"Saturnalia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... voices of men, women, and children,—cries and calls of quadrupeds,—each according to its own kind, all mingled together in what might have been taken for some nocturnal saturnalia ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... cannot end these things. It is not anarchy in the home if the whole family sits up all night on New Year's Eve. It is anarchy in the home if members of the family sit up later and later for months afterwards. It was not anarchy in the Roman villa when, during the Saturnalia, the slaves turned masters or the masters slaves. It was (from the slave-owners' point of view) anarchy if, after the Saturnalia, the slaves continued to behave in a Saturnalian manner; but it is historically evident that they did not. It is not anarchy to have a ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... of Death forever impress all who stand before this magnificent monument; it is found in Thorwaldsen's "Christ;" in Franklin Simmons's "Angel of the Resurrection,"—in such works as those that have a language for the soul, rather than in a "Saturnalia." ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Saturnalia or the Feast of Minerva, you will be presented with a sorry cloak, or a worn-out tunic; and a world of ceremony will go to the presentation. The first who gets wind of the great man's intention flies to you with the news of what is in store for you; ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... which these verses were written, is commonly played at the Saturnalia of the shoemakers on King Crispin's day. Burns sent it to ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... instance, the well-known French astronomer, M. Camille Flammarion,[39] has imagined the absorption of the nitrogen of the air in this way; and has gone on to picture men and animals reduced to breathing only oxygen, first becoming excited, then mad, and finally ending in a perfect saturnalia of delirium. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... unmuzzled, the dogs of war. What he did was to gather from all quarters an armed force, a motley crew, regulars and militia, sailors and landsmen, black and white, and permit them to hold for fourteen long days a saturnalia of blood. What he did was to summon the savage Maroon tribes to the feast of death, that by their barbaric warfare they might add yet one more shade of gloom to the picture. The official accounts are enough to blanch the cheek with horror. In two days after the riot martial law ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... an hour after noon. Ligarius was returning from the Campus Martius. He strolled through one of the streets which led to the Forum, settling his gown, and calculating the odds on the gladiators who were to fence at the approaching Saturnalia. While thus occupied, he overtook Flaminius, who, with a heavy step and a melancholy face, was sauntering in the same direction. The light-hearted young man plucked ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that it is a thing of the past; but it was also accompanied with a degree of grossness and brutality much less pleasant to regard, and of which the occasional popular amusements of bull-running, cock-fighting, cock-throwing, the saturnalia of Plough-Monday, and such like, were ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... anticipate. While the bulk of the Orientals was still beyond the Himalayas and the Gobi, Europe indulged in a wild saturnalia to celebrate its own doom. All pretense of sexual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small illprinted newspapers carried advertisements promising the gratification of strange lusts. A new cult of Priapus sprang up ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... bickerings buried in oblivion. From the middle of June to the middle of September, all trapping is suspended; for the beavers are then shedding their furs and their skins are of little value. This, then, is the trapper's holiday, when he is all for fun and frolic, and ready for a saturnalia ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... chronologies,—snapping up unconsidered trifles of anecdote,—tasting some long-interred bon-mot and relishing some disentombed scandal,—pausing over the symphonic prose of Milton, only to run, the next moment, to the Silenian ribaldry of Tom Brown the younger,—and so keeping up a Saturnalia, in which goat-footed sylvans mix with the maidens of Diana, and the party-colored jester shakes his truncheon in the face of Plato. Only in this wild and promiscuous license can we taste the genuine joys ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Coll. The Saturnalia don't happen every day. Rid us now of thy company: but stop, I will do thee a pleasure; ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... into a Donnybrook fair, but so it was when I was a boy, and the tents and the shows and the crowds on the Common were to the promiscuous many the essential parts of the great occasion. They had been so for generations, and it was only gradually that the Cambridge Saturnalia were replaced by the decencies and solemnities of ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... agrous, a vintage festival, which was celebrated in the "Demi" or boroughs of Attica, in honor of Bacchus, in the month Poseidon. This was the most ancient of the Festivals, and was held with the greatest merriment and freedom; the slaves then enjoyed the same amount of liberty as they did at the Saturnalia at Rome. The second Festival, which was called the Lensea, from lenus, a wine-press, was celebrated in the month Gamelion, with Scenic contests in Tragedy and Comedy. The third Dionysian Festival was the Anthesteria, ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Jews by the mob were merely a crude copy of the atrocities perpetrated upon them by the Government, and that the outlawed condition of the Jews bred the lawlessness and violence of the mob, which was fully aware of the anti-Semitic sentiments of the official world. The bloody saturnalia of Nizhni-Novgorod had, however, the beneficent effect that the Government, fearing the spread of the conflagration outside the Pale and even outside Jewry, took energetic steps to prevent all further excesses. As a matter of fact, the Nizhni-Novgorod ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... him, the early morning sun brightening the scene before him, not even combined could they dispel any of Bennington's bitter anger at the memory of last night's saturnalia. ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... hesitate before you accept the story of that saturnalia in its entirety, and before you believe that an old man of seventy, a priest and Christ's Vicar, was present with Cesare and his friends. Burchard does not say that he himself was a witness of what he relates. But the matter shall presently be ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... blending together into spectral dimness, with no sound audible but the continued quarrel in the front room of the jail. Keith crept along to the end of the building from where he could perceive the lights of the town twinkling dimly through the intense blackness. Evidently the regular evening saturnalia had not yet begun, although there was already semblance of life about the numerous saloons, and an occasional shout punctuated the stillness. A dog howled in the distance, and the pounding of swift hoofs along the trail told of fresh arrivals. An hour later and the single street of ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... Quack was king. A spurious leaven of charlatanism was traceable in politics, in science, in religion—pervaded all things indeed. The world was mad to cheat or to be cheated. The mountebank enjoyed his saturnalia. Never had he exhibited his exploits before an audience so numerous and so sympathetic—so eager to be swindled, so liberal in rewarding the swindler. Gravely does Miss Hannah More address Mr. Horace Walpole, concerning what she terms the 'demoniacal mummery'—'the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... bare mention of "constitutional convention" a shudder involuntary creeps over us, visions of bankrupt treasuries present themselves, new species of taxation to frighten our patient but impoverished people, and a general "brandy and cigar" saturnalia for our disinterested and immensely patriotic politicians. But of this we suppose we need have no ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... festival was in existence among the Hungarians two hundred years ago.[69] To this day certain religious sects of Russia and Hungary are in the habit of holding orgies at which all the ceremonies of the ancient Liberalia, Floralia, and Saturnalia are duplicated. These devotees claim that, when they have reached the acme of religious enthusiasm, the spirit of God directs them, hence their licentious and lustful acts cannot ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... scavengers by day, and howled in unison at regular intervals by night; for there was a sort of horrible harmony in the performance, and when the tom-toms of the gamblers accompanied it on all sides, and the pounding of dancers' feet—for in this enchanted land nobody ever seemed to go to bed—the saturnalia was complete. ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... how they would revel in the fierce fire-water, the glorious fire-water! Even the Squaws, useful at the skinning, would also drink, and reel, and become lower than the animals they had slain to bring about all this saturnalia. Why had his forefathers fought against the Palefaces? Was not all this civilized evil ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... spokesman for, in this world!—Alas, go where you will, especially in these irreverent ages, the noteworthy Dead is sure to be found lying under infinite dung, no end of calumnies and stupidities accumulated upon him. For the class we speak of, class of "flunkies doing saturnalia below stairs," is numerous, is innumerable; and can well remunerate a "vocal flunky" that will serve their ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... into the thick of this saturnalia that the great Tartarin came straying one evening to ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... doubt. Mr. Tennyson has said well, "There lives more doubt"—I quote from memory—"in honest faith, believe me, than in half the" systems of philosophy, or words to that effect. The victor had a slave at his ear during his triumph; the slaves during the Roman Saturnalia, dressed in their masters' clothes, sat at meat with them, told them of their faults, and blacked their faces for them. They made their masters wait upon them. In the ages of faith, an ass dressed in ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... feasts of the idolaters—the Kalends, and the Saturnalia, and the Quartesima, and the coronation day of their kings, and the day of their birth, and the day of their death." The words of R. Meier. But the Sages say, "every death anniversary in which there is burning of incense,(439) ...
— Hebrew Literature
... now, I wonder? Here's his sermon-paper on the table, and a Greek Testament, and Hints on Decorating Churches, with 'Constance Strangeways' on the first leaf—no other book. How long will this saturnalia last?" ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there came all the bustle of packing and preparation for departure, and a kind of saturnalia prevailed at Hyde Lodge—a saturnalia which terminated with the breaking-up ball: and who among the crowd of fair young dancers so bright as Charlotte Halliday, dressed in the schoolgirl's festal robes of cloud-like muslin, and with her white throat set off by a black ribbon ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... a considerable sum; but, like too many of his fraternity, he was seldom sober from Saturday night until Wednesday morning. His loving spouse 'rowed in the same boat'—and the 'little green-bottle' was dispatched several times during the days of their Saturnalia, to be replenished at the never-failing fountain of the ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... short-circuiting connections, destroying life far ahead of the point of attack; and, drawn along by the relentlessly creeping composite tractor beam, there progressed around the circumference of the hexan city two veritable Saturnalia of destruction—uninterrupted, cataclysmic detonations of sound and sizzling, shrieking, multi-colored displays of pyrotechnic incandescence combining to form ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... other great corporations were, in some sinister manner, influencing legislation. Railroads, insurance companies, great banking concerns, vast industrial corporations, were associated in the public mind as "the Interests." And the United States Senate was deemed the stronghold of the interests. A saturnalia of senatorial muckraking now laid bare the "oligarchy," as the small group of powerful veteran Senators who controlled the senatorial machinery was called. It was disclosed that the centralization of leadership in the Senate coincided with the centralization of power in the Democratic ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... ourselves need go back only to our grandfathers' and great-grandfathers' time to find that inebriety was not at all inconsistent with good morals and high standing. Moreover, no matter how often the Tarahumares indulge in such saturnalia, as soon as they recover their senses they are as decorous and solemn as ever. Their native stimulant does not seem to affect either their physical or their mental faculties, and, all scientific theories to the contrary, their children are strong, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... But the first mouthful is drunk by the girl's aunt or other female relative who had charge of her during her seclusion; and a little of it is poured on the fire-place.[87] Amongst the Zulus, when the girl was a princess royal, the end of her time of separation was celebrated by a sort of saturnalia: law and order were for the time being in abeyance: every man, woman, and child might appropriate any article of property: the king abstained from interfering; and if during this reign of misrule he was robbed of ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... it—all these manifestations of la vie, so unutterably dull and sordid, are of small concern to the cultured traveller. The intimate charm and spirit of Paris will be heard and felt by him not amid the whirlwind of these saturnalia largely maintained by the patronage of English-speaking visitors, but rather in the smaller voices that speak from the inmost Paris which we have essayed to describe. Nor can we bid more fitting adieu to Lutetia than by ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... took place in Italy, in consequence of the French war, and Paris sustained two sieges; the first by the German army; the second and most bitter by the French themselves, fighting against a mob of fanatical revolutionists and ending in a frightful saturnalia ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... hardly a breath in their bodies, as though just coming to life again. One of them when he saw the pettifoggers putting their heads together, and lamenting their sad lot, up comes he and says: "Did not I tell you the Saturnalia ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... Theophilus Thoro, "if you consider the Fourth as a great national saturnalia, in which every boy in the land has the privilege of doing whatever is right in his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... back to our theme! Back to despots and slaves! Feasts furnished by Famine! rejoicings by Pain! True Freedom but welcomes, while slavery still raves, When a week's Saturnalia hath ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... German sovereign, even communities which possessed no political rights at all, thought it necessary to have an agent on the spot, in order to filch, if possible, some trifling advantage from a neighbour, or to catch the first rumour of a proposed annexation. It was the saturnalia of the whole tribe of busybodies and intriguers who passed in Germany for men of state. They spied upon one another; they bribed the secretaries and doorkeepers, they bribed the very cooks and coachmen, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... their work in the Condor's hold, and simultaneous with the abduction on deck, a scene is transpiring in her cabin, which might be likened to a saturnalia ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... heat when required. There lie the antechamber and the bed-room, which get the sun all the day long. What do you think of my den, my Gallus? When I betake myself to this retreat I seem to have left my home behind me; and especially in the Saturnalia I delight in it. When the rest of the house is given up to the license of noisy festivals, no noises can disturb my reveries, no ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... interchanged with us anecdote and jest, and mingled with the sparkling imaginations of youth the reminiscences of riper years—I am sure they will have no cause to regret their share in those not ungraceful saturnalia, even though they may remember that the hour at which we separated was not always what we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... disturbance, hubbub, convulsion, tumult, uproar, revolution, riot, rumpus, stour[obs3], scramble, brawl, fracas, rhubarb [baseball], fight, free-for-all, row, ruction, rumpus, embroilment, melee, spill and pelt, rough and tumble; whirlwind &c. 349; bear garden, Babel, Saturnalia, donnybrook, Donnybrook Fair, confusion worse confounded, most admired disorder, concordia discors[Lat]; Bedlam, all hell broke loose; bull in a china shop; all the fat in the fire, diable a' quatre[Fr], Devil to pay; pretty kettle of fish; pretty piece ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... walls, as within, bore witness to the graciousness of the Emperor in the prolonged holiday he had granted the people. It was as if the Saturnalia had arrived. Industry, such as there ever is, was suspended; all were sitting idle, or thronging some game, or gathering in noisy groups about some mountebank. As we advanced farther, and came just beyond the great road leading to Tibur, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... The sudden madness and saturnalia of love into which I had these few weeks been plunged tapped, it seemed, my subliminal consciousness, maybe my ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... he continued. "Corsets, stockings, lingerie. Shop windows remind me of neighbors' bathrooms before breakfast. There's something odiously impersonal about them. See, all the way down the street—silks, garments, ruffles, laces. A saturnalia of masks. It's the only art we've developed in America—over-dressing. Clothes are peculiarly American—a sort of underhanded female revenge against the degenerate puritanism of the nation. I've seen them even at revival ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... enduring light. The moon drifts dimly in the heaven's height, Watching with wonder how the earth she knew That lay so long wrapped deep in dark and dew, Should wear upon her breast a star so white. The festivals of Babylon were dark With flaring flambeaux that the wind blew down; The Saturnalia were a wild boy's lark With rain-quenched torches dripping thru the town— But you have found a god and filched from him A fire that neither wind ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... unfortunate subject and his scarcely happier family. Nervous and irritable, the slightest inconveniences are magnified into terrible calamities, he constantly fears death, and his sleepless nights become a saturnalia of ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... a Saturday night, the hebdomadal Saturnalia, when the week's work was over, and no one had any thing to do; the heart of Joseph was jocund with pork chops and mulled beer, and, his evil genius tempting him, he proposed to three of his intimates "to go and give the Count a turn." Nearly every one had a nickname, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... is given up to harmless racket. Nowhere has the tradition of the Latin Saturnalia been fitted with less change into the Christian calendar. Men, women, and children of the proletariat—the unemancipated slaves of necessity—go out this night to cheat their misery with noisy frolic. The ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... fellow, I suppose, to the Brahmin mind. He sat over against this sacred Benares, and told those freethinkers, who came across at times, that his was the only one and true religion, and that the Phallic saturnalia on the opposite shore was damned, and the Ganges water was of no use whatever in the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... religion, when Louis XIV., in the latter years of his reign, had permitted Scarron's widow to make religion fashionable, by cloaking France with the mask of hypocritical piety—a mask soon, however, to be torn aside by Philippe of Orleans in the wild saturnalia of the