"Thucydides" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the proofs of this paper arrived from the printers. The exercise consists of half a chapter of Thucydides. I had to read it over carefully, as the text must be absolutely correct. At four-thirty my task was not yet completed. I had, however, promised to take tea in a friend's rooms, so I left the proof upon my desk. I was absent rather more than ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... at the papers transmitted to us from America—when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must avow that in all my reading—and I have read Thucydides, and have studied the master-states of the world—for solidity of reason, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion under a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... belief, we hear next to nothing apart from this. There is a story of a ram's head being found with one horn in the middle of the forehead; it was brought to Pericles, and the soothsayer Lampon explained the portent to the effect that, of the two men, Pericles and Thucydides, who contended for the leadership of Athens, one should prove victorious. Anaxagoras, on the other hand, had the ram's head cut open and showed that the brain did not fill up the cranium, but was egg-shaped and lay gathered together at the point where ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... to the emperor Claudius Gothicus (270), frequently referred to by the writers of the Augustan history. The work was continued by Eunapius of Sardis down to 404. Photius speaks very highly of the style of Dexippus, whom he places on a level with Thucydides, an opinion by no means confirmed by the fragments (C. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... rest under a perpetual nightmare until charitable oblivion dulled the memory of the enormous mass of talk. Sir John thinks we should read Confucius, the Hindoo religious poetry, some Persian poetry, Thucydides, Tacitus, Cicero, Homer, Virgil, a little—a very little—Voltaire, Moliere, Sheridan, Locke, Berkeley, George Lewes, Hume, Shakspere, Bunyan, Spenser, Pope, Fielding, Macaulay, Marivaux—Alas, is there ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,—these every lover of letters will desire to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list of such classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, the tastes of men begin to differ ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... that Dr. Arnold's skill as a teacher was unrivalled; he imparted a living interest to all he touched, to be attributed mainly to his habit of illustrating ancient events by "modern instances." Thus, Thucydides and Napier were compared almost page by page; thus the "High Church party" of the Jews was pointed to as a type of "the Tories." By means of his favourite topic, physical geography, he sought to bring the actual theatre of events before his pupils. Thus he ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... thought, told her that the mob had repented when they learnt the news. He had heard them cry: "Honour him!" and "A statue in the theatre!" and "Bring his body back,[106:1] bury him in Piraeus—Thucydides shall make his epitaph!" ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... kept during those years I find a record of the books that Shelley read during several years. During the years of 1814 and 1815 the list is extensive. It includes, in Greek, Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and Diogenes Laertius. In Latin, Petronius, Suetonius, some of the works of Cicero, a large proportion of those of Seneca and Livy. In English, Milton's poems, Wordsworth's "Excursion", Southey's "Madoc" and "Thalaba", Locke "On the Human ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... till a time within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the error has since in the usual course given way to others—that "the Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters of present import." This was the genuine "Times-v.-all-the-works-of-Thucydides" fallacy of the mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt motto of Philistia—as Philistia then was. For other times other Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once said, "to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... 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 them strikes their attention. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... corresponding diminution of artistic skill, a want of character in the persons, a laboured march in the dialogue, and a degree of confusion and incompleteness in the general design. As in the speeches of Thucydides, the multiplication of ideas seems to interfere with the power of expression. Instead of the equally diffused grace and ease of the earlier dialogues there occur two or three highly-wrought passages; instead ...
— Philebus • Plato
... independent way, as the noblest of training. His youth, however, was spent in the distressful later years of the Peloponnesian War, which ended in fearful gloom and disaster for his native city. Intimate, apparently, with the great historian Thucydides, whose unfinished work he seems to have edited, and subsequently to have continued in his own "Hellenica," he must have long foreseen the collapse of the Athenian empire, and then he and many other adventurous spirits found themselves in a society faded in prosperity, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... ce passe morbide, qui, meme quand il n'agit pas, influe terriblement par la contagion de la mort. Il ne faut ni combattre, ni critiquer, mais oublier. Oublions et marchons!—MICHELET, La Bible de l'Humanite, 483. It has excited surprise that Thucydides should speak of Antiphon, the traitor to the democracy, and the employer of assassins, as "a man inferior in virtue to none of his contemporaries." But neither here nor elsewhere does Thucydides pass moral judgments.— JOWETT, Thucydides, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... novelists than historians; and Tacitus has been censured for his audacity in pretending to discover the political springs and secret causes of events. Dionysius of Harlicarnassus has made an elaborate attack on Thucydides for the unskilful choice of his subject, and his manner of treating it. Dionysius would have nothing written but what tended to the glory of his country and the pleasure of the reader—as if history were a song! adds Hobbes, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the reference to twelve scribes, no doubt retained for business purposes as well as for book-making. They were bound by an oath to be faithful to the church and to write without fraud or malice. Aeneas Sylvius tells us he saw a Latin translation of Thucydides in the sacristy of ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... friend whispered as we gained the farther cliff. "This looks like it—no—yes, here it is! Close after me, sonny, and up we go. Surely, 'tis Robinson Crusoe and man Friday with a touch of something else thrown in—can't think what, for the moment, unless 'tis the scaling of Plataea. Ever read Thucydides?" ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... devotion, utterly perished from the earth. Yet Hannibal is remembered more widely than Scipio. Were Lee in the same case with Hannibal, men would magnify his name as long as history is read. "Of illustrious men," says Thucydides, "the whole earth is the sepulchre. They are immortalized not alone by columns and inscriptions in their own lands; memorials to them rise in foreign countries as well,—not of stone, it may be, but unwritten, in the thoughts ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... held the doctrine of a central fire (meson pyr) as the source of volcanic phenomena; and in the Dialogues of Plato allusion is made to a subterranean reservoir of lava, which, according to Simplicius, was in accordance with the doctrine of the Pythagoreans which Plato was recounting.[1] Thucydides clearly describes the effect of earthquakes upon coast-lines of the Grecian Archipelago, similar to that which took place in the case of the earthquake of Lisbon, the sea first retiring and afterwards inundating the shore. ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... a fellow who could conceive such a stupendous undertaking. Surely no one would think for a moment of putting it into execution! I also read with stolid indifference of the Herculean feats of labor performed by men known to history. For example, Demosthenes copied in his own handwriting Thucydides' History eight times, merely to make himself familiar with the style of that great man. An incident that appealed to me in a more benign ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... their feuds and competitions they consider themselves as surrounded with enemies, and are always prepared to repel incursions, or to make them. Like the Greeks in their unpolished state, described by Thucydides, the Highlanders, till lately, went always armed, and carried their weapons to ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... three classes: 1. Original histories; i.e., works written by contemporaries of the events described, who share in the spirit of the times, and may have personally taken part in the transactions. Such are the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon's Anabasis, Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion in England, Caesar's Commentaries. 2. Reflective histories, where the author writes at a later point of time, on the basis of materials which he gathers up, but is not himself a partaker in the spirit ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... later the Greeks under Nicias before Syracuse were so disconcerted by the appearance of an eclipse, which was interpreted as a direct omen and warning, that Nicias threw away the last opportunity to rescue his army. Thucydides, it is true, in recording this fact speaks disparagingly of the superstitious bent of the mind of Nicias, but Thucydides also was a man far in advance ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and Philistus, in whom I see that you have been wallowing. Callisthenes is a commonplace and hackneyed piece of business, like a good many Greeks. The Sicilian is a first-rate writer, terse, sagacious, concise, almost a minor Thucydides;[589] but which of his two books you have—for these are two works—I don't know. That about Dionysius is my favourite. For Dionysius himself is a magnificent intriguer, and was familiarly known to Philistus. But as to your postscript—are you really going in ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... The terrible selfish calculations of state reasons were turned into maxims of quite an ancient heathen character, not really evil in themselves, but reminiscent of similar maxims among the Athenians, which, as we read in Thucydides. were adopted by them in all simplicity, as the foundations of human morality. In addition to this I once more took up, by way of a restorative, as I had often done before, a volume of Schopenhauer, with whom I became on intimate terms, and I experienced a sensation of relief ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... been my greatest enemy!" Here, manifestly, in setting down a speech which a gentleman only thought, a chronicler overdraws his account with the patient reader, who has a right not to accept this draft on his credulity. But have not Livy, and Thucydides, and a score more of historians, made speeches for their heroes, which we know the latter never thought of delivering? How much more may we then, knowing my Lord Castlewood's character so intimately as we do, declare what was passing in ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Thucydides states that during the Peloponnesian war "things formerly repeated on hearsay, but very rarely confirmed by facts, became not incredible, both about earthquakes and eclipses of the Sun which came to pass more frequently than had been remembered ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... collecting which was given to John Baptist Say, the Economist. It comprised about three hundred and twenty volumes, more than half of which are historical, and nearly all, as it seems, in French. The ancient historians comprised in the list are Thucydides, Plutarch, Polybius, Arrian, Tacitus, Livy, and Justin. The poets are Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Ariosto, the Telemaque of Fenelon, the Henriade of Voltaire, with Ossian and La Fontaine. Among the works of prose fiction are the English novelists in forty volumes, of course ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... that we have shut something out. Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul. We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it. Else we are like a crab which should drag about Descartes, or as an ocean sucker which should hug a copy of Thucydides. ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Hobbes, in defending Thucydides, whom he has so admirably translated, from the charge of some obscurity in his design, observes that "Marcellinus saith he was obscure, on purpose that the common people might not understand him; and not unlikely, for a wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men), that ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... education. Witness the Indians, believing it to be right to kill aged persons. Witness savages of old, sacrificing their children to appease the gods. Just as there has been an evolution in tools, in laws and in institutions, so has there been an evolution of the intellectual element in conscience. Thucydides tells us that the time was in Sparta when stealing was right. In that far-off time a boy was praised for exhibiting skill and dexterity in pilfering. Stealing was disgraceful and wrong only when it was found out, and, if the theft was large and skillfully ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... It is related of Thucydides that, when a boy, he burst into tears on hearing Herodotus read his History, and the impression made upon his mind was such as to determine the bent of his own genius. And Demosthenes was so fired on one occasion by the eloquence of Callistratus, that the ambition was roused within ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... afternoon following the Oxford A match, Sheen, of Seymour's, was sitting over the gas-stove in his study with a Thucydides. He had been staying in that day with a cold. He was always staying in. Everyone has ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... least I cannot attach any other meaning to his reply, in which he retorts upon me my own words used elsewhere, and speaks of my argument as being wrecked upon this rock of grammar.' [112:2] If so, I can only refer him to Thucydides or any Greek historian, where he will find scores of similar instances. I need hardly say that the expression itself is quite neutral as regards time, meaning nothing more than 'his companions,' and that the ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... most brightly tinted and perfumed flowers of human thought. But I read over every philosopher, orator, and historian, in his own language. I loved especially those who united the three great faculties of intelligence,—narration, eloquence, and reflection; the fact, the discourse, and the moral. Thucydides and Tacitus above all others; then Machiavelli, the sublime practitioner of the diseases of empires; then Cicero, the sonorous vessel which contains all, from the individual tears of the man, the husband, the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... each hundredth man shot off an arrow. (23) Agamemnon. (24) Massilia (Marseilles) was founded from Phocaea in Asia Minor about 600 B.C. Lucan (line 393) appears to think that the founders were fugitives from their city when it was stormed by the Persians sixty years later. See Thucydides I. 13; Grote, "History of Greece", chapter xxii. (25) A difficult passage, of which this seems to be the meaning least free from objection. (26) Murviedro of the present day. Its gallant defence against Hannibal has been compared to that of Saragossa against the French. (27) See note ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... political ascendancy of Pericles was completely established at Athens, and the ascendancy of Athens among the Greek states was unchallenged, except by Sparta. He was forty at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was appointed to a military command seven years later, but his failure in that office caused his banishment. From that time he remained an exiled spectator of events; the date of his death is uncertain. His ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... his dissertation with his opinion of England and quotes Thucydides, V., 105, as the best applicable characterization of the British with which he is acquainted. "Among themselves, indeed, and out of respect for their traditional constitution, they prove to be quite decent. As regards their treatment of foreigners, a ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Athenian historian, Thucydides, was born about 471 B.C., within ten years of the great repulse of the Persian invasion. Before he was thirty, the great political ascendancy of Pericles was completely established at Athens, and the ascendancy of Athens among the Greek states ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... The whole story about Harmodius and Aristogiton and how they killed Hipparchus is told by Thucydides, vi. 54-59. Bion therefore practically called these sprouting ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... such as either he keepeth by skill or holdeth on by ignorance, and will not or peradventure cannot easily alter into any other. So we say that Cicero's style and Sallust's were not one, nor Caesar's and Livy's, nor Homer's and Hesiodus',[14] nor Herodotus' and Thucydides', nor Euripides' and Aristophanes', nor Erasmus' and Budeus' styles. And because this continual course and manner of writing or speech sheweth the matter and disposition of the writer's mind more than one or two instances can ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... gladly have given up taking pupils. He was growing old and his sight was beginning to trouble him; he was very weary of Thucydides, of Homer, of the works of Mr. Todhunter of which the green bindings expressed a hope still unrealised, of conic sections—even of his beloved Horace. He was tired of the stupidities of the dull young men who were sent to him because they ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... second Nemerosa, and the third Discoperta. The ascent, though very gradual, commences immediately on leaving the city of Catania, over a tolerably constructed road; the country around is formed on an ancient volcanic soil; probably the third eruption mentioned by Thucydides, which happened in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian war, and the second of the eighty-eighth Olympiad. Traversing the lands of Battianti, and St. Giovanni della Punta, the road is constantly over the lava, and the country on either side is delicious. Trecastagne, nine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... be a good thing for the world? After a lengthy period of peace there usually arises a craving for battle. Nearly fifty years of peace followed the defeat of the Persians in Greece, and at the end of that time, just before the Peloponnesian War, which was to bring ruin on the country, Thucydides tells us that all Greece, being ignorant of the realities of war, stood a-tiptoe with excitement. It was the same in England just before our disastrous South African War, when readers of Kipling glutted themselves with imaginary slaughter, and Henley cried to our country that ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... of Thucydides differs from that of Herodotus as a portrait differs from the representation of an imaginary scene; as the Burke or Fox of Reynolds differs from his Ugolino or his Beaufort. In the former case, the archetype is given: in the latter it is created. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... get a steel-handled sword from Fentum's for Jack Maggot; and everything was proceeding with delightful success, when one morning, as Mr. Dallas was apparently about to take his departure, with a volume of Becker's Thucydides under his arm, the respected Dominie stopped, and thus harangued: "I am informed that a great deal is going on in this family with which it is intended that I shall be kept unacquainted. It is not my intention to name anybody or anything at present; but I must say ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... husbandry, lived on the spontaneous produce of a rich soil, and dwelling in mountain caves, devoted themselves entirely to the pleasures of a pastoral life. He says that they were men of monstrous stature, and had but one eye, in the middle of their forehead. Thucydides supposes them to have been the original inhabitants of Sicily. As their origin was unknown, it was said that they were the offspring of Neptune, or, in other words, that they had come by sea, to settle in Sicily. According ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... back to his study, and Bob, having finished his oiling and washed his hands, started on his Thucydides. And, in the stress of wrestling with the speech of an apparently delirious Athenian general, whose remarks seemed to contain nothing even remotely resembling sense and coherence, he allowed the question of Mike's welfare to fade from his mind ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... the country! 'Twas we who pursued on the field of Marathon, whereas now 'tis wretches who pursue us to the death and crush us! What would Marpsias reply to this?(5) What an injustice that a man, bent with age like Thucydides, should be brow-beaten by this braggart advocate, Cephisodemus,(6) who is as savage as the Scythian desert he was born in! Is it not to convict him from the outset? I wept tears of pity when I saw an Archer(7) maltreat this old ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... is attempted to determine the precise sources from which the historical part of the work is derived. Among these sources are unquestionably Herodotus (for the tyranny of Peisistratus, and for the struggle between Cleisthenes and Isagoras), Thucydides (for the episode of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and for the Four Hundred), Xenophon (for the Thirty), and the poems of Solon. There is now among critics a general consensus in favour of the view that the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... those plans with which he had dazzled the Persian monarch. Rumour ascribed his death to poison, which he took of his own accord, from a consciousness of his inability to perform his promises; but this report, which was current in the time of Thucydides, ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... made the most of his opportunities. You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind. Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species. Nor can I discover that anything in his eventful life ever afterwards caused him ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... intelligence of his successes to Rome, whither Soaemus, the expelled monarch, had betaken himself. Soasmus was upon this replaced on the Armenian throne, the task of settling him in the government being deputed to a certain Thucydides, by whose efforts, together with those of Martius Verus, all opposition to the restored monarch was suppressed, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... irresistible as 'The Campbells are Coming,' or 'Auld Lang Syne.' He has described some men and some events once and for all, and so takes his place with Thucydides, Tacitus and Gibbon. Pedants may try hard to forget this, and may in their laboured nothings seek to ignore the author of 'Cromwell' and 'The French Revolution'; but as well might the pedestrian in Cumberland or Inverness seek to ignore Helvellyn or Ben Nevis. Carlyle is there, and will remain ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... seemed to think that a professorial chair in a German university was a more honorable position than that of a poet. Dalberg writes: "Influence on mankind" (for this he knew to be Schiller's highest ambition) "depends on the vigor and strength which a man throws into his works. Thucydides and Xenophon would not deny that poets like Sophocles and Horace have had at least as much influence on the world as they themselves." When the French invasion threatened the ruin of Germany and the downfall of the German sovereigns, Dalberg writes again, in 1796, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the latter being the earliest written records which belong to the history of the island, while the former were more easily remembered, from the construction of the verse. Much passes for history in other lands on far slighter grounds, and many a story in Thucydides or Tacitus, or even in Clarendon or Hume, is believed on evidence not one-tenth part so trustworthy as that which supports the narratives of these Icelandic story-tellers of the eleventh century. That with occurrences of undoubted truth, and minute particularity ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... considered, it must be admitted that the Athenian makes a use of their dearly loved "leisure," which men of a more pragmatic race will do well to consider as the fair equivalent of much frantic zeal for "business." Athenian "leisure" has already given the world Pericles, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, and Plato, not to name such artists as Phidias, whose profession cannot exempt them from ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... neighbourhood, we were sorry to return to our inn—and such an inn! We departed abruptly, and probably never to return; but we shall think of Segeste in Hyde Park, or as we pass the candlestick Corinthians of Whitehall. Thucydides[16] relates that a prevailing notion in his time was, that the Trojans after losing Troy went first to Sicily, and founded there Egesta and Eryx. Now, as on the same authority the first Greek colony was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... hazardous to assert that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be confidently asserted that he knows much more about them; that he thinks them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of them—through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and what not—he has in his mind's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the Dean, with a half-smile. "But not, sir," I said, "as you handled it. You told us, at the end of the sermon, that you remembered a summer afternoon when you were an undergraduate at Christ Church, and were sitting over your Thucydides close to your window, grappling with a long and complicated passage which was to be the subject of next morning's lecture; and that, glancing for a moment from your book, you saw the two most brilliant young Christ Church men of the day going down to ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... self-devotion." ... "All moral philosophers whose philosophy has been practically effective, from Socrates down, have been religious. Many have tried to find an independent basis but have not been successful—at least have not arrived at any agreement." ... "Thucydides ascribed the fall of Greece to the fall of religion. Machiavelianism followed the fall of the Catholic faith." ... "Into the void left by religion came spiritual charlatanry and physical superstition, such as the arts of the hierophant of Isis, the soothsayer, the astrologer—significant ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... themselves. They come to us through the minds of those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history; the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called in question. Good reasons can be given ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... The passage Thucydides, II. 15, is the authority deemed most weighty for the placing of the Limnae to the south of the Acropolis. The question of the location of this section of Athens is so intimately connected with the whole topography ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... usage in the severest writers. Neither can it be alleged that these might be bold poetic expressions, harmonizing with the Grecian idiom; for Poppo has illustrated this singular form of expression in a prose-writer, as philosophic and austere as Thucydides; a form which (as it offends against logic) must offend equally in all languages. Some beauty must have been described in the idiom, such as atoned for its solecism: for Milton recurs to the same idiom, and under the same entire freedom of choice, elsewhere; particularly in this instance, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... reputedly prehuman antiquity, must be the work of human hands, geared to human brains like ours. Tylor's wider range of observation, conspicuously supplemented by other work of Lubbock, embraced all human activities in one formula of comparison, which is indeed as old as Thucydides.[4] We can infer, that is, something about early stages of an advanced culture from ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... poorly with the idea that modern scientists have all the wisdom and intelligence known in the history of the ages. Among the wonderful characters of olden times we find Epictetus, Josephus, Strabo, Pliny, Seneca, Virgil, Aristotle, Plato, Tacitus, Thucydides and Herodotus. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... inscriptions on monuments and dedicated offerings supplied one of the chief materials of historical record. Their testimony was used by the earliest historians to supplement and reinforce the oral traditions which they embodied in their works. Herodotus and Thucydides quote early epigrams as authority for the history of past times;[1] and when in the latter part of the fourth century B.C. history became a serious study throughout Greece, collections of inscribed records, whether in prose or verse, began to be formed as historical material. The earliest ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... idol and makes it hateful in the eyes of the world, subsequent history has fully confirmed the moral instinct of the ancient Greeks, that national insolence or injustice (hybrist) brings its own severe punishment. The imaginary dialogue which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian and Melian envoys, and the debate in the Athenian Assembly about the punishment of revolted Mitylene, are intended to prepare the reader for the tragic fate of the Sicilian expedition. The same ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... we find very few references to its greatest works; it is evident that the Athenians, for example, took the greatest pride in the buildings that adorned their Acropolis and in the sculptures they contained; yet when Pericles, as reported by Thucydides, speaks of the statue of the Athena Parthenos, it is only to reckon the gold of her drapery as part of the possible resources of the state. We know that in the eyes of Pericles and of his hearers the preciousness of the material was only ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... we hear nothing of fasting, cleansing, and atonement. This we might explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the Greek saga, but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit. Thucydides is by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him, in the main, a rest from toil. He makes Pericles say of the Athenians: Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... be added, which, though interesting enough, can, in no possible judgment that can be called judgment, rank as in any way first-rate poetry. So, too, the habit of comparing the Nibelungenlied to the Iliad and Kudrun to the Odyssey (parallels not far removed from the Thucydides-and-Tennyson order) may excite resentment. But the Middle High German verse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is in itself of such interest, such variety, such charm, that if only it be approached in itself, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of speaking, the other day, on the Sicilian expedition; but Nicias (See Thucydides, vi. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rewards and punishments, prophecies, inspirations, sacrifices and religious superstitions, varied in as many forms as there be diversity of spirits; they send wars, plagues, peace, sickness, health, dearth, plenty, as appears by those histories of Thucydides, Livius, Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with many others, that are full of their wonderful stratagems.' They formerly devoted themselves, each one, to the service of particular individuals as familiar demons, 'private spirits.' ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides, the historian of the fall of Athens, describing his earliest ancestors, said that they "did not amount to very much," and this was probably true. They were very ill-mannered. They lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies to the wild dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... the public. In this interval of suspense, nearly a twelvemonth, I returned by a natural impulse to the Greek authors of antiquity; I read with new pleasure the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, a large portion of the tragic and comic theatre of Athens, and many interesting dialogues of the Socratic school. Yet in the luxury of freedom I began to wish for the daily task, the active pursuit, which gave a value to every ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... widening in the waters) from universal suffrage. Universal suffrage is Democracy. Is Democracy better than the aristocratic commonwealth? Look at the Greeks, who knew both forms; are they agreed which is the best? Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristophanes—the Dreamer, the Historian, the Philosophic Man of Action, the penetrating Wit—have no ideals in Democracy. Algernon Sidney, the martyr of liberty, allows no government to the multitude. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the continual advance of the Turk on the territories of the Emperors of Constantinople drove westward to the shelter of Italy and the Church, and to the patronage of the Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them their manuscripts of Homer and the dramatists, of Thucydides and Herodotus, and most momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato and Demosthenes and of the New Testament in its original Greek. The quick and vivid intellect of Italy, which had been torpid in the decadence of mediaevalism and its mysticism and piety, seized with avidity ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... I thank God, euen my poore studie lacketh not one. As, in Philosophie, Plato, Aris- totle, Xenophon, Euclide and Theophrast: In eloquens and Ciuill lawe, Demosthenes, schines, Lycurgus, Dinarchus, Demades, Isocrates, Isus, Lysias, Antisthenes, Andocides: In histories, He- rodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon: and ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be. The age of Pericles was rich in such characters; Pericles himself, Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides also, Xenophon and Socrates, each in his own order, the perfection of one remaining undiminished by that of the others. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless mould, works of art, which stand before us as an immortal presentment of the gods. Of ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... in Original] "Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad." Thucydides' Historiae. (Book 2, Chapter ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... relished but by a vitiated Taste, by the Taste of a Chameleon, not of a Man. Two or three Hours furnish Matter for an excellent Play: Why may not Two or Three Months supply Materials for as many Volumes? Is the History of Thucydides less entertaining or instructive, because its Subject is confined to narrow Bounds, than that of Raleigh, which hath the World for its Subject? Is Clarissa a mere Novel? Whoever considers it as such, does not understand ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... the observation of numerous star-gazers, perched up on arm-chairs and editor's tables, will inform the world of its magnitude and its place in the heaven of"—not poetry in this instance, but that serene and unclouded region of the firmament where shine unchanging the names of Herodotus and Thucydides. Those who had always believed in their brilliant schoolmate and friend at last felt themselves justified in their faith. The artist that sent this unframed picture to be hung in a corner of the literary gallery was equal to larger tasks. There was but one voice in the circle that surrounded the ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his tailor's bills, and nicks off his dinner-notes in diplomatic paragraphs, and keeps precis of them all. If he ever makes a joke, it is a quotation from Horace, like Sir Robert Peel. The only relaxation he permits himself, is to read Thucydides in the holidays. ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... example of the manner in which the orators praised 'the Athenians among the Athenians,' falsifying persons and dates, and casting a veil over the gloomier events of Athenian history. It exhibits an acquaintance with the funeral oration of Thucydides, and was, perhaps, intended to rival that great work. If genuine, the proper place of the Menexenus would be at the end of the Phaedrus. The satirical opening and the concluding words bear a great resemblance to the earlier dialogues; the ...
— Lesser Hippias • Plato
... Pachymer to Thucydides or Tacitus, I will praise his narrative, (l. i. c. 13—32, l. ii. c. 1—9,) which pursues the ascent of Palaeologus with eloquence, perspicuity, and tolerable freedom. Acropolita is more ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... falsities of citation to serve the ends of their vanity and secure a triumph to their own mistakes. Wherefore, my Tito, I think it not well that we should let slip the occasion that lies under our hands. And now we will turn back to the point where we have cited the passage from Thucydides, and I wish you, by way of preliminary, to go with me through all my notes on the Latin translation made by Lorenzo Valla, for which the incomparable Pope Nicholas the Fifth—with whose personal notice I was honoured while I was ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that ordinary English writing, such as the newspaper article, is superior to Plato: at any rate it is couched in language which is very rarely obscure. On the other hand, the greatest writers of Greece, Thucydides, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, are generally those which are found to be most difficult and to diverge most widely from the English idiom. The translator will often have to convert the more abstract Greek ...
