"Western Empire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chair and the keys of St Peter to another, without rousing the indignation of the Christian world. Liberty was an incomprehensible term. That energy of individual independence and physical force which excited the barbarians of the north to conquer the western empire, and enabled the Romans of Byzantium to save the eastern, was sinking into lethargy. Patriotism was an unknown feeling. Indeed, what idea of nationality or love of country could be formed by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Had France retained her possessions in America, she would still have had an interest in maintaining the colonial system, and it is doubtful if even her hatred of England would have induced her to aid the rebellious colonies. But, her dream of a great Western empire forever dispelled, she had much to gain and nothing to lose by drawing sword for the American cause. The British defeated the French at Quebec only to ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... when the spirit of the Romans had declined, and their armies had lost their former excellence, their supremacy was overthrown by men of the same race, that is to say by the Goths, the Vandals, and others like them, who spread themselves over the whole of the Western Empire. ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... periods may be traced from the age of Trajan and the Antonines, when the Roman monarchy, having attained its full strength and maturity, began to verge towards its decline; and will extend to the subversion of the Western Empire, by the barbarians of Germany and Scythia, the rude ancestors of the most polished nations of modern Europe. This extraordinary revolution, which subjected Rome to the power of a Gothic conqueror, was completed about the beginning ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... together; they occupied about two hundred years—roughly from the year 300 to the year 500. When they had run their course the Western Empire was no longer governed as one society from one Imperial centre. The chance heads of certain auxiliary forces in the Roman Army, drawn from barbaric recruitment, had established themselves in the various provinces ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... literatures had withdrawn itself into monasteries, and there narrowed till of secular Latin writing scarcely any knowledge remained save of Vergil (because of his supposed Messianic prophecy) and Statius, and of Greek, except Aristotle, none at all. What had been lost in the Western Empire, however, subsisted in the East, and the continual advance of the Turk on the territories of the Emperors of Constantinople drove westward to the shelter of Italy and the Church, and to the patronage of the Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them their manuscripts of Homer ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Thurii. But north of the gulf the first inhabitants are Greeks, called Epirotes, as far as the city of Epidamnus, which is situated on the sea. And adjoining this is the land of Precalis, beyond which is the territory called Dalmatia, all of which is counted as part of the western empire. And beyond that point is Liburnia,[81] and Istria, and the land of the Veneti extending to the city of Ravenna. These countries are situated on the sea in that region. But above them are the Siscii and Suevi (not those who are subjects ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... Age. If there were such a line, we should probably have crossed it already, whether in recording the last real Roman setting of the Horatian house in order by Mavortius in 527, or in referring to Venantius Fortunatus, the last of the Latin Christian poets. The usual date marking the end of the Western Empire, 476, is only the convenient sign for the culmination of the movement long since begun in the interferences of an army composed more and more of a non-Italian, Northern soldiery, and ending in a final mutiny or revolt which assumed the character of invasion ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... last Emperor of Rome, Romulus, was given by the people the derisive nickname of Augustulus, or 'the little Augustus'. The capture of Ravenna in his reign by Odoacer marks the end of the Western Empire. ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... victory which man has obtained over the licentiousness of nature; and if such were the ravages of the Tiber under a firm and active government, what could oppose, or who can enumerate, the injuries of the city after the fall of the Western Empire? A remedy was at length produced by the evil itself: the accumulation of rubbish and the earth that has been washed down from the hills is supposed to have elevated the plain of Rome fourteen or fifteen feet perhaps above the ancient ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... before the triumph of Christianity. In nothing does England's administration of India resemble Rome's government of its provinces in the seven centuries from the reduction of Sicily, 240 B.C., to the fall of the Western Empire, 476 A.D., so much as in the relation of nascent Christianity to the pagan cults which had made society what it was. Carey and the brotherhood stood alone in facing, in fighting with divine weapons, in winning the first victories over the secular as well as spiritual lawlessness ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... Yue-wen was a branch of the Hsien-pi, but was closely connected with the Huns and probably of Turkish origin. All the still existing remains of Toba tribes who had eluded sinification moved into this western empire. ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... school system encouraged by the State, and endowed with a large revenue for the support of the schools. Children can live in sight of the school, the college, the church, and grow up with the prosperity of the leading State in the Great Western Empire. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... a summary of my happy hours spent with animal trainers, I offer the opinion that dogs, because of their centuries of contact with man, are the most faithful creatures of the animal kingdom; that horses are the most useful, for this great western empire would still be a desert or a roaring wilderness had it not been for the horse. Elephants are smarter than many of the other creatures. They can reason from cause to effect. This I know, for one dark, rainy ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... year 476 has commonly been taken as the date of the "fall" of the Western Empire and of the beginning of the Middle Ages. What happened in that year was this. Since Theodosius the Great, in 395, had provided that his two sons should divide the administration of the Empire between them, most of the emperors of the West had proved weak and indolent ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... watched by the dragon, and her children devoured, so was the Church watched and persecuted by the emissaries of the Papal hierachy {sic}. The seven heads of the dragon represent the seven hills on which Rome is built; the ten horns, ten kingdoms into which the Western empire was divided. The tail of the dragon drawing a third part of the stars represent the power of the Romans, who had conquered one-third part ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton |
