"Trojan War" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if they were only a few mounds and graves, scarcely worthy of notice; yet they are such mounds as are found yet in the Trojan plains, sung by Homer, dating at least three thousand years ago, and even by many deemed earlier than the Trojan war, and still existing to this day to baffle our inquiries: while similar monuments existing by thousands in the plains of Scythia and Tartary, Persia and Arabia, as well as the forests and prairies of North America, evince a striking ...
— The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, 2nd ed. • C. S. Rafinesque
... that we derive most of the little we know of that ancient and mysterious people, the Phœnicians. He lived before the Trojan war; and of his writings but fragments survive—quotations in the writings ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... antiquaries to be the Capiterides; and the Abbe de Fontenu, in the Memoires de Literature, tom. vii. p. 126, proves, according to Vallancey, that the Phoenicians traded here for tin before the Trojan war. Homer frequently mentions this metal; and even in Scripture we have allusions to this land under the name of Tarshish (Ezekiel, c. xxvii., v. 12-25), being the place whence the Tyrians procured various metals, and among the rest, the English metal ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... hero of the Trojan war; also famous for his wanderings. One of his chief adventures, on his return voyage from Troy, was with the enchantress Circe, with whom he tarried a year, forgetful of his ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... of Argo Navis, and a Greenwich star. Also, a city of classical importance, visited by the heroes of the Trojan war, the reputed burial-place of the pilot of Menelaus, &c. But, as some ancient places have been so fortunate as to renew their classical importance in modern times, so this, under the modern name of Abukeir, has received a new "stamp of fate," by its overlooking, like Salamis, the scene of a naval ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the stitching of a glove, the outer edges bound with a cord of twisted pink leather, sewn on with stout pink thread (pl. 44). The colours are described as being wonderfully preserved, when it is remembered that they are nearly as old as the Trojan War; though perhaps their preservation is less surprising than that the flowers wreathed about several royal mummies of the same period should have shown their colours and forms when the cases were first opened, so as to be recognized ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Homeric designation of such stones, viz. chermadion, or handful; of which he also cites the definition given by Lucian, [Greek text: lithos cheiroplaethaes], a hand-filling stone. Ninety generations have passed since the Trojan war, and each of the ninety has used the same bountiful magazine. All readers of the Iliad must remember how often Ajax or Hector, took up chermadia, 'such as twice five men in our degenerate days ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... reader with the characters, events, and, so to speak, with the very physiognomy of a period ante Agamemnona; before the brilliant age of matured chivalry, which has given to song and romance the deeds of the later knighthood, and the glorious frenzy of the Crusades. The Norman Conquest was our Trojan War; an epoch beyond which our learning seldom induces our ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Trojan war,[1] AEneas retired with a company of Trojans, who escaped from the city with him, and, after a great variety of adventures, which Virgil has related, he landed and settled in Italy. Here, in process of time, he had ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... two cows, one of which, through impatience when her tail has stuck in the mud, says it is not an honour but an onus, and so pulls it off, and becomes a laughing stock to the world. The other cow waits patiently, and makes a long speech containing references to Cato and the Trojan war. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... and are chiefly confined to the lives and actions of the Jewish kings, who in general were a parcel of rascals: but these are matters with which we have no more concern than we have with the Roman emperors, or Homer's account of the Trojan war. Besides which, as those books are anonymous, and as we know nothing of the writer, or of his character, it is impossible for us to know what degree of credit to give to the matters related therein. Like all other ancient histories, they appear to be a jumble of ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... those on the same theme which had preceded them, gave rise to a generally accepted theory of European colonization subsequent to the Trojan war; and every man of note and royal family claimed to descend from the line ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... famous Greeks and Romans, with their portraits (Plin. N.H. xxxv. 11), the title being derived from the arrangement in groups of seven. Aristotle's Peplos had dealt similarly with the heroes of the Trojan War, and the 'Peplographia Varronis' of Cic. ad Att. xvi. 11, 3 is usually identified with ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... Memnon's image. Memnon was a famous king of Egypt who was killed in the Trojan war. His people erected a wonderful statue to his memory, which uttered a melodious sound at dawn, when the sun fell on it. At sunset ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... choose to call her, took a prominent part in the Trojan war, the origin of which ten years' struggle may be traced ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... cattle and horses. Of the interesting places of Epirus, memorable in history, ranks first Dodona, celebrated for its oracle, the most ancient in Greece, and only inferior to that of Delphi. It was founded by the Pelasgi before the Trojan war and was dedicated to Jupiter. The temple was surrounded by a grove of oak, but the oracles were latterly delivered by the murmuring of fountains. On the west of Epirus is the island of Corcyra (Corfu), famous for the shipwreck of Ulysses, and for the gardens of Aleinous, and for ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... although the contestants have been drawn from Attica only. There has been a public recital of Homer. Before a great audience probably at the Pnyx or the Theater a rhapsodist of noble presence—clad in purple and with a golden crown—has made the Trojan War live again, as with his well-trained voice he held the multitude spellbound by the music of ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... in the cause of the fleeting heartless Helen, the Trojan War is stirred up, and great Ajax perishes, and the gentle Patroclus is slain, and mighty Hector falls, and godlike Achilles is laid low, and the dun plains of Hades are thickened with the shades of Kings, so round this lovely giddy French princess, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... wherein is related Jupiter's frustrated wooing of Thetis, her marriage with Peleus, the episode of the golden apple, the judgment of Paris, the kidnapping of Helen, the mustering of the Greek forces, and the main events of the first nine years of the Trojan War. The Iliad (of which a synopsis is given) follows this epic, taking up the story where the wrath of Achilles is aroused and ending it with the ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... you credit for copiousness, if you start with the Trojan War—you may if you like go right hack to the nuptials of Deucalion and Pyrrha—and thence trace your subject down to to-day. People of sense, remember, are rare, and they will probably hold their tongues out of charity; or if they do comment, it will be put down to ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... called it, in the great swing under the chestnut-trees. Then, while they mended their stockings, Margaret would give Peggy a "talk-lesson," the only kind that she was willing to receive, on English history, with an occasional digression to the Trojan war, or the Norse mythology, as the case might be. Peggy detested history, and knew next to nothing of it, and this was a grievous ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... these books Mr. Baldwin presents respectively the legends relating to the Trojan War, the great Siegfried myth of Northern Europe, and the mediaeval romance of Roland and Charlemagne, bringing before the reader, with great spirit, with scholarly accuracy and with unfailing taste these heroic figures and the times ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... southward, partly by land, partly by sea, greedy for the wealth that was stored in the cultured lands of the Oriental world, and eager to find new settlements for an expanding population. Greek traditions spoke of the movement as a consequence of the Trojan war, and delighted to dwell on the voyages of its heroes into unknown seas, of the piratical descents to which it led, and of the colonies which were planted by it. The Philistine occupation of southern Palestine was one ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... the Temple of the Capitoline Jove. On one side of St John Lateran is the font where it is said that Constantine was baptised.—In the middle of the square is seen an obelisk, which is perhaps the most ancient monument in the world—an obelisk cotemporary with the Trojan war!—an obelisk which the barbarous Cambyses respected so much that in honour of it he put a stop to the conflagration of a city!—an obelisk for which a king pledged the life of his only son!—The Romans have, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... of the Pagans and that of the Bible, during the early history of the world. After reviewing the false, crude, and senseless vagaries and superstitious notions that passed for medicine from the period of the Trojan war, in 1184 B.C., to the dissolution of the Pythagorean Society, 500 B.C.—periods which existed after the writing of the books of Moses,—and the period between 500 B.C. and 320 B.C., or the philosophic era of medicine, during which flourished ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... is a long way from the great hero of the legends, isn't he? Using the old calendar, Zeus died in about 1100 B.C., not too long after the close of the Trojan War. As far as anybody knows, Neptune did the actual killing, but it's pretty clear that the ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... other side of the wall, out of the sphere of the composition. This extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject could only have been conceived by a great genius. Shakspeare, in his description of the painting of the Trojan War, in his Tarquin and Lucrece, has introduced a similar device, where the painter made a ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Egypt a high civilization in comparison with that of other nations, dating back to a mythical period. More than two thousand years before the Christian era, and six hundred before letters were introduced into Greece, one thousand years before the Trojan War, twelve hundred years before Buddha, and fifteen hundred years before Rome was founded, great architectural works existed in Egypt, the remains of which still astonish travellers for their vastness and grandeur. In the time of Joseph, before the eighteenth dynasty, there ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... the national faith, and lived under a pressure perpetually laid upon them by the public, adopting generally, as their most convenient course, an outward compliance with the religious requirements of the state. Herodotus cannot reconcile the inconsistencies of the Trojan War with his knowledge of human actions; Thucydides does not dare to express his disbelief of it; Eratosthenes sees contradictions between the voyage of Odysseus and the truths of geography; Anaxagoras is condemned to death for impiety, and only through the exertions of the chief of the state is his ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the school to which we see Telemachus going in these four Books. Heroes are his instructors, men of the deed as well as of the word, and the source from which all instruction is derived is the greatest event of the age, the Trojan War. The young man is to learn what that event was, what sacrifices it required, what characters it developed among his people. He is to see and converse with Nestor, famous at Troy for eloquence and wisdom. Then ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the rest, and they leave him as a hostage. VIII. The queen will know where the Rood is. Judas pleads that it all happened so long ago that he knows nothing about it. She says it was not so long ago as the Trojan war, and yet people know about that. When he persists, she orders him to be imprisoned and kept without food. He endures for six days, but on the seventh he yields. IX. Released from prison he leads the way to Calvary. He utters a fervent supplication in Hebrew, in which he pleads that He ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... follower, "he fought for the Greeks in the character of Euphorbus, in the Trojan war, was Hermatynus, and afterwards a fisherman; his next transformation having been into the ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and in figure compositions the names of the principal characters were written near them for purposes of identification. The most important works of Polygnotus were the wall paintings for the Assembly Room of the Knidians at Delphi. The subjects related to the Trojan War ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... Zarathustra, known to us as Zoroaster.* Most classical writers relegated Zoroaster to some remote age of antiquity—thus he is variously said to have lived six thousand years before the death of Plato,** five thousand before the Trojan war,*** one thousand before Moses, and six hundred before Xerxes' campaign against Athens; while some few only affirmed that he had lived at a comparatively recent period, and made him out a disciple of the philosopher Pythagoras, who flourished ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... disadvantages of college. Lastly, my dear fellow, never fall in love with any woman—if you do, you will inevitably repent it. This world would get on quietly without them—as long as it lasted—and I need'nt tell you that the Trojan War, and other interesting events, never would have happened, but for bright eyes, and sighs, and that sort of thing. If you are obliged to marry, because you have an establishment, write the names of your lady acquaintances ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... the old French writers, that it is difficult to lay down any positive rule for discriminating between them. But I believe the word roman particularly applies to such works as were to be supposed strictly historical: such are the romances of Arthur, Charlemagne, the Trojan War, &c. The fabliaux were generally, stories supposed to have been invented for the purpose of illustrating some moral; or real anecdotes, capable of being so applied. The lai, according to Le Grand, chiefly differed from the fabliau, in being ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... centuries elapsed? Shall it be still urged that the Phoenicians with their Tyre 2750 "B.C." (a chronology, accepted by Western history), their commerce, fleet, learning, arts, and civilization, were only a few centuries before the building of Tyre but "a small tribe of Semitic fishermen"? Or, that the Trojan war could not have been earlier than 1184 B.C., and thus Magna Graecia must be fixed somewhere between the eighth and the ninth Century "B.C.," and by no means thousands of years before, as was claimed by Plato and Aristotle, Homer and the Cyclic Poems, derived from, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... to poor and mountainous countries like Greece, the conditions are very different. It was an old belief among the Hellenes that in the days before the Trojan War 'the world was too full of people.' The increase was doubtless made possible by the trade which developed in the Minoan period, but the sources of food-supply were liable to be interfered with. Hence came the necessity for active colonisation, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... possibly been English defeats.[9] Then came innumerable poems, translated or imitated from French romances, on Charlemagne and Roland, Gawain and the Green Knight, Bovon of Hanstone, Percival, Havelock the Dane, King Horn, Guy of Warwick, Alexander, Octavian, and the Trojan War.[10] Hundreds of manuscripts, some of them splendidly illuminated, testify at the present day to the immense popularity of these imitations of French originals, and provide endless labour for the many learned societies that in our century ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... were Agamemnon and Menelaus: Menelaus' wife, Helen, was stolen by a guest, Paris of Troy, which caused the great Trojan war. ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... where a regular oracle is open for consultation. At Dodona we read that the Selloi or Helloi, a band or family of priests of ascetic habits, interpret the rustling of the sacred oak, and Agamemnon consults the Pythia, the Delphic priestess, before the Trojan war. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the Iliad are love, war, and plunder, though this last is less insisted on than the other two. The key-note is struck with a woman's charms, and a quarrel among men for their possession. It is a woman who is at the bottom of the Trojan war itself. Woman throughout the Iliad is a being to be loved, teased, laughed at, and if necessary carried off. We are told in one place of a fine bronze cauldron for heating water which was worth twenty oxen, whereas a few lines lower down a good serviceable maid-of-all- ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... Iliad, in proof of which we may mention, among many other indications, the introduction in the Odyssey of the sequel to the story of his heroes' adventures at Troy, as so many additional episodes in the Trojan war, and especially the tribute of sorrow and mourning which is paid in that poem to departed heroes, as if in fulfilment of some previous design. The Odyssey is, in fact, a sort of epilogue to ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... of expression to instil bitterness into her resentful words. The classic legend, instead of representing Oenone as forgiving Paris, makes her nurse her wrath throughout all the anguish and terror of the Trojan War. At its end, her Paris comes back to her. Deprived of Helen, a broken and baffled man, he returns from the ruins of his native Troy, and entreats Oenone to heal him of a wound, which, unless she lends her aid, must be mortal. Oenone gnashes ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... of Olynthus wrote (1) a history of the Trojan war; (2) an account of Alexander the Great. Philistus of Syracuse (1) a history of Sicily; (2) a life of Dionysius the elder; (3) a life of Dionysius the younger. He imitated Thucydides (de ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... both Mycenae and Sparta until the hundred years' truce with the Heracleids, or grandsons of Hercules, had come to an end, and they returned with a party of Dorians and conquered Sparta, eighty years after the Trojan war. ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from one cycle into another was by no means uncommon, or confined to Ireland; Greek heroes' names sometimes appear in the Irish tales; Cuchulain, in much later times, comes into the tales of Finn; and in Greece itself, characters who really belong to the time of the Trojan War appear in tales ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... of the plant could be kept within bounds it would be gladly admitted as a garden shrub. The stems and the base of the leaf-stalk are coated with, glaucous bloom, like that of a ripe plum. The bloom, easily to be rubbed off, is said to derive its title from that Glaucus who took part in the Trojan War and had the simplicity, or the wisdom, to exchange his suit of golden ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Hector. I might continue these coincidences indefinitely, but I believe that the point I desire to make is sufficiently clear to merit your attention. The great Grecian epics are epics of an African people and Helen, the cause of the Trojan war, must henceforth be conceived as a beautiful ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the American fur trade alone makes the Trojan War look like a Punch and Judy show! and the Missouri River was the path of the conquerors. We have the facts—but we have ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Bares Phrygius, Ovid and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provencal poets are his benefactors; the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung; Troilus ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... this preparation Milton began his history of England at the Flood, hastily recounted the facts to the time of the great Trojan war, and then said that he had arrived at a period when the narrative could not be so hurriedly dispatched. He showed how the old historians had gone back to Troy for the beginnings of the English race, and had chosen a great-grandson of ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... feast, held in honor of Licinius Murena having been chosen Augur, Horace endeavours to turn the conversation towards gayer subjects than Grecian Chronology, and the Trojan War, upon which his Friend Telephus had been declaiming; and for this purpose seems to have composed the ensuing Ode at table. It concludes with an hint, that the unpleasant state of the Poet's mind, respecting his ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A. D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A. D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