— Charmides • Plato
... gilded chains and sordid affluence, and who will die in defence of their rights as freemen. * * * For myself, I must declare that in all my reading and observation—and history has been my favorite study; I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world—that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. * ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... a pair of Aldines, and, what is better, a pair editionum principum,—the first Sophocles and the first Thucydides. Both have the proper attestation at the end that they come from the Aldi in Venice in the year 1502,—the Thucydides in May, and the Sophocles in August; hence the former has not the Aldine anchor at the extreme end. Both are in exquisitely clean condition; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... history of his country a subject of closet study. He did so, and in an eminent degree. His conciseness, clearness (when relieved from the burden of interpolation), and usual impartiality, point to a careful and spiritual study of Thucydides; but he could not attain to an equal degree of sweetness as the Greek historian, on account of the general character of their several languages differing. As far, however, as Roman could approach to Greek, I conceive Sallustius has approached to Thucydides. Tacitus (whose mind was impregnated ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... letters and in affairs, and endued with such moderation in the exercise of public offices, that to him would be awarded by the consenting voice of Englishmen the four-fold praise attributed to Pericles by his rival Thucydides—'To know all that is fitting, to be able to apply what he knows, to be a lover of his country, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... absurd to attack Froude on the ground that he was biassed. No man has ever yet written a living history without being biassed. Thucydides detested the radicalism of Cleon as heartily as Gibbon hated the Christianity of Rome. It was once the fashion of the Oxford school to decry Froude as being unworthy of the name of historian. Stubbs, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... appeared in bygone ages, suddenly starting up and striding over the earth—"the land as a garden of Eden before him, and behind him a desolate wilderness?" We have most of us read of such frightful visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... Thucydides tells us that an eclipse of the moon delayed the departure of the expedition against the Syracusans. "The preparations were made, and they were on the point of sailing, when the moon, being just then at the ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Homer's blindness rests on a passage in the Hymn to Apollo, quoted by Thucydides as a genuine work of Homer, and which is thus spoken of by one of the most accomplished scholars that this country or this age has ever produced: "They are indeed beautiful verses; and if none worse had ever been attributed ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... in the Gospels, which further guarantees them. It is remarkable how little of the adjective there is—no compliment, no eulogy, no heroic touches, no sympathetic turn of phrase, no great passages of encomium or commendation. It is often said about the Greek historian, Thucydides, that, among his many intellectual judgements, he never offers a criticism of any act that implies moral approbation or disapprobation; that he says nothing to show that he had feelings or that he cared about questions of right and wrong. Page after page ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... words on a long favourite subject—'were not of that odious and fantastic character which they have been in modern times; they implied real differences of the most important kind, religious and moral.' And after exemplifying this at length he goes on, 'It is not then to be wondered at that Thucydides, when speaking of a city founded jointly by Ionians and Dorians, should have thought it right to add "that the prevailing institutions of the two were Ionian," for according as they were derived from one or the other the prevailing type would be ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... translation of Callimachus: "Such a pretty girl as you are, are you not ashamed to be so learned?" But Madame Dacier acquired Greek by contriving to do her embroidery in the room where her father was teaching her stupid brother; and her queenly critic had learned to read Thucydides, harder Greek than Callimachus, before she was fourteen.—And so down to our own day, who knows how many mute, inglorious Minervas may have perished unenlightened, while Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were being educated ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... period of Persian rule in Egypt, the strongholds of Egyptian independence, admits of abundant demonstration from the Greek historians:—it was here, in the mysterious island of Elbo, that Amyrtaeus, (called by Thucydides "the king of the marshes,") held out after the reconquest of Egypt by Megabysus, B.C. 454, "for they could not take him on account of the great extent of the marsh; besides which, the marshmen are the most warlike of all the Egyptians."[66] ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the Troaedes was produced, Athens, now entirely in the hands of the War Party, had been engaged in an enterprise which, though on military grounds defensible, was bitterly resented by the more humane minority, and has been selected by Thucydides as the great crucial crime of the war. She had succeeded in compelling the neutral Dorian island of Melos to take up arms against her, and after a long siege had conquered the quiet and immemorially ancient town, massacred the men and ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... expense), and the new accessions to classical literature printed, the MSS. {162} which present themselves of already known authors carefully examined, and the variations to the received text marked. How much this is wanted we experience in the corruptions of Sophocles, AEschylus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristoteles! In this way much that is valuable may be recovered; much that is matter of discussion set at rest. Let me instance the Babrian fables, and the discovery of Mr. Harris at Alexandria; who, it was remarked to me, might have discovered the whole, instead ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... history than was written before the year 1859, which we may call the line of demarcation between the old and the new? If the English, German, and American historical scholars should vote as to who were the two best historians, I have little doubt that Thucydides and Tacitus would have a pretty large majority. If they were asked to name a third choice, it would undoubtedly lie between Herodotus and Gibbon. At the meeting of this association in Cleveland, when methods of historical teaching were under ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... absorbed almost his whole attention in his later school days, and the flowing beauty of his oral translations in class, whether of Thucydides, Plato or Virgil, was a thing not easily to ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... warre written by Thucydides the sonne of Olorus. Interpreted ... by Thomas Hobbes. London, for Richard ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... of man will be found in his tombs, says Thucydides; and as a matter of fact the sepulchre has ever occupied much of the thoughts of man, the result of a religious sentiment, a conviction that all does not end with the life which so ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... Walton rather overstates the case. Thucydides simply says that attendance on the sick promoted the spread of the pestilence. (Lib. II. ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... Thucydides; biographical note on, I, 25; articles by—the Athenians and Spartans contrasted, 25; the plague at Athens, 38; the sailing of the Athenian fleet for Sicily, 45; the completion of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... much less to tell a story than, as he says, "to decipher the man and his nature"; and in deciphering the man, to strike out pregnant and fruitful thoughts on all men. Why was it worth while for Mr. Jowett, the other day, to give us a new translation of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War? And why is it worth your while, at least to dip in a serious spirit into its pages? Partly, because the gravity and concision of Thucydides are of specially wholesome example in these days ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... mere common-place fellow; Plato, a discourser; Thucydides and Livy, tedious and dry; Tacitus, an entire knot: sometimes worth the ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... Peloponnesus was still clothed with its ancient terrors, an Imperial fleet was transported five miles over land across the Isthmus of Corinth. [74] The principles of maritime tactics had not undergone any change since the time of Thucydides: a squadron of galleys still advanced in a crescent, charged to the front, and strove to impel their sharp beaks against the feeble sides of their antagonists. A machine for casting stones and darts was built of strong timbers, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... later, two serpents, with heads meeting at the top, were substituted. The mythologists explained this by the story of Hermes finding two serpents thus knotted together while fighting; he separated them with his wand, which, crowned by the serpents, became the symbol of the settlement of quarrels (Thucydides i. 53; Macrobius, Sat. i. 19; Hyginus, Poet. Astron. ii. 7). A pair of wings was sometimes attached to the top of the staff, in token of the speed of Hermes as a messenger. In historical times the caduceus was the attribute of Hermes as the god of commerce and peace, and among the Greeks it ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... his preface, "I care only for the anecdotes, and prefer those in which I fancy I discover a true picture of the manners and characters of a particular period. This is not a very elevated taste; but I own, to my shame, that I would willingly give the whole of Thucydides for an authentic memoir of Aspasia, or of one of Pericles' slaves. Memoirs, the familiar gossip of an author with his reader, alone supply those individual portraits that amuse and interest me. It is not from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... spectator and camp-follower. It's your business. You'll find me in my study." And putting the poker carefully in its place, Clowes left the room. He went into his study, and tried to begin some work. But the beauties of the second book of Thucydides failed to appeal to him. His mind was elsewhere. He felt too excited with what had just happened to translate Greek. He pulled up a chair in front of the fire, and gave himself up to speculating how Trevor was getting on in the neighbouring study. He ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... contradictoriae, where the hallucination existed without the fulfilment. He shows a good deal of reading, and a liking for Sir Thomas Browne. The difference between him and his contemporary, Mr. Kirk, is as great as that between Herodotus and Thucydides. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Tradition said that the Thracians and Athenians were connected, through the marriage of a former prince Tereus (or Teres) with Procne, the daughter of Pandion. This old story, discredited by Thucydides, ii. 29, is referred to in Arist. "Birds," 368 foll. The Birds are about to charge the two Athenian intruders, when Epops, king of the Birds, formerly Tereus, king of Thrace, but long ago transformed into a hoopoe, intercedes in ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... though again and again interrupted, was never abandoned. To that rare combination of the imaginative and practical faculties which characterized my father's intellect, and received from his life such varied illustration, the story of Pausanias, indeed, briefly as it is told by Thucydides and Plutarch, addressed itself with singular force. The vast conspiracy of the Spartan Regent, had it been successful, would have changed the whole course of Grecian history. To any student of political phenomena, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... later period civil strife was to destroy their last traces. The old hoplite, from Rhamnus or Acharnae, pent up in beleaguered Athens during that first summer of the Peloponnesian war, occupying with his household a turret of the wall, as Thucydides describes—one of many picturesque touches in that severe historian—could well remember the ancient provincial life which this conflict with Sparta was bringing to an end. He could recall his boyish, half-scared curiosity concerning those Persian ships, coming ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... no scholar in the modern sense, but might well have been described by the old phrase which links scholar with gentleman. He lived by trade, but trade did not affect his life. The day's work over, he turned, with no feeling of incongruity, to a page of Thucydides, of Tacitus, or to those less familiar authors who lighted his favourite wanderings through the ruins of the Roman Empire. Better grounded for such studies than Harvey Rolfe, he pursued them with a steadier devotion and with all the advantages of domestic peace. In his mental habits, in ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... Indeed, about the only bad habit this man had was reading. He read to excess—he read everything and read all the time. He read novels, history, poetry, and dived deeply into the dead languages, reading Plutarch's Lives twice in a year, and Euripides, Thucydides, Homer, Cicero, Caesar—all without special aim or end. Such a restless appetite for reading is apt to produce mental dyspepsia, and is not at all to be advised for average people; and the probabilities ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... moment. Their lips met for the first time, but only for an instant. He had scarcely time to realise that this wonderful thing had happened before the mobile creature had darted to his book-shelves and was examining a Thucydides upside down. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... into the mysteries of Greece by Homer, the work at Greek was no longer tedious. Herodotus was a charming and humorous story-teller, and, as for Thucydides, his account of the Sicilian Expedition and its ending was one of the very rare things in literature which almost, if not quite, brought tears into one's eyes. Few passages, indeed, have done that, and they are curiously discrepant. The first book that ever made me cry, of ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... proceeding,) to the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men—such as Niebuhr, or O. Mueller, or Dr Thirlwall—will not be displeased with my resolution to decline so insoluble a problem. No attested facts are now present to us—none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides even in their age, on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the anti-Hellenic Pelasgians; and where such is the case we may without impropriety apply the remark of Herodotus respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Byzantium. His description of the plague of 543, which is exceedingly minute in its details, has given rise to the idea that he was a physician, but there is no proof of this. The same thing might have been with equal justice said of Thucydides; or we might assert that Procopius was an architect, on the strength of his ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... they allowed angels to appear in epics dealing with the earlier time, almost as freely as gods intervene in Homer. In short, the Homeric poet undeniably treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of Thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," and therefore ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... of knowledge, and because he intensely enjoyed the great authors, whose thoughts he studied. He had read parts of Homer, parts of Thucydides, parts of Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... War; and in one respect it is superior to that great speech. It is not only more natural, fuller of feeling, more touching and pathetic, but we know with absolute certainty that it was really delivered. Nature here takes precedence of art—even though it be the art of Thucydides." ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... been a great change in the status of women in the last twenty-five years. The apophthegm of Pericles, or rather of Thucydides, "that woman is best who is least spoken of among men, either for good or evil," is not so rigidly enforced. Increased wealth throughout Germany has left the German woman more leisure from the drudgery of the home. She is not so wholly absorbed by the duties of nurse, cook, and house-maid ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... 27, vi. 91; Xen. "Mem." III. vi. 12, in reference to B.C. 413, when Decelea had been fortified. As to the wholesale desertion of slaves, "more than twenty thousand slaves had deserted, many of them artisans," according to Thucydides. ...
— On Revenues • Xenophon
... well-read man. General Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, on being asked how he came to adopt a certain tactical combination which proved eminently successful at Louisbourg, said, "I had it from Xenophon." Havelock "loved Homer and took pattern by Thucydides," and, according to Mr. Forrest, adopted tactics at the battle of Cawnpore which he had learnt from a close study of "Old Frederick's" dispositions at Leuthen. There is no greater delusion than to ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Ukrainian history. He is "ready to cast everything aside rather than read Russian history," he writes to Pushkin. During his seven-year stay in St. Petersburg (1829-36) Gogol zealously gathered historical material and, in the words of Professor Kotlyarevsky, "lived in the dream of becoming the Thucydides of Little Russia." How completely he disassociated Ukrainia from Northern Russia may be judged by the conspectus of his lectures written in 1832. He says in it, speaking of the conquest of Southern Russia in the fourteenth century by Prince Guedimin ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... took a prominent part in preparing: "When your Lordships look at the papers transmitted us from America, when you consider their decency, firmness and wisdom, you can not but respect their cause and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must avow that, in all my reading—and I have read Thucydides and have studied and admired the master statesmen of the world—for solidity of reason, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion under a complication of difficult circumstances, no body of men can stand in preference to the general Congress of Philadelphia. The histories ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... wisdom, and even maintained that it was more wise than the assemblies of ancient Greece! He remarked:—"I must declare and avow, that in all my reading—and it has been my favourite study, and I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of the world—for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general congress at Philadelphia!" ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... with round eyes, and, with a last salute, slowly went out. None of us spoke, and presently Smugg opened his Thucydides. ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... perceive that an author must be studied in his own tongue: in order that no shade of meaning might be lost. Here again the two periods are easily distinguished. Nicholas V set his scholars, Poggio and Valla, to translate the Greeks, Herodotus and Thucydides, Aristotle and Diodorus. The feature of the later epoch is the number of Greek editions which came out to supplant the versions in common use. The credit for this advance in critical scholarship must be given to Aldus for his Greek Aristotle, which appeared ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... destiny appeared in the basement, and was presented to us as Hippolyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson, who had just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State of New Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish youth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, and looking forward to the future with a vacant and listless eye. I mean this was his figurative attitude; ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... mere region of the events and mutual relation of nations, than upon his universal acquaintance with general literature and the sister arts of politics and philosophy. It was for the treacherous and elegant Bolingbroke to reduce the noble art of Thucydides from the height of sublimity and grandeur to the parlor level of the conversations of the Hotel de Rambouillet, to introduce into the most serious political disquisitions, concerning perhaps the welfare of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... think that in the impetuosity of youth, you will resent the prudence with which the mother country holds you back. Upon a wise view of it, we find in the distinctive qualities and defects of youth and age the elements of a felicitous combination. The father of the philosophy of history, Thucydides, has attributed to Alcibiades a great truth: "Consider that youth and age have no power unless united; but that the lighter and the more exact and the middle sort of judgment, when duly attempered, are likely to be most efficient." I hope that the wise policy ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... one hundred lines to copy; for missing a lecture, the lecture to translate. This is the measure for an occasional offence.... For coming in late at night repeatedly, or for any offence nearly deserving rustication, I have known a whole book of Thucydides given to translate, or the Ethics of Aristotle to analyze, when the offender has been a good scholar, while others, who could only do mechanical work, have had a book of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... what authority can a book pretend to, where there are various readings?[10] And for this reason, it is manifest that no man can know the opinions of Aristotle or Plato, or believe the facts related by Thucydides or Livy, or be pleased with the poetry of Homer and Virgil, all which books are utterly useless, upon account of their various readings. Some books of Scripture are said to be lost, and this utterly destroys the credit of those that are ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... round the trophy erected on that occasion. Thus then the beautiful season of his youthful bloom coincided with the most glorious epoch of the Athenian people. He held the rank of general as colleague with Pericles and Thucydides, and, when arrived at a more advanced age, was elected to the priesthood of a native hero. In his twenty-fifth year he began to exhibit tragedies; twenty times was he victorious; he often gained the second place, but never was he ranked so low as in the third. In ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Naturalistic View of the Bible.—The Bible is not inspired at all, or at least in no way differing from any other book. Its authors were inspired, perhaps, just as Homer, or Thucydides, or Cicero were inspired, but not differently. It has no authority, therefore, over any other book, and is just as liable to be in error as any other. If you should bind in one volume the histories of Herodotus, Tacitus, Gibbon, and Mr. Bancroft, the poems of Horace, Hafiz, and Dante, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... warfare passed, and Troy remained untaken and seemingly unshaken. How the two hosts managed to live in the mean time the tellers of the story do not say. Thucydides, the historian, thinks it likely that the Greeks had to farm the neighboring lands for food. How the Trojans and their allies contrived to survive so long within their walls we are left to surmise, unless they farmed ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 4. Again, as Thucydides relates, that pestilence which at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war harassed the Athenians with a most cruel kind of sickness, came by slow steps from the burning plains of Ethiopia ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... "Then," writes Thucydides, "we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. Wealth we employ, not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avoid poverty with us is no disgrace; the true ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... charm to the supreme importance of analysing evidence, reproducing documents and accumulating proofs; but in general the depreciation of the literary element in history seems to me essentially wrong. It is only necessary to recall the names of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Livy and Tacitus, of Gibbon and Macaulay, and of the long line of great masters of style who have related the annals of France. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted that there is no subject in which rarer literary qualities are more demanded ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... at 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 up to their first principles," is a principal portion ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... to take down again my long disused Virgil and Cicero, and work through many a forgotten passage. At first the task was distasteful enough, but it soon became fascinating. My love of the classics revived. I began to read Homer and Thucydides, Tacitus and Lucretius, for my own pleasure. It was delightful to observe what interest my boys took in Virgil, as soon as they discovered that Virgil was not a mere task-book, but poetry of the noblest order. By avoiding all idea of mere unintelligent ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... to me and to the rather limited circle of readers whom I have reached. I remember debating, as a boy, whether the more desirable fame fell to the hero in a conflict or to the scribe who told the story. Whose place would one rather have? That of Timoleon and Nicias or of Plutarch and Thucydides their celebrants? But the celebrants, no doubt, seemed to their contemporaries very insignificant figures compared to the champions whose fame they perpetuated. The historians of America are a goodly company, scarcely less worthy than the champions ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... In the early part of the century, according to Nash, "every private scholar, William Turner and who not, began to vaunt their smattering of Latin in English impressions."[250] Thomas Nicholls, the goldsmith, translated Thucydides; Queen Elizabeth translated Boethius. The mention of women in this connection suggests how widely the impulse was diffused. Richard Hyrde says of the translation of Erasmus's Treatise on the Lord's Prayer, made by Margaret ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos |
