"Tacitus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her monuments, that the position of women was high; the wife was enthroned by the side of her husband, and impurity was condemned by the moral sense of the nation? What was it that enabled our barbaric ancestors, the Teutons, to overthrow the whole power of civilized Rome? On the authority of Tacitus, we know that they were singularly pure. Their women were held in the highest reverence, and believed to have something divine about them, some breath of prophetic insight. Their young men were not allowed to marry till they were five-and-twenty—in ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... the least repute has committed himself to the theory. Desperate attempts have been made to discredit the Christian writers of the first two centuries; it has been emphasized that Jesus is not mentioned in secular writers of the period, and the passage in Tacitus ("Annals", XV:44) has been explained away as a Christian interpolation, or, more gaily, by reviving the wild notion that Poggio Bracciolini forged the whole of the "Annals". But such trifling with history and literature does not serve. No scholar accepts the theory about Poggio—and yet if ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... The first merit of classics is that "they are languages; not particular sciences, nor definite branches of knowledge, but literatures". Under this head we have such glowing sentences as these: "Think of the many elements of thought a boy comes in contact with when he reads Caesar and Tacitus in succession, Herodotus and Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle". "See what is implied in having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides or Demosthenes; what light will have been shed on the essence and laws of human existence, on political ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... mournfully at the seething mass of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity. Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory VII, could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the Caesars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment of a national ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... to the Atlantic Ocean; and on the North to the Danube and the Rhine; including the best part of the then known world. The Romans, therefore, were not improperly called rerum domini [266], and Rome, pulcherrima rerum [267], maxima rerum [268]. Even the historians, Livy and Tacitus, (156) actuated likewise with admiration, bestow magnificent epithets on the capital of their country. The succeeding emperors, in conformity to the advice of Augustus, made few additions to the empire. Trajan, however, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... affectaretur, Num quid vis? occupo. At ille, Noris nos, inquit; docti sumus. Hic ego: Pluris Hoc, inquam, mihi eris. Misere discedere quaerens, Ire modo ocyus, interdum consistere: in aurem Dicere nescio quid puero: cum sudor ad imos Manaret talos. O te, Bollane, cerebri Felicem: aiebam tacitus! Cum quidlibet ille Garriret, vicos, urbem laudaret; ut illi Nil respondebam: Misere cupis, inquit abire. Jamdudum video: sed nil agis: usque tenebo: Persequar: hinc quo nunc iter est tibi? Nil opus est te Circumagi: quemdam volo visere, non tibi notum: Trans ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... its occurrence resident with his mother at Misenum, where the Roman fleet lay, under the command of his uncle, the great author of the "Historia Naturalis". His account, contained in two letters to Tacitus (lib. vi. 16, 20), is not so much a narrative of the eruption, as a record of his uncle's singular death, yet it is of great interest as yielding the impressions of an observer. The translation which follows is ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... I said, it had so much woman in it,—muliebrity, as well as femineity;—no self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture of fifty generations. Sharp business habits, a lean soil, independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things for the larynx. Still, you hear noble voices among us,—I have known families famous for them,—but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... that of all the ancient systems of philosophy; though even in these, in point of theory, we might trace great liberality and consideration for human rights. Where could be found finer sentiments of liberty than in Demosthenes and Cicero? Where bolder assertions of the rights of mankind, than in Tacitus and Thucydides? But, alas! these were the holders of slaves: It was not so with those who had been converted to Christianity. He knew, however, that what he had been ascribing to Christianity had been imputed by others to the advances which philosophy had made. Each of the two parties ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... like the Celtic hill towns of Normandy and Brittany, it took Roman impulse to develop it into anything more beautiful and influential than the mere stockade or zareba of the aborigine. The first mention of London is supposed to be in the works of Tacitus, a century and a half after Caesar's invasion. From this it would appear that by the year 62, in the reign of Nero, Londinium was already a place ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... light up a whole range of distant thoughts and sympathies within us; which in an instant affect the sensibilities of men with a something new and unforeseen; and which awaken, if only for a passing moment, the faculty and response of the diviner mind. Tacitus does all this, and Burke does it, and that is why men who care nothing for Roman despots or for Jacobin despots, will still perpetually turn to those writers almost as if they were on the level of great poets or very ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... in the Annals of Tacitus, Book XII., chapter xxxi., Ille (Ostorius) ... detrahere arma suspectis, cinctosque castris Antonam et Sabrinam fluvios cohibere parat, which refers to the fortification of the Antona and Severn rivers by the Roman general ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... affair. Piracies were prevalent. All printers revised the work of classic authors if they saw fit, and often they were specially rewarded for it by the Church. It was about this time that some one slipped that paragraph into the works of Josephus about Jesus. The "Annals" of Tacitus were similarly doctored, if in fact they were not written entire, during the Sixteenth Century. It will be remembered that the only two references in contemporary literature to Jesus are those in Josephus and Tacitus, and these the ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Bonaparte hated Tacitus. He was an aristocrat, he said, and lied in his history. He had blackened the character of Nero merely because he was a republican. "That may be, sire," said ——, "but it is not the generally received opinion, and authorities sustain him." "Read Suetonius," said he. "Truly," said M. Gallatin, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... as he says, 'for treason I can not deliver opinion that there is any, but very much felony.' The queen apprehending it gladly, asked, 'How?' and 'wherein?' Mr. Bacon answered, 'Because he had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus.' It would do one good to see, perhaps, how many felonious appropriations of sentences, and quotations, and ideas, the application he recommends would bring to light in ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Legislation Spurzheim and Craniology French Revolution, 1830 Captain B. Hall and the Americans English Reformation Democracy Idea of a State Church Government French Gendarmerie Philosophy of young Men at the present Day Thucydides and Tacitus Poetry Modern Metre Logic Varro Socrates Greek Philosophy Plotinus Tertullian Scotch and English Lakes Love and Friendship opposed Marriage Characterlessness of Women Mental Anarchy Ear and Taste for Music different English Liturgy Belgian Revolution Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon The Reformation ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... scarcely more synthetic than French. This contrast is carried out in the style of their writers. Those in Nahuatl were lovers of amplification, of flowing periods, of Ciceronian fullness; the Mayas cultivated sententious brevity, they are elliptical, often to obscurity, and may be compared rather to Tacitus, in his ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... ruins in the fifth century. Indeed to permit the defeated princes, under certain restrictions, to enjoy their former rights and jurisdictions, was perfectly in accordance with the usual policy of the Romans, as we may learn from the testimony of Tacitus, who remarks, in reference to the British king Cogidunus, that they granted to him certain states according to ancient custom, and the reason assigned is that they might have even kings as instruments ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... sung in the palace (this rendering seems more appropriate here than 'temple') will be broken off, and the singers' voices will quaver into shrill shrieks, so suddenly will the judgment be. Then comes a picture as abrupt in its condensed terribleness as anything in Tacitus—'Many the corpses; everywhere they fling them; hush!' We see the ghastly masses of dead ('corpse' is in the singular, as if a collective noun), so numerous that no burial-places could hold them; and no ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... as extravagant and superstitious as Surius, and Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus and Pliny. Suetonius gives us prodigies, where Surius has miracles, but that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes a life ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Cambridge—Headmasters of various Grammar Schools, were all candidates. One Isaac Cook—Headmaster of Ripon—explained as shewing the high value of his Classical attainments that when he was elected to Ripon he was examined "with another candidate in Terence, Cicero, Tacitus, the Greek Testament and Demosthenes, ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... sea." In the valley of Siddim were five—Adrah, Zeboin, Zoar, Sodom and Gomorrah. Stephen of Byzantium mentions eight, and Strabo thirteen (engulphed) —but the last is out of all reason. It is said (Tacitus, Strabo, Josephus, Daniel of St. Saba, Nau, Maundrell, Troilo, D'Arvieux), that after an excessive drought, the vestiges of columns, walls, etc., are seen above the surface. At 'any' season, such remains may be discovered ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... Laborde. In that article, which was eagerly read in Paris, and which caused the suppression of the 'Merceure', occurred the famous phrase which has been since so often repeated: "In vain a Nero triumphs: Tacitus is already born in his Empire." This quotation leads me to repeat an observation, which, I believe, I have already made, viz. that it is a manifest misconception to compare Bonaparte to Nero. Napoleon's ambition might blind his vision to political crimes, but ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... while the tongue entirely changes, were almost all affixed by the conquerors; the manners and customs were wholly German; and the same picture of a fierce and bold liberty, which is drawn by the masterly pen of Tacitus, will suit those founders of the English government. The king, so far from being invested with arbitrary power, was only considered as the first among the citizens; his authority depended more on his personal qualities than on his station; he was even so far on ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... present concerned with the specific question of classical education; else, I might reasonably question the justice of calling an intellectual discipline, which embraces the study of Aristotle, Thucydides, and Tacitus, which involves Scholarship and Antiquities, imaginative; still so far I readily grant, that the cultivation of the "understanding," of a "talent for speculation and original inquiry," and of "the habit of pushing things ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... the genetic and historical importance of the subject to such an extent that, at best, their scholars ultimately turn into little Sanskritists, etymological spitfires, or reckless conjecturers; but not one of them can read his Plato or Tacitus with pleasure, as we old folk can. The public schools may still be seats of learning: not, however of the learning which, as it were, is only the natural and involuntary auxiliary of a culture that is directed towards the noblest ends; but ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... latter less than the former. (23) Witness the state of Rome, invincible by her enemies, but many times conquered and sorely oppressed by her own citizens, especially in the war between Vespasian and Vitellius. (24) (See Tacitus, Hist. bk. iv. for a description of the pitiable state ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... be anything? You can be positive enough where a pretty girl is concerned. She is pretty, though, and as deutsch as her ancestors were a century or two ago, when they left the Rhineland and crossed the sea. A pure blonde German type. Tacitus would have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... true. When nations, wearied with mental enjoyments, behold nothing in the refinement of manners but the germ of depravity, they are pleased with the idea, that in some distant region, in the first dawn of civilization, infant society enjoys pure and perpetual felicity. To this sentiment Tacitus owed a part of his success, when he sketched for the Romans, subjects of the Caesars, a picture of the manners of the inhabitants of Germany. The same sentiment gives an ineffable charm to the narrative of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... the vast quantity of information which his strong memory ever placed at his disposal, the far greater proportion must have been accumulated now. He made himself a first-rate mathematician; he devoured history—his chosen authors being Plutarch and Tacitus; the former the most simple painter that antiquity has left us of heroic characters—the latter the profoundest master of political wisdom. The poems of Ossian were then new to Europe, and generally received as authentic remains of another age and style of heroism. The dark and lofty ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... appearance, the Cimbri and the Teutones. They defeated the Roman armies sent against them, and, turning to the south and west, went on their way along the north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now France. They had no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they could neither read nor write: "Literarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant." Very little is to be found concerning them in the Roman writers. The books of Pliny which treated of this time ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... refer to the preachers who have given their opinion of me. In the first place I am obliged to them for acting as my agents. I think Mr. Hogan has been imposed upon. Tacitus is a poor witness—about like Josephus. I say again that we have not a word about Christ written by any human being who lived in the time of Christ—not a solitary word, and Mr. Hogan ought ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Mount Vesuvius. Notwithstanding these evidences that the extinct volcanoes of Eyfel have been in activity since the country acquired its present conformation, there are no historical records of their operations. There is, indeed, a passage in Tacitus referring to fires that issued from the earth near Cologne; but his description does not warrant the conclusion that the event to which he alludes was of the nature of a volcanic eruption. The Drachenfels on the eastern ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... times, the greatest of great historians, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Caesar, Tacitus, Macchiavelli, and Clarendon, have written, and some have themselves published, the annals of the passing age and of the events in which they participated. I do not venture on such an ambitious work; the day of history has not yet arrived ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... future of this pagan civilisation. It had its great elements, but the signs of disruption were already apparent and no one could foresee what would take its place. The mood of the time is reflected in the pages of Tacitus and Juvenal. Into this atmosphere came Christianity with its doctrine of the holy love of God and its adoring faith in Jesus. But both Judaism and Hellenism had already the tendency to look back toward a better and happier time and to think of the present ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... unspeakable mental terrors only known to the damned on earth, yet did not give over his blasphemies but endeavored to drag down with him to his own perdition, all who came within the evil spell of his power. And though Tiberius came in the succession of the Caesars, and though unmatchable Tacitus has embalmed his carrion, yet do I account this Yankee Jackson full as dignified a personage as he, and as well meriting his lofty gallows in history; even though he was a nameless vagabond without an epitaph, and ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... difference not easily to be mistaken between the lessening of men which is occasioned by the loftiness of the platform whence the observation is made, and that which is produced by the malignant envy of the observer; between the gloomy judicial ferocity of a Pope or a Tacitus, and the villain levity which revels in the contemplation of imputed faults, or that fiendishness of feeling which gloats and howls over the ruins of reputations ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... "high seriousness" which is the test of the greatest prose as of the finest poetry. Humor and pathos, tragedy and comedy, all find their place and glimpses of the pageant of human history flit through the pages. It would seem as if it were impossible to read extracts from Thucydides and Tacitus and Gibbon and not long to go to their histories and learn all that could be said by such men about the life of man upon earth, about Athens and Rome and the rise and fall of empires. Selections are unsatisfying and the better they are the more unsatisfying they ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... more, when huge inns will supersede the canopy of the skies, and down beds will make the memory of birch twigs and heather blossoms pass away, we give from authority the proceedings of an evening's rest, which the next generation will study with somewhat of the feeling of reading Tacitus De ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... were any nitrous, or saline waters. [134]Maxime autem lucos (or lacus) sale gignendo faecundos Coelo propinquare, precesque mortalium nusquam propius audiri firmiter erant persuasi; prout exemplo Hermundurorum docet testis omni exceptione major [135]Tacitus. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us, but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was auribus istius temporis accommodata. They who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so, even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries:—there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping guard over a commonplace book, or a papyrus, are all predestined. So great is their abstraction or their ecstasy, that nothing that goes on around ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... habit of fattening their fish. Old Izaak would have abhorred the very thought of casting a line for such prey: sickening thoughts of cannibalism would have filled him with horror. But C.P.C. consented to hunt one day, so he writes to Tacitus. Did he ride after the dogs, spear in hand, to kill the fierce wild-boar? Not he. He; sat down by the nets with tablets on his knee, under the quiet shade, and meditated and enjoyed the solitude, and scribbled to his heart's content. Here a doubt arises. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... I would call forthwith upon the General himself, and demand, in explicit terms, a solution of this abominable piece of mystery. Here, at least, there should be no chance for equivocation. I would be plain, positive, peremptory—as short as pie-crust—as concise as Tacitus or Montesquieu. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... long time after, Edward III. (ob. 1377) was regarded as the first English monarch who had coined gold.(717) How little a barbarous people are in a condition to make use of very costly material as money, is proved by the account which Tacitus gives of the ancient Germans, who preferred silver to gold in trade.(718) England presents us with an instance of the other extreme. Since 1816, silver, in that country, has been used only as a species of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... of the Caledonians in the first century were, according to Tacitus, long, large, and blunt at the point, and hence in all probability made of iron, whence came the sharp-pointed leaf-shaped bronze swords so often found in Scotland, and what is the place and date of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... for the classicks and his friends, assures me they are a distinct species, and that, when any of their calves have horns, a mixture of breed can be traced. In confirmation of his opinion, he pointed out to me the following passage in Tacitus,—'Ne armentis quidem suus honor, aut gloria frontis[1034];' (De mor. Germ. Sec. 5) which he wondered had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... he refused to undertake the prosecution of a man the Emperor was determined to destroy, and there is some reason to suspect that Agricola himself was sacrificed to the suspicions and envy of Domitian. Like most good and honourable men, he had a good mother, whose virtues Tacitus records. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... crossed the Euphrates with the Roman legions to put Tiridates on the throne of Armenia, they propitiated the river according to the rites of their country by the suovetaurilia, the sacrifice of the hog, the ram, and the bull. Tiridates did the same by the sacrifice of a horse. Tacitus does not mention the river god, but the river itself, as propitiated (see [Annals,] book vi, chap. 37).[3] Plato makes Socrates condemn Homer for making Achilles behave disrespectfully towards the river Xanthus, though acknowledged to be a ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Tacitus and Suetonius record miracles alleged to have been performed by Vespasian. He is said to have anointed the eyes of a blind man at Alexandria with the royal spittle, and to have restored his sight. Another ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... vessels were often terribly overcrowded; one ship, it is said, brought no less than 1200 passengers from Alexandria. That on which St. Paul was wrecked had 276 souls on board, and one upon which Josephus once found himself had as many as 600. It is incidentally stated in Tacitus that a body of troops, who had been both sent to Alexandria and brought back thence by sea, were greatly debilitated in mind and body by that experience. On the other hand, as has been already stated, there was generally no such thing as a pirate to be heard of in all the ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... they are meagre, for they will be found to present a clear and comprehensive view of the existing information upon the particular topic, with a mastery which arises only from familiarity. Montesquieu said that Tacitus abridged all because he knew all; and no reader can peruse a number of this Encyclopaedia without being convinced that the success in preparing the perspicuous abridgments it contains is due to thorough knowledge. Its excellence is not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... St. Patrick ever had the name Maune, he could not have given it to the island, which was called Mona, Monabia, and Menavia, as far back as the days of Caesar, Tacitus, and Pliny. I have not access to any life of St. Patrick in which the name Maune occurs; but in the Penny Cyclopaedia, under the head "Patrick," I find it said, "According to Nennius, St. Patrick's original name was Maur," and I find the same stated in Rose's Biographical Dictionary. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... trip has been a great success, and I think Mother has really enjoyed it. As for me, I of course feel a little bored, as I always do on shipboard, but I have brought on a great variety of books, and am at this moment reading Milton's prose works, "Tacitus," and a German novel called "Jorn Uhl." Mother and I walk briskly up and down the deck together, or else sit aft under the awning, or in the after cabin, with the gun ports open, and read; and I also spend a good deal of time on the forward bridge, and ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... Nay, with the exception of Shakespeare he is perhaps the most complex figure in all literature. He is universal, he is provincial; he is pathetic, he is sneering; he is tender, he is merciless; he is sentimental, he is frigid. He can be as compact as Tacitus, and as prolix as Thackeray. He can be as sentimental as Werther, and as heartless as Napoleon. He can cry with the bird, grow with the grass, and hum with the bee; he can float with the spirits, and dream with the fevered. He is everywhere ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... sometimes nod? Sometimes, for an inadvertent hour, do the finer instincts of public spirit flag in those civic bosoms? What evil genius, hostile to the enjoyment of the people, persuaded them? Did the city fathers for one ill-starred moment forget their Tacitus, and silence the street music unmindful of those words, so familiar to them in their hours of classic ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... a Botticelli or a Filippino Lippi. The occupations of the Duke are represented on a smaller scale by armour, batons of command, scientific instruments, lutes, viols, and books, some open and some shut. The Bible, Homer, Virgil, Seneca, Tacitus, and Cicero, are lettered; apparently to indicate his favourite authors. The Duke himself, arrayed in his state robes, occupies a fourth great panel; and the whole of this elaborate composition is harmonised by emblems, badges, and occasional devices ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... opposite directions the Germans and Romans have developed the meaning of the old hereditary name for 'stranger.' To the Roman the stranger becomes an enemy; among the Germans he enjoys the greatest privileges, a striking confirmation of what Tacitus tells us in his Germania."[112] In a dog kennel we have the Norman form of Fr. chenil, related to chien; ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... the account given by a poet. Now let us see that of a philosophic historian. Tacitus says, "In the consulship of Paulus Fabius (A.D. 34) the miraculous bird known to the world by the name of the Phoenix, after disappearing for a series of ages, revisited Egypt. It was attended in its flight by a group of various birds, all attracted by the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a Senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen side by side the greatest painter and the greatest ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... human thought, and human motive. In these things the world did not have to wait for wisdom and insight until the modern scientific epoch. Age cannot wither the essential truth nor stale the potency of great literature in this respect. Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato, Tacitus, Dante, or Shakespeare would have nothing to learn of the human mind and heart from Haeckel ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... and the snow fell faster. A wind rose and drove it against the panes. The boys heard the blast roaring outside and the comfort of the warm room was heightened by the contrast. Harry's eyes turned reluctantly back to his Tacitus and the customs and manners of the ancient Germans. The curriculum of the Pendleton Academy was simple, like most others at that time. After the primary grades it consisted chiefly of the classics and mathematics. Harry led in the classics ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... within the case of treason? Whereto I answered, For treason, sure I found none; but for felony, very many: and when her majesty hastily asked me, Wherein? I told her, the author had committed very apparent theft; for he had taken most of the sentences of Cornelius Tacitus, and translated them into English, and put them into his text. And another time, when the queen could not be persuaded that it was his writing whose name was to it, but that it had some more mischievous author, and said with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Minos, as progenitor of mankind with the German Mannus: "Celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae et annalium genus est, Tuisconem deum terra editum, et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque." TACITUS, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... conspicuously Tacitus, represent the Germans, Franks and Gauls as very virtuous, and very severe in their punishment of offenders. The earliest known legislation in the northern kingdoms is in the Capitularies of Charlemagne, who ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... apprehend the least; whereas it should seem an impossibility in Nature for the same instrument to make itself fit for great and small works. And for your gift of speech, I call to mind what Cornelius Tacitus saith of Augustus Caesar: Augusto profluens, et quae principem deceret, eloquentia fuit. For if we note it well, speech that is uttered with labour and difficulty, or speech that savoureth of the affectation of art and precepts, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... horror which the belief inspired. The multitude, convinced that the Christians were atheists who ate human flesh and thought incest no crime, displayed against them a fury so passionate as to embarrass and alarm their rulers. The severe expressions of Tacitus, exitiabilis superstitio—odio humani generis convicti,[217] show how deeply the prejudices of the multitude imbued the educated class also. One asks oneself with astonishment how a doctrine so benign as that of Jesus Christ ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... ongoings, the entire gossip of the place, was like a woman's; moreover, every personage great or small, heroic or comic, in Homer—whose poems he made it a matter of conscience to read once every four years—Plautus, Suetonius, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Lucian, down through Boccaccio and Don Quixote, which he knew by heart and from the living Spanish, to Joseph Andrews, the Spectator, Goldsmith and Swift, Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Ferrier, Galt and Sir Walter,—he was as familiar with, as with David Crockat the nailer, or the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... The barditus of Tacitus, or the "din" made by the Norse "bards" (skalds) on shields and with shouts as they rushed into battle. It is not in Molbech, but Snorro frequently uses it in his Chronica, 1633.—43. Kalevala: Title of the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... still more monstrous falsifier, Gomora; but adopts them both, according to the custom of novelists; and not the slightest objection is raised. Then descending lower and still lower; disregarding alike the warning of Lord Bacon 'a credulous man is a deceiver,' and of Tacitus fingunt simul creduntque—he rakes up even a devotee, Boturini, and makes him also an historic authority, without overtaxing public credulity; though this wretch, as we have seen, out-Munchausens Pietro himself, and as he may have surpassed every other man in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... day who seem returning to the statement of facts rather than their adornment, but these are not the most generally admired. This simplicity, however, to be truly effective must be unstudied; it will not do to write with affected terseness, a charge which, I think, may be fairly preferred against Tacitus; such a style if ever effective must be so from excess of artifice and not from that artlessness of simplicity which I should wish to see prevalent ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... book, 'Now, lads,' said he, 'have at them in the morning, with heavy hands and light consciences.' He then kindly greeted Mac-Ivor and Waverley, who requested to know his opinion of their situation. 'Why, you know, Tacitus saith, "IN REBUS BELLICIS MAXIME DOMINATUR FORTUNA," which is equiponderate with our vernacular adage, "Luck can maist in the mellee." But credit me, gentlemen, yon man is not a deacon o' his craft. He damps the spirits of the poor lads he commands, by ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... for slavery," as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say of them; "the chosen people among the nations," as they themselves say and believe—the Jews performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... broths beautifully made. One of the stewardesses did more for me than I ever had done by any servant of my own . . . Your father and Louisa were ill but three or four days, and then your father read Tacitus and talked to the ladies, while Louisa ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... misfortunes of their lives, seem to distil nothing but happiness and the purest beauty into their poetry; they only come to their true selves amid the sunlight and the flowers. Other writers—such as Swift and Tacitus—rule supreme over the kingdom of darkness and horror, and their finest pages are written in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Writers of this kind are very rarely poets; and it is Baudelaire's great ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... was by taste a man of letters, and ended by being the translator of Tacitus; though many do not know that the two are one. His friends had tried to make him a man of business; and no doubt he had been well plied with commercial arithmetic. His first dramatic performance, the farce of "The Apprentice," ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Gear, "I thank you for the honor you do me. But I don't believe in the Bible. I don't believe it's the word of God any more than Homer or Tacitus. I don't believe those old Hebrews knew any more than we do—nor half so much. It says the world was made in six days. I think it more likely it was six millions of ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... was again immersed in Horace, which (with Tacitus) was his chief joy. Then Jo leaned nearer to Agnes Anne and whispered the dread news about the Haunted House. My sister paled, gasped, and clutched at the desk. Jo, fearful that she would begin, according to the sympathetic school phrase, "to ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... The target and claymore were the weapons of the Ancient Britons. Taylor quotes Tacitus, Agricola: "ingentibus ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... supporters as might possibly ease the misery of ruin, but not ward it off or avoid it. Among these last faithful and heroic friends was a certain Titius Sabinus, and the implacable Sejanus destroyed him with a suit of which Tacitus has given us an account, a horrible story of one of the most abominable judicial machinations which human perfidy can imagine. Dissensions arose to aggravate the already serious danger in which Agrippina and her friends had been placed. Nero, the first-born son, and Drusus, the second, became hostile ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... profited from the two most thoughtful historians, Tacitus and Plutarch; but, though a philosopher familiar with these authors might have dispensed with many others, he neglected nothing that could be of use. The reading necessary for the 'Spirit of Laws' is immense; and the author's ingenuity is the more ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... blancos. They are surrounded by other Indians of the woods (Indios del monte) who are of a reddish-brown, although now exposed to the same physical influences. The causes of these phenomena are very ancient, and we may repeat with Tacitus, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... mighty wizard, who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome, such as a magic mirror and statue. Caxton's so-called translation of the Aeneid was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Vergil's epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was an almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the Aureus, which was also called Solidus, varied at different times. According to Tacitus, it was valued and exchanged for 25 Denarii, which amounted to three dollars, ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... knowledge of the Latin language was of no small advantage to him in acquiring a knowledge of the Spanish and Italian—an advantage that he certainly did not think of, when he was plodding through Virgil and Horace, Cicero and Tacitus. He returned from his first voyage a thorough practical seaman, and more than tolerably acquainted with European languages. He rose in his profession, and might at the time we introduced him have commanded a ship; but ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... and over. It is no less worthy, to observe, how little alteration in good spirits, the approaches of death make; for they appear to be the same men, till the last instant. Augustus Caesar died in a compliment; Livia, conjugii nostri memor, vive et vale. Tiberius in dissimulation; as Tacitus saith of him, Jam Tiberium vires et corpus, non dissimulatio, deserebant. Vespasian in a jest, sitting upon the stool; Ut puto deus fio. Galba with a sentence; Feri, si ex re sit populi Romani; holding forth his neck. Septimius Severus in despatch; ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished elements in a general effect. But the first class of writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three first are but infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Tacitus, who begins his history of Rome by these words: 'Urbem Roman a principio reges habuere'. They form a very poor Latin hexameter, which the great historian certainly never made on purpose, and which he never remarked when he ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... young minds press forward to the little-likely prize of successful tragedy. That at one weak period I was bitten, my honesty would scorn to deny; but fortunately for my peace of mind, "Melpomene looked upon me with an aspect of little favour," and sturdy truth-telling Tacitus made me at last but lightly regardful of my subject. Moreover, my Pegasus was visited with a very abrupt pull-up from other causes; it has been my fatality more than once or twice, as you will ere long see, to drop upon other people's topics—for who can find any thing new under the sun?—and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... their beards. The Jews thought it ignominious to lose their beards, 2 Sam. c. x. v. 4. Among the Catti, a nation of Germany, a young man was not allowed to shave or cut his hair till he had slain an enemy. (Tacitus.) The Lombards or Longobards, derived their Fame from the great length of their beards. When Otho the Great used to speak anything serious, he swore by his beard, which covered his breast. The Persians are fond of long beards. We read in Olearius' Travels of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... but even he, greatest of historians since Tacitus, is not enough careful to mark for us the growth of national character, as distinct from ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of selection;—as Thucydides, whose object was to describe the evils of democratic and aristocratic partizanships;—or Polybius, whose design was to show the social benefits resulting from the triumph and grandeur of Rome, in public institutions and military discipline;—or Tacitus, whose secret aim was to exhibit the pressure and corruptions of despotism;—in all which writers and others like them, the ground-object of the historian colours with artificial lights the facts which he relates: 3. and which in idea is the grandest-the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... praise as a writer of epics. All that remains of his works is a beautiful fragment, preserved in the Suasoriae (i. 15) of the rhetorician Seneca, from a description of the Voyage of Germanicus (A.D. 16) through the river Ems to the Northern Ocean, when he was overtaken by the storm described by Tacitus (Ann. ii. 23). The cavalry commander spoken of by the historian is probably identical with the poet. Three elegies were formerly attributed to Pedo by Scaliger; two on the death of Maecenas (In Obitum Maecenatis and De Verbis Maecenatis moribundi), and one addressed to Livia ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... According to Tacitus, Nero's famous golden palace was one of the most magnificent edifices ever built, and far surpassed all that was stupendous and beautiful in Italy. It was erected on the site of the great conflagration at Rome, which was attributed by many to the wickedness ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... with scarcely an exception! Well, I was going to tell you: Glazzard comes from my own town, Polterham. We were at the Grammar School there together; but he read AEschylus and Tacitus whilst I was grubbing over Eutropius and ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... very rapid. He seems to have been millions of years in getting his body, while he has been only millenniums in getting his reason and intelligence. What progress since the dawn of history! Compare the Germans of the time of Tacitus, or the Gauls of the time of Caesar, or the Britons of the time of Hadrian with the people of those ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... of the influences that formed them are the histories of Livy, of Sallust, and of Tacitus. They wrote in a language that had been sublimated into electric clouds by the warm and splendid diffuseness of Cicero, and reduced to a granite-like strength by the cold and exquisite simplicity of Terence. The amiable fustian, the Falstaffian bombast ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... gamesters are subject to a ridiculous absence of mind. Tacitus tells us that the Emperor Vitellius was so torpid that he would have forgotten he was a prince unless people had reminded him of it from time to time.(8) Many gamesters have forgotten that they were husbands and ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the dawn of Teutonic history. This is the opinion of one of the profoundest students of Indo-Germanic origins. In his Reallexicon (art. "Keuschheit") O. Schrader points out that the oft-quoted Tacitus, strictly considered, can only be taken to prove that women were chaste after marriage, and that no prostitution existed. There can be no doubt, he adds, and the earliest historical evidence shows, that women in ancient Germany were not chaste before marriage. This ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... For this curious taunt, strongly illustrative of what Browning calls "nationality in drinks," see Herodotus, ii. 77. A similar feeling may perhaps be traced in Tacitus' description of the national beverage of the Germans: "Potui humor ex hordeo aut frumento, in quandam similitudinem vini corruptus" (Germania, ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... and did not produce the least inconvenience to the author: whereas the letter on music was taken seriously, and incensed against me the whole nation, which thought itself offended by this attack on its music. The description of the incredible effect of this pamphlet would be worthy of the pen of Tacitus. The great quarrel between the parliament and the clergy was then at its height. The parliament had just been exiled; the fermentation was general; everything announced an approaching insurrection. The pamphlet appeared: from that moment ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Teutonia ball is better got up. This young person asked me 'how I liked the Germania?' Taking it for granted that such a badly dressed young woman must be a school teacher, with perhaps classical tastes, I replied that it was one of the most pleasing compositions of Tacitus, and that I occasionally read it of a morning. 'Oh, it's not very taciturn,' she replied; 'I mean the band.' 'Very true,' said I, 'he says agmen, which you translate band very happily, though I might possibly say 'body' in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... subject is illustrated by the most apposite quotations from the works of different travellers and historians. It is the writer's opinion that in uncivilized life, the degradation of woman, though common, is not universal. The celebrated passage in Tacitus is quoted in support of this position; and among other less interesting extracts, is the following account of Galway by Hardiman, a country which, so great is the blessing of a paternal and judicious government, may furnish, in the nineteenth century, illustrations of uncivilized ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... And he painted her portrait with extraordinary insight, boldness, and truthfulness. There is that in the Preacher's portrait of Madam Bubble which only comes of the artist having mixed his colours, as Milman says that Tacitus mixed his ink, with resentment and with remorse. Out of His reading of Solomon and Moses and the Prophets on this same subject, as well as out of His own observation and experience, conflict and conquest, our Lord added some strong and deep and inward touches of His ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... book-lovers. They appear, for the most part, to have made a constant companion of some particularly favourite book; for instance, St. Jerome slept with a copy of Aristotle under his pillow; Lord Clarendon had a couple of favourites, Livy and Tacitus; Lord Chatham had a good classical library, with an especial fondness for Barrow; Leibnitz died in a chair with the 'Argenis' of Barclay in his hand; Kant, who never left his birthplace, Koenigsburg, had a ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... perhaps the very greatest, of the political philosophers of the present day. Alone of all his contemporaries, his best works will bear a comparison with those of Machiavelli and Bacon. Less caustic and condensed than Tacitus, less imaginative and eloquent than Burke, he possesses the calm judgment, the discriminating eye, and the just reflection, which have immortalised the Florentine statesman and the English philosopher. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... The words of Jordanes (which are important on account of their bearing on the passage of Tacitus quoted below) are: "Ascitis certis ex satellitibus patris et ex populo amatores sibi clientesque consocians paene sex mille viros cum quibus inscio patre emenso Danubio super Babai ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... the better sort of them, which, though they were not probable, yet carried no seeming impossibility in the picturing." By the time Flamsteed was fifteen years old he had embarked in still more serious work, for he had read Plutarch's "Lives," Tacitus' "Roman History," and many other books of a similar description. In 1661 he became ill with some serious rheumatic affection, which obliged him to be withdrawn from school. It was then for the first time that he received the rudiments ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... absolutely new does not stimulate; what narrows appreciation, narrows attention also.'' The significant thing for us is that "the absolutely new does not stimulate''— a matter often overlooked. If I tell an uneducated man, with all signs of astonishment, that the missing books of Tacitus' "Annals'' have been discovered in Verona, or that a completely preserved Dinotherium has been cut out of the ice, or that the final explanation of the Martian canals has been made at Manora observatory,— all this very interesting news will leave him quite cold; ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... stories of the gods were passed from one person and one generation to another. The fundamental myths of a race have a surprising tenacity of life. How many centuries had elapsed between the period the Germanic hordes left their ancient homes in Central Asia, and when Tacitus listened to their wild songs on the banks of the Rhine? Yet we know that through those unnumbered ages of barbarism and aimless roving, these songs, "their only sort of history or annals," says the historian, had preserved intact the story of Mannus, the Sanscrit Manu, and his three sons, and of ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... was placed at College upon the most respectable footing. He wore the velvet cap, and enjoyed the rustling of the tassels upon his silk gown, as he paraded the High street of Oxford. But although he could translate Tacitus and Theocritus with creditable facility, he thought it more advantageous to gratify the cravings of his body than of his mind. He rode high-mettled horses; he shot with a gun which would have delighted an Indian prince; he drank freely out of cut-glasses, which were manufactured according to his ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... crowns on their heads, and the egg of a mythical serpent round their necks; we could hear the cries and groans of the victims as they were offered up in sacrifice to the serpent, and to Bel (the sun). Tacitus said they held it right to stain their altars with the blood of prisoners taken in war, and to seek to know the mind of the gods from the fibres of human victims. One very large stone outside the circles was called the "Friar's Heel," the legend stating that when the devil was busy erecting ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... be delivered up to torture and death, to prevent the quarrel spreading wider through the nation. This custom of making compensation also prevailed among European nations in their earlier and more uncultivated ages. In the time of Tacitus, the relations of the maimed or murdered person, among the Germans, were obliged to accept of a compensation, and restrain the spirit of revenge. During the Anglosaxon period in England, laws were ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's Prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early study of the best models in his own language had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... though somewhat indirectly, to further the process. Tacitus two or three times observes that the western provinces of the Empire looked out on no other land to the westward and bordered on no free nations. That is one half of a larger fact which influenced the whole history of the Empire. Round the west lay the sea and the Sahara. In the east were ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... historians, who deal with political or social history; for the history of philosophy there are metaphysical, empirical, sceptical, idealist, and spiritualist historians. Absolutely historical historians do not and cannot exist. Can it be said that Thucydides and Polybius, Livy and Tacitus, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Giannone and Voltaire, were without moral and political views; and, in our time, Guizot or Thiers, Macaulay or Balbo, Ranke or Mommsen? And in the history of philosophy, from ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... "Epist.," lib. I, xvii, 50. "Sed tacitus pasci si corvus posset, haberet Plus dapis, et rixae multo minus invidiaeque." I append the original, for the sake of Swift's very free rendering.—W. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... of the second Caesar rather than of the first that Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin, Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke—why! there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value. The same thing is true ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Montesquieu selects as the supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell or an Oxenstiern.[1] The loss of Sulla's Commentaries[2] is irreparable as the loss of the fifth book of the Annals of Tacitus or the burnt Memoirs of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is a disaster without a parallel. What Sulla felt as a first, most living impulse appears in later times as a colder, a critical judgment. It is thus that it presents itself ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... was not remarkable. In "the classical field" he describes himself "truly as nothing," and learned to read Homer in the original with difficulty. He preferred Homer and Aeschylus to all other classical authors, found Tacitus and Virgil "really interesting," Horace "egotistical, leichtfertig," and Cicero "a windy person, and a weariness." Nor did he take much to metaphysics or moral philosophy. In geometry, however, he excelled, perhaps because Professor (subsequently Sir John) Leslie, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... this all honor be given him; but he did not rest here. He examined the New Testament with the critic's scalpel, and applied the principles of ordinary interpretation to the word of God. He held that Moses should receive no better treatment than Cicero or Tacitus. Logos was reason and wisdom in the Greek writings; why should it mean Christ or the Word when we find it in the gospel of John? Regeneration need not be surrounded with a saintly halo; it is absurd to suppose that it can mean any ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... loose and diffus'd in all Conscience. So that when I read him sometimes for a good while together, tho' I go on very evenly and smoothly, I find it difficult to recollect what I have been doing, and whether I have been reading or sleeping. My present Advice to him therefore is, that he would study Tacitus, and such other Politicians as say much in few Words: And if he obstinately persists in the same Childish fondness for his Style, I shall be obliged to shew in how small a Compass the whole Substance of what ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... Teutons were likely to have more convenient materials than wood whereon to write, so that the adaptation of the forms would not have been necessary. That the Germans were familiar with some sort of marks on wood at a much earlier period is shown by Tacitus's Germania, chap. x. There we are told that for purposes of divination certain signs were scratched on slips of wood from a fruit-bearing tree (including, no doubt, tile beech; cp. book, German Buch, and Buchstabe, a letter of the alphabet); the slips were thrown down promiscuously on a white ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... industriously defaced pages once imagined to have been immortal! The most elegant compositions of classic Rome were converted into the psalms of a breviary, or the prayers of a missal. Livy and Tacitus "hide their diminished heads" to preserve the legend of a saint, and immortal truths were converted into clumsy fictions. It happened that the most voluminous authors were the greatest sufferers; these were preferred, because their volume being the greatest, most profitably repaid their destroying ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... any body shou'd wonder, how the Word Graecis crept into Caesar's Text, I will instance you the like Mischance in Pliny, lib. 7. cap. 57. where 'tis thus written,—"Gentium consensus tacitus primum omnium conspiravit ut IONUM literis uterentur." And afterwards,—"Sequens gentium consensus in tonsoribus fuit." And again,—"Tertius consensus est in Horarum observatione." Now who is there that sees not plainly the Word IONUM ought to be left out, ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... been favourite slaves of the Emperor, and so had won great power at court. At the date of this incident he had been for some five or six years the procurator of the Roman province of Judaea; and how he used his power the historian Tacitus tells us in one of his bitter sentences, in which he says, 'He wielded his kingly authority with the spirit of a slave, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Heidelberg, where he had studied; and some line engravings in black frames—one a view of Oxford with the Thames wandering by, another a portrait of the Duke of Wellington, and still another of Nell Gwynn. Scattered about the room were easy-chairs and small tables piled high with books, a copy of Tacitus and an early edition of Milton being among them, while under the wide, low window stood a narrow bench crowded with flowering plants in earthen pots, the remnants of the winter's bloom. There were also souvenirs of his earlier ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of the patriarchs Asher and Gad—their sex having been changed in the transition from one language to another—and represent the Greek and Roman elements in the Church, while the Epistle to the Philippians itself is a plagiarism from the Agricola of Tacitus [25:1]. When therefore I find our author supporting some of his more important judgments by the authority of 'Hitzig, Volkmar and others,' or of 'Volkmar and others,' [25:2] I have my own opinion of the weight which such names should ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... together materials for the storehouse of his memory, that will enable him to pursue his interested views and future operations on society with every prospect of success. Genius has no participation in his studies: his knowledge of Greek and Latin is grammatical and pedantic; he reads Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, Caesar, Xenophon, Thucydides, in their original language; boasts of his learning with a haughty mien and scornful look of self-importance, and thinks this school-boy exercise of memory, this mechanism of the mind, is to determine ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... wintered in these regions, in the midst of that slothful and immovable sea, which according to the very false expressions used by Tacitus, forms the girdle of the world, and in which is heard the uproar caused by the rising of the sun. The Dutchmen, therefore, were unable to picture to themselves the sufferings which threatened them. They bore them, however, with admirable patience, without a single murmur, and without ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... day's hunting, looked to be forty years old. He had reached the last stages of the malady of which he died, the symptoms of which were such that many reflecting persons were justified in thinking that he was poisoned. According to de Thou (the Tacitus of the Valois) the surgeons found suspicious spots—ex causa incognita reperti livores—on his body. Moreover, his funeral was even more neglected than that of Francois II. The body was conducted from Saint-Lazare to Saint-Denis by Brantome and a few archers of the guard ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... articles of great interest which are in type, but unavoidably postponed until next Saturday, the fourth and last in the month, when we shall consequently publish a double number, are Shakspeare and Fletcher, by Mr. Hickson—Illustrations of Chaucer, No. IV.—Illustrations of Tennyson—Sallust and Tacitus—Haybands in Seals, by Mr. Lower, Mr. Burtt, and L. B. L.—North Side of Churchyards—Sir F. Kynaston's Academy, by Dr. Rimbault—and several very important communications on ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... years before the Christian era, and was known to the Jewish people in very early times. According to the writer of the Book of Kings (1 Kings x. 21), "It was nothing accounted of in the days of Solomon," but Tacitus declares that in ancient Germany silver was even more valuable than gold. The mines of Laureion (Laurium) gave the Greek state of Attica its chief power, and the failure of the mines marked the ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... for what says Tacitus—that profound reader of the human heart,—'beneficia eo usque loeta sunt,' favours easily repaid beget affection—favours beyond return engender hatred. But, Sir, a truce to trifling;" and here Mr. Elmore composed his countenance, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... parlement was devised to relieve the Crown of the hostility aroused by curbing the power of the nobles (Il Principe c. 19). A closer parallel to the policy of Henry VIII. may be found in that which Tacitus attributes to Tiberius with regard to the Senate; "he must devolve on the Senate the odious duty of trial and condemnation and reserve only the credit of clemency ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... insurrection of the Germans, and in A.D. 71 C. Julius Agricola, father-in-law of the historian Tacitus, entered Britain as legate to Petilius Cerialis. He was made governor of the province in A.D. 77, and led his victorious armies as far north as the Highlands of Scotland. This excellent character, by his justice and moderation, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... like a conqueror, with a great number of prisoners sailed into France, and so to Rome, where after his return out of Brytaine, hee consecrated to Venus a surcote of Brytaine pearles, the desire whereof partly moved him to invade this country."—(Stow's "Annales," p. 14, ed. 1634.) Tacitus, in the Agricola 12, says that British ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... of both was identical is a difficult question. We believe it very probable that the worship of Thor, Odin, and Frigga, was purely Scandinavian, and penetrated Germany, as far as Switzerland, with the Saxons. Hertha, according to Tacitus, was the supreme goddess of the Germans. She had no place in Scandinavian mythology. Ipsambul, so renowned among the Teutons, was quite unknown in Scandinavia. The Germans, in common with the Celts, considered the building of temples unworthy the Deity; whereas, the Scandinavian ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... people of the south seem to have regarded, as a phenomenon, those blue eyes, which with us are so common, and, indeed so characteristic of beauty, as to form an indispensable requisite of every Daphne of Grub Street. Tacitus, however, from whom Juvenal perhaps borrowed the expression, adds an epithet to crulean, which makes the common interpretation doubtful. 'The Germans,' he says (De Mor. Ger. 4.), 'have truces et crulei oculi, fierce, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... went too far for British endurance, and brought a terrible retribution upon themselves. Paulinus Suetonius, an able officer, who then commanded in Britain, was absent on an expedition to conquer the island of Mona. Of this expedition the historian Tacitus gives a vivid account. As the boats of the Romans approached the island they beheld on the shore the Britons prepared to receive them, while through their ranks rushed their women in funereal attire, their hair flying loose ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... spoken is assuredly the best historian in Paradise, for Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Cornelius Nepos, Suetonius, Manetho, Diodorus Siculus, Dion Cassius, and Lampridius are deprived of the sight of God, and Tacitus suffers in hell the torments that are reserved for blasphemers. But Paul Orosius does not know heaven as well as he knows the earth, for he does not seem to bear in mind that the angels, who proceed from man ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest, and estimable, as our neighboring savages are. But whither is senile garrulity leading me? Into politics, of which I have taken final leave. I think little of them, and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier. Sometimes, indeed, I look back to former occurrences, in remembrance of our old friends and fellow-laborers, who have fallen before us. Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, I see now living not more than ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... deities, twelve in number, among whom was Diana; and the Dii Selecti, numbering eight. Of these, one was Luna, the moon, daughter of Hyperion and sister of the Sun. [208] Livy speaks of "a temple of Luna, which is on the Aventine"; and Tacitus mentions, in his Annals, a temple consecrated to the moon. In Horace, Luna is "siderum regina"; [209] and in Apuleius, "Regina coeli," [210] Bishop Warburton, in his synopsis of Apuleius, speaks of the hopeless condition of Lucius, which obliged him to fly to heaven for relief. "The ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... painted to the life, flying from one adventure to another, which was indeed the disease he had, whereof not long after he died in Argos. Characters are drawn with an astonishing breadth, depth, and decision. Nothing in Tacitus surpasses the epitaph on Epaminondas, the worthiest man that ever was bred in that nation of Greece. Everywhere are happy expressions, with wisdom beneath. It is a history for the nurture of virtuous citizens and generous ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... took possession of all the country from the river Euphrates to the Red Sea, and called it Nabathaea. Pliny the Elder and Strabo speak of the Nabataei as situated between Babylon and Arabia Felix, and call their capital Petra. Tacitus, in his Annals (Book ii. ch. 57), speaks of them as having a king. Perhaps the term 'Nabathaea regna' implies here, generally, the whole ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... historians generally give fewer portraits and bring more intelligence and common-sense to their judgments; but even among them there is plenty of scope for choice, and you must not begin with the wisest but with the simplest. I would not put Polybius or Sallust into the hands of a youth; Tacitus is the author of the old, young men cannot understand him; you must learn to see in human actions the simplest features of the heart of man before you try to sound its depths. You must be able to read facts clearly before you begin to study maxims. Philosophy in the form of maxims is only fit ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Alexander's marches. But the main facts can never be lost; something will remain, enough to "point a moral or adorn a tale." The object of all historical knowledge is moral wisdom, and this we may learn from narratives as brief as the stories of Joseph and Daniel, or the accounts which Tacitus has left us of the lives of the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... united to brevity; but to this combination Latin is utterly unequal. From the vagueness and uncertainty of meaning which characterises its separate words, to be perspicuous it must be full. What Livy, and much more Tacitus, have gained in energy, they have lost in lucidity and elegance; the correspondence of Brutus with Cicero is forcible, indeed, but harsh and abrupt. Latin, in short, is not a philosophical language, not a language in which a deep thinker ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... of Tacitus[554], and I hazarded an opinion, that with all his merit for penetration, shrewdness of judgement, and terseness of expression, he was too compact, too much broken into hints, as it were, and therefore too difficult to be understood. To my great satisfaction, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... plaudits of the people were unmistakably genuine. During his stay in the city he riveted more firmly still the affections both of the Senate and of the people. The reconciliation of the Empire with liberty, inaugurated, as Tacitus says, by Nerva, seemed now to be securely achieved. Trajan was absolutely open and simple, and lived with men at Rome as he had lived with his soldiers while on service. He realized the Senate's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... delayed,' the pendulum of thought had swung back to where it began. His theory was introduced to the Romans under the cultured style of Cicero, and was welcomed by them as the philosophical panegyric of their state. The last notice of it in Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the stable polity formed out of these elements as a constitution easier to commend than to produce and in no case lasting. Yet Polybius had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had prophesied the rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the ochlocracy fifty years and ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... this library is of interest as showing the strong trend of his thoughts towards history, though at a later date he was careful to limit its study in the university and schools which he founded. He had with him 125 volumes of historical works, among which the translations of Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Livy represented the life of the ancient world, while in modern life he concentrated his attention chiefly on the manners and institutions of peoples and the memoirs of great generals—as Turenne, Conde, Luxembourg, Saxe, Marlborough, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... bigoted, and niggardly as the Italian; but a plain, faithful, modest fellow, indefatigable, staid, quiet, intelligent and brave, yet almost always misknown, purely from his constitution. The words of Tacitus still are true: "nullos mortalium armis aut fide ante Germanos." Should you class the four most cultivated nations of Europe, according to the temperaments, the German would be Phlegma; and as such, I, a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... be constrained to look elsewhere for shelter. Then some daring innovators, driven from the favoured land, would construct habitations by grubbing into the soil, and covering them with a roof of turf. The ancient Germans, according to Tacitus, lived in underground cabins, heaped over with dung to keep them warm during the long winter. With the invention of the earthenware stove, the German Bauer has been enabled to rise above the surface; but he ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... there came various new cults connected with them, most of them implying entirely new deities, and only one or two of them new sides of old deities. The body of old Roman religion had received its first blows; what Tacitus (Hist. i. 4) says of the downfall of the empire—"Then was that secret of the empire disclosed, that it was possible for a ruler to be appointed elsewhere than at Rome"—is true of Roman religion in this period when it was discovered that the state might take into itself deities from outside ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... pr-Carolingian hands, Lombardic or Lombardesque was certainly the most peculiar, and is perhaps the most difficult to read. One evidence of this is the diversity of opinion on the true reading of certain proper names in the original MS. containing the oldest text of Tacitus which happens to be a Lombard MS. The characters and other examples of the eleventh to the thirteenth century that have been published at Monte Cassino, however, fully illustrate the peculiarities of the handwriting, ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... in Tacitus that the Romans found silver in Sardinia; and it occurred to him, that, as the ancients were not learned in extracting metals, silver might still be found among the lead which was turned out of the mines as refuse. The ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... and the more when she had occasion to mention her people of Scotland, which she did frequently to the Duke. What are you, poor meanlike Mortal, thought I, who talks in the style of a Soveraign? Nature seems to be inverted when a poor infirm Woman becomes one of the Rulers of the World, but, as Tacitus observes, it is not the first time that Women have governed in Britain, and indeed they have sometimes done this to better ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... Aurelian was succeeded by Tacitus, who was followed by Probus, as the latter was by Carus: this emperor being killed by a thunder storm, his sons, Carnious and Numerian, succeeded him, and during all these ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... orthodoxy. To-day we are fighting for the inhuman, for the equally impracticable and immoral principle of race antagonism. Germans fight because through their veins courses the red blood of the Teutons of Tacitus. They are fighting because they are convinced that they have the Might and the Right and the Duty of crushing the French and the Russians, because through French veins courses the tainted blood of the Gauls ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... ancient times was the origin of the feudal service of a more modern period, is a point on which men of learning have not precisely made up their minds. With regard to the exact state of the ancient German people, Tacitus affords us a great deal of most interesting information. Whether or not, certain passages which I have brought with me marked in the Germania are incontestable evidences that our ancestors enjoyed or understood the practice of a wise and well-regulated representative ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... educational tradition has been already mentioned. And our histories of the early Church are too often warped by an unfortunate bias. Christianity has been judged at its best, paganism at its worst. The rhetorical denunciations of writers like Seneca, Juvenal, and Tacitus are taken at their face value, and few have remembered the convention which obliged a satirist to be scathing, or the political prejudice of the Stoics against the monarchy, or the non-representative character ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... according to Tacitus, played to such desperation, that, when they had lost every thing else, they staked their personal liberty, and, in the event of bad fortune, became the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... extensive tillage, with abandonment of fields every few years, prevails in the Tartar districts of the Russian steppes, as it did among the cattle-raising Germans at the beginning of their history. Tacitus says of them, Arva per annos mutant et superest ager,[114] commenting at the same time upon their abundance of land and their reluctance to till. Where nomadism is made imperative by aridity, the agriculture which accompanies it tends to become fixed, owing ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... conquerors themselves give us the most glorious testimony to their valor. The Belgae, writes Caesar, were the only people amongst the Gauls who repulsed the invasion of the Teutones and Cimbri. The Batavi, Tacitus tells us, surpassed all the tribes on the Rhine in bravery. This fierce nation paid its tribute in soldiers, and was reserved by its conquerors, like arrow and sword, only for battle. The Romans themselves ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller |
