"Acropolis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I see Athens and its Acropolis again?"—Miserable man! art thou not contented with the daily sights that meet thine eyes? canst thou behold aught greater or nobler than the Sun, Moon, and Stars; than the outspread Earth and Sea? If indeed thous apprehendest ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... the temple and garden of Aesculapius on the sunny side of the Acropolis at home in Athens. But he could not speak. He gazed hungrily into ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... reach of which comes down to the sea on the south, at the very base of Hymettus. Here, about five miles from the shore, an abrupt rock rises from the plain, about 200 feet high, bordered on the south by lower eminences. That rock is the Acropolis. Those lower eminences are the Areopagus, the Pmyx, and the Museum. In the valley formed by these four hills we have the Agora, and the varied undulations of these hills determine the features of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... wealth of its sanctuaries. It was founded five or six hundred years ago, and is an enclosure studded with cathedrals, and embracing broad streets and spacious squares,—a citadel and city within itself, being to Moscow what the Acropolis was to Athens. The various buildings are a strange conglomerate of architecture, including Tartar, Hindu, Chinese, and Gothic exhibited in noble cathedrals, chapels, towers, convents, and palaces. There are about twenty churches ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... named Helen and the other Xanthippe. At the age of twenty, Helen was wed to Aristagoras the tinker, and went with him to abide in his humble dwelling in the suburbs of Athens, about one parasang's distance from the Acropolis. ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... Syrian women still employ it as a charm against barrenness, as did the devotees of Mithras and Saba-Zeus. The Earth-born civilizers of the early world, Fohi, Cecrops, and Erechtheus, were half-man, half-serpent. The snake was the guardian of the Athenian Acropolis. NAKHUSTAN, the brazen serpent of the wilderness, became naturalized among the Hebrews as a token of healing power. "Be ye," said Christ, "wise as serpents, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery, unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... minute descriptions of Napoleon's birthplace at Ajaccio, of his villa in Elba, of the tapestries, pictures and statues in the National Museum at Naples, of the Acropolis, of the monument of Lysicrates, of the Greek Theater and of the Roman Amphitheater at Syracuse, and of whatever else I was directed ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... roofed with cedar. The image of the goddess occupied a comparatively small apartment within the magnificent enclosure. This image, which was said to have fallen down from Jupiter, [121:5] was not like one of those pieces of beautiful sculpture which adorned the Acropolis of Athens, but rather resembled an Indian idol, being an unsightly female form with many breasts, made of wood, and terminating below in a shapeless block. [122:1] On several parts of it were engraved mysterious symbols, called "Ephesian letters." [122:2] ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... architectural remains. By the Troyes-Belfort route, Provins may be visited. This is, perhaps, the most perfect specimen of the mediaeval walled-in town in France. To my thinking, neither Carcassonne, Semur nor Guerande surpass Hegesippe Moreau's little birthplace in beauty and picturesqueness. The acropolis of Brie also possesses a long and poetic history, being the seat of an art-loving prince, and the haunt of troubadours. A word to the epicure as well as the archaeologist. The bit of railway from Chalons-sur-Marne to Nancy ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... place of safety. The instinct of self-preservation and even the methods of defense are, after all, almost identical in every age and clime; and the motive which led the Indians to the summits of these mesas was, no doubt, the same that prompted the Athenians to make a citadel of their Acropolis, and mediaeval knights to build their castles on the isolated crags of Italy, or on the mountain ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... New Ilium, the Hill of Hissarlik, near the coast of the AEgean; and second, that the Greek traveller, Pausanias, was right in stating that the murdered Agamemnon and his kin were buried within the walls of the Acropolis at Mycenae, and not without it. In both these opinions he ran counter to the prevailing views of his time. It was generally believed that, if Troy had ever any real existence at all, its site was to be ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... to.' This was a constant boast of his, and not altogether a vain one. He might be an archaeological traveller eager about new-discovered relics and curious about ruined temples. He might be a yachting man, who only cared for Salamis as good anchorage, nor thought of the Acropolis, except as a point of departure; or he might be one of those myriads who travel without knowing where, or caring why: airing their ennui now at Thebes, now at Trolhatten; a weariful, dispirited race, who rarely look so thoroughly ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... up its station. The Persians pressed on both by land and sea. A rapid march through Phocis and Boeotia brought Xerxes to Athens, soon after the Athenians, knowing that resistance would be vain, had evacuated it. The Acropolis, defended by a few fanatics, was taken and burnt. One object of the expedition was thus accomplished. Athens lay in ruins; and the whole of Attica was occupied by the conqueror. The Persian fleet, too, finding the channel of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... from the shadows of the Acropolis and the Acrocorinthus to the crests and valleys of the Seven Hills, the tone is changed. We do not speak of the degenerate days when, after ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... owed its origin to a deified seer, was given in a cave into which the votary entered, bathed, and anointed himself, while holding a honeyed cake. He obtained the desired knowledge by what he saw and heard. Written oracles existed of the prophecies of celebrated seers, and were preserved in the acropolis of Athens. Among the Arabs divination was, and is, greatly practised, and also among the Celtic people. Oracular answers were usually couched in dark ambiguous terms; and it was thought that at times the information was ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... in April, 1913, was an out-of-the-way provincial city of little importance outside of its situation as the nucleus of a great fortress. There were two cities—an old one, la ville des eveques, on a kind of acropolis rising from the left bank of the Meuse, and a newer one built on the meadows of the river. Round the acropolis Vauban had built a citadel whose steep, green-black walls struck root in the mean streets ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... first spread was toward the south of the peninsula. Tarentum, one of the southern states, brought over to its assistance Pyrrhus the Epirot. He did little in the way of assisting his allies—he only saw Rome from the Acropolis of Praeneste; but from him the Romans learned the art of fortifying camps, and caught the idea of invading Sicily. Here the rising republic came in contact with the Carthaginians, and in the conflict that ensued discovered the military value ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... three thousand years, the fragments of this architecture may often seem, at first sight, like works of nature. At Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae, the skeleton of the old architecture is more complete. At Mycenae the gateway of the acropolis is still standing with its two well-known sculptured lions—immemorial and almost unique monument of primitive Greek sculpture—supporting, herald-wise, a symbolical pillar on the [207] vast, triangular, pedimental stone above. The ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the east of the point marked by Chemberli Tash (the column of Constantine). There the principal gate of the town opened upon the Egnatian road. From that gate the wall descended towards the Sea of Marmora, touching the water in the neighbourhood of the Seraglio lighthouse. The Acropolis, enclosing venerated temples, crowned the summit of the first hill, where the Seraglio stands. Immediately to the south of the fortress was the principal market-place of the town, surrounded by porticoes on its four sides, and hence named the Tetrastoon. On the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... its arches dislocated, its columns stretching over the earth; in these ruins you could still detect the solid proportions of a sort of Tuscan architecture; farther off, the remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here, the caked heights of an acropolis along with the fluid forms of a Parthenon; there, the remnants of a wharf, as if some bygone port had long ago harbored merchant vessels and triple-tiered war galleys on the shores of some lost ocean; still farther off, long rows of collapsing walls, deserted thoroughfares, a whole Pompeii ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... remains, simply because no real estate boom has yet reached them but Bunker Hill, there is a feeling that apartments would rent better if the musty associations of the spot were obliterated by some such name as "Buckingham Heights," or "Commonwealth Crest;" "The Acropolis" has been prayerfully considered by the freemen of the modern Athens;— whatever the decision may be, certain it is the name Bunker Hill is a heavy load for choice corners in ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... Athenians being deceived gave him those 67 men chosen from the dwellers in the city who became not indeed the spear-men 68 of Peisistratos but his club-men; for they followed behind him bearing wooden clubs. And these made insurrection with Peisistratos and obtained possession of the Acropolis. Then Peisistratos was ruler of the Athenians, not having disturbed the existing magistrates nor changed the ancient laws; but he administered the State under that constitution of things which was already established, ordering ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... ado over me than I was accustomed to, but I got through all right and secured comfortable quarters at the New York Hotel, just across the street from the Parliament Building. From the little balcony at my window I could look out at the Acropolis. The principal places visited the first day were the Stadium, ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... Amboise stands high above the town, like another Acropolis above a smaller Athens; it rises upon the only height visible for some distance, and is in a commanding position for holding the level fields of Touraine around it, and securing the passage of the Loire between Tours and Chaumont, which is the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... boat we rode over a level plain with green trees by the wayside till we reached Athens and put up at a good tarven. Athens, "The eye of Greece," mother of arts and eloquence, wuz built in the first place round the Acropolis, a hill about three hundred feet high, and is a place that has seen twice as many ups and downs as Jonesville. But then it's older, three or four thousand years older, I spoze, and has had a dretful time on't since Mr. Theseus's day, ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... refinement and artificial beauty which are English, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and classical names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills, the Cliffs of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Derwent, and Winandermere, which are to him now instead of the Acropolis and Parthenon, of Baiae, and Athens with its sea-walls, and Arcadia ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... silver, tin, copper, and bronze and made beautiful pottery. There is evidence of religious significance in the buildings, and what is called the temple was the royal residence and served as a sort of acropolis. The surrounding residences in the valley were evidently occupied by wealthy traders and were not fortified. Here the gold was received from surrounding districts and bartered ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... usually surrounded by high, thick stone walls, which made them safe from sudden attack. Within or beside the city there was often a lofty hill, which we should call a fort or citadel, but which they called the upper city or acropolis. There the people lived at first when they were few in number, and thither they fled if the walls of their city were broken ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... as that which comes to the hero who dies in a worthy cause! There is Athens, already the world's university; but no books, no libraries, no lecture-halls, only great teachers who walk about followed by a crowd of youths eager to drink in their words. Here is the Acropolis, with its snow-white temples and propylaeum, fair and chaste as though they had been built in heaven and gently lowered to this Attic mound by the hands of angels. There in the Parthenon are the sculptures of Phidias, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... off," said Coleman. And in clear language he began to labour with the man. " Look here, now, if you think you are engaged in steering a bunch of wooden-headed guys about the Acropolis, my dear partner of my joys and sorrows, you are extremely mistaken. As a matter of fact you are now the dragoman of a war correspondent and you were engaged and are paid to be one. It becomes necessary that you make good. Make good, do you understand? ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... (-Ve-diovis-), or as it was termed in the later Hellenizing epoch, the Asylum, was covered with wood and presumably intended for the reception of the husbandmen and their herds, when inundation or war drove them from the plain. The Capitol was in reality as well as in name the Acropolis of Rome, an independent castle capable of being defended even after the city had fallen: its gate lay probably towards what was afterwards the Forum.(12) The Aventine seems to have been fortified in a similar style, although less strongly, and to have ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and Hercules, near which Plato had his country seat, and in the midst of which he had taught as well his followers after him. But the most impressive spectacle laying on his right hand, that small and precipitous hill "The Acropolis" where clustered together monuments of the highest art, and memorials of the national religion, such as no other equal spot of ground has ever borne. The Apostle's eyes, in turning to the right, would fall on the north-west side of the eminence, ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... beautiful symmetria prisca of the Greeks, and it is just where we English fail, where all our art fails. Striking ideas we have, and well executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, with satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom or never have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not come from single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a gateway there;—no, it arose from all things being perfectly combined for a supreme total effect. What must not an Englishman feel about our deficiencies in ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... goat kind is ever sacrificed to Minerva, because they are said to make the olive sterile even by licking it, for their very spittle is poison to the fruit. For this reason goats are never driven into the Acropolis of Athens, except once a year for a certain necessary sacrifice, lest the olive tree, which is said to have its origin there,[55] might be touched by ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... of most travellers educated enough to feel the spell of the Violet Crown. Illusions as to the eternal summer with which poets have blessed the Isles of Greece vanished as they found deep snow in the streets, icicles on the Acropolis, and snow-balling in the Parthenon. He had a reception only a shade less cordial than if he were Demosthenes come back. He dined with King Otho, and went to a Te Deum in honour of the Queen's birthday. Finlay, the learned man who had more ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of the palace, she raised a mound of extraordinary size over his tomb; Ctesias says it was nine stades high and ten wide. The town stretching to the middle of the plain, near the Euphrates,[450] the funerary mound was conspicuous at many stades' distance like an acropolis; they tell me that it still exists although Nineveh was overthrown by the Medes when they destroyed the Assyrian empire." The exaggerations in which Ctesias indulged may here be recognized. It is impossible to take seriously statements which make ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... One ought to be able to conjure with it; the genius that concentrated the sun of Syracuse on the hostile anchorage, was of no common measure. We spent our day on a visit of the deepest interest, up at Epipolae (i.e., the position on or over the city, as Thucydides expresses it,) the acropolis, in fact, of Syracuse, and at about the same distance from the town itself as Athens is from Piraeus. In order to do this commodiously, we allowed ourselves to be suspended between two mules in a very narrow watchman's box, lettiga, (the ancient lectiga, you will say—no: here there is nothing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... seem to have wrought a wonderful and instantaneous change in the disposition of that power and its people towards ourselves;[74] and Lord Elgin, availing himself of these favourable circumstances, obtained in the summer of 1801, access to the Acropolis of Athens for general purposes, with a concession to "make excavations and to take away any stones that might appear interesting to himself." The result (shortly stated) was the excavation of the once celebrated "Elgin marbles," about which, if we are to credit the report from which ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... populace, the gaudy colours of their dress, the tumult of carriages and horses, the march of soldiers intermixed, the waving of banners and sound of martial music added to the high excitement of the scene; while round us reposed in solemn majesty the relics of antient time. To our right the Acropolis rose high, spectatress of a thousand changes, of ancient glory, Turkish slavery, and the restoration of dear-bought liberty; tombs and cenotaphs were strewed thick around, adorned by ever renewing vegetation; the mighty dead hovered over their monuments, and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... to have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies—in the embrace of fire to join the gods; or in a sundering of the earth, when the Acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous over-swarming of ocean. This she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery and disgrace, "Oh," she cries, "bear me away—wind, wave and bark!" ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... city. At the end of each of the long streets rises a mountain, and on the mountain rest the clouds and the sky. You walk outwards, and climb the nearest and most prominent of the heights to the Acropolis, to the mighty slabs of the marble of the Parthenon, simple and pure in the mountain air, a point of view where it is always morning, and you look down from the ancient Athens to the new. Your eyes rest on modern ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... if a modern Athenian would thus carelessly direct you to the Acropolis. Is the comparison faulty? Surely a ruin is sacred only for what men did there. We are indeed a headlong race. We keep our ruins behind us. Perhaps that is why we get somewhere. And yet, what beauty ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... equivalent to saying that the crucial test of the frieze of the Parthenon is its adaptability to an apartment in Bloomsbury. So long as the illusion of the Acropolis gave credit to Pheidias' design, and the sunlight of Attica imposed its delicate intended shadows edging the reliefs, the countrymen of Pericles might be tricked; but the visitor to the British Museum, as he ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... treasure which had been contributed by the other Greek cities for defence against the barbarians to the beautifying of Athens, and to furnishing them with games and amusements, and especially to the erection of the group of temples upon the Acropolis, in this way distributing patronage and keeping his people employed much as a modern political "boss" does the same ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 08, August 1895 - Fragments of Greek Detail • Various
... my Lord, am I to receive, or reply to, the narrow concessions of your closing sentence? The Spirit of Truth was breathed even from the Athenian Acropolis, and the Law of Justice thundered even from the Cretan Sinai; but for us, He who said, "I am the Truth," said also, "I am the Way, and the Life;" and for us, He who reasoned of Righteousness, reasoned also of Temperance and Judgment to come. Is this the sincere milk of the Word, which ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... it is, and less perfect than it is, had not that particular stepping-stone been found and shaped and placed in position. Taken as a whole, our stepping-stones lead us up and up towards the alluring heights of an acropolis of knowledge, on which stands the Temple of Modern Science. The story of the building of this wonderful structure is ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... buildings and ugly lines, and overhead a meagre strip of sky. Over Athens the sky hung glorious, a curve of light from side to side. His soul flew wide to meet it. Once more he was swinging along the "Street of the Winds," his face lifted to the Parthenon on its Acropolis, his nostrils breathing the clear air. Chicago had dropped from him like a garment, his soul rose and floated.... Athens everywhere—column and cornice, and long, delicate lines, and colour of marble and light. He drew a ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... being stood upon the towering crag of the Acropolis, amid the ruins of the Temple of Minerva, and gazed upon the inspiring scene. Around him rose the matchless memorials of antique art; immortal columns whose symmetry baffles modern proportion, serene Caryatides, bearing with greater grace a graceful burthen, ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... one Kylon among the Athenians, a man who had gained the victory at the Olympic games: this man behaved with arrogance, wishing to make himself despot; and having formed for himself an association of men of his own age, he endeavoured to seize the Acropolis: but not being able to get possession of it, he sat down as a suppliant before the image of the goddess. 63 These men were taken from their place as suppliants by the presidents of the naucraries, ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... on the Acropolis, Mary, a new Pallas to guard the Parthenon." His imagination leapt from vista to vista of the future, each opening to new delights. Mary's followed, lured, dazzled, a little hesitant. Her own visions, unformulated though they were, seemed of somewhat different stuff, but she saw he could ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... shed Shows dense beetle blackness in swarm, lurid Chance, The Goddess of gamblers, above. From the head, Then when it worked for the birth of a star Fraternal with heaven's in beauty and ray, Sprang the Acropolis. Ask what crown Comes of our tides of the blood at war, For men to bequeath generations down! And ask what thou wast when the Purse was brimmed: What high-bounding ball for the Gods at play: A Conservative youth! who the cream-bowl skimmed, Desiring ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... some brave deed of old, or some illustrious name of philosopher, warrior, statesman, poet, that the world will not willingly let die. A rush of stirring glorious memories swept over her mind as she gazed on the lofty summit of the Acropolis, covered with memorials of the ancient art, and associated with the great events of Athenian history. The Parthenon, or Temple of Pallas; the Temple of Theseus; that of Olympian Jove; the Tower of the Winds, or so-called Lantern of Demosthenes; and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates,—all ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... of the fanatic, this soapbox. From it the voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost always a raucous one. Luther and Sophocles, and even a Citizen of Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a temple of wisdom. What more fitting acropolis for freedom of speech than the ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at the top where clustered the great temples and palaces—the Acropolis of the city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out upon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark's ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... ancestry to which he could point, the oldest of European dynasties were things of a day. When the towering Pyramids that overlook the Nile were still new; before the Homeric ballads had yet been chanted in the streets of an Eastern city; before the foundations of the Parthenon were laid on the Acropolis; before the wandering sons of AEneas found a home in the valley of the Tiber, the chieftains of his house enjoyed the conqueror's fame, and his ancestors swayed the sceptre of Erie. Nor was he unworthy ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,—so I thought. I don't think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,—but we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... construed into the least sympathy with art or poetry at all. You called yourself a Christian, and I have no doubt that you sincerely believe yourself to be one; but to me you seemed to be more like one of those, cultured Greeks who gave St. Paul an interested hearing on the Acropolis. And yet you seemed to me so genuinely anxious to do what was right, that I am going to ask you, faithfully and sincerely, to reconsider your position. You are drifting into a kind of vague and epicurean optimism. You spoke of the message of God through nature; there is no direct ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Anchesmus, Philopappus, &c. &c. are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. But am I to be told that the "nature" of Attica would be more poetical without the "art" of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... right angles—and they went down it towards the Gate of Helios in the south wall. The Serapeum lay to their right, several streets leading to it from the street of the Sun. To reach the house where Eusebius lived they ought to have turned down the street of the Acropolis, but a compact mass of frenzied creatures came storming down it from the Serapeum, and towards them. The sun was now fast setting over the City of the Dead on the western horizon. Marcus tried to get out of the middle of the road and place Dada in safety by the house at the corner, but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... who has stood on the Acropolis, And look'd down over Attica; or he Who has sail'd where picturesque Constantinople is, Or seen Timbuctoo, or hath taken tea In small-eyed China's crockery-ware metropolis, Or sat amidst the bricks of Nineveh, May not think much of London's first appearance— But ask him what ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... civilized nations. Thanks to Memoirs and Maxims, we are able to reconstruct the life of a seventeenth or eighteenth century noblewoman as completely as German archeologists have rebuilt the temple of the Wingless Victory on the Acropolis from surrounding débris. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... beauty, from his Salmonia:—"If we look with wonder upon the great remains of human works, such as the columns of Palmyra, broken in the midst of the desert, the temples of Paestum, beautiful in the decay of twenty centuries, or the mutilated fragments of Greek sculpture in the Acropolis of Athens, or in our own Museum, as proofs of the genius of artists, and power and riches of nations now past away, with how much deeper feeling of admiration must we consider those grand monuments ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... it is no sure indication that we will not spend the day in the Riadi or the old-clothes market. If either you or I ever reach our destination, it will be by the sheerest accident. And yet one might as well undertake to see Rome without the Capitoline Hill, or Athena without the Acropolis, as Moscow without the Kremlin. We have had several glimpses of it, to be sure, in the course of our rambles, but you must admit that they were very vague and indefinite—especially the last, when, if you remember, we were laboring under ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... turned, at the bidding of the Thirty, the Laconian guards, with those of the citizens who shared their views, appeared on the scene and took away the arms of all except the Three Thousand, carried them up to the Acropolis, and safely ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... he said. I think of his children, of his home, of his boyhood, and our early life together. Then I think of our mother and the old home, and so on and on. Presently I glance at a history among my books, and immediately think of Greece and Athens and the Acropolis, Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, schoolmates and teachers, and friends connected in one way or another with my college study ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... 500 to 440 B.C., and was reckoned among Athenian artists because, though not born at Athens, he did most of his works there, and his most famous work, the statue of a cow, stood on the Acropolis of that city. This cow was represented as in the act of lowing, and was elevated upon a marble base. It was carried from Athens to Rome, where it stood in the Forum of Peace. Many writers mentioned this work of Myron's, and thirty-seven epigrams ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... have pieces of Greek architecture, as we have reprints of the most valuable records, and it is better to build a new Parthenon than to set up the old one. Let the dust and the desolation of the Acropolis be undisturbed forever; let them be left to be the school of our moral feelings, not of our mechanical perceptions; the line and rule of the prying carpenter should not come into the quiet and holy ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... over an arm of the sea at Spuyten Duyvil, and bursting to sight again in this truncated pyramid, beats it all hollow. By George, too, the bay yonder looks as blue as ever the AEgean Sea to Byron's eye, gazing from the Acropolis! But the painted foliage on these crags!-the Greeks must have dreamed of such a vegetable phenomenon in the midst of their grayish olive groves, or they never would have supplied the want of it in their landscape by embroidering their marble temples with gay ...
— The Man In The Reservoir • Charles Fenno Hoffman
... a small town but fine. It is chiefly yellow houses with red roofs, and mountains around it, which remind you of pictures you have seen when a youth. Also olive trees and straight black pines and the Acropolis. There is not much of it left as far as I can see from the city, but what there is is enough to make you wish you had brushed up your Greek history. I have now reached the place where Pan has a cave, where the man voted against Aristides because ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... texts, and on the imbecilities of the decadence; but all the more is labour wasted and insight obscured by the new pedantry; the research into unimportant origins which the Greeks themselves wisely left covered in a mist of mythology. The destruction dealt on the Athenian acropolis, under the name of scholarship, is a type of modern practice. The history of two thousand years has so far as possible been swept carelessly away in the futile attempt to lay bare an isolated picture of the age of Pericles; now archaeologists find that they cannot stop ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... heart into all our companies, we will stand firm here and fight the Danaans however hard they press us, for there is nothing else to be done. Meanwhile do you, Hector, go to the city and tell our mother what is happening. Tell her to bid the matrons gather at the temple of Minerva in the acropolis; let her then take her key and open the doors of the sacred building; there, upon the knees of Minerva, let her lay the largest, fairest robe she has in her house—the one she sets most store by; let ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... rest knowing his power and courage chose rather to be persuaded than forced into compliance. He therefore destroyed the prytaneia, the senate house, and the magistracy of each individual township, built one common prytaneum and senate house for them all on the site of the present acropolis, called the city Athens, and instituted the Panathenaic festival common to all of them. He also instituted a festival for the resident aliens, on the sixteenth of the month, Hekatombeion, which is still kept up. And having, according to his promise, laid down his sovereign power, he arranged ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... often the one that juts out farthest into the subjacent plain, by way of security against the attack of enemies. This is the beginning of almost every great historical European town; it is an arx or acropolis overhanging its own tilth or ager; and though in many cases the town came down at last into the valley, retaining still its old name, yet the remains of the old earthworks or walls on the hill-top above often bear witness to our own day to the original ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... fatherland was the place where he was born; where he had spent his earliest years playing hide and seek amidst the forbidden rocks of the Acropolis; where he had grown into manhood with a thousand other boys and girls, whose nicknames were as familiar to him as those of your own schoolmates. His Fatherland was the holy soil where his father and mother lay buried. It was the small house within the high city-walls where his ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... as I could, and then he remarked: "Do you know, while in Athens our little party stood on the Acropolis admiring the Parthenon, and one enthusiastic Grecian exclaimed: 'There is the wonder of the world. For three thousand years its perfection has baffled and taught the genius of every generation. It can be copied, but ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... part Athens performed in the Persian wars gave her the political ascendancy in Greece and enabled her to assume the beginning of the states; in fact, enabled her to establish an empire. Pericles rebuilt Athens after the destructive work of the Persians. The public buildings, the Parthenon and the Acropolis, were among the noted structures of the world. A symmetrical city was planned on a magnificent scale hitherto unknown. Pericles gathered about him architects, sculptors, poets, dramatists, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the centre of art and learning, adorns our collection with Athens, the Acropolis and Parthenon, the latter almost completely and shamefully bereft of those famous marbles, chiseled by Phidias nearly ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... ago, a tuft of grass growing at the foot of one of the grand marble columns of the Parthenon at the Acropolis at Athens, I found a compass mark in the footing, or foundation—a mere scratch in the stone—made, probably, by some architect's assistant, before the Christian era. I make no claim to more than having made ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... and ran. They would stand and fight a little again—then run. I thought that we should chase them to Athens. I had visions of riding into the city in the wake of Edhem Pasha and pitching my ragged camp by the Acropolis. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... for immortal souls across sky and sea, comes nearer to being a work of art than almost anything we possess to-day, because it tells the truth, because it is the material form of a spiritual idea, because it is a sublime and beautiful expression of New York in the way that the Acropolis was a sublime and beautiful expression of Athens. The Acropolis was beautiful because it was the abode of heroes, of great individuals; and the Brooklyn Bridge, because it expresses the bringing together of millions of men. It is the architecture of crowds—this Brooklyn Bridge—with winds and sunsets ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Would anything survive mutilation with the serene confidence in its fragmentary but everywhere penetrating interest which seems to pervade the most fractured fraction of a Greek relief on the Athenian acropolis? Yes, there would be the debris ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... sides of the building, and sometimes not. When it is so continued, water-spouts are inserted into it at intervals, usually in the form of lions' heads. Fig 53 shows a fine lion's head of this sort from a sixth century temple on the Athenian Acropolis. If it be added that upon the apex and the lower corners of the pediment there were commonly pedestals which supported statues or other ornamental objects (Fig. 52), mention will have been made of all the main features of the exterior of a Doric ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... river of the Troad which takes its rise in the rocky, wooded eminence which, according to Greek tradition, formed the acropolis of Troy. The Palladium was set up on its banks near its source, in a temple especially erected for it (l. 6), and from this lofty position was supposed to watch over the safety of the city and her defenders on the ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Olympic games, of good birth and powerful position, who had married a daughter of Theagenes, a Megarian, at that time tyrant of Megara. Now this Cylon was inquiring at Delphi; when he was told by the god to seize the Acropolis of Athens on the grand festival of Zeus. Accordingly, procuring a force from Theagenes and persuading his friends to join him, when the Olympic festival in Peloponnese came, he seized the Acropolis, with the intention of making himself tyrant, thinking ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... movement. However, a few days later, the citadel was taken at night, owing to the treachery of a woman who admitted an English detachment; and the next day, to the general astonishment, the British standard floated over the Acropolis ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Persae, 463, sq.; and Herodotus, viii. 90. Harpocration records the preservation, in the Acropolis, of the silver-footed throne on which Xerxes sat when he watched the battle of Salamis from the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... will have passed away like a morning cloud. Look at the fame of Nineveh levelled in the dust. Search for the site of Babylon, with its walls and gates, its hanging gardens and terraces! Contemplate the ghost of the enlightened Athens, stalking through the ruins of her Parthenon, her Athenaeum, or Acropolis. Examine the shadow of power which now remains to the mighty Rome, the empress of the world. Even so will it be with England; ere ten centuries have rolled away, her sun-like splendour will illume ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... Parthenon, built under the direction of Phidias, the most celebrated sculptor of that time, who adorned it with many of his works, and especially with the huge statue of Athena in ivory, forty-seven feet in height. The Acropolis was also enriched with another figure of Athena in bronze—also the work ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... testify to this. It is a city that enticed and still entices the mighty of the earth; Roman Emperors in the past came to appease the wrath of its gods, a German Emperor to-day comes to pilfer its temples. For the Acropolis in the poplar grove is a mine of ruins. The porphyry pillars, the statues, the tablets, the exquisite friezes, the palimpsests, the bas-reliefs,—Time and the Turks have spared a few of these. And when the German Emperor came, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Lincoln had an essentially Hellenic mind. First of all the architecture of his thought was that of the Greek masters, who, whether as Phidias they built the Parthenon to crown with harmonious beauty the Acropolis, or as Homer they recorded in swelling narrative from its dramatic beginning the strife of the Achaeans before Troy, or even as Euclid, they developed from postulates the relations of space, had a deep insight into the order in which mother nature was striving ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... reign of reverie set in. The devotion of the cloister knew that mood thoroughly, and had sounded all its stops. For the object of this devotion was absent or veiled, not limited to one supreme plastic form like Zeus at Olympia or Athena in the Acropolis, but distracted, as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections. But then, the Church, that new Sibyl, had a thousand secrets to make the absent near. Into this kingdom of reverie, and with it into a paradise of ambitious refinements, the earthly love enters, and ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... Eretria, the produce of which they were enjoying, because they had espoused the cause of Antony. Moreover he forbade them to make any one a citizen for money. It seemed to them that what happened to the statue of Athena had tended to their misfortune. Placed on the Acropolis facing the east it had turned about to ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... eyes of his mind, and heart: saying aloud, to himself, names of glorious places—"Athens—Rome—Venice," and going there in the airship of imagination; calling up visions of rose-sunset light on the yellowing marble of the Acropolis, or moonlight in the Pincian gardens, with great umbrella-pines like blots of ink on steel, or the opal colours shimmering deep down, under the surface of the Grand Canal. He made Dierdre understand his way of "listening ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... picturesque appearance, isolated and seemingly independent, but really parts of a low range parallel to Hymettus. Upon one of the most considerable of these, whose precipitous sides make it a natural fortress, stood the Acropolis, and upon the group of lesser heights around and in the valleys between clustered the dwellings ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... you to the then still unfurnished theatre of Athens, hewn out of the limestone rock on the south-east slope of the Acropolis. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... standing on the Acropolis at Athens or in the Tribuna at Florence, they feel themselves sadly "out of it." They think longingly of Billy or Jimmy, and the coffee and cakes of their far Missouri or Arkansas home, and come back cursing Europe and its contents. No damage is ever done by foreign ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... of Mars Hill, and climbed to the top of the ruined Acropolis, disturbing a few lizards, spiders, bats, rooks and pigeons that made their homes where the eloquence of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... has sent him out to the farm. As for the lady, she has gone to the Acropolis to visit Minerva's temple. It's open now. Go and ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... to land for fear the ship would sail without them. It was blowing a perfect gale, the sea was rough, and the captain too cross to tell us how long we would have on shore. I looked at my companion and she looked at me. In that one glance we decided that we would see the Acropolis or die in the attempt. A Cook's guide was watching our indecision with hungry eyes. We have since named him Barabbas, for reasons known to every unfortunate who ever fell into his hands. But he was clever. He said that ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... or dreamed there, holding one knee in the hand. A cascade foamed and rolled over the pretty rocks; a tree, truncated like a column, supported an ivy; a tombstone bore an inscription. The stone shafts erected on the lawns hardly suggest better the Acropolis than this elegant little park recalled wild forests. It is the charming and artificial place where city people go to look at flowers grown in hot-houses, and to admire, as one admires the spectacle of life at the theater, that agreeable representation of the beauties of nature ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... whether it be his car or the other. In regard to the world, we have come to feel its whirl. We have noticed the pyramids of Egypt lifted to hide the sun; the mountains of Hymettus hurled down, so as to disclose the moon that was behind them to the watchers on the Acropolis; and the mighty mountains of Moab removed to reveal the stars of the east. Train the telescope on any star; it must be moved frequently, or the world will roll the instrument away from the object. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Athena like the white ship upon the waves. The audiences in the tragedies should be shown like wheat-fields on the hill-sides, always stately yet blown by the wind, and Athena the one sower and reaper. Crowds should descend the steps of the Acropolis, nymphs and fauns and Olympians, carved as it were from the marble, yet flowing like a white cataract down into the town, bearing with them Athena, their soul. All this in the Photoplay ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... See Ducange, C. P. l. i. part i. c. 16, and his Observations sur Villehardouin, p. 289. The chain was drawn from the Acropolis near the modern Kiosk, to the tower of Galata; and was supported at convenient ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... purchaser. But when they found me impracticable, they brought out their greatest curiosity—a flint arrow-head, such as used to be plowed up in scores near the place where I was born. Thoroughly disgusted with the sight of this Acropolis, with this ancient Athens of mud, I turned my horse's head toward Puebla; and as I rode on, I met scores of these modern Athenians trotting homeward, bare-headed and bare-footed, carrying "papooses" on their backs, while their faces, forms, and hair, and ragged dress, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... these encomiums. Which brings up, in this immediate connection, the dealings of Periclean Athens with the funds of the League, and the source as well as the destination of these surplus funds. Out of it all came the works on the Acropolis, together with much else of intellectual and artistic life that converged upon and radiated from this Athenian center of culture. The vista of Denkmaeler that so opens to the vision of a courageous fancy is in itself such a substance of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... conducted a series of campaigns between 1684 and 1687, but with terrible barbarity on both sides. The Venetian fleet entered the Piraeus on September 21, 1687. The city of Athens was immediately occupied by their army, and siege laid to the Acropolis. On September 25 a Venetian bomb blew up a powder magazine in the Propylaea, and the following evening another fell in the Parthenon. The classic temple was partially ruined; much of the sculpture which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... terraced gardens were near by, and above them in the distance the Tower of Isaac Angelus arose over Blacherne, like a sentinel on guard against the opposing summits of Galata and Pera. From the bench, the walk, besides being wide and smooth, extended, with a slight curvature northward to the Acropolis, now Point Serail, and on the south to the Port of Julian. The airy promenade thus formed was reached by several stairs intermediate the landmarks mentioned; yet the main ascent was near the Imperial ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... of his Country must have a monument worthy of his exalted place in history. What shall it be? A temple such as Athens might have been proud to rear upon her Acropolis? An obelisk such as Thebes might have pointed out with pride to the strangers who found admission through her hundred gates? After long meditation and the rejection of the hybrid monstrosities with ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... object in Athens is the Acropolis, or Citadel—a rock which rises abruptly from the plain, and is crowned with the Parthenon. This was a temple dedicated to the goddess Minerva, and was built of the hard white marble of Pentelicus. It suffered ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... looking at the buttressed Acropolis and the ruined temples,—the Doric Parthenon, the Ionic Erechtheum, the Corinthian temple of Jupiter, and the beautiful Caryatides. But see those steps cut in the natural rock. Up those steps walked the Apostle Paul, and from that summit, Mars Hill, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... disinterment of others, and the conservation of all the existing monuments; and time will probably ere long give us back, so far as is possible, all that the vandalism or recklessness of modern ages has obscured or destroyed. On the Acropolis the results of these efforts at restoration are chiefly visible; day by day the debris of ruined fortifications, of Turkish batteries, mosques, and magazines, are disappearing; every thing which is not Pentelic ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... to persuade themselves, that this is all Galatea has to do—to appear behind a curtain as a 'pose plastique,' to make an excellent 'tableau vivant,' and to wear Greek drapery, as if she had stepped down from a niche in the Acropolis. All this Miss Mary Anderson does to perfection. She is a living, breathing statue. A more beautiful object in its innocent severity the stage has seldom seen. But is this all that Galatea has to do? Those who have studied Mr. Gilbert's poem will scarcely say so. Galatea descended from her ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... At Antioch, Seleucus Callinicus built a sanctuary for the statue of Isis sent to him from Memphis by Ptolemy Euergetes.[14] In token of his friendship Ptolemy Soter introduced his god Serapis into Athens, where the latter had a temple at the foot of the Acropolis[15] ever after, and Arsinoe, his mother or wife, founded another at Halicarnassus, about the year 307.[16] In this manner the political activity of the Egyptian dynasty was directed toward having the divinities, ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... the most classic of all these legendary coast towns near Naples, as it was here that the Cumaean Sibyl dwelt with the mysterious sibylline leaves,—the books that were carried to Rome. A colossal Acropolis was once here, fragments of whose walls are now standing; and the rocky foundation is honeycombed with secret passages and openings. It is here that Virgil's "Grotto of the Sibyl" is supposed to have stood,—the grotto "whence resound ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... English; and it must be acceptable by them in teaching the native children of each country. I shall not be satisfied, unless I can feel that the little maids who gather their first violets under the Acropolis rock, may receive for them AEschylean words again with joy. I shall not be content, unless the mothers watching their children at play in the Ceramicus of Paris, under the scarred ruins of her Kings' palace, may yet teach them there ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... their chieftains, and drove away the Turkish soldiers, inflicting on them the grossest barbarities. In a few days the Turks possessed nothing in the Morea but their fortresses. The Turkish garrison of Athens shut itself up in the Acropolis. Most of the islands of the Archipelago hoisted the standard of the Cross; and the strongest of them armed and sent out cruisers to prey on ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord |
