"Serapis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... northern cliffs beside the sea, he was constrained to remember that it was along these craggy places that, men said, a century and a half ago, Mark, the first Christian apostle to Alexandria, had been dragged by cords, at the time of the feast of the god Serapis. Then, tradition said, there had arisen a dreadful tempest of hail and lightning, that ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... was immense; and its museum, colleges, library, and literary men made it also the centre of Greek literature. Alexandria, too, was famous for its superstition and its licentiousness: the festivals and rites of Serapis had long excited the contempt of the ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... of borrowing. We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus Bagaeus, and Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later times, too, the Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so forth. But this habit of borrowing was regarded with disfavour by pious conservatives, and was probably, in the width of its hospitality at least, an innovation. As Tiele remarks, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... insecure ice. Beyond, one sees the little fissures (fumaroli) emitting fumes of sulphur, and the guides take us to stifling caverns in the hill-side where we are shown the beautiful primrose-coloured crystals. The Solfatara, the Amphitheatre and the Temple of Serapis, these are the recognised "sights" of Pozzuoli, which strangers visit to-day in the space of an hour or two, and then return to Naples comforted with the feeling that they have exhausted the attractions of the place. Certainly ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... came from Mariette Bey, who was then director of the Egyptian Museum at Boulak. Auguste Edouard Mariette was a Frenchman who, while an attache of the Louvre, in 1850, had gone on a scientific expedition to Egypt for the French government and had discovered the temple of Serapis at Memphis. It was an "enormous structure of granite and alabaster, containing within its enclosure the sarcophagi of the bulls of Apis, from the nineteenth dynasty to the time of the Roman supremacy." After his return to Paris, he was appointed in 1855 assistant ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of Phidias, and others the Venus of Paphos from Praxiteles; but I don't think it fierce enough for the first, nor handsome enough for the last.... Therefore I am inclined to join with Signor Julio de Pampedillo, who, in a treatise dedicated to the King of the Two Sicilies, calls it the Serapis of the Egyptians, and supposes it to have been fabricated about eleven hundred and three years before the Mosaic account of the creation.' A bystander inquires what has become of the nose of the bust? 'The nose? What care I for the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... 'Sections and Views illustrative of Geological Phenomena', 1830, tab. 40; Charles Babbage, 'Observations on the Temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli, near Naples, and on certain Causes which may produce Geological Cycles of great Extent', 1834. "If a stratum of sandstone five miles in thickness should have its temperature raised about 100 degrees, its ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... "China," p. 217. The symbol of the cross was engraved on the walls of the temple of Serapis. "When the temple of Serapis was torn down and laid bare," says Socrates, "there were found in it, engraven on stones, certain characters, which they call hieroglyphics, having the forms of crosses. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... set, and Doric pillars overlaid With Golden Architrave; nor did there want Cornice or Freeze, with bossy Sculptures grav'n, The Roof was fretted Gold. Not Babilon, Nor great Alcairo such magnificence Equal'd in all thir glories, to inshrine Belus or Serapis thir Gods, or seat 720 Thir Kings, when Aegypt with Assyria strove In wealth and luxurie. Th' ascending pile Stood fixt her stately highth, and strait the dores Op'ning thir brazen foulds discover wide Within, her ample ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... The Brahmins wore it a few thousands years ere that. From them it came through the Assyrians to the priests of Isis in Egypt, and afterwards of Serapis at Athens. The late Pope (the saints be good to him) once told me the tonsure was forbidden by God to the Levites in the Pentateuch. If so, this was because of the Egyptian priests wearing it. I trust ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... striking his own colors to our superior and irresistible enemy." (This enemy, as Mr. Thackeray has just said, is "Monsieur John Paul Jones, afterwards Knight of His Most Christian Majesty's Order of Merit.") "Sir Richard [Pearson, of the English frigate Serapis] has told the story of his disaster in words nobler than any I could supply, who, though indeed engaged in that fatal action, in which our flag went down before a renegade Briton and his motley crew, saw but a very small ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... self-renewing gods, 'bull of his mother.' The most renowned was the Hapi or Apis bull of Memphis, in whom Ptah was said to be incarnate, and who was Osirified and became the Osir-hapi. This appears to have originated the great Ptolemaic god Serapis, as certainly the mausoleum of the bulls was the Serapeum of the Greeks. Another bull of a more massive breed was the Ur-mer or Mnevis of Heliopolis, in whom Ra was incarnate. A third bull was Bakh or Bakis of Hermonthis the incarnation of Mentu. And a fourth bull, Ka-nub ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... as of his most religious Egyptians? It was a great problem: but Ptolemy solved it. He seems to have taken the same method which Brindley the engineer used in his perplexities, for he went to bed. And there he had a dream: How the foreign god Serapis, of Pontus (somewhere near this present hapless Sinope), appeared to him, and expressed his wish to come to Alexandria, and there try his influence on the Religious Sentiment. So Serapis was sent for, and came—at least the idol of him, and— accommodating personage!—he actually fitted. ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... book IV, chapter 81, relates that at the instance of the God Serapis, a citizen of Alexandria, who had a maimed hand, entreated that he might be pressed by the foot and sole of Vespasian (A. D. 9-79). The Emperor at first ridiculed the request, and treated it with disdain. However, upon learning ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... convents which were the great monuments of Mediaeval piety. The revenues of the temples were confiscated. Among the great works of ancient art which were destroyed, but might have been left or converted into Christian use, were the magnificent temple of Edessa and the serapis of Alexandria, uniting the colossal grandeur of Egyptian with the graceful harmony of Grecian art. At Rome not only was the property of the temples confiscated, but also all privileges of the priesthood. The Vestal virgins ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... sensational foreign cults and of the struggle of the state religion against them, is found in the case of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The spread of Isis worship into the Greek, and consequently also into the Roman world, began relatively early. In the third century Isis and her companion Serapis were well established on the island of Delos; and in the second century we find traces of their worship in Campania, especially at Pompeii and Puteoli. This last-named place, the seaport Puteoli, the modern ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... of Asia being absent in order to wait on the emperors, probably Valerian and Galien, the governor of Lycia, residing at Patara, to show his zeal for the idols, published an order on the festival of Serapis, to oblige all to offer sacrifice to that false god. Leo seeing the heathens out of superstition, and some Christians out of fear, going in crowds to adore the idol, sighed within himself, and went to offer up his ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler |
