"Marathon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fences and haystacks became ready-made fortifications, and every rising spot was filled with irate hostile yeoman who harried them with aim true and deadly. They soon began to run and leave their wounded behind, and in place of a retreat their disorderly flight must have had the appearance of a Marathon race, the rattle of musketry acting or serving as signals for each to do his ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... pitfall before us is that we read history not as men, but as gods, knowing the event. The name of Marathon to us implies not struggle, not danger, but triumph; and as we think of the little band of Athenians defiling from the mountains and looking on the sea, with the utmost determination we cannot quite enter into their thoughts. Of how little avail must have seemed this ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Marathon— And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dream'd that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persians' grave, I could not deem ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... enchantment in the background, it occurred that a flock of geese were meditating, as geese will, in the middle of the road. The gooseherd, a shabby middle-aged man, looked as though he had recently lost the Battle of Marathon, and was asking himself whether the path of his retreat might not lie through ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Cyclades, and falling upon Eretria and Attica. Eretria's punishment warned the Athenians to resist to the uttermost; and the skill of Miltiades, backed by the valor of his countrymen, gave to Athens the great victory of Marathon. Datis fell back upon Asia, having suffered worse disasters than his predecessor, and bore to the king the melancholy tidings that his vast force of from 100,000 to 200,000 men had been met and worsted ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... little hand, and start running, you'll find you'll soon be running too. And, years hence, when you win the Marathon at the Olympic Games, you'll come to me with tears in your ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... of the four thousand, that it was magnificent but not strategy, not war, does not take into account the fact that Sparta had for nearly half a century been looked to as the military leader of Greece. It was audacious in the Athenians to fight the battle of Marathon without them, and they did so only because the Spartans did not come at their call. Sparta had not come to Thermopylae in force, it is true; but her king was there with three hundred of her best men. Only by staying and fighting could he show that Sparta held by right the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... and Pirithous was of a most intimate nature, yet it originated in the midst of arms. Pirithous had made an irruption into the plain of Marathon, and carried off the herds of the king of Athens. Theseus went to repel the plunderers. The moment Pirithous beheld him, he was seized with admiration; he stretched out his hand as a token of peace, and cried, "Be judge ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... "I'll do anything you say but plough or cut wood. My enchanted youth on the farm was filled with those delights, and before I go back to that a swift Marathon runner must ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... neither commercial nor clerical or religious purposes have furnished any working motive, unless where, as express missionaries, they have prepared their readers to expect such a bias to their researches. Colonel Leake, the most accurate of travellers, is a soldier; and in reviewing the field of Marathon, of Plataa, and others deriving their interest from later wars, he makes a casual use of his soldiership. Captain Beaufort, again, as a sailor, uses his nautical skill where it is properly called for. But in the larger proportions of their works, even the professional are not professional; ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Electoral Engineering) paid a business visit to the Grand Vizier. According to Eastern etiquette they discoursed for a while on indifferent subjects. The minister only checked himself in time from making a passing reference to the Marathon Race, remembering that the Vizier had a Persian grandmother and might consider any allusion to Marathon as somewhat tactless. Presently the Minister broached the ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... them is one that needs consideration; and to judge him fairly we must look at the problem from his side and postulate that Socialism (whether he interpreted its theories aright or not) did pursue practical ideals. If Aeschylus was more proud of fighting at Marathon than of writing tragedies—if Socrates claimed respect as much for his firmness as a juryman as for his philosophic method—surely Morris might believe that his duty to his countrymen called him to leave his study and his workshop to take an active part in public affairs. He might be more prone ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... arrived, and I am only now on my way to Greece—my native land, the mother of the arts and sciences, the country of Socrates and Plato, of Alexander and Aristides, the battle-fields of Thermopylae and Marathon. Ah, signora, Greece once contained all that is noble and great, and brave—what she once was, such she