"Silenus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stone such as a little man can sit on, on which they say Silenus rested, when Dionysus came to the land. Silenus is the name they give to all old Satyrs. About the Satyrs I have conversed with many, wishing to know all about them. And Euphemus, a Carian, told me that sailing once on a time to Italy he was driven out of his course ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... Socrates first to the busts of Silenus, which have images of the gods inside them; and, secondly, to Marsyas the flute-player. For Socrates produces the same effect with the voice which Marsyas did with the flute. He is the great speaker and enchanter who ravishes the souls of men; the convincer ...
— Symposium • Plato
... Moon's point of view, Wilsonople, a Silenus, is discerned in an arm-chair winking at a couple too plainly pouting their lips for a doubt of their intentions ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... down to rest on the steps of one of the churches, a procession of patriots happened to fix its quarters on the spot. Its leader, an old grotesque-looking fellow, dressed in a priest's vestments—doubtless a part of the plunder of the night—and seated on a barrel on wheels, like a Silenus, from which, at their several halts, he harangued his followers, and drank to the 'downfal of the Bourbons,' soon let me into the history of the last twelve hours. 'Brave Frenchmen,' exclaimed the ruffian, 'the eyes of the world are fixed upon you; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... book we have more of the real Socrates, such as he is depicted in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, in the earliest Dialogues of Plato, and in the Apology. He is ironical, provoking, questioning, the old enemy of the Sophists, ready to put on the mask of Silenus as well as to argue seriously. But in the sixth book his enmity towards the Sophists abates; he acknowledges that they are the representatives rather than the corrupters of the world. He also becomes more dogmatic and constructive, passing beyond the range either of the political ...
— The Republic • Plato
... too, swelled his eyes, As large as nuts, or larger; He gasped forth heavy sighs, Like music from Silenus' charger. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the old man, twinkling his little black eyes like a godly Silenus, and nursing one of his fat legs with a lickerish smile, "isn't the Lord Almighty providin' for His beloved heritage jist as fast as He anyways kin? This war's a-goin' on till the biggest part o' you male Gentiles hez killed each other off, then the leetle handful that's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... and strangers, take up a poker to one of them, and heard him use language as blackguard as his action. I have seen Sheridan drunk, too, with all the world; but his intoxication was that of Bacchus, and Porson's that of Silenus. Of all the disgusting brutes, sulky, abusive, and intolerable, Porson was the most bestial, as far as the few times that I saw him went which were only at William Bankes's (the Nubian discoverer's) rooms. I saw him once go away in a rage, because ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... 8. And old Silenus, shaking a green stick 105 Of lilies, and the wood-gods in a crew Came, blithe, as in the olive copses thick Cicadae are, drunk with the noonday dew: And Dryope and Faunus followed quick, Teasing the God to sing them something ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; that it was I who laughed good-humouredly at the reeling old Silenus of a baronet—whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the world—Faithless, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this load behind them plodding On the ass! Silenus he, Old and drunken, merry, nodding, Full of years and jollity; Though he goes so swayingly, Yet he laughs and quaffs alway.— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... genuine Parisian, slight and erect in form, the brilliant light of her eye quenched by her long lashes, charmingly dressed, sits down upon the sofa. Caroline bows to a fat gentleman with thin gray hair, who follows this Paris Andalusian, and who exhibits a face and paunch fit for Silenus, a butter-colored pate, a deceitful, libertine smile upon his big, heavy lips,—in short, a philosopher! Caroline looks upon this individual ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the same may be said of other famous men. But of this strange being you will never be able to find any likeness, however remote, either among men that now are or who ever have been—other than ... Silenus and the Satyrs, and they represent in a figure not only himself but his words. For his words are like the images of Silenus which open. They are ridiculous when you first hear them.... His talk is of pack-beasts ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... the figure of the Roman God Silenus. He was the son of Pan, and the oldest of the satyrs, who were supposed to be half goat. Can you find the goat's horns among his curls? He was a rollicking old satyr, very fond of wine, always getting into mischief. The grape design at ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... There were Silenus' foul and loathsome route, There Sphinxes, Centaurs, there were Gorgons fell, There howling Scillas, yawling round about, There serpents hiss, there seven-mouthed Hydras yell, Chimera there spues fire and brimstone out, And ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... was brought up by the nymphs and Mercury, and then became a great conqueror, going to India, and Egypt, and everywhere, carrying the vine and teaching the use of wine. He was attended by an old fat man, named Silenus, and by creatures, called Fauns and Satyrs, like men with goats' ears and legs; his crown was of ivy, and his chariot was drawn by leopards, and he was at last raised to Olympus. His feasts were called orgies; he-goats were ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that he had seen Sheridan "drunk, with all the world; his intoxication was that of Bacchus, but Porson's that of Silenus. Of all the disgusting brutes, sulky, abusive, and intolerable, Porson was the most bestial, so far as the few times that I saw him went, which were only at William Bankes's rooms. He was tolerated in this state among the young men for his talents, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... extant, we have feasting and wine drinking, the chorus tells Polyphemus he may swallow any milk he pleases so that he does not swallow them—which the Cyclops says he would not do because they might be dancing in his stomach—and Silenus recommends the Cyclops to eat Ulysses' tongue, as it will ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the style is of a more commonplace character. The other poems in the volume are comparatively harmless, though it is sad to find Shakespeare's 'Bacchus with pink eyne' reappearing as 'pinky-eyed Silenus.' ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men — of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... even the literal inelegance of Davidson had spirit enough to translate, "Where'er the god hath moved around his graceful head." The hideous figure of that ebriety, in its most disgusting stage, the ancients exposed in the bestial Silenus and his crew; and with these, rather than with the Ovidian and Virgilian deity, our own convivial ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... who were either to have their throats cut, or be republicanized by means of singing, dancing, and revolutionary Pans and Silenus's, already beheld their property devastated by pillage or conflagration, and were in danger of a pestilence from the unburied bodies of their families.—Let the reader, who has seen Lequinio's pamphlet, compare his account of the sufferings ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... alike in one of his own fragments and in Moschus' lament, Bion is represented as courting this same Galatea after she has rid herself of the suit of Polyphemus. Vergil was content with no such simple mythology as this. He must needs shake Silenus from a drunken sleep and bid him tell of Chaos and old Time, of the infancy of the world and the birth of the gods. This mixture of obsolescent theology and Epicurean philosophy probably possessed little reality ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the crown upon his locks, then stooped and uncovered the dice, saying, with a laugh, "See, my Drusus, by the ass of Silenus, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... slight turn of the head the glitter of the spectacles seemed to gauge the size of the beer saloon in the basement of the renowned Silenus Restaurant. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... ever welcome guest; But O ——, too long you stay, Already young Amyntor, brisk and gay, His lovely Doris o'er the plain pursues: The sparkling juice at Sylvan nymphs command Richly distils from their ambrosial hand, And old Silenus ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... as he upraised his glowing and dripping countenance from the brook, resembled Silenus emerging from one of the rivers which Bacchus metamorphosed into wine during his campaign in India. He resorted to attrition and contrition, to maceration and laceration; he tried friction with leaves, with grass, with sedge, with ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Bay of Biscay. I am not unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous incombustibles, the CIGAR, so called, of the shops,—which to "draw" asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even if my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I have seen ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... into the Tartarean abyss. The rest of the Caesars successively advanced to their seats; and as they passed, the vices, the defects, the blemishes of their respective characters, were maliciously noticed by old Silenus, a laughing moralist, who disguised the wisdom of a philosopher under the mask of a Bacchanal. As soon as the feast was ended, the voice of Mercury proclaimed the will of Jupiter, that a celestial crown should be the reward of superior merit. Julius ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... intemperance, gluttony, and luxury. But what a delicate monster he is, and what a ravishing lyric strain he is master of! The pleasure that Milton forswore was a young god, the companion of Love and Youth, not an aged Silenus among the wine-skins. He viewed and described one whole realm of pagan loveliness, and then he turned his face the other way, and never looked back. Love is of the valley, and he lifted his eyes to the hills. His guiding star was not Christianity, which in its ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... they heap their plates with ambrosia, and are nectar-bibbers; but their choicest dainties are the smoke of sacrifice ascending with rich fumes, and the blood of victims poured by their worshippers round the altars. During dinner, Apollo harped, Silenus danced his wild measures, the Muses uprose and sang to us from Hesiod's Birth of Gods, and the first of Pindar's odes. When we had our fill and had well drunken, we ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... in the palmiest days. Four negro banjo players and as many jubilee singers titillated the jaded senses of the guests in a manner achieved by the infamous saxophone syncopating jazz of the Barbary Coast of our times. The dinner was over. The four and one half bottles of champagne allotted to each Silenus had been consumed, and a well-defined atmosphere of bored satiety had begun to settle down when suddenly the old-fashioned lullaby "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" broke forth from the banjoists and singers. Four waiters came in bearing a surprisingly monstrous object, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... monopolist Mammon may chuckle, Riparian Ahabs rejoice; There's excuse in your Caliban aspect, your hoarse and ear-torturing voice, You pitiful Cockney-born Cloten, you slum-bred Silenus, 'tis you Spoil the silver-streamed Thames for Pan-lovers, and all the ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... bit of it," replied Sandy, with immense gravity. "The auld Silenus has better taste. He says there's a young lass running after him, fit to break her heart aboot him,—puir thing, she must have vera little choice o' men! He hasna quite made up his mind, though he admeets she's as fine a lass as ony man need require. He's sorely afraid she ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... open in anticipation of racy talk and self-indulgence, while his great nose, his pink cheeks, his fat, loose hands and his big belly, gallantly carried, gave him, beneath his jacket and felt hat, a perfect likeness to a little rustic god his ancestors worshipped, the old Silenus. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... ordinary life. The kordax was an ancient dance of the old comedy, with indecent gestures, in which the human figure was caricatured according to all the deformations which it underwent by vice or sensuality. All the effects of gluttony and Bacchic excess were caricatured in the figure of Silenus. The old woman fond of wine lost all modesty under the influence of wine.[2027] The leaders of the choruses, in a later time at Athens, offered reminders of primitive barbarism and of the immolation of human beings, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... chains to be broken, and has provided in the course of Nature the means of its escape. It was a doctrine of immemorial antiquity, shared alike by Egyptians, Pythagoreans, the Orphici, and by that characteristic Bacchic Sage, "the Preceptor of the Soul," Silenus, that death is far better than life; that the real death belongs to those who on earth are immersed in the Lethe of its passions and fascinations, and that the true life commences only when the soul is emancipated for ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a sort of Aristophanic humour. How a great original genius like Plato might or might not have written, what was his conception of humour, or what limits he would have prescribed to himself, if any, in drawing the picture of the Silenus Socrates, are problems which no critical ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... dawntime of discovery, that he was almost justified in this delusion. Having caught the Proteus of the world, he tried to grasp him; but the god changed shape beneath his touch. Having surprised Silenus asleep, he begged from him a song; but the song Silenus sang was so marvellous in its variety, so subtle in its modulations, that Lionardo could do no more than recall scattered phrases. His Proteus was the spirit of the Renaissance. The Silenus ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Carthage, between the hill of St. Louis and the sea. They were all executed in antiquity. There are coin, types, a head of Herakles, similar to that of some silver coins attributed to Jugurtha, the fronting head of Silenus of the coins of Kyzikos, the galley of the coins of Sidon, etc., all of the purest Greek style. There are also some female heads, recalling Greek Sicilian coins; standing figures; an Athena, a Pan, a Hermes fastening his heel-pieces, a Marsyas, an amazon, a nude ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... her ballet-dancer's dress, played at the same time the cymbals and the big bass-drum a desperate accompaniment to three measures of a polka, always the same, which were murdered by a blind clarionet player; and the ringmaster, a sort of Hercules with the face of a galley-slave, a Silenus in scarlet drawers, roared out his furious appeal in a loud voice. Mixed with the crowd of loafers, soldiers, and women, I regarded the abject spectacle with disgust—the last ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee |
