"Nero" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Janus that could show himself in good company. The quadrifrons Janus was now the orthodox Janus; and it would have been as much a sacrilege to rob him of any single face as to rob a king's statue [2] of its horse. One thing may recall this to Mr. Landor's memory. I think it was Nero, but certainly it was one of the first six Caesars, that built, or that finished, a magnificent temple to Janus; and each face was so managed as to point down an avenue leading to a separate market-place. Now, that there were four market-places, I will ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... window; moonlight and glooms and falling leaves. He remained there for some time. Brother Jacques waited patiently to learn the vicomte's determination. He was curious, too, to test this man's core. Was it rotten, or hard and sound? There was villainy, but of what kind? The helpless villainy of a Nero, or the calculating villainy of a Tiberius? When the vicomte presented his countenance to Brother Jacques, it had undergone a change. It was masked with humility; all the haughtiness was gone. He ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... prowess to do great deeds, not of skill to pile millions upon millions, a Pelion upon an Ossa of wealth. Nor in the vain luxury of New York can we detect anything save the signs of age. It is only in modern America that the mad extravagance of Nero's Rome may be matched. There the banquet of Trimalchio might be presented without surprise and without reproach. It differs from what are known as "freak dinners" only in the superiority of its invention and in the perfection ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... of Nero, that a cinical mock-philosopher, called Demetrius, saw, for the first time, one of these pantomime compositions. Struck with the truth of the representation, he could not help expressing the greatest marks of astonishment: but whether his pride made him feel a sort of shame for ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... this expectation could not be justifiable unless from the same evidence he was warranted in concluding some general proposition, as, for instance, that all Roman emperors are just rulers; he would immediately have thought of Nero, Domitian, and other instances, which, showing the falsity of the general conclusion, and therefore the insufficiency of the premises, would have warned him that those premises could not prove in the instance of Commodus, what they were inadequate ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... protested that it was Racine's chef d'oeuvre; that the ancients had never written any thing finer; that neither Tacitus nor Corneille had ever produced any thing more forcible. He had like to have quarrelled with Subligny, because in the scene where Nero hides behind a curtain to listen to Junia, he could not restrain a burst of laughter, which was echoed all over the house. Perhaps this bad play will furnish him with the materials for another 'Folle Querelle,'[3] which will make us laugh as much as the first. Ninon and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... of condemned criminals were exposed to public ignominy, and their children, a more serious evil, were reduced to poverty by the confiscation of their fortunes. But if the victims of Tiberius and Nero anticipated the decree of the prince or senate, their courage and despatch were recompensed by the applause of the public, the decent honors of burial, and the validity of their testaments. The exquisite avarice and cruelty of Domitian appear to have deprived the unfortunate of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... nero?-neither Mr. Chute nor I can recollect the term. Though you are in the season of the villegiatura, believe me, Mr. Conway will not find Florence duller than he would London: our diversions, politics, quarrels, are buried all in our Alphonso's ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... house, after so long a stay, Will send you half unsatisfied away; When, fallen from your expected pomp, you find A bare convenience only is design'd. You, who each day can theatres behold, Like Nero's palace, shining all with gold, Our mean ungilded stage will scorn, we fear, And, for the homely room, disdain the cheer. Yet now cheap druggets to a mode are grown, And a plain suit, since we can make ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... test for the pluck of their terriers. "Drawing a badger" is the proper sporting-phrase,—the animal being chained to a barrel, from the recesses of which he contends savagely with the fierce little dogs pitted against each other to drag him out within a given time. Nero looked on at the sport with a majestic air of contempt, as dog after dog was withdrawn from the conflict. At length, disgusted with the failures, he watched his opportunity until the badger made a dive from his den at a retreating foe, when, snapping him up by the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... unfortunate miserable Country has been for almost twelve Years, burning in the Flames of Civil War. But much more am I griev'd, when I reflect that so many have not only been idle Spectators of these dreadful Fires (as Nero was of flaming Rome) but have endeavour'd by their wicked Speeches and Libels to blow the Bellows, whilst few or none have contributed their Assistance ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... you were ever at this place: I fancy you once were. It is duller even than it used to be: because of even the Fishing having almost died away. But the Sea and the Shore remain the same; as to Nero, in that famous passage {165} I remember you pointed out to me: not quite so sad to me as to him, but not very lively. I have brought a volume or two of Walpole's Letters by way of amusement. I wish you were here; and I will wait here if ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... resky in that den— For I think she juggled three cubs then, And a big "green" lion 'at used to smash Collar-bones for old Frank Nash; And I reckon now she haint forgot The afternoon old "Nero" sot His paws on her:—but as for ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... upon these great religious or national works was the cause of their destruction as soon as they were withdrawn and superseded by something of a newer fashion. The intrinsic value in precious metals of such works is proved by Pliny's statement that Nero gave four millions of sesterces for covers of couches in a banqueting-hall.[452] The hangings or carpets taken by the Caliph Omar from Kosroes' white palace (A.D. 651) must have been some of the finest ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Fountains Abbey, and flanked by rocks, wildly overgrown with shrubs; and before us, seen more distinctly, are the statues of Hercules and Antaeus, and a Dying Gladiator—the Temple of Piety, in which are bronze busts of Titus Vespasian and Nero, and a fine bas-relief of the Grecian Daughter. In front of this temple the water assumes a variety of fantastical forms, ornamented at different points by statues of Neptune, Bacchus, Roman Wrestlers, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... that's just what he feels like. He's going on to tell her some more about what he feels like, but Vernabelle is now greeting Oswald Cummings, the pagan of splendid sins, from the Elite Bootery. She tells Oswald there is a cold cruelty in the lines of his face that reminds her of the emperor Nero. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... and wrathful beyond all words to describe. He hears that voice Singing; he stops short, perfectly rabid with indignation. "Singing," he muttered, "singing in triumph, and glowering at the very House she dooms to destruction. Worse than Nero striking his lyre amidst the conflagration of Rome!" By-and-by Sophy, who somehow or other cannot sit long in any place, and tires that day of any companion, wanders away from the lake and comes right upon Fairthorn. Hailing, in her unutterable secret bliss, the musician who had so ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... milk is said to be a great beautifier and preserver of the skin. Poppaea, wife of the Emperor Nero, used it for that purpose, having four or five hundred asses constantly in her retinue, to furnish her every morning ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... which was a circular to the Principal Officers of State, Sheriffs of Counties, &c. four original copies are preserved in the British Museum; three among the Harleian MSS., Nos. 283, and 2131; and one, from which the above is copied, Cotton. MSS, Nero, C. x. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... lot, against whom he was struggling in the interests of the shareholders. I disclaimed any sympathy with capitalists, and declared that I was theoretically a Socialist. The President grunted, but when I added that he might, so far as I cared, act the Nero and cut off all the financial heads at one blow, he and his countrymen laughed at a conceit which evidently appealed to them. But his Honour relapsed again into a grunt when I inquired what he considered must be the upshot of the agitation. On pressing him, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... less reputable person, was in his early days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from the first ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... pleasure to find that to get a good view, particularly of the dome, it was necessary for me to go from it several miles—to the Pincian hill, or a terrace of the beautiful Villa Doria-Pamfili. The latter view is one of the finest, as nothing else of all Rome is seen. The cathedral stands on the site of Nero's Circus, where many Christians were martyred, and where the Apostle Peter is said to have been buried after his crucifixion. In the year 90 an oratory was built there, and in 306 Emperor Constantine erected a church. It was the grandest ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... goaded the Jews into the final rebellion. It contains, however, a digression on the conversion of the royal house of Adiabene to Judaism, which is tricked out with examples of God's Providence. Yet another digression records the villainies of Nero (which no doubt was pleasing to his patrons) and the amours of Drusilia, the daughter of Agrippa I. But of the rising discontent of the Jewish people in Palestine we have no clear picture. Josephus fails as in the Wars to bring out the inner incompatibility ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... than Roman in character, and Petronius is plainly thinking of the town (colonia he calls it) in southern Italy where the scene of Trimalchio's supper is laid; probably a Greek city by origin, Croton or Cumae. A translation of this passage will be found in Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 133. The most useful words in it for our purpose are ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... had many warnings of what was brewing. But Mr. Birrell, the Chief Secretary, who in frivolity seemed a contemporary embodiment of Nero, deemed cheap wit a sufficient reply to all remonstrances, and had to confess afterwards that he had utterly miscalculated the forces with which he had to deal. He was completely taken by surprise when, on the 20th of April, an attempt to land weapons from a German vessel, escorted by ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... befell that, one hot season, Messer Ricciardo thought he would like to visit a very beautiful estate which he had near Monte Nero, there to take the air and recreate himself for some days, and thither accordingly he went with his fair lady. While there, to amuse her, he arranged for a day's fishing; and so, he in one boat with the fishermen, and she in another with other ladies, they put out to watch the sport, which they ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... excelled the government of princes of mature age, even for that reason which they seek to traduce, which is that by that occasion the state hath been in the hands of pedantes: for so was the state of Rome for the first five years, which are so much magnified, during the minority of Nero, in the hands of Seneca, a pedenti; so it was again, for ten years' space or more, during the minority of Gordianus the younger, with great applause and contentation in the hands of Misitheus, a pedanti: so was it before ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... narrative was a French refugee, who entered the service of William of Orange. To find the beginning of his ancestry, we must reach far back into history. The Rapins were supposed to have been driven from the Campagna of Rome during the persecutions of Nero. They took refuge in one of the wildest and most picturesque valleys of the Alps. In 1250 we find the Rapins established near Saint-Jean de la Maurienne, in Savoy, close upon the French frontier. Saint-Jean de la Maurienne ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... who knoweth but it may be true? that spirits of wickedness and enmity may execute each other's punishment, as those of righteousness and love minister each other's happiness! that—damned among the damned—the spirit of a Nero may still delight in torturing, and that those who in this world were mutual workers of iniquity, may find themselves in the next, sworn retributors of wrath? No idle threat was that of the demoniac ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... stage and the upper regions, they obstinately remained neuter. The master of Europe and France then cast a furious look at this handful of men who dared not to admire his work, feeling in his heart the wish of Nero, and thought for a moment how happy he should be if all those men had but ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... respects sexual anomalies often govern the acts of hysterical persons and other psychopaths. The Roman emperors, Nero, Tiberius and Caligula were almost certainly sadists and enjoyed sexual pleasure at the sight of the sufferings of their victims. Valerie, Messalina and Catherine de Medici were also female sadists. Under the hypocritical veil of religion, Catherine de Medici was the principal instigator of the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... few princes in Germany were refractory, but my attendants struck them dead instantly. I pronounced the doom of Rome to the Pope, and soon afterwards all the territory about Rome, the March of Ancona, the great city and all its riches sank into that vast bed of burning lava which heats Nero's bath. These two considerations were the delirious wanderings of the mind, but I hope to feel their force, to pray and strive for their accomplishment to the end of my life. But it is now time to attend ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... empire corrupt to the very marrow of its bones, than the somber galvanism under the influence of which the skeleton of tyranny danced upon the tombs of Heliogabalus and Caracalla! What a beautiful thing that mummy of Rome, embalmed in the perfumes of Nero and swathed in the shroud of Tiberius! It had to do, messieurs the politicians, with finding the poor and giving them life and peace; it had to do with allowing the worms and tumors to destroy the monuments of shame, while drawing from the ribs of this mummy a virgin as beautiful ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... Of this sort of dedication, Gaspar Sanctius writeth thus: Alia dedicatio est, non solum inter prophanos, sed etiam inter Haebreos usitata, quae nihil habet sacrum sed tantum est auspicatio aut initium operis, ad quod destinatur locus aut res cujus tunc primum libatur usus. Sic Nero Claudius dedicasse dicitur domum suam cum primum illam habitare caepit. Ita Suetonius in Nerone. Sic Pompeius dedicavit theatrum suum, cum primum illud publicis ludis et communibus usibus aperuit; de quo Cicero, lib. 2, epist. 1. Any other sort of dedicating churches we hold to be superstitious. ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... not the government the sense to let these people alone? After all their revolutions and convulsions, they have sunk into perfect political indifference, and literally care not a straw whether they are governed by Napoleon, Nero, or Nebuchadnezzar. To be always appealing to them with Bonapartist demonstrations and manifestoes, is to awaken political sentiments, in them, and so to create a danger which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... few debase the greater part of our species below the order of men. What an affront to the King of the universe, to maintain that the happiness of a monster, sunk in debauchery and spreading desolation and murder among men, of a Caligula, a Nero, or a Charles, is more precious in his sight than that of millions of his suppliant creatures, who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God! No, in the judgment of heaven there is no other superiority among men than a superiority in wisdom ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... down, I hope. I haven't felt so flighty in a blue moon, and it's all your fault, Patricia Louise Kendall, with your tales about theaters and parties and the like! We'll have to put a muzzle on her, won't we, Judith?—like poor old Nero after he nipped Georgie Smith when Georgie tried to make him walk ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... certain virtues have dropped to zero, Left by the sun on the mountain's dewy side; Churchman's charities, tender as Nero, Indian suttee, heathen suicide, Service ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... courtiers; Alphonsus turned his head, and so did his parasites. [373]Sabina Poppea, Nero's wife, wore amber-coloured hair, so did all the Roman ladies in an instant, her fashion ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... his pen, but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death, "Qualis artifex pereo!" better than most history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle was mere rebellion, and that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... insensate slaughter; a highly gifted intellectual, he has had to pursue a policy of insane stupidity. Twenty-five years ago a professor of the University of Munich, Dr. Quidde, compared the Kaiser to Caligula. The analogy between William and Caligula or Nero points to another analogy, that between Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg and Seneca, the ill-fated counsellor of the Caesars. Read in the Annals of Tacitus the speech of Seneca to Nero, and you will perhaps understand the position of Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg in the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... reach, but they felt it to be indecent to shout or exult on the spot where he was breathing his last. Rome, so long supposed the capital of Christendom, certainly took a very pagan view of this act, and the piece represented on the occasion at the theatres was "The Death of Nero." ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... power of much which is called Christianity? Consider Catholics eating their God: is that the worship of the Father in spirit and truth? Think of the religious wars, of the religious persecutions: did natural religion ever do anything as bad as this? We cry out against Nero, who covered Christians with pitch, and burned them as torches in the amphitheatre. But how many were thus tortured? Perhaps ten, perhaps twenty, or let us say a hundred. But, according to Llorente, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... 17, to the famous Jerom Bignon, Advocate-General: After reading it over and over, he remained satisfied that it was the same which Photius had seen, and which St. Jerom, Clement of Alexandria, and before them St. Irenaeus, had; and which was written in the end of Nero's reign, or some years before that of Vespasian; and that it was most authentic, without the least interpolation. As to the second Epistle, ascribed to St. Clement, he did not think it written by that Pope: but at the same time did not question its ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... the motive power to develop into absolute wickedness. Vanity can be savagely suspicious and diabolically cruel. What are the two typical names which stand revealed in history as the names of the two vainest men that ever lived? Nero ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... great and sore assaults to lay against our armour? Yea, he is a crafty warrior, and also of great power in this world; he hath great ordnance and artillery; he hath great pieces of ordnance, as mighty kings and emperors, to shoot against God's people, to persecute or kill them; Nero, the great tyrant, who slew Paul, and divers other. Yea, what great pieces hath he had of bishops of Rome, which have destroyed whole cities and countries, and have slain and burnt many! What great ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... copra-trees. A comical old fellow, Pedro Pocpotoc (a name derived from chicken language), used to live here, and on moonlight nights, planting his fat feet on the window-sill, like a droll caricature of Nero, he would sing Visayan songs to the accompaniment of a cheap violin. A talkative old baker lived a short way down the street with his three daughters. They were always busy pounding rice in wooden mortars with long poles, thus making rice-flour, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... the story of the cruelties of this Paraguayan Nero. With his suspicious nature and his absolute power, his subjects had no more security for their lives than those of old Rome. Plots against his person—which he identified with the state—served him as a pretext for seizing ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... thirteenth year after Hannibal had crossed the Alps that any considerable reinforcement was sent to aid the Carthaginian general. Then his brother Hasdrubal, having raised an army in Spain and Southern Gaul, crossed the Alps to join him. But he was met, as he marched south, by the consuls Livius and Nero with an army greatly superior to his own; and was crushed by them on the river Metaurus, the Spanish and Ligurian troops being ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... old. I have no pets now, but I had a Newfoundland dog named Nero, and a pussy named Major. On the 14th of April I was in the woods, and I found two buttercups. They were the first wild flowers I ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... The music that Nero had played him, When Rome was touched off with a match; Why the king let the lady upbraid him For burning her buns ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... Agrippina, in her rage with her son Nero, threatens to take her stepson, Britannicus, to the camp of the Legion, and there assert his right to the throne, she invokes the spirit of his father, whom she had poisoned, and the manes of the Silani, whom she had murdered. 'Simul ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... by the reply of a dull student to the earnest teacher who strove to arouse in him some spontaneous opinion on human conduct. With enthusiasm and dramatic force, this instructor exhibited the career of Nero,—showed his list of crimes natural and unnatural, personal and political; his indecency, and cruelty, demanding what should be said of the monster. The student, spurred by questions, some-what fretfully responded, "He ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Dictionaries for the correct and original meaning of 'impero,' (I govern,) and 'imperium.' The word 'Empire' has an unpleasant ring from some points of view and to some minds. One thinks of Roman Emperors, Domitian, Nero, Tiberius,—of the word 'imperious,' and of the French 'Empire' under Napoleon I. and Napoleon III. The Latin word means 'the giving of commands.' All depends on whether the commands given are good, and the ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... not ascribe to political institutions that paramount influence which it is the feeling of this age to attribute to them. The Senate that confronted Brennus in the Forum was the same body that registered in an after-age the ribald decrees of a Nero. Trial by jury, for example, is looked upon by all as the Palladium of our liberties; yet a jury, at a very recent period of our own history, the reign of Charles II., was a tribunal as iniquitous as the Inquisition.' ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Delos In the frescoed halls are dancing, As two thousand years before now;— Pantheon and Coliseum In their spacious fate have sheltered All the world's swift evolution;— Where a Hermes from that corner Saw the footsteps firm of Cato, Pontifex in the procession,— Saw then Nero as Apollo Lifted up take sacrifices, Saw then Gregory, the wrathful, Riding forth to rule in spirit Over all the known world's kingdoms,— Saw then Cola di Rienzi Homage pay to freedom's goddess 'Mid the Roman people's paeans,— ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... succeeded to his charge did little more for about sixty years than secure the frontiers of the Roman province. But in the beginning of Nero's reign the command in Britain was devolved on Suetonius Paulinus, a soldier of merit and experience, who, when he came to view the theatre of his future operations, and had well considered the nature of the country, discerned evidently that the war must of necessity be protracted ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... back from fire to store. No fine firm fabric ever yet grew like a gourd. Nero's House of Gold was not raised in a day; nor the Mexican House of the Sun; nor the Alhambra; nor the Escurial; nor Titus's Amphitheater; nor the Illinois Mounds; nor Diana's great columns at Ephesus; nor Pompey's proud Pillar; nor the Parthenon; nor the Altar of Belus; nor Stonehenge; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Nero used to call mushrooms the relish of the gods, because Claudius, his predecessor, having been, as was supposed, poisoned by them, was, after his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... in Boeotia about 46 A.D.; died in 125; celebrated for his forty-six "Lives of Greeks and Romans," and for works on philosophical and moral subjects; settled at Athens at the time of Nero's visit in 66, and traveled in Greece, Egypt and Italy; being in Rome during the reign of Vespasian; lived at Chaeronea in the latter part of his life ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... inspired the pictorial conception. No one, however, who looked upon his suffering martyrs, could suppose for a moment that he honoured their martyrdom. They were but the vehicles for his hate of humanity. He was the torturer, and not Diocletian or Nero. ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... submission, and has sent uncountable millions through wretched lives to shameful graves. [Great applause.] "With a lot of myths and superstitions, derived from a dark and barbarous past, it has prevented civilization from protecting mankind; and, Nero-like, has fiddled away upon its ridiculous dogmas while the world was ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... overcome. And now there was a woman in the world who defied him, a woman forsooth whom he had bought, whom he had married, who had been handed over to him, but who would never, never be his. Ah! in the old days, to subdue her, he would if needful have fired Rome like a Nero; but now he asked himself what he could possibly do to prevent her from belonging to another. That galling thought made the blood gush from his gaping wound. How that woman and her lover must deride him! And to think that they had sought ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... mob clamored as though Nero sat there and lions had been loosed in the arena. The strange medley of cries smote on the ears of Allis. How like wild beasts they were, how like wolves! She closed her eyes, for she was weary of the struggle, and listened. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?" Compared with the kingdom to which he belonged, what was Rome with all its power? Compared with the King whom he served, what was Nero with all his glory? Compared with the joys of holy living, what was the world with all its attractions? But he failed to realise these great facts, and hence he acted the part of a weakling; he bent as a reed, when he ought to have stood firm as an oak. If all the first disciples had been made of ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... will be found noble, it will be estimated great, it will be ranked good, it will be considered sublime, in a Socrates, in an Aristides, in a Cato: it will be thought abject, it will be viewed as despicable, it will be called corrupt, in a Claudius, in a Sejanus, in a Nero: its energies will be admired, we shall be delighted with its manner, fascinated with its efforts, in a Shakespeare, in a Corneille, in a Newton, in a Montesquieu: its baseness will be lamented, when we behold mean, contemptible men, who ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... not yet, as the reader will understand from the foregoing explanation, either the fine colonnade of Bernini, or the dancing fountains, or that Egyptian obelisk which, according to Pliny, was set up by the Pharaoh at Heliopolis, and transferred to Rome by Caligula, who set it up in Nero's Circus, where it remained till 1586. Now, as Nero's Circus was situate on the very ground where St. Peter's now stands, and the base of this obelisk covered the actual site where the vestry now is, it looked like a gigantic needle shooting up from the middle of truncated columns, ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was hurried like lightning. After a short time the angel caused me to look, and I could see the wretched knight suffering a terrible steeping in a frightful boiling furnace, in company with Cain, Nimrod, Esau, Tarquin, Nero, Caligula, and the others who were the founders of genealogies, and were the first to ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... not, man-of-war's-men! that by the Parthian magi the ocean was held sacred? Did not Tiridates, the Eastern monarch, take an immense land circuit to avoid desecrating the Mediterranean, in order to reach his imperial master, Nero, and ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... slain and their forces routed, while he almost annihilated the Roman army which was besieging Locri. In 207 B.C. his brother Hasdrubal marched from Spain to his aid, but was surprised, defeated, and slain at the Metaurus by the consul Nero. By the barbarous commands of Nero, Hasdrubal's head was flung into the camp of Hannibal, who had been till then in ignorance of his brother's doom. The battle of the Metaurus sealed the fate of "the lion's brood"—of the great house of Hamilcar. But for four years Hannibal stood at ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... there was a family of peasants who were credited with a miraculous power of curing rheumatic disorders. Lord Denbigh succeeded in getting one of the family, an old man, to come, and learned from him the legend of the cure. The belief was that in the reign of Nero, the Apostles Peter and Paul took refuge in the hut of an old couple named Cancelli, near Foligno, and, as a proof of gratitude, gave to the male descendants of the family living near the spot the power of curing rheumatic disorders to the end ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... to her; you might let her hear from your consecrated lips that she is not a castaway because she is a Roman; that she may be a Nero and yet a Christian; that she may owe her black locks and dark cheeks to the blood of the pagan Caesars, and yet herself be a child of grace; you will tell her this, won't ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... spoke, and following the direction of his eyes, I turned. In a dark recess in that part of the room stood a bronze statue, some six feet in height. It portrayed the great mystic in a long habit fashioned after a monkish cowl, and his hair and face reminded me of a bust of Nero I had once seen in the gallery of the Louvre. Ombos told me that the life of Albert Magnus had been written by Dr. Sighart. This Dominican, magnus in magia, major in philosophia, maximus in theologia, was distinguished alike for his knowledge of the black art and ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... the way of his slightest caprice. He often puts me in mind of Nero. With the same indifference to the welfare of others with which Nero amused himself by burning down Rome, he is amusing himself by pulling ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Nero, the most infamous of the emperors, committed rapes on the stage of the public theaters of Rome, disguised as a ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Woodlawn for the reception of Mrs. Graham, who came up early in October, bringing with her a larger train of house servants than was often seen in Woodford county. About three weeks after her arrival, invitations were issued for a party or "house warming," as the negroes termed it. Nero, Durward's valet, brought the tiny notes to Mr. Livingstone's, giving them into the care of Carrie, who took them ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... Black Nero was a magnificent mastiff, with not a white hair on his back. He had run into Dame Dorothy's one Fifth of November from the forest, when quite a little puppy; and she had housed him and fed him ever since; and now she was so much ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... embarrassing facts and all gloomy questions. A matter for declamations, say the clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer; Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers. I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to "that ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... is the giant with the hundred hands that wields the sceptre; the tyrannical bead-roll by which the kingdom prays backward, and at every curse drops a committee-man. Let Charles be waived whose condescending clemency aggravates the defection, and make Nero the question, better a Nero than a committee. There is less execution by a ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... you expect of a people whose governor calls the gentry 'the upper crust of society,' and who in their turn see an affinity between a Scotch and a Roman fiddle, and denounce him as a Nero? But then who looks, as he says, for taste in a colony? it is only us Englishmen who have any. Yes, he calls this place 'Epaigwit.' It has a distingu appearance on his letters. It has now a name, the next thing is 'a ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the reign of Nero, an earthquake overthrew a considerable portion of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Scarcely had the inhabitants in some measure recovered from their alarm, and begun to rebuild their shattered edifices, when a still more terrible catastrophe occurred, and the first recorded ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... pluck his Pagan life from gloom, and wed her day unto his night. But what of all this now?—The sin that is "worse than witchcraft" is upon him! His hands are stained with innocent blood! He has spurned his benefactress with the foot of Nero, "removed her candlestick", and left her in hunger, cold and ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... much depravity. But the confessions of pirates show how habitual scenes of blood and violence harden the heart of man; and history abundantly proves that despotic power produces a fearful species of moral insanity. The wanton cruelties of Nero, Caligula, Domitian, and many of the officers of the Inquisition, seem like the frantic acts ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... time out to reply. "You know who I was about fifty reincarnations ago? Nero, burning Rome." Theosophists never hesitated to make fun of their religion, that way. The way they see it, a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of. "And look at the job I did on Moscow, a ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... fittest that Julius Ceasar, [tr. note: sic] one of the grandest rulers of all ages, should succumb under the daggers of Brutus and Cassius: that Paul and Seneca should die by authority of their inferior, Nero; that Popery, rotten to the core and represented by men who would have brought on the ignominous [tr. note: sic] collapse or extinction of every other dynasty in the days of the Roman pornocracy, should survive, ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... through all the city. Xenophon, you and I are in this death Eternally bound. This husband have I slain To lift unto the windy chair of the world Nero, my son. Your silence I will buy With endless riches; but a ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... the inherent defects of democratic governments, and fatal as the results finally and inevitably are, we need only glance at the reigns of Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula, of Heliogabalus and Caracalla, of Domitian and Commodus, to recognize that the difference between freedom and despotism is as wide as that between Heaven and Hell. The cruelty, baseness, and insanity of tyrants are incredible. Let him who complains of the fickle humors ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... would escape death himself, it became necessary to rejoice at the death of his friend or relative. Under Nero, many went to return thanks to the gods for their relatives whom he had put to death. At least, an assumed air of contentment was necessary; for even fear was sufficient to render one guilty. Everything gave the tyrant umbrage. If a citizen was popular, he was considered ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... little else since his kindergarten days than to think up trials for those who would not bow to his peevish will. He seemed to be gifted in finding out exactly what would be the finest kind of torture for any given soul who happened to be his victim. He had the mind of Nero and the spirit of a mean little beast. The wonder, the great miracle was, that he had not in some way discovered that Ruth had been visiting the camp, and taken his revenge before she left. This was the first thought that came to Cameron when he found himself shut into the murky atmosphere. ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... which makes us do what is righteous.... Hence man is righteous by doing what is righteous.... Thereupon Osiander, in order to say something also concerning forgiveness of sins, tears remission of sins from righteousness. He expressly declares that the sins are forgiven to all men; Nero however, is damned because he does not possess the essential righteousness; and this, he says, is God Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.... Osiander contends that man is just on account of the indwelling of God, or on account of ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Zerviah began to notice that things were somehow different. He found some flowers near his table. He was reading about Nero at the time; but he put aside his Gibbon, and fondled the flowers instead. Bernardine did not ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... succeed Malhar Rao, one of those fantastic persons we read about in fairy stories but seldom find in real life. For extravagant phantasies and barbaric splendors he beat the world. He surpassed even those old spendthrifts of the Roman Empire, Nero, Caligula and Tiberius. He spent a million of rupees to celebrate the marriage ceremonies of a favorite pigeon of his aviary, which was mated with one belonging to his prime minister. But the most remarkable of his extravagant freaks ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Nero was king by accident in show; But Socrates by nature in good sooth; By right of both Augustus; luck and truth Less ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... light and airy, which was smooth and sparkling, which was stitched and of buckskin, so that it hindered not the movements of his arms outside. Over that he put outside an over-mantle of raven's feathers, which Simon Magus had made [1]as a gift[1] [2]for Darius[2] [3]Nero,[3] king of the Romans. Darius bestowed it upon Conchobar; Conchobar gave it to Cuchulain; Cuchulain presented it to [4]Laeg son of Riangabair,[4] his charioteer. The same charioteer took the crested, plated, four-bordered battle-cap with variety of every colour ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... looked back on it all, with his friend's comment in his mind, he began to see, not how clever or diplomatic had been the old attitude, but how absolutely and obviously essential. It was possible indeed for Peter to be a subject of Nero in things pertaining to Caesar; but how could that be possible to Peter's successor when the Kingdom of Christ which he ruled on earth had become a Supra-national Society to which the nations of the earth ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... as that tyrant old, The mocking witness of his crime, In thee shall loathing eyes behold The Nero of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sun. Still I should desire greater strength and a stouter bow, wilder creatures to combat. The intense life of the senses, there is never enough for them. I envy Semiramis; I would have been ten times Semiramis. I envy Nero, because of the great concourse of beauty he saw. I should like to be loved by every beautiful woman on earth, from the swart Nubian to ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... time of his birth. Till 48, the date of his mother's execution, he was looked upon as the heir presumptive; but Agrippina, the new wife of Claudius, soon persuaded the feeble emperor to adopt Lucius Domitius, known later as Nero, her son by a previous marriage. After the accession of Nero, Agrippina, by playing on his fears, induced him to poison Britannicus at a banquet (A.D. 55). A golden statue of the young prince was set up by the emperor Titus. Britannicus is the subject ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the first century A. D. He was a Greek military surgeon of Cilician origin who served under Nero, and in him the Greek intellect is obviously beginning to flag. His work is prodigiously important for the history of botany, yet so far as rational medicine is concerned he is almost negligible. He begins at the wrong end, either giving lists of drugs with the symptoms that ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Nero did roused attention, even in those nearest him; hence Vinicius was alarmed. He regained self-control, and began imperceptibly to look toward Caesar. Lygia, who, embarrassed at the beginning of the banquet, had seen Nero as in a mist, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... think you're an Emp'ror Nero?" inquired Hiram, sarcastically. "And even that old cuss wa'n't so skin-tight as you be. He provided sports for the people, and it helped him hold his ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... who lived in the days of Nero and the apostles, has left an account of Babylon as he saw it, as late as the first century of our era. Still the Euphrates swept beneath its walls, dividing the city into halves, with great palaces on ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... no need of praetorian cohorts, or of countless legions to guard them, but were defended by their own good lives, the good-will of their subjects, and the attachment of the senate. In like manner he will perceive in the case of Caligula, Nero, Vitellius, and ever so many more of those evil emperors, that all the armies of the east and of the west were of no avail to protect them from the enemies whom their bad and depraved lives raised up against them. And were the history of these emperors ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... 'The Emperor Nero,' said Janet. 'He killed Harry's friend Seneca in the eighty-somethingth year of his age; an old man, and—hush, grandada!' She ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sang, and danced. His power was irresistible and electric. As a composer he ranks very high. His greatest works are the Ocean Symphony, Dramatic Symphony, and a character sketch for grand orchestra called "Ivan the Terrible;" his operas, "Children of the Heath," "Feramors," "Nero," "The Maccabees," "Dimitri Donskoi," and the "Demon;" the oratorios "Paradise Lost" and "Tower of Babel;" and a long and splendid catalogue of chamber, salon, and concert music, besides some beautiful songs which are great ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... matter did require," "so many tears that her chamber-boy could scarce get napkins enough to dry her eyes." With absurdly unconscious offensiveness and egotism Knox began acquaintance with his sovereign by remarking that he was as well {366} content to live under her as Paul under Nero. Previously he had maintained that the government was set up to control religion; now he informed Mary that "right religion took neither original nor authority from worldly princes but from the Eternal God alone." "'Think ye,' quoth she, 'that subjects, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... HIERO. Why, Nero thought it no disparagement, And kings and emperours haue tane delight To make experience of their wit ...
— The Spanish Tragedie • Thomas Kyd
... Nero $1.25 net Ulysses $1.25 net The Sin of David $1.25 net Poignant dramas which, according to the best critics, mark their author as the greatest writer of dramatic verse in ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... but little civil authority. Justice was administered in the name and by the laws of Rome, and taxes were paid immediately to the emperor. Several of the Roman governors severely oppressed and persecuted the Jews, and at length, in the reign of Nero they openly revolted from the Romans. Then began the Jewish war, which was terminated after an obstinate defence and unparalleled suffering, on the part of the Jews, by the total destruction of the city and temple of Jerusalem, by Titus son of Vespasian the Roman ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... fen-country. Ultimately Beric is defeated and carried captive to Rome, where he succeeds in saving a Christian maid by slaying a lion in the arena, and is rewarded by being made the personal protector of Nero. Finally, he escapes and returns to Britain, where he becomes a wise ruler ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... In Europe men of distinguishing ability have seemed to revel in this form of inquiry and to have prosecuted it without the slightest reference to the cruel and revolting features associated with it. They have made of it a school of Nero in which brutality became a ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... the finger Of Lucie he fitted a ring: A month or two later They made him dictator, In place of the elderly king: He was lauded by pulpit, and boomed by press, And no one had ever a chance to guess, Beholding this hero Who ruled like a Nero, His valor was ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... have been worth narrating because of their abounding in deeds of great merit, such as the lives of Washington, Gladstone, Frances E. Willard, and Joan of Arc. The lives of others have been thought worth narrating because of their great wickedness, as the lives of Nero and ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... practice of raising houses to a considerable height in the air. But the loftiness of the buildings, which often consisted of hasty work and insufficient material, was the cause of frequent and fatal accidents, and it was repeatedly enacted by Augustus as well as by Nero that the height of private dwellings should not exceed the measure of seventy feet ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... Salinator. This man, the father of the Salinator mentioned in 7, was consul in 219 and subdued the Illyrians, but was condemned for misappropriation of public moneys and went into exile. In 210 he was induced to return by the desire of the senate. In 207 he became consul with C. Claudius Nero, and defeated Hasdrubal in the great battle of the Metaurus. In 204 Livius was censor with Nero as his colleague, and won his name Salinator by imposing a tax on salt. The title was bestowed in ridicule, but clung to the family. Salinator was a relative ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... can't get the hang of Henderson. He doesn't seem to care what his wife does. He's a cynical cuss. The other night, at dinner, in Washington, when the thing was talked over, he said: 'My dear, I don't know why you shouldn't do that as well as anything. Let's build a house of gold, as Nero did; we are in the Roman age.' Carmen looked dubious for a moment, but she said, 'You know, Rodney, that you always used to say that some time you would show New York what a house ought to be in this climate.' 'Well, go on,' and he laughed. 'I suppose lightning will not strike that sooner ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Charlottenburg. As Effi walked up and down the long front, between the Palace and the orange trees, she studied time and again the many Roman emperors standing there, found a remarkable resemblance between Nero and Titus, gathered pine cones that had fallen from the trees, and then walked arm in arm with her husband toward the Spree till they came to ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... began to move into the west. Beaut looked at his mother and at the deserted streets of Coal Creek and put his head down upon his hands and in the crowded car before the gaping people wept with joy that he had seen the last of youth. He looked back at Coal Creek, full of hate. Like Nero he might have wished that all of the people of the town had but one head so that he might have cut it off with a sweep of a sword or knocked it into the gutter ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... for the local financial uneasiness; and the one made the other ridiculous—first, that the nation's Executive was mad as Nero and had deliberately begun a senseless holocaust involving the entire nation; the other that a "panic" was due, anyway. It resembled the logic of the White Queen of immortal memory, who began screaming before she pricked her finger ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... weeks from that time it was pretty well known through the neighbourhood that Dick Lawson had given out that he could make his Rover whip Markland's Nero, a noble animal that had never been matched by any dog around. Markland's son felt his pride in his dog touched at this, and challenged Dick to a battle. The time was set, and the place, a neighbouring field, chosen. Old and ...
— Who Are Happiest? and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... anxiously attentive as if we had been the most perfect friends. My mouth was shut up by the command I had received from the Queen our mother, so that I only answered his dissembled concern with sighs, like Burrus in the presence of Nero, when he was dying by the poison administered by the hands of that tyrant. The sighs, however, which I vented in my brother's presence, might convince him that I attributed my sickness rather to his ill offices ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... of Alexandria came on an embassy to Rome 39 The works of Philo are saturated with Stoic ideas and he displays an exact acquaintance with their terminology Seneca Exiled to Corsica 41 Recalled from exile 49 Forced by Nero to commit suicide 65 His Moral Epistles and philosophical works generally are written from the Stoic standpoint though somewhat affected by Eclecticism Plutarch Flor. 80 The Philosophical works of Plutarch which have most bearing upon the Stoics are— ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... his death is one of the noblest antiquity records; but his life was deeply marked by the taint of flattery, and not free from the taint of avarice, and it is unhappily certain that, after its accomplishment, he lent his pen to conceal or varnish one of the worst crimes of Nero. The courage of Lucan failed signally under torture, and the flattery which he bestowed upon Nero, in his "Pharsalia," ranks with the Epigrams of Martial as probably the extreme limit of sycophancy to which ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... believer and the exasperated unbeliever, Christianity is being turned from a practice to a polemic, and if we are to recall the old spirit we must recall the old earnestness and simplicity of the early Martyrs. We do not hear that they called Nero an atheist, but we do hear that they went singing to the arena. By their example we may recover the spirit of song, and have done with invective. If we find music and joyousness in the old conception, it is not in the fashion of the time to explain it away in some ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... is no ice here. A great deal of snow comes down from the great stock up yonder, and from the valley between Piz Accio and Piz Nero, here on the right—avalanches of snow. We could not walk along here in March; it would be madness. But it soon wastes, ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... enforced in Europe? Who can read of the tortures there inflicted without shuddering with horror? It is not necessary to go back to the times of the Romans with their amphitheaters and gladiators, and with their throwing of Christians to wild animals, or to Nero using Christians as torches in his garden. How long is it since witches were burned, not only in Europe by the thousand, but in enlightened and Christian New England? although it is true that the numbers there burned were relatively ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... was riding on his black horse, Nero, when he saw this very beautiful girl, in distress. He asked her what was the matter; she told him that she was falsely accused—that the ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... doth in the east behold, And those who do remain In western lands or dwell under Booetes' wain And those whose skins are tanned With southern winds, which roast and burn the parched sand. What? Could this glorious might Restrain the furious rage of wicked Nero's spite? But oh! mishap most bad, Which doth the wicked sword to cruel ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... age, and at his full height, he was hardly so tall as Helen. Swarthy of complexion, his hair dark as the night, his eyes large and lustrous, with what Milton calls "quel sereno fulgor d' amabil nero," his frame nervous and slender, he looked compact ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... we have been conjecturing has been a mere cloud city. The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who, writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the landing of Caesar), in that style of his so full of vigour and so sharp in outline, that it seems fit rather to be engraved on steel than written on perishable paper, says that Londinium, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... philosopher to commit suicide, his wife insisted on opening her veins, and dying with him. After long resistance, he consented, saying, "I will not deprive you of the honor of so noble an example." But Nero would not allow her to die thus, and had her veins bound up; not, however, until she had lost so much blood that her blanched face, for the rest of her days, gave rise to the well known rhetorical comparison, "as ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... felt that it had been betrayed; Jay was burned in effigy; Hamilton was stoned at a public meeting; State legislatures declared the treaty unconstitutional. Washington was attacked so fiercely that he said the language used "could scarcely be applied to a Nero, to a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket." When Congress met in 1795 an effort was made to prevent the necessary appropriations for carrying out the treaty. It was only the great personal popularity of Washington that saved the country from ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... succeeded in breaking through to the Pyrenees with reinforcements for Hannibal. The attempt, however, was checked for the moment; and before it could be renewed, the fall of Capua released twelve thousand veteran Romans, who were sent to Spain under Claudius Nero, a man of exceptional ability, to whom was due later the most decisive military movement made by any Roman general during the Second Punic War. This seasonable reinforcement, which again assured the shaken grip ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... formed of crumbled brickwork. Nothing has been told—nothing can be told—to satisfy the belief of any but the Roman antiquary. [The Palatine was the site of the successive "Domus" of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, and of the Domus Transitoria of Nero, which perished when Rome was burnt. Later emperors—Vespasian, Domitian, Septimius Severus—added to the splendour of the name-giving Palatine. "The troops of Genseric," says Hobhouse (Hist. Illust., p. 206), "occupied the Palatine, and despoiled it of all its riches... ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... nicknamed "the Step-Father of his country." The imputation on his honor stung so keenly that he declared "he would rather be in his grave than in the Presidency," and in private correspondence he complained that he had been assailed "in terms so exaggerated and indecent as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket." The only rejoinder which his dignity permitted him to make is that contained in his Farewell Address, dated September 17, 1796, in which he made a modest estimate of his services and ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... call being ahead of the time," she demanded shrilly, "getting behind science to behave like Nero? And for my part I don't see anything whatever about the island that is ahead of the times. You haven't even got silk shoe-laces. I actually had to use a cloth-of-gold sandal strap to lace my oxfords, and when I lost a cuff-link I was obliged to make shift with two sides of one of Queen ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... century after the Saviour's Birth there were living three great writers who were united in close friendship, viz. the younger Pliny, and the historians Tacitus and Suetonius. Suetonius wrote lives of the first twelve Caesars, and, in his history of Nero (A.D. 54-68), mentions the punishment of Christians, "a set of men of a new and mischievous superstition." Tacitus, describing the same reign[1], and the burning of Rome (A.D. 64), {107} shows that Nero tried to throw ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... he is too the licenser. Has he been a father? he will stand too for godfather. Had he acted Pyramus, he would have been Moonshine too, and the Hole in the Wall. That first author of 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' (such as his) Nero, was of the same temper. He could not be contented with the Roman empire, unless he were too his own precentor; and lamented only the detriment that mankind must sustain at his death, in ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... submit to the loss of a remote province without much difficulty. He therefore acted as if Rome had no rights in this part of Asia, established his brother at Artaxata, and did not so much as send an embassy to Nero to excuse or explain his acts. These proceedings caused much uneasiness in Italy. If Nero himself cannot be regarded as likely to have felt very keenly the blow struck at the prestige of the Empire, yet there were those among his advisers who could well understand ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... six hours. In the history of the Caesars occur portents of all three kinds; for at the death of Julius the earth was shrouded in darkness, the birth of Augustus was heralded by a star, and the downfall of Nero by a comet. So, too, in one of the Christian legends clustering about the crucifixion, darkness overspread the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour. Neither the silence regarding it of the only evangelist who claims to have been present, nor the fact that observers like Seneca ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... as early as the sixth century B. C., we are all familiar with Xenophanes' poem(1) complaining that the gods were credited with the worst crimes of mortals—in fact, with abominations only known in the orgies of Nero and Elagabalus. We hear Pindar refusing to repeat the tale which told him the blessed were cannibals.(2) In India we read the pious Brahmanic attempts to expound decently the myths which made Indra the slayer of a Brahman; the sinner, that is, of the unpardonable ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... it would seem as if political and military precedents of even a century ago could have no possible value. As for our present "anxious morality," as Maeterlinck calls it, it seems equally clear that the sinful extravagances of Sardanapalus and Nero, and the conspicuous public virtue of Aristides and the Horatii, are alike impotent to ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... antiquity in short longed to know the fountains whence flowed the famous river, and longed in vain—exploration does not seem to have been very becoming to the other sex either. Madame Tinne came further up the river than the centurions sent by Nero Caesar, and showed such indomitable pluck as to reflect honour on her race. I know nothing about her save what has appeared in the public papers, but taking her exploration along with what was done by Mrs. Baker, no long time could have elapsed before the laurels ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... decorations were food for endless chatter. Alanna, because Marg'ret was so genuinely fond of her, lived in the seventh heaven of bliss, trotting about with the bigger girls, joining in their plans, and running their errands. The "grandchildren" were to have a play, entitled "By Nero's Command," in which both Teresa and Marg'ret sustained prominent parts, and even Alanna was allotted one line to speak. It became an ordinary thing, in the Costello house, to hear the little girl earnestly repeating this line to herself at ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... that manner; it resembled (as near as I can describe it) that famous place called Sherrick-fair, or a Staffordshire-Wake. While we were applying our admiration that way, we arrived at a small hut erected for that purpose, where Nero the tyrant, like a blind fiddler, was surrounded by a confused tribe of all sorts and sexes, like another Orpheus ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... was given the fellowship of the most blessed Apostle Paul, that chosen vessel who not at a different time, as heretics prate, but at one time and on one and the same day by a glorious death, was crowned together with Peter in agony in the city of Rome under the Emperor Nero. And they equally consecrated the said holy Roman Church to Christ and placed it over all the others in the whole world by their presence and ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... quite true, as you say, the polls are only open once in four years—when men once get the habit—who knows where it will end—it is hard enough to keep them at home now! No, history is full of unhappy examples of men in public life; Nero, Herod, King John—you ask me to set these names before your young people. Politics has a blighting, demoralizing influence on men. It dominates them, hypnotizes them, pursues them even after their earthly career is over. Time and again it has been proven ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... and favourite of the Emperor Nero, was the master of Epictetus, the lame slave and Stoic philosopher, who was amongst the greatest of pagan moralists. Epaphroditus, who treated his slave with great cruelty, is said to have been one day twisting his leg for ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... Don't you remember, mother, and you, Ephraim, the curious little switch Nero used to give his tail whenever he was turned around? Well, this 'spook' horse did just the same thing. Oh, I ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... theatres to be opened, though they felt the pangs of hunger now. They {214} retorted readily when there was some speech of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Their city was not yet on fire, they said, and Napoleon, the Nero of the catastrophe, could not fiddle because he had no ear for music! The Cirque National was opened on October 23rd, though fuel was running short and the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... which command it on either side with friendly fortifications, in which lie the keys of the place. Historically, Besancon is a place of great interest. It witnessed the catastrophe of Julius Vindex, who had made terms with Rufus, the general sent against him by Nero, but was attacked by the troops of Rufus before they learned the alliance concluded between the two generals. Vindex was so much grieved by the slaughter of his troops, and the blow thus struck, by an unhappy accident, at his designs against the ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... transformation which is passing over our Society in some such abrupt and even grotesque image at the end of it. The beginnings of a decline, in every age of history, have always had the appearance of being reforms. Nero not only fiddled while Rome was burning, but he probably really paid more attention to the fiddle than to the fire. The Roi Soleil, like many other soleils, was most splendid to all appearance a little before sunset. And if I ask myself what will ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... thoughtful men of the race along these lines. They have been restrained by selfish, personal and petty motives, while the constitutional rights which vitalize their citizenship have been "denied or abridged" by legislation of certain of the States and by public opinion, even as Nero fiddled while Rome burned. If they had been actuated by a strong pride of ancestry and of race, if they had felt that injury to one was injury to all, if they had hung together instead of hanging separately, their place in the civil ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al. |