will be again—when we, her brave sons, have regenerated her, when we have driven forth the accursed ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... they said, "thou know'st how Hercules Was not content to wait till folk asked aid, But sought the pests among their guarded trees; Thou know'st what name the Theban Cadmus made, And how the bull of Marathon was laid Dead on the fallows of the Athenian land, And how folk ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... speedily to the spot, and make himself safe! The running of the celebrated Greek, who, with his breast laid open by a ghastly wound, ran eighty miles in ten hours to announce to the impatient Athenians the victory of Marathon, was the pace of a tortoise compared with ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... as New-York, but whose inhabitants produced within the short space of two centuries, reckoning from the battle of Marathon, as Landor says, a larger number of exquisite models, in war, philosophy, patriotism, oratory and poetry—in the semi-mechanical arts which accompany or follow them, sculpture and painting—and in the first of the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... of the Greek tragedy, who distinguished himself as a soldier both at Marathon and Salamis before he figured as a poet; wrote, it is said, some seventy dramas, of which only seven are extant—the "Suppliants," the "Persae," the "Seven against Thebes," the "Prometheus Bound," the "Agamemnon," ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... but though he hadn't strength to speak he had enough for action. He rushed headlong to the street, and like the Greek from Marathon who fell in the square at Athens, with his laurel in his hand, Friquet reached Councillor Broussel's threshold, and then fell exhausted, scattering on the floor the louis ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Prometheus, as already mentioned; the death of the two brothers, the Cercopes, famous robbers; the defeat of the Bull of Marathon; the death of Lygis, who disputed the passage of the Alps with him; that of the giant Alcyaneus, who hurled at him a stone so vast that it crushed twenty-four men to death; that of Eryx, king of Sicily, whom he killed with a blow of the cestus, for refusing to deliver to him the oxen ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... hear nothing of the democracy of the Middle West, but everything of the plutocracy of the middleman, who is probably as unpopular in the Middle West as the miller in the Middle Ages. If Mr. Elihu K. Pike could be transplanted bodily from the neighbourhood of his home town of Marathon, Neb., with his farm and his frame-house and all its fittings, and they could be set down exactly in the spot now occupied by Selfridge's (which could be easily cleared away for the purpose), I think we could really get a great deal of good by watching him, even if the watching ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... d'you know about me? I'm engaged! No, honest, straight I am! Look at me ring! Aw, it is not; it's a regular engagement-ring. I'm going to be out of this hell-hole in two weeks, and Papa Pemberton can work off his temper on somebody else. Me, I'm going to do a slumber marathon till ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Transatlantic pilgrimage of every true American? What is the true Mecca of his heart? Not the hoary tombs of the Pharaohs, and the one hundred gated cities of the Nile. Not the Acropolis and the Parthenon, the plains of Marathon, the Pass of Thermopylae, thrilling as they are with heroic and patriotic emotion; not the Forum and the Coliseum and the triumphal arches of Rome. No; the pious pilgrim from the Far West seeks a sequestered, old-fashioned ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... completion of it; and we may please ourselves with the fancy that had this imaginary narrative ever been finished, we should have found Plato himself sympathising with the struggle for Hellenic independence (cp. Laws), singing a hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis, perhaps making the reflection of Herodotus where he contemplates the growth of the Athenian empire—'How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness!' or, more probably, attributing ...
— The Republic • Plato
... "Good little Marathon, wasn't it?" he called from the road. "Did you hear me yelling like an Indian? I chased them as far as the boundary line, and when I saw them they were still running. Gee, Mr. Gordon, I mean Uncle Dick, you got back from the oil ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... said; "thank you. That was a bit of a Marathon, wasn't it?" He measured the distance across the ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... me, I ordered our postilion to drive to Mont St. Jean, without stopping at Waterloo. We got out at the monuments. Lord Byron gazed about for five minutes without uttering a syllable; at last, turning to me, he said—"I am not disappointed. I have seen the plains of Marathon, and these are as fine. Can you tell me," he continued, "where Picton fell? because I have heard that my friend Howard was killed at his side, and nearly at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... my mind'll jump right over to the "Soldier of Marathon," or "Eve," no knowin' at all where my thoughts will take me ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... at night, And he stood by the bed of the Benthamite, And he said, in a voice that thrilled the frame, "If ever the sound of Marathon's name Hath fired thy blood or flusht thy brow, "Lover of Liberty, rouse ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... begins again. The date at which Alcibiades "flourished" was ascertained, but what he was "noted for" got hopelessly mixed with what Thernistocles was "noted for." The momentary impression that the battle of Marathon was fought by Salamis was soon dissipated, and the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and his fortunes. That image[1] seems to me to explain better than any other that remarkable outburst of literary activity which makes the Elizabethan Period unique in English literature, and only paralleled in the world's literature by the century after Marathon, when Athens first knew herself. With Elizabeth England came of age, and at the same time entered into possession of immense spiritual treasures, which were as novel as they were extensive. A New World promised adventures to the adventurous, untold wealth ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... sum is calculated, for three declamations. He built at Athens a stadium six hundred feet long, entirely of white marble, and capable of admitting the whole population. His theatre, erected to the memory of his wife, was made of cedar wood curiously carved. He had two villas, one at Marathon, the place of his birth, about ten miles from Athens, the other at Cephissia, at the distance of six; and thither he drew to him the elite, and at times the whole body of the students. Long arcades, groves of trees, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Lycurgus, having for its object the encouragement of that very spirit. Attica was full of slaves—yet the love of liberty was its characteristic. What else was it that foiled the whole power of Persia at Marathon and Salamis? What other soil than that which the genial sun of republican freedom illuminated and warmed, could have produced such men as Leonidas and Miltiades, Themistocles and Epaminondas? Of Rome it would be superfluous to speak at ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... shone in literature and might, When Marathon's broad plains saw sword and fight; Thy monumental ruins stand alone, Decay has breathed upon thy sculptured stone And desolation walks thy princely halls, The green branch twines around thy olden walls; And ye who stood the ten years' siege of ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... Greece and Rome—had they not, in a great measure, become disunited by factions, we might, even in these days, however degenerate, have witnessed something like that national energy which was displayed in the bay of Salamis, and on the plains of Marathon." ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... will also find that on some important day they will withhold their co-operation, in order to rob you of your glory. The cause of Greece is, nevertheless, a glorious cause. Our remembrance of what their ancestors did at Salamis, at Marathon, at Thermopylae, gives an additional interest to all that concerns them. But, to say the truth of them, they are a race of tigers, and their ancestors were the same. I shall be glad to see them fall upon their aigretted keeper and his pashas; but, confound ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... and hearing from Mr. Mack of the doings and achievements of the great men whose residence at Serampore has given it a sacredness it will ever retain in the annals of Indian Missions, I felt as a young Greek would feel on being taken to Marathon and Thermopylae. I felt I was entering on a war, where there had been heroes before me, which demanded courage and endurance of a far higher order than had ever been enlisted in ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... sheep were folded, and we were all seated beneath the myrtle which shaded our cottage, my grandsire, an old man, was telling of Marathon and Leuctra; and how, in ancient times, a little band of Spartans, in a defile of the mountains, had withstood a whole army. I did not then know what war was; but my cheeks burned, I know not why, and I clasped the knees of that ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... will the sweat of their brows be sweet, and the sweetener of the rest that follows; but, when the victory is at last achieved, they will come in for a share in the glory; even as the meanest soldier who fought at Marathon or at King's Mountain became a sharer in the glory of those saving days; and within his own household circle, the approbation of which approaches the nearest to that of an approving conscience, was ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Austere, upon his face Death's pallor and the deathless light of hope. Here with these great he dwells for evermore, His dust yet quick with love of country. Yes, A god speaks to us from this sacred peace, That nursed for Persians upon Marathon, Where Athens gave her heroes sepulture, Greek ire and virtue. There the mariner That sailed the sea under Euboea saw Flashing amidst the wide obscurity The steel of helmets and of clashing brands, The smoke and lurid flame of funeral pyres, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... collected the treasure of Delos, which made Phidias and the Parthenon possible. During the life of Confucius lived Leonidas, Miltiades, Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes. And then quite naturally occurred the battles of Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae. Then lived Buddha-Gautama, Lao-tsze, Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, Pythagoras, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... "This here Marathon race business through three-foot snow ain't for invalids like me and Husky," one of them said cheerfully, with his mouth full of sandwich. "We're also rans, and ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... unaccountable sounds which startle travellers in lonely spots, were attributed to Pan, who possessed a frightful and most discordant voice; hence the term panic terror, to indicate sudden fear. The Athenians ascribed their victory at Marathon to the alarm which he created among the Persians ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... of war had ebb'd away From Trachis and Thermopylae, Long centuries had come and gone Since that fierce day at Marathon; ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish memory. But as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates and in matters mathematical especially; so that I gave her inexhaustible patience many a sad hour. To this day I cannot tell in what year was fought the battle of Marathon, or when John signed Magna Charta; though the battle itself, and the scene of the barons with menacing brows gathered about John, stood clearly pictured in my imagination. Dates were arbitrary, and to my memory nothing arbitrary would stick. Nevertheless, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... till, challenging AEschines for arraigning him, thus counselling the people, he rises to this great level: "But, never, never can you have done wrong, O Athenians, in undertaking the battle for the freedom and safety of all: I swear it by your forefathers—those that met the peril at Marathon, those that took the field at Plataea, those in the sea-fight at Salamis, and those at Artimesium, and many other brave men who repose in the public monuments, all of whom alike, as being worthy of the same honour, the ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Sweden paid to Brandenburg, or the last of any consequence; and ended the domination of the Swedes in those quarters. A thing justly to be forever remembered by Brandenburg;—on a smallish modern scale, the Bannockburn, Sempach, Marathon, of Brandenburg. [See Pauli, v. 161-169; Stenzel, ii. 335, 340-347, 354; Kausler, Atlas des plus memorables Batailles, Combats et Sieges, or Atlas der merkwurdigsten Schlachten, Treffen und Belagerungen (German and French, Carlsruhe and Freiburg, 1831), ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... as open windows can make it, to keep the flowers fresh, and to avoid stuffiness. The door-bell continues its ringing, and the parlor maid finds herself a contestant in a marathon, until some one decides that card envelopes and telegrams had better be ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... terpsichorean marauders was to be dislodged she must have assistance. It was man's work. She made a brave dash through the hall mercifully unmolested; found the stairs; raced up them; and fell through the doorway of her son Eustace's bedroom like a spent Marathon runner staggering past ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... impossible to adopt the peace position of non-resistance. As a matter of bare fact, in reviewing history would not all of us most desire to have chased the enslaving Persian host into the sea at Marathon, to have driven the Austrians back from the Swiss mountains, to have charged with Joan of Arc at Orleans, to have gone with Garibaldi and his Thousand to the wild redemption of Sicily's freedom, to have severed the invader's sinews with De Wet, to have shaken an ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... angry rumble. Round and round a stunted pinon they raced, hot and angry. I was too helpless with mirth to be of any aid, and the Chief's gun was in the car. Still, an angry range cow on the prod is no joke, and it began to look serious. At last the impromptu marathon ended by the Chief making an extra sprint and rolling into the Ford just as her sharp horns raked ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... make no difference with your sympathies," he asked with some earnestness, "whether a man is in the right or in the wrong? Would you have had no sympathy for the Greeks at Marathon?" ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... around, And all the Muse's tales seem truly told, Till the sense aches with gazing to behold The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon: Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold, Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone: Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... The Porch, i.e. the Painted Porch ([Greek: stoa poikilae]) at Athens, the great hall adorned with frescoes of the battle of Marathon, which served as lecture-room to Zeno, the founder ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... looks back and sympathises with all the joy and life of ancient time. With the circling dance burned in still attitude on the vase; with the chase and the hunter eagerly pursuing, whose javelin trembles to be thrown; with the extreme fury of feeling, the whirl of joy in the warriors from Marathon to the last battle of Rome, not with the slaughter, but with the passion—the life in the passion; with the garlands and the flowers; with all the breathing busts that have panted beneath the sun. O beautiful human life! Tears come in my eyes as I ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... not to this generation what it has been. The rust of long disuse has been rubbed off by the iron hand of fate,—shall we not say, rather, by the good hand of our God upon us?—and the awful word stands forth once more, red-lettered and real. Marathon, Waterloo, Lexington, are no longer the conflict of numbers against numbers, nor merely of principles against principles, but of men against men. And as we stand on this silent hill, the prize of so many struggles, our own hearts swell with the hopes and sink with the fears that its green ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... sorrow-stricken bard chanting. The soul of a nation is rising, the beat of her wings keeping time to the music of olden proud resounding lines. Who led the Grecian fleet at Salamis?—Not Spartan Eurygiades, but an old blind man dead these centuries. Who led the victors at Marathon? Not sly Athenian Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth: blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian eye could see: the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Tra'n creigiau a'n bylchau'n bod; Cariwn mewn cof trwy'r cweryl, Y'mhob bwlch, am Thermopyl; Gwnawn weunydd a llwynydd llon, Mawr hwythau, fel Marathon; Yn benaf llefwn beunydd,— ...
— Gwaith Alun • Alun
... the lad, sitting down on the high stool before the lathe Overholt was not using, "the charge of Balaclava's a true story, because it's been told by both sides; but they all say that it did no good, anyway, except to make poetry of. But Marathon! Nobody had a chance to say a word about it except the Greeks themselves, and they weren't going to allow that the Persians wiped up the floor with them, were they? Why should they? And if Balaclava had happened then, those Greek fellows would ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... the lieutenant and speaking of Greece. "You see, Marathon, what did Marathon use to be to me? A date, 490, I believe, but on that evening, with the evening glow falling across the plain, it sounds improbable, but I said to—to Katakasianopulos, I said, 'Katakasianopulos, I feel ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Edith," Maurice remonstrated; "this isn't any Marathon! Go slow. I'm not in any hurry to ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... hovering through the dusk. There were soothsayers, indeed, who had long foretold what happened soon after, giving shape to vague, supernatural terrors. And then he had crept [160] from his hiding-place with other lads to go view the enemies' slain at Marathon, beside those belated Spartans, this new war with whom seemed to be reviving the fierce local feuds of his younger days. Paraloi and Diacrioi had ever been rivals. Very distant it all seemed now, with all the stories he could tell; for in those crumbling little ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... relief of Orleans, or Marathon, was one of the decisive battles of the world. History hinged upon it. If England had won, Scotland might have dwindled into the condition of Ireland—for Edward II was not likely to aim at a statesmanlike policy of union, in his father's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... ended his journey and laid his capture before Eurystheus. A day or two later Hercules loosed the bull, which, after wandering through the woodlands of Arcadia, crossed the isthmus and came to the plains of Marathon, whence, after doing much damage, it swam off to sea and was never ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... years upon struggling humanity in Europe; a guiding pharos across a stormy sea; and Harlem, Leyden, Alkmaar—names hallowed by deeds of heroism such as have not often illustrated human annals, still breathe as trumpet-tongued and perpetual a defiance to despotism as Marathon, Thermopylae, or Salamis. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... immediately washed my feet, an excellent practice of the Chinese, changed my footgear, drank many cups of tea, and often went straight to my p'ukai. The roads of China take it out of the strongest man. There are no Marathon runners here; progress is a tedious toil, often ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... article, headed "A New Marathon" on the Servian victory, appeared in the Greek newspaper Patris of Athens on Dec. 3, (16, New Style,) 1914, expressing the views of ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of a conjectured race. Yet let his child learn by rote the speech of the Greek, where he abjures his fellow-citizens by the bravery of those who fought foremost at Marathon—let him learn to say that was noble in the Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal nation! But the Jew has no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... afraid of his easy-going Latin blood. If I should put him on his feet, he would, in all probability, stand still. He might even walk a little, but I doubt me if he'd ever do a Marathon." ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... "Stanzas to be inserted after stanza 86th in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, instead of the song at present in manuscript."-[MS. note to "To Inez."] [The stanzas To Inez are dated January 25, 1810, on which day Byron and Hobhouse visited Marathon. Most likely they were addressed to Theresa Macri, the "Maid of Athens," or some favourite of the moment, and not to "Florence" (Mrs. Spencer Smith), whom he had recently (January 16) declared emerita to the tune of "The spell is broke, the charm is flown." A ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... be assumed to begin with the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.), and it certainly ended in 322 B.C., when Athens passed decisively under the power of Macedonia; although since the battle of Cheroneia (338 B.C.) she had done little more than ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... war field, would it not be grand? What were the plains of Marathon, the pass of Thermopylae, or Cannae paved with golden ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Marathon, Mr Dedalus said, looking again on the fireplace and to the window, and Marathon ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... decrepit Italy, the Italy so rightly drawn by Marino in his Pianto, lay groveling in the dust of decaying thrones. Her lyrist had to sing of pallone-matches instead of Panhellenic games; to celebrate the heroic conquest of two Turkish galleys by a Tuscan fleet, instead of Marathon and Salamis; to praise S. Lucy and S. Paul with tepid fervor, instead of telling how Rhodes swam at her god's ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that ten years back the former Great King had sent his best troops to be signally defeated upon the coast of Attica; but the losses at Marathon had but stimulated the Persian lust of conquest, and the new King Xerxes was gathering together such myriads of men as should crush down the Greeks and overrun their country by mere force ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... will use that science of which you too often only boast. Above all, I had been pondering over the awful and yet tender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and its kindred temples. And these, or such as these, I thought to myself, were the sisters of the men who fought at Marathon and Salamis; the mothers of many a man among the ten thousand whom Xenophon led back from Babylon to the Black Sea shore; the ancestresses of many a man who conquered the East in Alexander's host, and fought with Porus in ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... oak-woods on the slope of Parnes; on another through noisy and mongrel Piraeus, and over undulating wrinkled ground, burnt up by the sun and covered with low scrub and bushes of myrtle, to the shore of the gulf opposite to Salamis; on yet another to Marathon, where they lunched on the famous mound beneath which the bodies of the Athenians who fell in the battle were buried. They took no companion with them. Dion carried a revolver in his hip pocket, but never had reason to show or to use it. When they dismounted they tethered ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... action, and desirous also to make himself popular, left Athens to fight with the bull of Marathon, which did no small mischief to the inhabitants of Tetrapolis. And having overcome it, he brought it alive in triumph through the city, and afterwards sacrificed it to the Delphinian Apollo. The story of Hecale, also, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the naval contingents from Phoenicia which crushed the Ionian revolt. The expedition of Mardonius, and still more that of Datis and Artaphernes, had indicated the danger threatening Greece when the master of a great army was likewise the master of a great navy. Their defeat at Marathon was not likely to, and as a matter of fact did not, discourage the Persians from further attempts at aggression. As the advance of Cambyses into Egypt had been flanked by a fleet, so also was that of Xerxes into Greece. By the good fortune sometimes vouch-safed ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... thy friends to see, 90 Thy dwelling, and thy native soil again. So Pallas spake, Goddess caerulean-eyed, And o'er the untillable and barren Deep Departing, Scheria left, land of delight, Whence reaching Marathon, and Athens next, She pass'd into Erectheus' fair abode. Ulysses, then, toward the palace moved Of King Alcinoues, but immers'd in thought Stood, first, and paused, ere with his foot he press'd The brazen threshold; for a light he saw 100 As of the sun or moon illuming clear The palace of ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... his hold on the Greek cities of Asia Minor was insecure so long as they could look for armed help to their kindred beyond the Archipelago, and he had sent his satraps to raid the Greek mainland. That first invasion ended disastrously at Marathon. His son, Xerxes, took up the quarrel and devoted years to the preparation not of a raid upon Europe, but of an invasion in which the whole power of his vast empire was to be put ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... I said, recognising in the first one the detective-sergeant who had assisted in clearing up the Marathon mystery. And back of him was Coroner Goldberger, whom I had met in two previous cases; while the third countenance, looking at me with a quizzical smile, was that of Jim Godfrey, the Record's star reporter. The fourth man was a policeman in uniform, who, at a word from Simmonds, took ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... him when he adds—"The account of Shakspeare may stand as a perpetual model of encomiastic criticism, exact without minuteness, and lofty without exaggeration. The praise lavished by Longinus on the attestation of the heroes of Marathon by Demosthenes, fades away before it. In a few lines is exhibited a character, so sublime in its comprehension, and so curious in its limitations, that nothing can be added, diminished, or reformed; nor can the editors and admirers of Shakspeare, in all their emulation of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... to recall what happened once when a certain middleweight from this side went over there and broke the British heart by licking the British champion; and again what happened when a Yankee boy won the Marathon at the Olympic games in London a few years ago. But as this man was a Briton himself these other Britons harkened to his sputterings, for England, you know, grants the right of free speech to all Englishmen—and denies it to ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay. He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared cedar. Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted with wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... the man fades away again, without even looking startled, to mutter "Well, you needn' be so damn peeved about it—I'll say you needn' be so damn peeved—whatcha think you are, anyhow—Marathon Mike?" as Oliver's feet take Oliver swiftly away ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... reason why the old Greeks scaled Parnassus so efficiently is that all the master-climbers got, and kept, their human machines in good order for the climb. They trained for the event as an Olympic athlete trains to-day for the Marathon. One other reason why there was so much record-breaking in ancient Greece is that the non-artists trained also, and thus, through their heightened sympathy and appreciation of the master-climbers, became masters by proxy. But ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... she refused Princeman last night she will not talk to Hollis and scarcely to me is dull and does not eat I beat all entries in ten mile Marathon today and she hardly ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... we once encountered at Athens was to doubt the moderns, we shall quote better evidence than any Greek. Our acquaintance of the Athenian inn, who had a very elegant appearance, appealed to us to confirm the Graecia mendax, saying, he had just returned from Marathon, and his guide had been telling him far greater lies than he ever heard from an Italian cicerone. "The fellow had the impudence to say, that his countrymen had defeated 500,000 Persians in the plain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... The Marathon Mystery The Holladay Case That Affair at Elizabeth Affairs of State At Odds with the Regent Cadets of Gascony The Path of Honor A Soldier of Virginia The Heritage The Quest for the Rose of Sharon The Girl with the Blue Sailor The Mystery of the ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found. Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy! No; there was something queer about it. He could not ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... ancient plain, when night comes on, Shakes to a ghostly battle-blast, Since Persia fell at Marathon. ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... visited all the spots that had become illustrious by the great battles fought between the Greeks and Persians. He gives a minute description of the Pass of Thermopylae, and of his visit to the plain of Marathon, the battlefield of Plataea, and his return to Asia Minor, whence he passed along the coast on which the Greeks had established several colonies. Herodotus can only have been twenty-eight years of age when he returned ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... has passed. But the fire had been terrible. It had burnt Athens at least, down to the very roots. True, while Sophocles was dancing, Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at Salamis, as his father Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years before, was fleeing back to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of slaves and mercenaries to be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by sea at Mycale. The bold hope was over, in which the Persian, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... GREAT KING to cope— What if the scene he saw— The modern Xerxes—from the slope Of crimson Quatre-bras, Was but the fruit we early won From tales of Grecian fields Such as the swords of Marathon Carved on the Median shields Oh, honour to those chainless Greeks, We drink them one and all, Who block'd that day Oppression's way ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... rushes. Besides stones, plummets of lead, called 'glandes,' (as in the present instance), and molubdides, of a form between acorns and almonds, were cast in moulds, to be thrown from slings. They have been frequently dug up in various parts of Greece, and particularly on the plains of Marathon. Some have the device of a thunderbolt; while others are inscribed with dexai, 'take this.' It was a prevalent idea with the ancients that the stone discharged from the sling became red hot in its course, from the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Haywood apparently had in mind not Alderman Barber, whom the character little resembles, but rather Antonio in Otway's "Venice Preserved." And the plot of "The Distressed Orphan, or Love in a Mad-House" (c. 1726), where young Colonel Marathon feigns himself mad in order to get access to his beloved Annilia, may perhaps owe its inspiration to the coarser mad-house scenes of Middleton's "Changeling."[8] On the whole, however, the drama but poorly repaid its ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... the Egyptians against their conquerors, appears to have been provoked by the news of the battle of Marathon. Egypt heard, in B.C. 490, that the arms of the oppressor, as she ever determined to consider Darius, had met with a reverse in European Greece, where 200,000 Medes and Persians had been completely defeated by 20,000 Athenians and Plataens. Darius, it was understood, had taken ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... clothes and walk back after a mile or so," I said. "Suppose we don't make it a Marathon. Why walk farther than we ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... was compelled to retreat also. In 490 Darius sent out another army under Mardonius, this time embarking it on a fleet of 600 triremes which succeeded in arriving safely at the coast of Attica in the bay of Marathon. While the army was disembarking it was attacked by Miltiades and utterly defeated. The second expedition, therefore, came to nothing. But Marathon can hardly be called a decisive battle because it merely postponed the invasion; it affected in ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... on the field of Marathon (490 B.C.), and the Asiatic host, after a desperate conflict, turned and fled. So confident had the Persians been of victory, that they had brought a mass of white marble with which to erect a monument on the plain of Marathon. This Phidias, the great Greek sculptor, carved into a gigantic figure ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 25, April 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the memory of one rapturous instant is gathered what I was soon to see of Greece, is focussed the meaning of history, poetry and art. I was to stand one evening in spring on the mound where heroes sleep and gaze upon the plain of Marathon between darkening mountains and the blue thread of the strait peaceful now, flushed with pink and white blossoms of fruit and almond trees; to sit on the cliff-throne whence a Persian King had looked down upon a Salamis fought and lost.... In that port-hole ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... certain incidents, simple in themselves, in which probably the actors are always at the time quite unconscious of their perennial significance, and yet which become landmarks in the evolution of the human spirit. Such are Thermopylae and Marathon and Bunker Hill. Such was that first convention at Seneca Falls.... The light from that meeting, springing from a vital source, has vitalized every point it has touched. Other torches lit by that have become beacon lights, and every one has stood ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and speech to the ancient noblenesses of Rome and the Middle Age; for he had walked and conversed with them, unchanged in everything but in the dress. Had he known Greek literature he could have recalled to imperishable life such men as Cimon and Aristides, such deeds as Marathon and Salamis. For had we not had our own Salamis acted within a few years of his birth; and were not the heroes of it still walking among men? It was surely this continual presence of "men of worship," this atmosphere of admiration and respect and trust, in which Shakespeare must ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... states represented the cause of the people; and the oriental empires the cause of the few. These little states grew so rapidly that the despots of Asia became alarmed, and organized gigantic expeditions to destroy them. At Marathon and Salamis, the people's cause met and drove back the mighty invasion; and two hundred years later, under the lead of Alexander, dissolved every Asiatic empire, from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, to its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... we could row to within five yards and harpoon a couple; but generally they would wake up, when we were about twenty yards away, and begin to slide off into the water. We would then shoot, and if they attacked us it was easy to harpoon them; while if they started to leave the country, it might be a Marathon race before we got close enough to make the harpoons fast in ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... Athenians rule; while Demosthenes, who has not brought us Persian gold but has taken bribes for himself and has kept them to this day, is about to receive a golden wreath from you! And Themistokles, and they who died at Marathon and Plataea, aye, and the very graves of our forefathers—do you not think they will utter a voice of lamentation, if he who covenants with barbarians to work against ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Plataian help. The Plataeans sent a thousand well appointed warriors to help at Marathon. The ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... desired; as, to attain to old age; the man desires to live to a good old age; we should not speak of his attaining his dotage. One may attain an object that will prove not worth his labor, but what he achieves is in itself great and splendid; as, the Greeks at Marathon achieved a glorious ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald |
