhaustive investigation of facts nor a conscientious abstention from fiction was necessary. Hence we find the works of the one filled with impossible events, and those of the other with orations confessedly fictitious; ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... that the Thracians and Athenians were connected, through the marriage of a former prince Tereus (or Teres) with Procne, the daughter of Pandion. This old story, discredited by Thucydides, ii. 29, is referred to in Arist. "Birds," 368 foll. The Birds are about to charge the two Athenian intruders, when Epops, king of the Birds, formerly Tereus, king of Thrace, but long ago transformed ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... school again myself before I could attempt to instruct them. I had to take down again my long disused Virgil and Cicero, and work through many a forgotten passage. At first the task was distasteful enough, but it soon became fascinating. My love of the classics revived. I began to read Homer and Thucydides, Tacitus and Lucretius, for my own pleasure. It was delightful to observe what interest my boys took in Virgil, as soon as they discovered that Virgil was not a mere task-book, but poetry of the noblest order. By avoiding all idea of mere unintelligent task-work, I soon got them to take a real interest ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... Thucydides states that during the Peloponnesian war "things formerly repeated on hearsay, but very rarely confirmed by facts, became not incredible, both about earthquakes and eclipses of the Sun which came to pass more frequently than had been remembered in former times." ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... kingdoms by oracles, auguries, dreams, rewards and punishments, prophecies, inspirations, sacrifices and religious superstitions, varied in as many forms as there be diversity of spirits; they send wars, plagues, peace, sickness, health, dearth, plenty, as appears by those histories of Thucydides, Livius, Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with many others, that are full of their wonderful stratagems.' They formerly devoted themselves, each one, to the service of particular individuals as familiar demons, 'private spirits.' Numa, Socrates, and many others were ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... Athens, from Asia, touched with its breath the aspiring minds of youth, with the effect of some pestilential planet, and as soon as the tradition of the past was broken, eloquence halted and was stricken dumb. Since that, who has attained to the sublimity of Thucydides, who rivalled the fame of Hyperides? Not a single poem has glowed with a healthy color, but all of them, as though nourished on the same diet, lacked the strength to live to old age. Painting also ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... neighbourhood, we were sorry to return to our inn—and such an inn! We departed abruptly, and probably never to return; but we shall think of Segeste in Hyde Park, or as we pass the candlestick Corinthians of Whitehall. Thucydides[16] relates that a prevailing notion in his time was, that the Trojans after losing Troy went first to Sicily, and founded there Egesta and Eryx. Now, as on the same authority the first Greek ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... years of warfare passed, and Troy remained untaken and seemingly unshaken. How the two hosts managed to live in the mean time the tellers of the story do not say. Thucydides, the historian, thinks it likely that the Greeks had to farm the neighboring lands for food. How the Trojans and their allies contrived to survive so long within their walls we are left to surmise, unless they farmed their streets. And thus we reach the opening of ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... combed, till the janitor came in his gold-banded cap, like a Continental porker. When they said they would like to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, he owned his inability to cope with the affair, and said he must send for the superintendent; he was either in the Herodotus or the Thucydides, and would be there in a minute. The Buttons brought him—a Yankee of browbeating presence in plain clothes— almost before they had time to exchange a frightened whisper in recognition of the fact that there could ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... scholars. Dr. Gabell made them so. My father's Latin verses were not good; but that was because he was not poetical—not because he was a bad scholar. But he wrote the most admirable Latin prose; and, as for his Greek prose, you couldn't tell it from Thucydides." In this kind of scholarship Matthew Arnold was nurtured; and whatever in this respect his training had left imperfect, he perfected by close and continuous study. His Greek and Latin reading was both wide and accurate, perhaps wider in Greek ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... been a great change in the status of women in the last twenty-five years. The apophthegm of Pericles, or rather of Thucydides, "that woman is best who is least spoken of among men, either for good or evil," is not so rigidly enforced. Increased wealth throughout Germany has left the German woman more leisure from the drudgery of the home. She is not so wholly absorbed by the duties ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history; the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called in question. Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them can ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Thucydides, who had already expressed the opinion quoted by many a modern Philistine,—"The wife who deserves the highest praise is she of whom one hears neither good nor evil outside her own house,"—anticipates a later verdict, in words that might have been ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... widening in the waters) from universal suffrage. Universal suffrage is Democracy. Is Democracy better than the aristocratic commonwealth? Look at the Greeks, who knew both forms; are they agreed which is the best? Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristophanes—the Dreamer, the Historian, the Philosophic Man of Action, the penetrating Wit—have no ideals in Democracy. Algernon Sidney, the martyr of liberty, allows no government to the multitude. Brutus died for a republic, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