Regency. The Abbe de Bernis was also a constant visitor at the house of Madame d'Etioles; he was, in the parlance of the time, the Abbe de la Maison—it is true he had no other benefice—but little thought then, either the abbe of the house or the mistress of the house, that within ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... prelate to retire, or at least not to take notice of a nobleman so obviously beyond the control of his reason. The Bishop, however, insisted—mingling reproof, menace; and somewhat imperious demands—that the indecent Saturnalia should cease. It would have been wiser for him to retire. Count Hoogstraaten, a young man and small of stature, seized the gilt laver, in which the company had dipped their fingers before seating themselves at table: "Be quiet, be quiet, little ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was a Neoplatonic philosopher and Latin grammarian of the early part of the 5th century A.D. He is best known as the author of the "Saturnalia" and of a commentary upon Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis" in that author's "De republica". It is this latter work that is probably in the mind of Chretien, as well as of Gower, who refers to him in his "Mirour l'omme", and of Jean de Meun, the author ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... enticed the pick of the students to him. My brother-in-law was for several weeks guarded day and night against possible attacks by the populace, and on this occasion, as the mediator of a flowing hospitality, I celebrated among the most famous 'bloods' of the University the true saturnalia of ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... populate that quarter penetrate the better streets, blowing horns and begging of the passers. They have probably no more sense of its difference from the old carnival of Catholic Europe than from the still older Saturnalia of pagan times. Perhaps you will say that a masquerade is no more pagan than a football game; and I confess that I have a pleasure in that innocent misapprehension of the holiday on the East Side. I am not more censorious ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... was invited out to a Food Saturnalia at a Country Place. The Dinner was postponed until late in the Day because they all ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... drank not. This was Jacques. With fixed and lurid eye, he gazed upon vacancy. A stranger to what was passing around him, the unhappy man thought of the Bacchanal Queen, who had been so gay and brilliant in the midst of similar saturnalia. The remembrance of that one being, whom he still loved with an extravagant love, was the only thought that from time to time roused him ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... to have donned strange carnival clothes, for a mystic Saturnalia. It was literally swaddled in bedquilts,— tumbler-quilts, rising-suns, Jacob's-ladders, log-cabins, and the more modern and altogether terrible crazy-quilt. There were square yards of tidies, on wall and table, and furlongs of home-knit lace. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... reluctantly realized. The Indian Explosive Substances Act and Summary Justice Act of 1908, together with the Press Act of the same year and the more drastic one enacted last February, have at last to some extent checked the saturnalia of lawlessness that continued, though with signs of abatement, into the beginning of this year. The Press Act of 1910, especially, seems to have really arrested the poisonous flow of printer's ink and with it the worst forms of crime ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... wrote his Hereward, and there is no doubt that he derived much good from his schooling under such excellent masters as Coleridge and Johns. When writing of Helston it is customary to say a great deal about its Flora, or Furry Day, the 8th of May—a relic of old Maytide saturnalia. Though the dance through the streets to a special kind of hornpipe, in at the front doors and out at the back, is still continued, the old spirit that actuated it is dead—it has become very much of a make-believe, a show for visitors, a galvanised ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... said the martyr. The fact is, she was well aware that this was a case of quid pro quo; and that Gwen was entitled, by treaty, to a perfect Saturnalia of sweet-hearting till after Christmas, in exchange for the six months of penal servitude to follow. But she preferred to indicate that the terms of the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Saturn. He, according to the old legends, had first taught husbandry, and when he reigned in Italy there was a golden age, when every one had his own field, lived by his own handiwork, and kept no slaves. There was a feast in honor of this time every year called the Saturnalia, when for a few days the slaves were all allowed to act as if they were free, and have all kinds of wild sports and merriment. Afterwards, when Greek learning came in, Saturn was mixed up with the Greek Kronos, or Time, who devours his offspring, and the reaping-hook his figures ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a grand saturnalia is best when Mr. Smith goes from home for a day or two. Then I can deny myself to visitors—take full license—set the hydrant running, and puzzle the water commissioners with an extra consumption of Schuylkill. My ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... appears; Then, amused, yet annoyed at the way he was treated, He first laughed at the joke, and then burst into tears. It is thus that this day of mistakes and surprises, When fools write on foolscap, and wear it the while, This gay saturnalia for ever arises 'Mid the showers and the sunshine, the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... debauchery, dissipation, abandon, drunkenness saturnalia, orgies, bacchanals, lechery; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... do honour to God. It is the only occasion of the kind, and the clergy, either knavish or ignorant, encourage all this shameful riot. The lower orders take it all in good faith, and anyone who raised any objection would run some risk, for the bishop goes in front of the saturnalia, and consequently ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... keep darning it until Christmas to get it mended! The health of a great many people makes an annual visit to some mineral spring an absolute necessity; but, my dear people, take your Bible along with you, and take an hour for secret prayer every day, though you be surrounded by guffaw and saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they denounce you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand off from those institutions which propose to imitate on this side the water the iniquities of Baden-Baden. Let your moral and your immortal health keep pace with your physical recuperation, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... of this catastrophe she separated herself almost entirely from her blood-stained husband, and spent her life in the recesses of the harem, praying as a Christian both for the murderer and his victims. It is a relief, in the midst of this atrocious saturnalia to encounter this noble and gentle character, which like a desert oasis, affords a rest to eyes wearied with the contemplation of ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... pointing to an illustration of certain college athletic sports, "a number of youthful cavaliers posturing and capering in a partly nude condition before a number of shameless women, who emulate the saturnalia of heathen Rome by waving their handkerchiefs. We have here a companion picture," he said, indicating an illustration of gymnastic exercises by the students of a female academy at "Commencement," "in which, as thou seest, even ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... city itself the winter was all the brighter for the contrast, among those who could pay for light and warmth. The habit-makers made a great sale of the spoil of all such furry creatures as had escaped wolves and eagles, for presents at the Saturnalia; and at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed more ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... manner of the house—of gold cups, crystal flagons, and tall, slender glasses which looked as if they might have been cut out of deep-hued amethyst. The slaves had withdrawn, as it was one of the first nights of the Saturnalia and their duties were lightened by a considerate master. The unusual cold and the savage winds that had held Rome in their grip for the past few days were forgotten within the beautiful dining-room. ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... went into his house, and found no one up but the maids, who were keeping that saturnalia among the household gods, which, I am given to understand, goes on in every well-regulated household before the lords of the creation rise from their downy beds. I have never seen this process myself, but I am ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... beneath the Tudor's sway. And then a Northern Stuart wore their crown, Whose son, unmindful he was over men Truth-lovers, lied to them and lost his head; For Puritans held no respect for lies. Next flared Charles Satyr's saturnalia Of Lely Nymphs, who panting sang "More gold; We yield our beauties freely; gold, more gold." Hapless explosions, folly, frenzied plots; Till well coerced by Lowland William's craft. Then plans that led to nought, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... only get what's coming to them. They graft with the bakers, scratch-my-arse-and-I'll-scratch-yours! That's the way it always is, the poor devils are out of luck, but the jaws of the capitalists are always keeping the Saturnalia. If only we had such lion-hearted sports as we had when I first came from Asia! That was the life! If the flour was not the very best, they would beat up those belly-robbing grafters till they looked like Jupiter had been at them. How well I remember Safinius; he lived near the old arch, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... The SATURNALIA was the festival of Saturn, to whom the inhabitants of Latium attributed the introduction of agriculture and the arts of civilized life. It was celebrated near the end of December, corresponding to our Christmas holidays, and ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... observed, that even in this overgrown town the winter has not been productive of events. Good night! I have two days to wait for a letter that I may answer. Stay -, I should tell you, that I have been at Sir Joseph Banks's literary saturnalia,(756) where was a Parisian watchmaker, who produced the smallest autoMaton that I suppose was ever created. It was a rich snuffbox, not too large for a woman. On opening the lid, an enamelled bird started up, sat on the rim, turned round, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... their God who is evil, as Proudhon said, that senseless and ludicrous God who delights in grotesque saturnalia, in ridiculous prayers, in shameful mummeries, in vows contrary ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... hundred spectator-students, to rush for seats in the stand. The arrival of T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., to train for form and height in the high-jump, though a daily occurrence, was always the signal for a Saturnalia of sport at ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... were told stories of the lack of common morality and decency in the region, but they made no note of them. And, perhaps fortunately, they were not there during court week to witness the scenes of license that were described. This court week, which draws hither the whole population, is a sort of Saturnalia. Perhaps the worst of this is already a thing of the past; for the outrages a year before had reached such a pass that by a common movement the sale of whisky was stopped (not interdicted, but stopped), and not a drop of liquor could be bought in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the return of Spring, and said to be in honour of Krishna, and of his son Kama-deva, the god of love. It is identified with the Holi or Dola-yatra, the Saturnalia, or rather, Carnival of the Hindus, when people of all conditions take liberties with each other, especially by scattering red powder and coloured water on the clothes of persons passing in the street, as described in the play ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... gross and rustic kind of raillery, reproached each other with their failings, and at the same time were nothing sparing of it to their audience. Somewhat of this custom was afterwards retained in their Saturnalia, or Feasts of Saturn, celebrated in December; at least, all kind of freedom in speech was then allowed to slaves, even against their masters; and we are not without some imitation of it in our Christmas gambols. Soldiers also used those Fescennine verses, after measure ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... fool with brains. The brainless fool fulfils himself in low ways—in alcoholic saturnalia, in salvation carnivals, in freethought hysterics, in political bombs. The Higher Foolishness expresses itself in aberrations of poetry and art, in table-rapping and theosophy, in vegetarianism, and in ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to surpass his neighbor. To hear these men of position boast of their gallantries with all classes, one would have thought that the entire canton underwent periodical changes and became one vast Saturnalia, where rustic satyrs courted their favorite nymphs. But nothing came of it, after all; once the feast was digested, and they had returned to the conjugal abode, all these terrible gay Lotharios became once more chaste and worthy fathers of families. Nevertheless, Julien, who was unaccustomed to ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... pagan times, the custom of disguising the dancing worshipper in a more or less hideous mask, had steadily persisted in certain of the more licentious festivals, and the riotous horseplay of the Middle Ages was the direct descendant of the Saturnalia of Rome. Too often, as I have pointed out before, the churches themselves were the scene of these abuses, which took the form not merely of bestial travesties, but of diabolical disguises in which Satan and his imps were represented ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... of the corn-supply, to which office he had been appointed in August. The letter is written not earlier than the 10th of December, for the new tribunes for B.C. 56 have come into office, and not later than the 16th, because on the 17th the Saturnalia began. Perhaps as the senate is summoned and presided over by Lupus, it is on the 10th, the day of ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... The Saturnalia, a national festival held in December in honour of Saturn, was celebrated after the ingathering of the ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... of judicial Saturnalia. You must know, that one of the requisites to be a macer, or officer in attendance upon our supreme court, is, that they shall be ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... among other eccentricities, determined upon having a feast once a year, in imitation of the Saturnalia in ancient Rome. In this project he engaged several persons of rank, and his plan was put in execution at the deanery house. When all the servants were seated, and every gentleman placed behind his own servant, the Dean's footman, who ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... formed themselves, and went their own ways unchecked. Five days were sufficient to put an end to all discipline and order. During these wild doings no privacy could be had. If the errors of the nobility had been borne hitherto, now began the saturnalia of the populace, and they were far more bloody and horrible than ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... firmly. "Bisley is to be more like Shoeburyness (where the Artillery set an excellent example to the Infantry) than the Surrey saturnalia." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... fable which Julian composed under the name of the Caesars, is one of the most agreeable and instructive productions of ancient wit. During the freedom and equality of the days of the Saturnalia, Romulus prepared a feast for the deities of Olympus, who had adopted him as a worthy associate, and for the Roman princes, who had reigned over his martial people, and the vanquished nations of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... in a few secluded hamlets in Westmoreland, and in one or two other places in the kingdom; nor can that disuse be much regretted, since what was founded as a religious act, every where degenerated into an occasion for unseemly revelry, in fact, into a sort of rustic saturnalia. And yet, when we look at this remain of the olden time, as observed at Ambleside, we are tempted ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... finally, incongruity that made the fantasy perfect, over all, through all, there wound, caressingly, the notes of the little melody that had that afternoon flowed from his fingers on to Sergius' battered piano:—the melody which now forms the principal theme of the weirdest of his tone poems; the "Saturnalia of the Red Death," ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... distinguished, the arts flourished, and the spread of political liberty became apparent; although it is equally certain that they were at the same time fatal alike to the aristocracy and to the magistrature; and that they rapidly paved the way to the absolutism of Louis XIV, to the shameless saturnalia of the Regency, and to the dishonouring and degrading excesses of Louis XV, who may justly be said to have prepared by his licentiousness the scaffold ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... below would tell of one of the revelers taking the water, but save for the more distant throbbing of riverside industry, and rarer note of shipping, the mad discords of this rat saturnalia alone claimed ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... that his unknown enemy after first firing the tannery had then rounded off a perfect evening by burglarizing his house threw Simon Varr into a state of mental confusion. Here was a saturnalia of crime condensed into the space of a few hours. And the man's audacity was no less bewildering than his swift efficiency! Who, in this hitherto quiet township of Hambleton, had suddenly developed a brand of vicious courage that nerved him to commit arson and burglary? Simon reviewed an ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... such another! At the entrance to the grounds gran'ther stopped me while he solemnly untied the knot in his empty sleeve. I don't know what kind of hairbrained vow he had tied up in it, but with the little ceremony disappeared every trace of restraint, and we plunged head over ears into the saturnalia of delights that was an old-time ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... over, and despise the very weakness they cherish. Often do they repeat Mr. Hume's sentiments; when comparing the French and Athenian character, he alludes to women. "But what is more singular in this whimsical nation, say I to the Athenians, is, that a frolic of yours during the Saturnalia, when the slaves are served by their masters, is seriously continued by them through the whole year, and through the whole course of their lives; accompanied too with some circumstances, which still further augment the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... and Menshevik parties have known us too long and too well to believe these accusations. At the same time, they were too deeply interested in their success to repudiate them publicly. And even now one cannot recall without disgust that saturnalia of lies which was celebrated broadcast in all the bourgeois and coalition newspapers. Our organs were suppressed. Revolutionary Petrograd felt that the provinces and the army were still far from being with it. In workingmen's sections of the ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... existence of the Press; the healthful proportions of kingdoms, neither too confined nor too vast, have created new hopes, which history cannot destroy. As a proof, look to all late revolutions: in England the Civil Wars, the Reformation,—in France her awful Saturnalia, her military despotism! Has either nation fallen back? The deluge passes, and, behold, the face of things more glorious than before! Compare the French of to-day with the French of the old regime. You are silent; well, and if in all States there is ever some danger of evil ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... long strain of conflict to indulgence in endless orgies of extravagance like nothing ever witnessed by a world long since surfeited with contemplation of weird excesses: daily that wild dance of death attained wilder stages of saturnalia, the bands blaring ever louder to drown the mutter of savage elemental forces working ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... legitimate sense of that word. It is very curious to observe how the strangers flock to Paris in order to enjoy the spectacle of themselves, reckoning the French for nothing save the ministers of their pleasures, et improbi turba impia vici. If, in the midst of these brilliant saturnalia, the pares were to rise, and another Commune spring from the kennel to the day, how many of the lords of the Philistines would be buried under the ruins of the temple of Dagon? But to revert to Germany, ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... The saturnalia is brought to a close, when all become so intoxicated they can neither tell story nor sing song. Then some stagger to their tents, others dropping over where they sit, and ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... enter into contests for holiday honors with the high-born daughters of successful swindlers, but will be kindly permitted by the lordly Halliwell to stand on the curb and see beauts who are only by the grace of boodle, roll by like triumphant Sylla on Fortune's bike. During the Saturnalia in ancient Rome the master acknowledged the brotherhood of man by ministering to his slave; but Kansas City, thanks to the omnipotent Halliwell, has cut the working class off from mankind—the hewers of wood and drawers of water are no longer considered ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... was a woman—the eternal feminine," I said, sticking him to the point, for I was more interested in him than in the seething saturnalia, our common sobriety amid which seemed somehow to raise our casual acquaintanceship to the plane of ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... The physician was a sorry chemist and a worse philosopher. He blundered in his analysis of the means; and if I remember rightly, he whines like a priest at the motives,—for see you not what was really the cause of this spreading pestilence? It was the Saturnalia of the Weak,—a burst of mocking license against the Strong; it was more,—it was the innate force of the individual waging war ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Whitford, under a fresh supply of wine, leading in the boisterous mirth. One after another, attracted by the gayety and laughter, joined the group, until it numbered fifteen or twenty half-intoxicated young men and women, who lost themselves in a kind of wild saturnalia. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... was dying and a young year was about to be born. Along the blazing stretch of Broadway from Thirtieth street to Columbus circle seethed and sounded the noisy saturnalia of New ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... (Books XIII and XIV, Xenia and Apophoreta, are two collections of inscriptions for presents at the Saturnalia); also a Liber Spectaculorum on the opening of the grand Flavian amphitheatre (the Coliseum) begun by ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... pages of Josephus. A splash or two of 'blood of poor innocents,' more or less, found on the Idumean tyrant's bloody skirts, could be of little consequence in the eyes of those who knew what a long saturnalia of horrors his reign had been; and the number of the infants under two years old in such a tiny place as Bethlehem would be small, so that their feeble wail might well fail to reach the ears even of contemporaries. But there is no reason for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... therefore they left them their swinging censers, their gold chalices, and their symbolic candles. Thus it is that Roman Catholicism became, and is still, merely a Christian form of Paganism which is made to pay successfully, just as the feasts and Saturnalia of ancient days were made to pay as spectacular and theatrical pastimes. I should not blame your Church if it declared itself to be an offshoot of Paganism at once,—Paganism, or any other form of faith, deserves respect as long as its priests and followers are sincere; but when ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of the slaves was the hideous misuse Christian masters allowed them to make of Chrismas Day and week. It was then they danced the bamboula, incessantly. All through the year this Saturnalia was prepared for in meetings held at night by their leaders. The songs to which they danced were made of white society's scandals reduced to satirical rhyme; and to the rashest girl or man there was power ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... with its neighbours and Madrid. The sorriest hamlet was determined to stand on its own bottom. Federation had given place to cantonalism, marked by massacres, incendiarism, and every description of brutality, and bloody saturnalia were celebrated throughout the length and ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... the Saturnalia, and exiled the dancing teachers, but the many acts of the Senate to secure a better standard were useless against the foreign inhabitants of the Empire accustomed ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... most sumptuous palace into which he had now removed, were matters that scandalized even the population of Rome. Senators, patricians, grave councillors, noble matrons were alike willingly or unwillingly obliged to join in the saturnalia that prevailed. The provinces were ruined to minister to the luxury of Rome. The wealth of the noblest families was sequestrated to the state. All law, order, and decency were ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... with calmness, if not with gratitude, and lighted it from the match he gallantly held for her. And so they smoked. The Merle twin never smoked for two famous Puritan reasons—it was wrong for boys to smoke and it made him sick. He eyed the present saturnalia with strong disapproval. The admiration of the Wilbur twin—now forgetting his ignominy—was frankly worded. Plainly she was ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... that Vermina, the son of Syphax, with a greater number of horse than foot, was coming to the assistance of the Carthaginians. A part of his infantry with all the cavalry having attacked them on their march on the first day of the Saturnalia, routed the Numidians with little opposition, and as every way by which they could escape in flight was blocked up, for the cavalry surrounded them on all sides, fifteen thousand men were slain, twelve ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... Custom House, as well as that on the Bed, has already revealed certain means of discerning the thought of a woman; but we make no pretence in this book of exhaustively stating the resources of human wit, which are immeasurable. Now here is a proof of this. On the day of the Saturnalia the Romans discovered more features in the character of their slaves, in ten minutes, than they would have found out during the rest of the year! You ought therefore to ordain Saturnalia in your establishment, and to imitate Gessler, who, when he saw William Tell shoot ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... were laid bare by this action, and with the quickness of lightning hundreds of furious hands tore and snatched, while hot voices smote the air in snarls and gasps. They wanted this money—would lose their lives for it. In an instant the pawn-shop hall had been turned into a sulphurous saturnalia horrid to witness. That gave you a grim idea of mob violence. I rushed to ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... considered with the superficial frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality. We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the world's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in life. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age tragedies among ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... got drunk with blood to vomit crime, And fatal have her Saturnalia been To Freedom's cause, in every age and clime; Because the deadly days which we have seen, And vile Ambition, that built up between Man and his hopes an adamantine wall, And the base pageant last upon the scene, Are grown the pretext for the eternal thrall Which nips Life's tree, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... the throne with Janus king of Italy, his reign seems to have been so mild, so beneficent, that it was called the golden age; human victims were sacrificed on his altars, until abolished by Hercules, who substituted small images of clay. Festivals in honor of this god, called Saturnalia, were instituted long antecedent to the foundation of Rome they were celebrated about the middle of December, either on the 16th, 17th, or 18th; they lasted in latter times several days, originally but one. Universal liberty prevailed at the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... was attempted to identify him with the Grecian god Cronos, and fabled that after his dethronement by Jupiter he fled to Italy, where he reigned during what was called the Golden Age. In memory of his beneficent dominion, the feast of Saturnalia was held every year in the winter season. Then all public business was suspended, declarations of war and criminal executions were postponed, friends made presents to one another and the slaves were indulged with great liberties. A feast ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... your way," wrote Caesar, "On the Saturnalia, Third, And I'll just drop in, my Tullius, For a quiet ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... said well, "There lives more doubt"—I quote from memory—"in honest faith, believe me, than in half the" systems of philosophy, or words to that effect. The victor had a slave at his ear during his triumph; the slaves during the Roman Saturnalia dressed in their masters' clothes, sat at meat with them, told them of their faults, and blacked their faces for them. They made their masters wait upon them. In the ages of faith, an ass dressed in ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... his wife and children. But his tormentors would have none of that, and shot him then and there. Lecomte fell on his knees; they dragged him to his feet, and continued firing into his still warm body. When the populace was allowed to come in they danced a saturnalia over his corpse. Auber said: "My heart bleeds when I gaze on all that is going on about me. Alas! ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... looking out from their windows, all intoxicated with the mere delight of living and the gladness of a new day. The pagan populace of Antioch—reckless, pleasure-loving, spendthrift—were preparing for the Saturnalia. But all this Hermas had renounced. He cleft his way through the crowd slowly, like a reluctant swimmer weary ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... schooner, that at one moment it looked very much as though they were about to throw off all the trammels of discipline and obedience, and proceed forthwith on board the Spaniard, to participate in the saturnalia still in progress there; and it was only by the production of a lavish allowance of rum, and a promise from the carpenter that they should all have their turn on board the doomed ship, that they could be restrained from heaving ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... butter to her salt," whereas the accessory should be put to the principal; thus, by a subtle transposition of the words, converting the accessory into the principal, by making it appear to abound in quantity. Many similar sayings of great men and philosophers are recorded in the Saturnalia of Macrobius. When Cicero saw his son-in-law, Lentulus, a man of small stature, with a long sword by his side: "Who," says he, "has girded my son-in-law to that sword?" thus changing the accessary into the principal. ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... our golden youth in the fifties to do so. Every night in the Haymarket there was a kind of noisy saturnalia, in which golden youths joined hands with youths who were by no means golden, to give much trouble to the police, and fill the pockets of the keepers of night-houses—"Bob Croft's," "Kate Hamilton's," "the Piccadilly Saloon," ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... celebrated her saturnalia in the following months, and unfurled her blood-stained standard over the nation. She was not satisfied with having brought to the guillotine more than ten thousand aristocrats and royalists, to terrify the faithful adherents and servants of the throne. She required, moreover, ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... to three dollars, one-third of which was to be paid to the peon at the end of the week, which debt, due for well-performed labor, was invariably paid in aguardiente, and the Indian made happy, until the following Monday morning, he having passed through another Saturday night and Sunday's saturnalia of debauchery and bestiality. Those thousands of honest, useful people were absolutely destroyed ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... dissipation. Every generation, in every country, will bequeath to those who succeed it splendid examples and great images of the dead, to be admired and imitated; there were such among the Romans, under the basest Emperors; such in England when the Long Parliament ruled; such in France during its Saturnalia of irreligion and murder, and some such have made ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... be likened to that of the lover in Heinrich von Kleist's poetically sublime, but morally atrocious, tragedy, Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The Duke killed Marie because doing so gave him the most damnable pleasure,—her the most ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... passengers being discovered scattered about the deck, lashed helplessly neck and heels together, or chained to ring-bolts in the deck and bulwarks, whilst the pirates had taken possession of the cabin and had held a regular saturnalia there, in the progress of which the unfortunate lady passengers had been subjected to the vilest outrages, and one poor little child had been cruelly murdered before its distracted mother's face. The captain and the chief mate ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood |
