"Gladiatorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vein noways calculated to bring the dove o' peace hoverin' around, an' volunteers as a friendly suggestion that the cattlemen had best send to town and order four nice new tombstones before ringin' the curtain up on any gladiatorial pow-wow. When the cowpunchers rides back, honors is even, an' each side ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... than in Greece, because, when war actually came, the Greeks were themselves exposed to all its horrors and sufferings, but in England the bloodthirsty mind could enjoy the conflict in a suburban train with a half-penny paper. As in bull-fights or gladiatorial shows, the spectators watched the expensive but entertaining scene of blood and death from a safe and comfortable distance. They gave the cash and let the credit go; they thoroughly appreciated the rumble of ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... In the gladiatorial arena of the court-room, Mr. Palma was regarded as a large-brained, nimble-witted, marble-hearted man, of vast ambition and tireless energy in the acquisition of his aims; but his colleagues and clients would as soon have sought chivalric tenderness in a bronze statue, or a ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... said Mr. Hume, sourly, "they contrived the whole thing as a gladiatorial spectacle for their amusement. I don't think I was ever so near death;" and he shook hands gravely. "If you had not fired when you did, he would have ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... must insist that he get a permit from the mayor, relieving us from all responsibility, before we allow him to be torn limb from limb. Return to-morrow at two o'clock, and if this man's courage still keeps up, you will see before your shuddering eyes an encounter which will make the historical gladiatorial combats of ancient Rome pale into insignificance.' I could sling a few language myself, those days, and the mayor was a friend of mine—or I thought he was—so I figured we could catch the suckers for an admission and then call it off, because he ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take heed that no act of his ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Roman gladiatorial shows, and to the philosophic detachment by which Marcus Aurelius was able to see and yet not to see them; and the whole book was the spiritual story of a young Roman's soul, a priestlike artistic temperament, born in the haunted twilight between the setting sun of pagan religion and philosophy ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... would suit the emergency, unless I stated, with your august leave, that Cyril, and not you, celebrated the gladiatorial exhibition; which might hardly ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old Queen), but he had resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and the Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli and the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of Parlimentary history, talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling of our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like a socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the Union every year, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... dropping his voice from its impetuous pitch, to a more quiet and yet more ardent quality, "Ye 'lowed oncet thet I shouldn't never tech ye withouten ye said I mout. I've done obeyed ye—but now." He slowly extended both arms and stood upright in gladiatorial strength and compelling erectness. "But now ye're a-comin' inter my arms—of yore own accord—because we ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... conclusion are we to draw from these premises? Can we think it possible, that those, who refused to strike again, or to go to law with those who injured them, and who thought an attendance at the gladiatorial spectacles criminal on the principle, that he who stood by was a murderer, though the murder was sanctioned by law; should not have an objection to the military service, on the principle, that ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... Mathilde de la Mole. Here Beyle has a subject after his own heart. The loves of the peasant youth and the aristocratic girl, traversed and agitated by their overweening pride, and triumphing at last rather over themselves than over each other—these things make up a gladiatorial combat of 'espagnolismes,' which is displayed to the reader with a supreme incisiveness. The climax is reached when Mathilde at last gives way to her passion, and throws herself into the arms of Julien, who forces himself to make ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... advance;—thirdly, that this polished condition of society, which should naturally with the evils of a luxurious repose have counted upon its pacific benefits, had yet, by means of its circus and its gladiatorial contests, applied a constant irritation, and a system of provocations to the appetites for blood, such as in all other nations are connected with the rudest stages of society, and with the most barbarous modes of ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the ships at anchor under its guns, all gazed with eager eyes over the open waters of the bay, their interest in the coming contest as intense as Roman audience ever displayed for the life and death struggle in the gladiatorial arena. Before them lay a mightier amphitheatre than that of the Coliseum, and before them was to be fought more notable struggle for life and death than ever took place within ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... enough!" said the girl, vehemently. "They go there and sit and have a good time at the expense of the Province, and show off a little with a passage-at-arms now and then that suggests more of a gladiatorial arena than that of a body of ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... had found himself handicapped by a lack of the mysterious enrichment that a tour through college gives the least absorbent mind. He was determined to provide it for his boy, though Joel felt that every moment's delay in leaping into the commercial arena was so much delay in arriving at gladiatorial eminence. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... "on this short day of frost and sun to sleep before evening." ("The Renaissance.") "Marius the Epicurean" was not an Epicurean in the sense in which the doctrines of Epicurus have been travestied through the ages: he turned away sickened from the barbarities of the gladiatorial combats, longing for the time when the forces of the future would create a heart that would make it impossible to be thus pleasured. If "Carpe diem" is Pater's motto, the hour is not to be plucked ignobly; if style is his watchword in art, style alone cannot make ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... scramble up to the bulwarks, and with very bad success. They had not far to go, for the schooner's bulwarks were very low for a sea-going vessel, but here was the main defence, the nets fully ten feet high and very strong—a defence suggestive of the old gladiatorial fight between the Retiarius, or net and trident-bearer, and the Secutor, or sword and ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... three—and the thing was over. She saw the Grays being crushed back and realized that the Browns had won, when a last detail of the lessening tumult fixed her attention with its gladiatorial simplicity. Here, indeed, it was a case of man to man with the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... with this festival extended through three successive days. They consisted of sacrifices and other religious rites, dramatic spectacles, athletic games, and military and gladiatorial shows. In the course of these diversions there was celebrated on one of the days what was called the Trojan game, in which young boys of leading and distinguished families appeared on horseback in a circus or ring, where they ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... could feel the breath sharp in her lungs. "I would rather.... He would make a good spectacle in the gladiatorial contests. He would look well with a sword through ...
— Step IV • Rosel George Brown
... answered gently; "the arena must yet be sanded!" This she said having reference to the covering up of the bloodstains at the gladiatorial shows with fine sand. "Well," she went on, "waste not thine anger on a thing so vile. I have thrown my throw and I have lost. Vae victis!—ah! Vae victis! Wilt thou not lend me the dagger in thy robe, that here and now I may end my shame? No? Then one word more, most ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... had good abilities, for he was honoured with frequent letters from Cicero when the latter was governor of Cilicia. He kept up some of his extravagant tastes; for when he was Aedile (which involved the taking upon him the expense of certain gladiatorial and wild-beast exhibitions), he wrote to beg his friend to send him out of his province some panthers for his show. Cicero complied with the request, and took the opportunity, so characteristic of him, of lauding his own administration ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... golden casket by no means small, which held, so they told us, the first shavings of Trimalchio's beard. I asked the hall-porter what pictures were in the middle hall. "The Iliad and the Odyssey," he replied, "and the gladiatorial games given under Laenas." There was no time in ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... around, and theatron, a place for spectators), a building in which the seats for spectators surround the scene of the performance. The word was doubtless coined by the Greeks of Campania, since it was here that the gladiatorial shows for which the amphitheatre was primarily used were first organized as public spectacles. The earliest building of the kind still extant is that at Pompeii, built after 80 B.C. It is called spectacula in a contemporary inscription. The ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... would gracefully acknowledge the fact of its defeat; and, as human beings, gifted with the faculty of reason, would cheerfully admit the demonstrated results of its exercise. He would find it difficult to comprehend why the men who were overcome in a fair gladiatorial strife in the open arena of debate, with brain pitted against brain, and manhood against manhood, should resort to the rough logic of "blood and iron," when the nobler kind of logic, that which ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... dancing girls, the hours, or seasons, graces, satyrs, and many others; devotional pictures, such as representations of the ancient divinities, lares, penates, and genii; pictures of tavern scenes, of mechanics at their work; rope-dancers and representations of various games, gladiatorial contests, genre scenes from the lives of children, youths, and women, festival ceremonies, actors, poets, and stage scenes, and last, but not least, many caricatures, of which I here give ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... scimiter, brand, curtana, claymore, smallsword, glaive, broadsword, cutlass, Damascus blade, spadroon, creese. Associated Words: scabbard, sheathe, unsheathe, forte, hilt, sheath, foible, foil, fence, fencer, gladiatorial, gladiatorism, gladiature. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... across the Edgware Road, opposite the house at the corner of Upper Bryanston Street. This house has iron galleries from which the Sheriffs watched the execution, and in it after the ceremony the gallows were deposited. Galleries were erected for spectators as at a gladiatorial show, and special prices were charged for special exhibitions. Among the people who suffered at Tyburn, the best known are: Roger de Mortimer, for treason, 1330; Perkin Warbeck, 1449; the Holy Maid of Kent and her confederates, ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... party quitted the sombre gallery and made their way into the open air. After they had gone about twenty yards the guides came to an abrupt halt and one of them pointed to the centre of the vast gladiatorial arena. ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... a minority, and so the sex shows a good deal fewer religious enthusiasts per mille than the sex of sentiment and belief. Attending, several years ago, the gladiatorial shows of the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I was constantly struck by the great preponderance of males in the pen devoted to the saved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers came ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... these unfortunate victims; the one after his triumph, and the other on the pretext of a rebellion.[672] No war, says Lipsius,[673] was ever so destructive to the human race as these sports. In spite of the laws of Constantine and Constans, gladiatorial shows survived the old established religion more than seventy years; but they owed their final extinction to the courage of a Christian. In the year 404, on the kalends of January, they were exhibiting the shows in the Flavian amphitheatre before the usual ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... be a theatre for any show, with heights around it insignificant, but offering a vantage ground whence could be watched the struggle in the midst. There was a sacred centre—an island and a mount—and, within the lines, so great a concourse of gladiatorial souls as befits the greatest of spectacles. I say, I do not know how far such visions are permitted, nor how far the right reason of the Church condemns them; but the dream returned to me very powerfully, recalling my boyhood, when the traveller told ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... boast that he would have me horsewhipped if I dared venture into England. You will readily conceive that any gentleman of self-respect cannot permit such farcical utterances to be delivered without appending a gladiatorial epilogue. Well! what are the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... attached to this sport, we know both from history and the romantic fables of the poets. Marc Antony, at one of his breakfasts with Cleopatra, had eight wild boars roasted whole; and though the Romans do not appear to have been addicted to hunting, wild-boar fights formed part of their gladiatorial shows in the amphitheatre. In France, Germany, and Britain, from the earliest time, the boar-hunt formed one of the most exciting of sports; but it was only in this country that the sport was conducted without dogs,—a real hand-to-hand contest of man and beast; ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... bourgeoisie, and playing Chopin at the age of four, his friends had been confronted with a problem of no mean difficulty. Heaven, on the threshold of his career, had intervened to solve it. Hovering, as it were, with one leg raised before the gladiatorial arena of musical London, where all were waiting to turn their thumbs down on the figure of the native Potts, he had received a letter from his mother's birthplace. It was inscribed: "Egregio Signor ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... spirals; the evident delight of the artist in plant and animal forms and his neglect of the human figure—all these are Celtic. When we turn to the rarer scenes in which man is specially prominent—a hunt, or a gladiatorial show, or Hesione fettered naked to a rock and Hercules saving her from the monster[4]—the vigour fails (Fig. 17). The artist could not or would not cope with the human form. His nude figures, Hesione and Hercules, and his clothed gladiators are not fantastic but grotesque. They retain ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... parade that though it began with the dawn of day, the ninth hour had arrived when it ascended to the Capitol, and night had fallen when the emperor returned to his palace. Then followed theatrical representations, games in the circus, gladiatorial combats, wild-beast shows, and naval engagements. Not for generations had Rome seen such a festival. Of the rich spoils a considerable portion was dedicated to the gods of Rome, the temples glittered with golden offerings, and the Temple of the Sun, a magnificent structure erected by Aurelian, ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the gate, whither the citizens flocked to see gladiatorial displays or contests between wild beasts. With the exception of one at Dorchester, it is the largest in Britain. It is made of lofty banks of earth, which surround the arena, and must have been an imposing structure in the days of its glory, with its tiers of ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... means. They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the "golden hair" will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within. Nay, if obvious practical difficulties can be overcome, let those women who feel inclined to do so descend into the gladiatorial arena of life, not merely in the guise of retiariae, as heretofore, but as bold sicariae, breasting the open fray. Let them, if they so please, become merchants, barristers, politicians. Let them have a fair field, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they present, though some of them are still delightful enough. "The Killing of Julius Caesar Localized" is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque report of a gladiatorial combat in The Innocents Abroad. The Answers to Correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period. The Jumping Frog itself was not originally of this harvest. It has a history of its own, as ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... wife. The evangelical method is this: it has not occupied itself with communities, yet has wrought the profoundest of the social revolutions; it has not demanded any reform, yet has accomplished all of them; the atrocities of war and of torture, the gladiatorial combats and immodest spectacles, the despotism of fathers and the debasement of women, all have disappeared before a profound, internal action, which attacks the very roots of ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... literary executor, may have had the handling of these letters, and have done something toward producing their literary excellence. The subjects selected were not always good, and must occasionally have produced in Cicero's own mind a repetition of the reprimand which he once expressed as to the gladiatorial shows and law-court adjournments; but Caelius does communicate much of the political news from Rome. In one letter, written in October of this year, he declares what the Senate has decreed as to the recall of Caesar from Gaul, and gives the words of the enactments ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... to wickedness, and ugliness to sin, argues that education must be so conducted that the body can be safely entrusted to the care of the soul and suggests, what later became a slogan of a more degenerate gladiatorial athleticism, that to be well and strong is to be a philosopher—valare est philosophari. The Greeks could hardly conceive bodily apart from psychic education, and physical was for the sake of mental training. A sane, whole mind could hardly reside in an ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... knowledge, and great energy and decision of character to execute his purpose, were his protection. Perhaps not ten of a hundred youth could do the same thing, and be saved from ruin. Augustine tells of a Christian young man who was prevailed upon to visit the amphitheatre to witness the gladiatorial games. He was unfriendly to such sports, and consented to go solely to please his companion. For his own protection he resolved to close his eyes that he might not be influenced by the scene. For some time he kept his eyes closed; but, at length, a tremendous shout caused him to open ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... am sick of the whole thing. I would reintroduce prize-fighting and bear-baiting and gladiatorial shows to brace the nation up a bit. We'll get jammed full of rotten vices ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... spectacle of mere physical torture, in gladiatorial combats, or in the bloody precincts of plaza de toros, as grossly demoralizing as the loathsome minutiae of heinous crimes upon which legal orators dilate; and which Argus reporters, with magnifying lenses at every eye, reproduce for countless newspapers, that ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Once in a long interval when the ball gets dangerously near a goal, someone on the imperiled side kicks it half the length of the field, and the scrimmages are renewed. But it is rarely kicked at all except at such junctures. Foot-ball! I say to myself that it is a gladiatorial combat with an occasional punt thrown in by way of identification. But every one around me is declaring that the play of both sides is magnificent, that the team work is perfection, and the head qualities displayed unique in the annals of the game. Sam tells me again and again that Fred is doing ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... with the crowd, because austere and taciturn; he would not wear the pomps and tinsels, or swagger it in public to their taste. He was too reserved; he was not a good mixer: if you fell on your knees to him, he simply recoiled in disgust. He would not witness the gladiatorial games, with their sickening senseless bloodshed; nor the plays at the theatre, with their improprieties. In these things he was an anomaly in his age, and felt about them as would any humane gentleman today. So it was easy for his enemies to work ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... staccato as a mandolin. He gazed with all his vibrating artistic soul into the girl's humid blue eyes; half frightened she looked down at her pretty, dimpled hands—the hands of a baby despite their gladiatorial size. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... The nobles are overcome, and in the second act they appear at the Capitol to acknowledge their submission to Rienzi: but Adriano, who has been among them, warns Rienzi that they have plotted to kill him. Festal dances, processions, and gladiatorial combats follow, in the midst of which Orsini rushes at Rienzi and strikes at him with his dagger. Rienzi is saved by a steel breastplate under his robes. The nobles are at once seized and condemned to death. Adriano pleads with Rienzi to spare his father, and ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... exhausted provincials. Every young man of active ambition or noble birth, whose resources had been impoverished by debauchery and extravagance, had but to borrow fresh sums in order to give magnificent gladiatorial shows, and then, if he could once obtain an aedileship, and mount to the higher offices of the State, he would in time become the procurator or proconsul of a province, which he might pillage almost at his will. Enter the house ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... [Footnote: Methodus, cap. VII., pp. 359-61. Bodin also points out that there was an improvement, in some respects, in manners and morals since the early Roman Empire; for instance, in the abolition of gladiatorial spectacles (p. 359).] ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... frequent pleasant intercourse to such an extent, that our friends the boon companions of the conspiracy, the young chin-tufts, speak of him in ordinary conversation as Gnaeus Cicero. Accordingly, both in the circus and at the gladiatorial games, I received a remarkable ovation without a single cat-call. There is at present a lively anticipation of the elections, in which, contrary to everybody's wishes, our friend Magnus is pushing the claims of Aulus's son;[104] and in that matter his weapons are neither his ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... consistent with noble rank or honourable estate. Christianity might be expected to spare some sympathy for a calling that offers prizes to abandonment and self-immolation, but her eye is fixed on a more distant mark than the pleasure of the populace, and, as in gladiatorial Rome of old, her best efforts have been used to stop the games. Society, on the other hand, preoccupied with the art of life, has no warmer gift than patronage for those whose skill and energy exhaust themselves on the mimicry of life. The reward of social consideration ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... (Sat. b. i. c. 12) that the gladiatorial shows sometimes cost Europe twenty or thirty thousand lives in a month; and that not only the men, but even the women of all ranks were passionately fond of these shows. See Bishop ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... curly hair and delicate hands skilled in the limner's art; the Numidians with skins of ebony and keen black eyes that shone like dusky rubies; they were agile at the chase, could capture a lion or trap the wild beasts that are so useful in gladiatorial games. There were Greeks here, pale of face and gentle of manner who could strike the chords of a lyre and sing to its accompaniment, and there were swarthy Spaniards who fashioned breast-plates of steel and fine chain mail to resist the assassin's dagger: there were Gauls with long ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... [178] An allusion to gladiatorial spectacles. This slaughter happened near the canal of Drusus, where the Roman guard on the Rhine could be spectators of the battle. The account of it came to Rome in the first year ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... the same Mr. Brownson whom the American people long since tried and found wanting as a safe or wise counsellor; the same of whom the Roman Catholic Church one day assumed the responsibility, and found the task more onerous than had been expected. He retains his arrogance, his gladiatorial skill, his habit of sweeping assertion; but perhaps his virulence is softened, save where some unhappy "humanitarian" is under dissection. Enough remains of the habit, however, to make his worst pages the raciest, and to render it a sharp self-satire when he proclaims, at the very outset, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... I said to the others, "that we are going to assist at a gladiatorial show arranged ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... Carpenters and boat-builders Agriculture Field sports Ornaments of dress Greek arts Roman luxuries Material wonders Great cities Commerce Roman roads Ancient Rome Architectural wonders Roman monuments Roman spectacles Gladiatorial shows Roman triumphs Authorities ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... Romans for gladiatorial combats is well known. Not a few persons followed the calling of gladiator-trainers, and had whole corps of these doomed men, whom they let to those who wished to get up such shows. There were several schools of gladiators, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the life or death of Rebecca. It was a scene of bustle and life, as if the whole vicinity had poured forth its inhabitants to a village wake, or rural feast. But the earnest desire to look on blood and death, is not peculiar to those dark ages; though in the gladiatorial exercise of single combat and general tourney, they were habituated to the bloody spectacle of brave men falling by each other's hands. Even in our own days, when morals are better understood, an execution, a bruising match, a riot, or a meeting of radical reformers, collects, at considerable ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... of the evening sacrifice, and the darkness began slowly to lift. Then the Nazarene uttered his only word of complaint: "I thirst." Whereupon a strange thing happened. One of my soldiers, trained in the arena and in gladiatorial contests—a man who had never been known to spare a foe, delighting in the sack of cities, looking on unmoved when children were dashed against the stones—this man dipped a sponge in the sour wine which was provided ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... the stage upon any part of the house. The lowest sob of a dying heroine, in her very last agony, is heard as plainly by the occupant of the back seat of the amphitheatre, as are the thundering denunciations of the tragic actor in the wildest of gladiatorial scenes. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now, the Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch hadn't subsided. The amount of the contributions hadn't been figured up yet, for Sister Soulsby kept the list; but there had been a tremendous ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Alipius preceded him to Rome, and there "was damnably delighted" with the gladiatorial combats, being "made drunk with a delight in blood." Augustine followed him to Rome, and there lost the girl of his heart, "so that my heart was wounded, as that the very blood did follow." The lady had made a ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... in shape, used for public games, races, and beast-fights. The Theatra were edifices designed for dramatic exhibitions: the Amphitheatra (double theatres, buildings in an oval form) served for gladiatorial shows and the fighting of wild animals. That which was erected by the Emperor Titus, and of which there still exists a splendid ruin, was called the Coliseum, from a colossal statue of Nero that stood ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... how such a civic festival would go off in London or Edinburgh, or especially in Dublin. To be sure, they would not introduce their shillelahs! But in the classic taste of the French, there were no such gladiatorial doings. To be sure, they have a natural good-humour and gaiety which inclines them to be pleased with themselves, and ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of God, and straightway "followed the sphere of westward wheeling stars," and journeyed on to Rome muttering, "The call of God! The call of God!" Not on a foolish errand did he go, for, after his visit to the Eternal City, gladiatorial combats ceased. ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... the debasing of a naturally fine people of good instincts to an ignorant and fanatical mob, who, in the name of religion, were entertained with gigantic autos-da-fe, as the Roman populace were with the terrible spectacles of their gladiatorial shows and the immolation of Christian victims ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... resolve, but her feelings betrayed themselves by the quivering of her nostrils. And oh, what a speech she made! Such torrents of furious hatred in the cause of universal love! Comrade Mary quoted a Socialist writer who had said that just as gladiatorial combats had continued until Christian monks were willing to throw themselves into the arena, so war would continue until Socialists were willing to throw themselves beneath the hoofs of the cavalry. And in this Quaker spinster ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... one's relations to the universe, or advance in moral goodness and personal culture. Some highly civilised nations of historic times have been more cruel and barbarous than many quite uncultivated ones. For example, the Romans, at the height of their civilisation, went mad drunk with blood at their gladiatorial shows; the Athenians of the age of Pericles and Socrates offered up human sacrifices at the Thargelia, like the veriest savages; and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most civilised commercial people ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... that men who can not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a kingdom. During his reign, gladiatorial contests were relieved of their savage brutality, work was given to many, education became popular, and people said, "The Age of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... did the Greeks merely ignore the Latin language. They refused to be romanized in any other respect. Even the Roman amusements tended to disgust them, and it is to the credit of his superior refinement that the average Greek was repelled by those brutal exhibitions of gladiatorial bloodshed and slaughter over which the ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... swordsman ever seen in any arena came from its use to denote the paling of a palisade, or any stake or post. Palus, in a fight, always appeared to stand still: metaphorically he might be said to seem as immobile as the post upon which beginners in the gladiatorial art practice their first attempts at strokes, cuts, thrusts and lunges. So little did he impress beholders as mobile, so emphatically did he impress them as stationary, that he might almost as well have been an upright stake, planted permanently ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... government of the provinces; the complete reform of the system of collecting taxes; the abolition of the cruelty of the criminal laws and the mitigation of sentences unnecessarily severe; the regulation of gladiatorial exhibitions; the diminution of the absolute power possessed by fathers over their children and of masters over their slaves; the admission of women to equal rights to succession to property from their children; the rigid suppression ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... honourably vanquished by him, even to the slicing of his nose in two pieces, the cracking of his crown in sundry places, and the scoring of his body as though it had been a Loin of Pork for the Bakehouse, he was taken into his service, and became a principal figure in all the grand gladiatorial encounters, at wages of forty shillings a week and his meat. As for Mr. Figg himself, who was as good at backsword as at broadsword, at quarter-staff as at foil, and at fisticuffs as any one of them,—to say nothing of his Cornish wrestling,—I saw him once, and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... vast change from the "gladiatorial theory" to that of "mutual helpfulness." Call it a revolution, if you will. Revolutions are not unheard of in the history of the animal kingdom any more than in human history. We have seen, first, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... answer. The gladiatorial show had lost its charms for him and his mind brooded gloomily over coming events. The sun was not up, though it was broad dawn when he and his companions went out into the cool, silent streets, realising when they ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... presence of presbyters and bishops. Such was one of the first evangelizers of India, Pantnus; such was the hermit Telemachus, whose earnest protest, aided by his heroic death, extinguished at Rome the horrors of the gladiatorial games; such was Antony, the mighty preacher in the wilds of the Thebaid and the streets of Alexandria; such, in later days, was Francis of Assisi, when first he began his career as the most famous ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... deities from all over Greece, mutilated by all sorts of tasteless adaptations, were also gathered in the new metropolis. The main hall in the palace was adorned with representations of the crucifixion and other Biblical scenes. The gladiatorial shows, so popular in Rome, were forbidden here, though theatres, amphitheatres, and hippodromes kept their place. It could nowhere be mistaken, that the new imperial residence was, as to all outward appearance, a Christian city. The smoke of heathen sacrifices never rose from the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... but when they wish to express approbation, and usually when saying "good-by," they put up the thumb with the fingers closed. In Yuen-nan and eastern Tibet we noted the same custom among the aboriginal tribesmen. I wonder if it is merely a coincidence that in the gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome "thumbs up" meant mercy ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... turmoils in the time of the Gracchi, and the scene in the forum when Mark Antony played on the heartstrings of the populace. Everything is grist that comes to our mill. Even a football game is a modern rendition of a gladiatorial combat. Don't ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... character does not appeal except in moments of contention. There never yet has been a time when the theatre could compete successfully against the amphitheatre. Plautus and Terence complained that the Roman public preferred a gladiatorial combat to their plays; a bear-baiting or a cock-fight used to empty Shakespeare's theatre on the Bankside; and there is not a matinee in town to-day that can hold its own against a foot-ball game. Forty thousand people gather annually ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... frequently was seen At combats gladiatorial, And ate enough to feed Ten boarders at Memorial; He often went on sprees And said, on starting homus, "Hic labor—opus est, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... the world at large, which regards her with tense anxiety. Let America beware. Even a just war may give rise to all possible iniquities. Vestiges of ancient fierceness linger within us; the human animal licks its chops as it watches the gladiatorial combats. We veil these cannibal appetites under highsounding names, speaking of Right and of Liberty. The last hope of our day lies in youth. Let youth claim for the future the individual's prerogative ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... for line and form and rhythmic strength would have called his body beautiful. Its flesh was smooth and brown, flowing in frictionless ease over muscles that escaped bulkiness; its shoulders swung with a sort of gladiatorial freedom. But the Hellenic sculptor would have found the head suited to his use as well as the torso and limbs, for it was a head well shaped and well carried, dominated by eyes alert with intelligence, and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... taste, he read Mr Stevenson and Mr Meredith, Miss Braddon and Mr Henry James, Ouida and Mr Thomas Hardy; Mr Hall Caine and Mr Anstey; Mrs Oliphant and Miss Edna Lyall. Not everybody can peruse all of these very diverse authors with pleasure. He began his poem on the Roman gladiatorial combats; indeed his years, fourscore and one, left his intellectual eagerness as unimpaired as that of Goethe. "A crooked share," he said to the Princess Louise, "may make a straight furrow." "One afternoon he had a long ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... still one of the most imposing structures, in the world; broken in every part, but still showing, by what remains of its massive walls, what it must once have been. History tells us, that, upon its completion, it was inaugurated by gladiatorial combats continued for one hundred days; during which time five thousand wild beasts were killed in contests with Christian slaves, who acted as gladiators. The Coliseum was begun by Vespasian, on his return from his war with the Jews, but was dedicated ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... prize-fighting. Here again you see a strange contradiction. The people are preeminently religious, and prize-fighting and football are the sports of brutes; yet the two are most popular. No public event attracts more attention in America than a gladiatorial fight to the finish between the champion and some aspirant. For months the papers are filled with it, and on the day of the event the streets are thronged with people crowding about the billboards to receive the news. No national event, save the killing of a President, ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... a thick-built woman, after the gladiatorial fashion ... as she moved she made me think of a battleship going into action. There was something about her face ... a squareness of jaw, a belligerency, that reminded me of Roosevelt, whom I had seen twice ... once, at Mt. Hebron, when he had made a speech from the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... He despises serious friends, and, boy as he is, spends his tender years in revelling with the most abandoned youths among harlots and wine-cups. He rules your house, orders your slaves, directs your banquets. He is a frequent visitor to the gladiatorial school and there—as a boy of position should!—he learns from the keeper of the school the names of the gladiators, the fights they have fought, the wounds they have received. He never speaks any language save Punic, and though he may occasionally use a Greek ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... with entablatures of stone or marble, and construct walks above in the upper story. But in the cities of Italy the same method cannot be followed, for the reason that it is a custom handed down from our ancestors that gladiatorial shows should be given in ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... attest the grandeur of the ancient city. Here are walls built, probably, before the foundation of Rome, and yet steadfast as the Apennines. There are also a broken ring or two of an amphitheatre; for the Etrurians preceded and instructed the Romans in gladiatorial shows. It is suggestive to seat one's self upon these solid granite seats, where twenty-five hundred years ago some grave Etrurian citizen, wrapped in his mantle of Tyrrhenian purple, his straight-nosed wife at his side, with serpent bracelet and enamelled brooch, and a hopeful family clustering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... waters, brawl; kick up a row, kick up a dust; turn the house out of window. Adj. discordant; disagreeing &c v.; out of tune, ajar, on bad terms, dissentient &c 489; unreconciled, unpacified; contentious &c 720. quarrelsome, unpacific^; gladiatorial, controversial, polemic, disputatious; factious; litigious, litigant; pettifogging. at odds, at loggerheads, at daggers drawn, at variance, at issue, at cross purposes, at sixes and sevens, at feud, at high words; up in arms, together by the ears, in hot water, embroiled. torn, disunited. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... displayed a figure in which the grace of an Antinous met with the columnar strength of a Grecian Hercules,— presenting, in its tout ensemble, the majestic proportions of a Jupiter. He stood—a breathing statue of gladiatorial beauty, towering above all who were near him, and eclipsing the noblest specimens of the human form which the martial assembly presented. A buzz of admiration arose, which in the following moment was suspended ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... city, there were five festivals. The candidates for the consulship spent large sums on these games, the splendor of which became the standard by which the electoral body measured the fitness of candidates. A gladiatorial show cost seven hundred and twenty thousand sesterces, or ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... chariot-races took place. Hugo seems to be confusing it with the Colosseum, where the gladiatorial combats were fought. ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... for themselves and their elders, but pertness, luxurious habits, and neglect alike of themselves and of others. The schools moreover, apart from their faulty methods and ideals of instruction, encourage other faults. The boys' interests lie not in their work, but in the theatres, the gladiatorial games, the races in the circus—those ancient equivalents of twentieth-century athleticism. Their minds are utterly absorbed by these pursuits, and there is little room left for nobler studies. 'How few boys will talk of anything else at home? What topic of conversation ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... was then sent against the barbarians, to reduce under the authority and dominion of the Romans such of them as had not yet been subdued. Scipio returned to Carthage, to pay his vows to the gods, and to exhibit a gladiatorial show, which he had prepared on account of the death of his father and uncle. This exhibition of gladiators was not formed from that description of men which the lanistae are accustomed to procure, such as slaves, or ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... festival, every night magnificent banquets. One spectacle, excursion, or hunting party followed another. In the theatres, the Odeum, the Hippodrome, no more brilliant performances, races, naval battles, gladiatorial struggles, and combats between beasts had been given, even before Actium. Dion himself had formerly attended the entertainments of those who belonged to the court circle, the society of "Inimitable Livers." It had been ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... disappeared from the fasces in the city with the abolition of kingship. As further illustration of the dislike of all bloodshed, cp. the rule of XII. Tables, "mulieres genas ne radunto," i.e. at funerals, Cic. de Legibus, ii. 59, and Serv. Aen. iii. 67 from Varro, and v. 78. The gladiatorial ludi may have been a revival of an old custom akin to human sacrifice of captives in the field. See Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... city, was not a regular market surrounded with walls, but an irregular space bounded by the Tiber on the west, and the Palatine Hill and the Circus Maximus on the east. The Cloaca Maxima ran beneath it, and it was rich in temples and monuments. On it the first gladiatorial exhibition occurred, B.C. 264, and there too, other burials of living persons had been made, in spite of the long-ago abolishment of such rites by Numa.] and the public excitement somewhat allayed ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... local journals of a "Mis a Mort" at Nimes, and a "Corrida de Meurte"—borrowing the phrase from the Spanish—at Arles, each to take place in the great Roman arenas, which had not seen bloodshed for centuries; not since the days when the Romans matched men against each other in gladiatorial combat, and turned tigers loose upon ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield |
