"Saturnalia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dying and a young year was about to be born. Along the blazing stretch of Broadway from Thirtieth street to Columbus circle seethed and sounded the noisy saturnalia of New ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... blending together into spectral dimness, with no sound audible but the continued quarrel in the front room of the jail. Keith crept along to the end of the building from where he could perceive the lights of the town twinkling dimly through the intense blackness. Evidently the regular evening saturnalia had not yet begun, although there was already semblance of life about the numerous saloons, and an occasional shout punctuated the stillness. A dog howled in the distance, and the pounding of swift hoofs along the trail told of fresh arrivals. ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... and daughters of joy looking out from their windows, all intoxicated with the mere delight of living and the gladness of a new day. The pagan populace of Antioch—reckless, pleasure-loving, spendthrift—were preparing for the Saturnalia. But all this Hermas had renounced. He cleft his way through the crowd slowly, like a reluctant swimmer weary of ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... encouraging this, I see other advantages in it. Trade is languishing; Fouche tells me that there are great complaints. This will set a little money in circulation; besides, I am on my guard about the Jacobins. Everything is not bad, because it is not new. I prefer the opera-balls to the saturnalia of the Goddess of Reason. I was never so enthusiastically applauded ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... cut off all communication with its neighbours and Madrid. The sorriest hamlet was determined to stand on its own bottom. Federation had given place to cantonalism, marked by massacres, incendiarism, and every description of brutality, and bloody saturnalia were celebrated throughout the length and breadth ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... stand before this magnificent monument; it is found in Thorwaldsen's "Christ;" in Franklin Simmons's "Angel of the Resurrection,"—in such works as those that have a language for the soul, rather than in a "Saturnalia." ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... were growing less and less. Blood was reduced to despair. If he went off now, Heaven knew what would happen to the town, the temper of those whom he was leaving being what it was. Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable. Unable to reach a decision, his own men and Hagthorpe's took the matter off his hands, eager to give chase to Rivarol. Not only was a dastardly cheat to be punished but an enormous treasure to be won by treating ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... The sudden madness and saturnalia of love into which I had these few weeks been plunged tapped, it seemed, my subliminal consciousness, maybe ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... has already revealed certain means of discerning the thought of a woman; but we make no pretence in this book of exhaustively stating the resources of human wit, which are immeasurable. Now here is a proof of this. On the day of the Saturnalia the Romans discovered more features in the character of their slaves, in ten minutes, than they would have found out during the rest of the year! You ought therefore to ordain Saturnalia in your ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... of the truth. The physician was a sorry chemist and a worse philosopher. He blundered in his analysis of the means; and if I remember rightly, he whines like a priest at the motives,—for see you not what was really the cause of this spreading pestilence? It was the Saturnalia of the Weak,—a burst of mocking license against the Strong; it was more,—it was the innate force of the individual waging ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... (i.e. later in 84 and 85)[643] he published two books, the thirteenth and fourteenth, composed of neat but trifling poems on the presents (Xenia and Apophoreta) which it was customary to give at the feast of the Saturnalia. From this point his output was continuous and steady, as the following table ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... cairns of stone; the Klickitats, who swathed them like mummies and laid them in low, rude huts on the mimaluse, or "death islands" of the Columbia; the Chinooks, who stretched them in canoes with paddles and fishing implements by their side; and the Kalamaths, who burned them with the maddest saturnalia of dancing, howling, and leaping through the flames of the funeral pyre. Over sixty or seventy petty tribes stretched the wild empire, welded together by the pressure of common foes and held in the grasp of the ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... comicality in the scene of the study. There sat Colonel Adams, still unaffectedly dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed whalebone nodding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough to have sobered a Saturnalia. Sir Leopold Fischer was leaning against the mantelpiece and heaving with all the ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... legislation. Railroads, insurance companies, great banking concerns, vast industrial corporations, were associated in the public mind as "the Interests." And the United States Senate was deemed the stronghold of the interests. A saturnalia of senatorial muckraking now laid bare the "oligarchy," as the small group of powerful veteran Senators who controlled the senatorial machinery was called. It was disclosed that the centralization of leadership in the Senate coincided with the centralization of power in the ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... equals, and spoke of his wife and children. But his tormentors would have none of that, and shot him then and there. Lecomte fell on his knees; they dragged him to his feet, and continued firing into his still warm body. When the populace was allowed to come in they danced a saturnalia over his corpse. Auber said: "My heart bleeds when I gaze on all that is going on about me. Alas! I have lived ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... emperor's head was the token of sovereignty and carried with it the obligation to pay tribute. Every fibre in your nature protests against the prostitution of itself to anything short of God. You remember the story in the Old Testament about that saturnalia of debauchery, the night when Babylon fell, when Bel-shazzar, in the very wantonness of godless insolence, could not be satisfied with drinking his wine out of anything less sacred than the vessels that had been brought ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... venerable, all that was poetic, even to abbey churches; yea, dug up the very bones of ancient monarchs from the consecrated vaults where they had reposed for centuries, and scattered them to the winds; and then amid the mad saturnalia of sacrilege, barbarity, and blasphemy to proclaim the reign of "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," with Marat for their leader, and Danton for their orator, and Robespierre for their high-priest; and, finally, to consummate the infamous farce of reform ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... and modern; meaning of the word feriae; change in its meaning; holidays of plebs; festival of Anna Perenua; The Saturnalia; the ludi and their origin; ludi Romani and plebeii; other ludi; supported by State; by private individuals; admission free; Circus maximus and chariot-racing; gladiators at funeral games; stage-plays at ludi; political feeling ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... widely worshiped, it was little used in the construction of early calendars. Primitive astronomy knew hardly anything of solstices and equinoxes, and where these are noted in the more advanced rituals, they appear to be attachments to observances founded on other considerations—so the Roman Saturnalia, celebrated near the winter solstice, and apparently the plebeian festival of the summer solstice attached to the worship of Fortuna; and the same thing is probably true of the Semitic and Greek festivals that occurred near the equinoxes ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... I suppose, to the Brahmin mind. He sat over against this sacred Benares, and told those freethinkers, who came across at times, that his was the only one and true religion, and that the Phallic saturnalia on the opposite shore was damned, and the Ganges water was of no use whatever in ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... "There lives more doubt"—I quote from memory—"in honest faith, believe me, than in half the" systems of philosophy, or words to that effect. The victor had a slave at his ear during his triumph; the slaves during the Roman Saturnalia, dressed in their masters' clothes, sat at meat with them, told them of their faults, and blacked their faces for them. They made their masters wait upon them. In the ages of faith, an ass dressed in sacerdotal ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... anticipate. While the bulk of the Orientals was still beyond the Himalayas and the Gobi, Europe indulged in a wild saturnalia to celebrate its own doom. All pretense of sexual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small illprinted newspapers carried advertisements promising the gratification of strange lusts. A new cult of Priapus sprang up and virgins were ceremoniously deflowered ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... especially in these irreverent ages, the noteworthy Dead is sure to be found lying under infinite dung, no end of calumnies and stupidities accumulated upon him. For the class we speak of, class of "flunkies doing saturnalia below stairs," is numerous, is innumerable; and can well remunerate a "vocal flunky" that will serve their purposes ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... high-born daughters of successful swindlers, but will be kindly permitted by the lordly Halliwell to stand on the curb and see beauts who are only by the grace of boodle, roll by like triumphant Sylla on Fortune's bike. During the Saturnalia in ancient Rome the master acknowledged the brotherhood of man by ministering to his slave; but Kansas City, thanks to the omnipotent Halliwell, has cut the working class off from mankind—the hewers of wood and drawers of water are no longer considered human! Surely we are making rapid "progress"—are ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... she separated herself almost entirely from her blood-stained husband, and spent her life in the recesses of the harem, praying as a Christian both for the murderer and his victims. It is a relief, in the midst of this atrocious saturnalia to encounter this noble and gentle character, which like a desert oasis, affords a rest to eyes wearied with the contemplation of so much ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... were in honor of Janus, the great god of the Sabines, the god of beginnings, celebrated on the first of January, to which month he gave his name; also the feasts in honor of the Penates, of Mars, of Vesta, of Minerva, of Venus, of Ceres, of Juno, of Jupiter, and of Saturn. The Saturnalia, December 19, in honor of Saturn, the annual Thanksgiving, lasted seven days, when the rich kept open house and slaves had their liberty,—the most joyous of the festivals. The feast of Minerva lasted five days, when offerings were made by all mechanics, artists, and scholars. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... for our golden youth in the fifties to do so. Every night in the Haymarket there was a kind of noisy saturnalia, in which golden youths joined hands with youths who were by no means golden, to give much trouble to the police, and fill the pockets of the keepers of night-houses—"Bob Croft's," "Kate Hamilton's," "the Piccadilly ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... oblivion. From the middle of June to the middle of September, all trapping is suspended; for the beavers are then shedding their furs and their skins are of little value. This, then, is the trapper's holiday, when he is all for fun and frolic, and ready for a saturnalia among the mountains. ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... quiet. The mobs on the street seemed to be looking for food rather than treasure. They were, however, generally resting, worn out; they were sleeping—preparing for the evening. With nightfall the saturnalia of death would begin again with ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... home near Caen Charlotte Corday heard as from afar the story of this dreadful saturnalia of assassination which was making Paris a city of bloody mist. Men and women of the Girondist party came to tell her of the hideous deeds that were perpetrated there. All these horrors gradually wove themselves in the young girl's imagination around the sinister and repulsive figure ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... was Antoninus's wish to murder his brother at the Saturnalia, but he was not able to carry out his intention. The danger had already grown too evident to be concealed. As a consequence, there were many violent meetings between the two,—both feeling that they were being plotted against,—and many precautionary measures ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... hideous saturnalia, and deafened by the brass and percussion instruments I tried to get away, but my neighbors protested and I was forced to sit and suffer. What followed was incomprehensible. The crazy amazons, the Walk-your-horses, and the disagreeable Wotan kept things in a perfect uproar for half an hour. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... also part of the religious ceremonies attendant on the worship of Dionysos or Bacchus.[28] Along with the drinking of certain vegetable decoctions, dancing formed an important part of the witches' saturnalia during the medieval period. When in a state of frenzy, partly drug induced and partly the product of exhilaration caused by wild dancing, visions of Satan followed. In the dancing mania of the fourteenth century, the sufferers ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... and found the good old priest on his knees, a crucifix clasped to his breast, his white face upturned, shouting ave marias and pater nosters at the top of his aged voice as if fearful they would not ascend above the saturnalia on the roof. The Devil added to his distraction by loud bursts of ribald laughter; but the father, revolving his head as if it were on a pivot, continued to pray. Satan began to curse like ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... was a woman—the eternal feminine," I said, sticking him to the point, for I was more interested in him than in the seething saturnalia, our common sobriety amid which seemed somehow to raise our casual acquaintanceship to the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... melancholy. All power was concentrated at Rome and in the legions. The most shameful and degrading scenes were daily enacted. The Roman aristocracy, which had conquered the world, and which alone of all the people had any voice in public business under the Caesars, had abandoned itself to a saturnalia of the most outrageous wickedness the human race ever witnessed. Caesar and Augustus, in establishing the imperial power, saw perfectly the necessities of the age. The world was so low in its political relations that no other form of government ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... song is sung at Fairlop fair, one of the gayest of the numerous saturnalia kept by the good citizens of London. The venerable oak has disappeared; but the song is nevertheless song, and the curious custom of riding through the fair, seated in boats, still ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... the people, incited by the propaganda of the clerics, nursed frightful hatred against the Jews, not only as "infidels," but also as intellectual aristocrats. The rage of the populace was the combustible material in the terrific explosions that occurred periodically, in the bloody saturnalia of the Pastouraux (1320), in the Black Death riots (1348), in ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... says Macrobius, "consider You-piter as the soul of the world." Hence the words of Virgil: " Muses let us begin with You-piter; the world is full of You-piter." (Somn. Scrip., ch. 17). And in the Saturnalia, he says, "Jupiter is the sun himself." It was this also which made Virgil say, "The spirit nourishes the life (of beings), and the soul diffused through the vast members (of the universe), agitates the whole mass, and forms but ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... God who is evil, as Proudhon said, that senseless and ludicrous God who delights in grotesque saturnalia, in ridiculous prayers, in shameful mummeries, in vows contrary ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... winter quarters, however, was not unbroken. Oroeses, king of the Albanians dwelling beyond the Cyrnus, made an expedition against them just at the time of the Saturnalia. He was impelled partly by a wish to do a favor to Tigranes the younger, who was a friend of his, but mostly by the fear that the Romans would invade Albania, and he cherished the idea that if he should fall upon them in the winter, when they were not expecting hostilities ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... epic of the Middle Ages, in which animals represent men, "full of broad rustic mirth, inexhaustible in comic devices, a world Saturnalia, where wolves tonsured into monks and nigh starved by short commons, foxes pilgrimaging to Rome for absolution, cocks pleading at the judgment-bar, make strange mummery." The principal characters are Isengrim the wolf ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... poets tried to identify him with the Grecian god Kronos, and fabled that after his dethronement by Jupiter, he fled to Italy, where he reigned during what was called the Golden Age. In memory of his beneficent dominion, the feast of Saturnalia was held every year in the winter season. Then all public business was suspended, declarations of war and criminal executions were postponed, friends made presents to one another, and the slaves were indulged with great liberties. A feast was given them ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... of Spring, and said to be in honour of Krishna, and of his son Kama-deva, the god of love. It is identified with the Holi or Dola-yatra, the Saturnalia, or rather, Carnival of the Hindus, when people of all conditions take liberties with each other, especially by scattering red powder and coloured water on the clothes of persons passing in the street, as described in the play called Ratnavali, ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... sacred to Saturn. He, according to the old legends, had first taught husbandry, and when he reigned in Italy there was a golden age, when every one had his own field, lived by his own handiwork, and kept no slaves. There was a feast in honor of this time every year called the Saturnalia, when for a few days the slaves were all allowed to act as if they were free, and have all kinds of wild sports and merriment. Afterwards, when Greek learning came in, Saturn was mixed up with the Greek Kronos, or Time, who devours his offspring, and the reaping-hook his figures used to carry ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... back?" said the martyr. The fact is, she was well aware that this was a case of quid pro quo; and that Gwen was entitled, by treaty, to a perfect Saturnalia of sweet-hearting till after Christmas, in exchange for the six months of penal servitude to follow. But she preferred to indicate that the terms of the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the quickness of lightning hundreds of furious hands tore and snatched, while hot voices smote the air in snarls and gasps. They wanted this money—would lose their lives for it. In an instant the pawn-shop hall had been turned into a sulphurous saturnalia horrid to witness. That gave you a grim idea of mob violence. I ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... a kind of judicial Saturnalia. You must know, that one of the requisites to be a macer, or officer in attendance upon our supreme court, is, that they shall be ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... array—after the princely manner of the house—of gold cups, crystal flagons, and tall, slender glasses which looked as if they might have been cut out of deep-hued amethyst. The slaves had withdrawn, as it was one of the first nights of the Saturnalia and their duties were lightened by a considerate master. The unusual cold and the savage winds that had held Rome in their grip for the past few days were forgotten within the beautiful dining-room. A multitude of lamps, hanging from the lacquered ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... I should have had such a tremendous visitor! But never mind; for all went off very pleasantly. But when he arrived at Philippus's house[1] on the evening of the second day of the Saturnalia, the place was so full of soldiers that they could hardly find a spare table for Caesar himself to dine at. There were two thousand men. Really I was in a state of perplexity as to what was to be done next day: but Barba ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... back to our theme! Back to despots and slaves! Feasts furnished by Famine! rejoicings by Pain! True Freedom but welcomes, while slavery still raves, When a week's Saturnalia hath loosened ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Charles IX., and of the Marshals de Montmorency, De Retz, and the Sieur du Mazille, physician to the king, that he could perform the most wonderful things by the aid of a devil to whom he had sold himself. He described at great length the saturnalia of the fiends, the sacrifices which they offered up, the debaucheries they committed with the young and handsome witches, and the various modes of preparing the infernal unguent for blighting cattle. He said he had upwards of twelve hundred accomplices in the crime of witchcraft ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble breast in a divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the Saturnalia or the Feast of Minerva, you will be presented with a sorry cloak, or a worn-out tunic; and a world of ceremony will go to the presentation. The first who gets wind of the great man's intention flies to you with the news of what is in store for you; and the ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,—the final expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... Seneca remarks (Epist. xi. 5) "that the Roman players hang down their heads, fix their eyes on the ground and keep them lowered, but are unable to blush in acting shame." According to Macrobius, who lived in the filth century ('Saturnalia,' B. vii. C. 11), "Natural philosophers assert that nature being moved by shame spreads the blood before herself as a veil, as we see any one blushing often puts his hands before his face." Shakspeare makes Marcus ('Titus Andronicus,' act ii, sc. 5) say to his niece, "Ah! now thou turn'st ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... them now, with unstrung nerves, made them seem a hundred-fold more terrible than when they were the spontaneous offspring of hot blood. With the reflection came the thoguhts that this was but a prelude—an introduction—to an infinitely horrible saturnalia of violence and blood, through which he was to be hurried until released by his own destruction. This became a nightmare that threatened to stagnate the blood in his veins. He gasped, turned his back to the wall with an effort that thrilled him with ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... morality and decency in the region, but they made no note of them. And, perhaps fortunately, they were not there during court week to witness the scenes of license that were described. This court week, which draws hither the whole population, is a sort of Saturnalia. Perhaps the worst of this is already a thing of the past; for the outrages a year before had reached such a pass that by a common movement the sale of whisky was stopped (not interdicted, but stopped), and not a drop of liquor could ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... speedily resolved itself into a saturnalia that drenched the land with blood and roused the civilized world into resentful horror. As the tide of barbarity swept forward into Northern France, stories of the horrors filtered through the close web of German censorship. ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Camille Flammarion,[39] has imagined the absorption of the nitrogen of the air in this way; and has gone on to picture men and animals reduced to breathing only oxygen, first becoming excited, then mad, and finally ending in a perfect saturnalia of delirium. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... guests, one alone laughed not, drank not. This was Jacques. With fixed and lurid eye, he gazed upon vacancy. A stranger to what was passing around him, the unhappy man thought of the Bacchanal Queen, who had been so gay and brilliant in the midst of similar saturnalia. The remembrance of that one being, whom he still loved with an extravagant love, was the only thought that from time to time roused ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... before, was startling. It was as if the earth had suddenly opened and vomited forth the thousands of Mulattoes and Zambos, Indians, Metises, and Creoles,[9] that now sang, danced, chattered, screamed, and shouted—doing their utmost worthily to play their part in the time-honored saturnalia of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... but, like too many of his fraternity, he was seldom sober from Saturday night until Wednesday morning. His loving spouse 'rowed in the same boat'—and the 'little green-bottle' was dispatched several times during the days of their Saturnalia, to be replenished at the never-failing fountain of ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... helped me to a good part Of my letter; for you must have observed, that even in this overgrown town the winter has not been productive of events. Good night! I have two days to wait for a letter that I may answer. Stay -, I should tell you, that I have been at Sir Joseph Banks's literary saturnalia,(756) where was a Parisian watchmaker, who produced the smallest autoMaton that I suppose was ever created. It was a rich snuffbox, not too large for a woman. On opening the lid, an enamelled bird started ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Tudor's sway. And then a Northern Stuart wore their crown, Whose son, unmindful he was over men Truth-lovers, lied to them and lost his head; For Puritans held no respect for lies. Next flared Charles Satyr's saturnalia Of Lely Nymphs, who panting sang "More gold; We yield our beauties freely; gold, more gold." Hapless explosions, folly, frenzied plots; Till well coerced by Lowland William's craft. Then plans that led to nought, or worse, enforced By ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... continued. "Corsets, stockings, lingerie. Shop windows remind me of neighbors' bathrooms before breakfast. There's something odiously impersonal about them. See, all the way down the street—silks, garments, ruffles, laces. A saturnalia of masks. It's the only art we've developed in America—over-dressing. Clothes are peculiarly American—a sort of underhanded female revenge against the degenerate puritanism of the nation. I've seen them even at revival meetings ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the hall, beside him his case and hold-all—what belongings he had thrust into them anyhow. He was intending to see the couple into the cab and then go quietly away, for he was determined to avoid the loathsome saturnalia with which his colleagues were certain to signalize the debacle. When the two appeared, he started involuntarily. He had been prepared for violence, he had expected tears.... The vision of a blubbering idiot, that mowed and mumbled, its wig awry, its ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... a second, a nameless fright seized hold of the gilded quarters, but when they saw how well the police did their dispersing work, and choked up with their clubs the protests of aggregated suffering, self-confidence came back, revelry was resumed, and the saturnalia of theft went ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Articles were received with unequivocal marks of displeasure, many of the churches refusing to obey the royal command, and the revival of the festival of Christmas was denounced as the return of the ancient Saturnalia. Three years later the King obtained an Act of Parliament enforcing the Articles on the repugnant spirit of the people. "Dr. Laud, whose name we now meet for the first time, afterwards to become so notorious, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... of the Holi, the Saturnalia of India, terminates on the last day of Phalgun, or 16th of March.[16] On that day the Holi is burned; and on that day the ravages of the monster (for monster they will have it to be) are supposed to cease. Any field that has remained untouched up to that time is considered to ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... because he was the center figure in a saturnalia of work; Sandy, because no matter how hard a man has to work he can chew tobacco all the time; the crowd, because the spectacle of fire, water, and steam was fine, and they didn't have to do anything but sit around and look on. The sun got lower and lower as, one by one, the spectators departed ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... among other eccentricities, determined upon having a feast once a year, in imitation of the Saturnalia in ancient Rome. In this project he engaged several persons of rank, and his plan was put in execution at the deanery house. When all the servants were seated, and every gentleman placed behind his own servant, the Dean's footman, who presided, found fault with some meat ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... by this dizzy saturnalia and avoiding the pranks of animated hosiery and the more ponderous frolics of over-alls, sheets and tablecloths, Saint-Prosper entered the kitchen. Here the farm hand and maid of all work were eating, and the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... will hesitate before you accept the story of that saturnalia in its entirety, and before you believe that an old man of seventy, a priest and Christ's Vicar, was present with Cesare and his friends. Burchard does not say that he himself was a witness of what he relates. But the matter shall ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... celebrated her saturnalia in the following months, and unfurled her blood-stained standard over the nation. She was not satisfied with having brought to the guillotine more than ten thousand aristocrats and royalists, to terrify ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... which offerings are made, and afterwards the whole is set on fire. For a luminous account of the Hol[i], which is perhaps the worst open rite of Hinduism, participated in by all sects and classes, we may cite the words of the author of Ante-Brahmanical Religions: "It has been termed the Saturnalia or Carnival of the Hindus. Verses the most obscene imaginable are ordered to be read on the occasion. Figures of men and women, in the most indecent and disgusting attitudes, are in many places openly paraded through the streets; the most filthy ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... out to a Food Saturnalia at a Country Place. The Dinner was postponed until late in the Day because they all dreaded ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... night, the hebdomadal Saturnalia, when the week's work was over, and no one had any thing to do; the heart of Joseph was jocund with pork chops and mulled beer, and, his evil genius tempting him, he proposed to three of his intimates "to go and ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... rumpus, stour[obs3], scramble, brawl, fracas, rhubarb [baseball], fight, free-for-all, row, ruction, rumpus, embroilment, melee, spill and pelt, rough and tumble; whirlwind &c. 349; bear garden, Babel, Saturnalia, donnybrook, Donnybrook Fair, confusion worse confounded, most admired disorder, concordia discors[Lat]; Bedlam, all hell broke loose; bull in a china shop; all the fat in the fire, diable a' quatre[Fr], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pagans seem to have had a glimpse of the Divine unity over the multiplicity of their idols, and of the rays of the Divine holiness across the saturnalia of their Olympi. It was a Greek who wrote these words: "Nothing is accomplished on the earth without Thee, O God, save the deeds which the wicked perpetrate in their folly."[6] It was in a theatre at Athens that the chorus of a tragedy sang, more than two thousand years ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... gathered thickest, bawling sea-songs, circulating square faces, and dancing uproarious Virginia reels and old-country dances. The police, including the reserves, stood in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the governor was too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great. It was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was license; it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-rover along with all these other chesty sea-rovers among the ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... It is anarchy when people cannot end these things. It is not anarchy in the home if the whole family sits up all night on New Year's Eve. It is anarchy in the home if members of the family sit up later and later for months afterwards. It was not anarchy in the Roman villa when, during the Saturnalia, the slaves turned masters or the masters slaves. It was (from the slave-owners' point of view) anarchy if, after the Saturnalia, the slaves continued to behave in a Saturnalian manner; but it is historically ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... European-American civilization, is considered with the superficial frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality. We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the world's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in life. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... noon. Ligarius was returning from the Campus Martius. He strolled through one of the streets which led to the Forum, settling his gown, and calculating the odds on the gladiators who were to fence at the approaching Saturnalia. While thus occupied, he overtook Flaminius, who, with a heavy step and a melancholy face, was sauntering in the same direction. The light-hearted young man plucked ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and be, in imagination, one of the sixty thousand spectators who thronged to behold the strange Africans, Sarmatians, and others who are gathered together from the four quarters of the Roman world to take part in the Saturnalia. He asked us to watch with Propertius whilst the slumbers of his Cynthia were disturbed by dreams that she was flying from one of her all too numerous lovers. Under his treatment, Mr. Cornford says, the most commonplace ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the road. They were all going in his direction. At the entrance to the park a band of Germans was putting up the wires for a telephone line. They had just been reconnoitering the rooms befouled with the night's saturnalia, and were ha-haing boisterously over Captain von Hartrott's inscription, "Bitte, nicht plundern." To them it seemed the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... which was celebrated in the "Demi" or boroughs of Attica, in honor of Bacchus, in the month Poseidon. This was the most ancient of the Festivals, and was held with the greatest merriment and freedom; the slaves then enjoyed the same amount of liberty as they did at the Saturnalia at Rome. The second Festival, which was called the Lensea, from lenus, a wine-press, was celebrated in the month Gamelion, with Scenic contests in Tragedy and Comedy. The third Dionysian Festival was the Anthesteria, ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... projecting mind is an intoxication beyond fermented grapejuice or a witch's brewage; and under the guise of active wits they will lead us to the parental meditation of antics compared with which a Pagan Saturnalia were less impious in the sight of sanity. This is full-mouthed language; but on our studious way through any human career we are subject to fits of moral elevation; the theme inspires it, and the sage residing in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the stern old Roman with his Saturnalia, when for once in all the year the slave and the plebeian might speak their ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... husband's ineptitude, as yet unrevealed, but to her well known. To win success for a second-rate man! that is to a woman—as to a king—the delight which tempts great actors when they act a bad play a hundred times over. It is the very drunkenness of egoism. It is in a way the Saturnalia of power. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... let loose upon a little district, unmuzzled, the dogs of war. What he did was to gather from all quarters an armed force, a motley crew, regulars and militia, sailors and landsmen, black and white, and permit them to hold for fourteen long days a saturnalia of blood. What he did was to summon the savage Maroon tribes to the feast of death, that by their barbaric warfare they might add yet one more shade of gloom to the picture. The official accounts are enough to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... willingness, but not the resolution. She threw her scruples into the waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went with her and her crowd to one of the most reckless dances in Greenwich Village, where men and women strove to outdo the saturnalia of Montmartre, vied with one another in exposure, and costumed themselves as closely according to the fig-leaf era as the grinning policemen dared ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... I wonder? Here's his sermon-paper on the table, and a Greek Testament, and Hints on Decorating Churches, with 'Constance Strangeways' on the first leaf—no other book. How long will this saturnalia last?" ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... people' in the common meaning of the phrase; since for the most part they desire for themselves, consciously or unconsciously, absolutely unlimited freedom, which must inevitably degenerate into something resembling the saturnalia of barbaric times, and which the sacred hierarchy of nature will never grant them. They were born to serve and to obey; and every moment in which their limping or crawling or broken-winded thoughts are at work shows us clearly out of which clay nature moulded them, and what trade ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... suffers the gang to lurk unmolested about the skirts of his estate, on condition that they do not come about the house. The approaching wedding, however, has made a kind of Saturnalia at the Hall, and has caused a suspension of all sober rule. It has produced a great sensation throughout the female part of the household; not a housemaid but dreams of wedding favours, and has a husband running ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... the city walls, as within, bore witness to the graciousness of the Emperor in the prolonged holiday he had granted the people. It was as if the Saturnalia had arrived. Industry, such as there ever is, was suspended; all were sitting idle, or thronging some game, or gathering in noisy groups about some mountebank. As we advanced farther, and came just beyond the great road leading to Tibur, we passed the school ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... one-third of which was to be paid to the peon at the end of the week, which debt, due for well-performed labor, was invariably paid in aguardiente, and the Indian made happy, until the following Monday morning, he having passed through another Saturday night and Sunday's saturnalia of debauchery and bestiality. Those thousands of honest, useful people were absolutely destroyed ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... a mad saturnalia, half light, half shadow, amid which the fierce figures of the painted warriors passed and repassed in drunken frenzy, making night hideous with savage clamor and frenzied gesticulations. I would have crept on farther, seeking a place for crossing ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... was commended because it was expected that he at all events would speak the truth; by reason of his youth it was not thought possible that he could be guilty of duplicity in thought or speech. And he still further increased their hopes by ordering that the celebration of the Saturnalia extend over five days, and by taking from each of those enjoying an allowance of grain only an as instead of the denarius which they were wont to give an emperor for the ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... the slaves was the hideous misuse Christian masters allowed them to make of Chrismas Day and week. It was then they danced the bamboula, incessantly. All through the year this Saturnalia was prepared for in meetings held at night by their leaders. The songs to which they danced were made of white society's scandals reduced to satirical rhyme; and to the rashest girl or man there was power in the warning, "You'll get yourself sung about at Christmas." ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... legitimate republic, in Caesar the democratic usurper. People in general moreover expected from the nephew of Marius, the son-in-law of Cinna, the ally of Catilina, a repetition of the Marian and Cinnan horrors, a realization of the saturnalia of anarchy projected by Catilina; and though Caesar certainly gained allies through this expectation— so that the political refugees immediately put themselves in a body at his disposal, the ruined men saw in him their deliverer, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... The Roman Saturnalia was a remembrance of the Atlantean colonization. It was a period of joy and festivity; master and slave met as equals; the distinctions of poverty and wealth were forgotten; no punishments for crime were inflicted; servants and slaves went about dressed in the clothes of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... fondness, delights to make the period of time which children spend at home, as striking a contrast as possible with that which they pass at school. The holydays are made a jubilee, or rather resemble the Saturnalia. Even if parents do not wish to represent a school-master as a tyrant, they are by no means displeased to observe, that he is not the friend or favourite of their children. They put themselves in mean competition with him for their affection, instead of co-operating with him in all ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... salt water, which is all Jack can get, being on an allowance of fresh, had little efficacy, and was more for taste than utility. The captain was below all the afternoon, and we had something nearer to a Saturnalia than anything we had yet seen; for the mate came into the scuppers, with a couple of boys to scrub him, and got into a battle with them in heaving water. By unplugging the holes, we let the soap-suds off the decks, and in a short time ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... that a like festival was in existence among the Hungarians two hundred years ago.[69] To this day certain religious sects of Russia and Hungary are in the habit of holding orgies at which all the ceremonies of the ancient Liberalia, Floralia, and Saturnalia are duplicated. These devotees claim that, when they have reached the acme of religious enthusiasm, the spirit of God directs them, hence their licentious and lustful acts ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... part of the hotels, and groggeries in this county will not only be kept open to sell, in defiance of the law, but also to give rum away, when they can in no other manner accomplish their diabolical purpose of making men drunk. This town and county is to be made a perfect saturnalia of drunkenness, and the Licensed Victimizers—I cannot call them by any other name—promise to pay all the cost, though it should amount to a hundred thousand dollars. Friends! What care they for the misery and crime this cruel, heartless course ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... has greatly declined in violence, as well it might, since the O.P. saturnalia of disturbance, which lasted some sixty-six nights at Covent Garden Theatre in 1809. Swords were no longer worn, but the rioters made free use of their fists, called in professional pugilists as their allies, and in addition to catcalls, armed themselves with bells, post-horns, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... should be turned into a Donnybrook fair, but so it was when I was a boy, and the tents and the shows and the crowds on the Common were to the promiscuous many the essential parts of the great occasion. They had been so for generations, and it was only gradually that the Cambridge Saturnalia were replaced by the decencies and solemnities of ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that most desolating war. From an ignorant and sensual soldiery, excited to madness by a prolonged resistance, and by one of the most sanguinary conflicts recorded in the history of sieges, forbearance could hardly be expected. The horrible saturnalia, in which murder and rape, pillage and intoxication, are pushed to their utmost limits, are the necessary condition of a successful assault on a desperately defended fortress; and supposing them prohibited, and that such prohibition could be enforced, we agree with Mr Grattan in believing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... brazen and noisy, flitted women, bold of eye, painted of cheek, gaudy of raiment, making mock of their sacred womanhood. Riot reigned unchecked, while the quiet, sleepy town of the afternoon blossomed under the flickering lights into a saturnalia of unlicensed pleasure, wherein the wages ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... a Neoplatonic philosopher and Latin grammarian of the early part of the 5th century A.D. He is best known as the author of the "Saturnalia" and of a commentary upon Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis" in that author's "De republica". It is this latter work that is probably in the mind of Chretien, as well as of Gower, who refers to him in his "Mirour l'omme", and of Jean de Meun, the author of the second part of ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... from below would tell of one of the revelers taking the water, but save for the more distant throbbing of riverside industry, and rarer note of shipping, the mad discords of this rat saturnalia alone ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... came out like a dandelion in the sun! HE'S a whole saturnalia in himself, once he is roused. I shouldn't like to say whose waist his arm did not go round. Really, Ursula, he seems to reap the women like a harvest. There wasn't one that would have resisted him. It was too amazing! Can you ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... years of his reign, had permitted Scarron's widow to make religion fashionable, by cloaking France with the mask of hypocritical piety—a mask soon, however, to be torn aside by Philippe of Orleans in the wild saturnalia of the Regency. The Abbe de Bernis was also a constant visitor at the house of Madame d'Etioles; he was, in the parlance of the time, the Abbe de la Maison—it is true he had no other benefice—but little thought then, either the abbe of the house ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... friend, entreat you, my dear sir, at no time to forget that you are a Christian and a Protestant gentleman. Be sober and rational, and, if there be any truth in religion at all, do not make a mockery of it, by converting the Lord's day into a monstrous Saturnalia. Here is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... pillaged—one of its aged citizens sick and infirm, wantonly murdered in the arms of his wife—and other crimes committed by hireling soldiers, and by brutalized officers, over which the chaste historian must draw a veil. The church of God itself was not spared during the saturnalia of lust and violence. His temple was profaned, and His altars desecrated. What British ruthlessness had left scathed and prostrate, was soon looked upon with neglect. The moles and the bats held their revels ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... anecdote,—tasting some long-interred bon-mot and relishing some disentombed scandal,—pausing over the symphonic prose of Milton, only to run, the next moment, to the Silenian ribaldry of Tom Brown the younger,—and so keeping up a Saturnalia, in which goat-footed sylvans mix with the maidens of Diana, and the party-colored jester shakes his truncheon in the face of Plato. Only in this wild and promiscuous license can we taste the genuine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... they interchanged with us anecdote and jest, and mingled with the sparkling imaginations of youth the reminiscences of riper years—I am sure they will have no cause to regret their share in those not ungraceful saturnalia, even though they may remember that the hour at which we separated was not always what we used ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... verses were written, is commonly played at the Saturnalia of the shoemakers on King Crispin's day. Burns ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Whitford, under a fresh supply of wine, leading in the boisterous mirth. One after another, attracted by the gayety and laughter, joined the group, until it numbered fifteen or twenty half-intoxicated young men and women, who lost themselves in a kind of wild saturnalia. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... show that former moon-worship still colours our religion, it is not to be overlooked that, as our Christmas festivities are but a continuation of the Roman saturnalia, with their interchanges of visits and presents, so "the Church, celebrating in August the festival of the harvest moon, celebrates at the same time the feast of the Assumption and of the Sacred Heart of the Virgin. And Catholic painters, following the description in the Apocalypse, fondly ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... in cases of joy, dismissal from the house in quarrels, wishing joy on New Year's Day, king and queen on twelfth day (from the Saturnalia), holding up the hand in sign of assent, shaking hands, etc., are Roman customs, so were executions just out of the town, where also the executioner resided. In Anglo-Saxon times this officer was a man ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... "magic" mirror, which the natives had not dared to remove, set afire the sapphires upon his bracelet as he sat rigidly in a camp chair in a suit of pyjamas. Upon the bed lay Birnier, nursing his bandaged left arm. Now and again the thrumming, chanting and the shrilling of the saturnalia without rose into discordant yells like a gust of ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... perpetrated upon them by the Government, and that the outlawed condition of the Jews bred the lawlessness and violence of the mob, which was fully aware of the anti-Semitic sentiments of the official world. The bloody saturnalia of Nizhni-Novgorod had, however, the beneficent effect that the Government, fearing the spread of the conflagration outside the Pale and even outside Jewry, took energetic steps to prevent all further excesses. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... children, intending to seize and keep them as pledges of his reconciliation with Pompey. For there was then a common report that Pompey was on his way homeward from his great expedition. The night appointed for the design was one of the Saturnalia; swords, flax, and sulphur they carried and hid in the house of Cethegus; and providing one hundred men, and dividing the city into as many parts, they had allotted to every one singly his proper place, so that in a moment, many kindling the fire, the city might be in a flame all ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... what's coming to them. They graft with the bakers, scratch-my-arse-and-I'll-scratch-yours! That's the way it always is, the poor devils are out of luck, but the jaws of the capitalists are always keeping the Saturnalia. If only we had such lion-hearted sports as we had when I first came from Asia! That was the life! If the flour was not the very best, they would beat up those belly-robbing grafters till they looked like Jupiter had been at them. How well I remember ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... lie the antechamber and the bed-room, which get the sun all the day long. What do you think of my den, my Gallus? When I betake myself to this retreat I seem to have left my home behind me; and especially in the Saturnalia I delight in it. When the rest of the house is given up to the license of noisy festivals, no noises can disturb my reveries, no clamors ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... Catholic countries the name given to a season of feasting and revelry immediately preceding Lent, akin to the Saturnalia of the Romans. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... —often most dissolute—of the land. But now the guests were thinned in numbers by death, by marriage, by worn out passions; and many a fierce spirit had been tamed by adversity, till the mirth had grown to be half moody, and the saturnalia gross rather in intention than ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... of Macrobius except that he was a Greek, and lived in the fifth century. His principal work was his "Saturnalia," and he selected for it this title and plan, because, as he tells us, men were in his day so much occupied with business, that it was only in the annual festival of misrule that they had any time for reflection or social intercourse. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... was not angry at this speech, but spoke to all his friends about the magnanimous conduct of Fabricius, and intrusted the prisoners to him alone, on the condition that, if the senate refused to make peace, they should be allowed to embrace their friends, and spend the festival of the Saturnalia with them, and then be sent back to him. And they were sent back after the Saturnalia, for the senate decreed that any of them who remained behind should be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... ancient peoples at any rate threw an illumination of religious (that is, of communal and public) value over sex-acts, and to a great extent made them into matters either of Temple-ritual and the worship of the gods, or of communal and pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and other similar festivals. We have certainly no right to regard these celebrations—of either kind—as insincere. They were, at any rate in their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social and festal; and from either point of view they were far better than the secrecy of private ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... for a grand saturnalia is best when Mr. Smith goes from home for a day or two. Then I can deny myself to visitors—take full license—set the hydrant running, and puzzle the water commissioners with an extra consumption of Schuylkill. My last exploit in this way was rather disastrous; and I am patiently ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... the festivals of the Jews, and who would deem strange and outlandish their Sabbaths and New Moons and other Holy Days erst loved of the Almighty, we deal familiarly with the Saturnalia and the Calends of January, with the Matronalia and the Feast of the Winter Solstice; New Year's gifts and foolish presents fill all our thoughts; merrymakings and junketings are in every house. The Heathens guard their religion better; they are heedful to observe none ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... death can only be likened to that of the lover in Heinrich von Kleist's poetically sublime, but morally atrocious, tragedy, Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The Duke killed Marie because doing so gave him the most damnable pleasure,—her ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... arc lights. A shifting crowd. There are some streets that draw aimless feet. The blazing store fronts, clothes shops, candy shops, drug-stores, Victrola shops, movie theatres invite with the promise of a saturnalia in suspense. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... connections, destroying life far ahead of the point of attack; and, drawn along by the relentlessly creeping composite tractor beam, there progressed around the circumference of the hexan city two veritable Saturnalia of destruction—uninterrupted, cataclysmic detonations of sound and sizzling, shrieking, multi-colored displays of pyrotechnic incandescence combining to form a spectacle ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... our horses, tripped over each other and fell in their crazy haste to fill sacks, skins, and nondescript vessels of all sorts—metal, wood and clay—with grain. Women staggered under burdens that would assure their households of food for months. It became a saturnalia and jubilee for the long, half-starved slaves, men and women. By-and-by looting became more general. The houses of Emirs who had run away or been killed were entered and plundered by the populace. Donkeys were caught and loaded ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... character, as the "Forgetful," the "Braggart," the "Man of 100,000 sesterces";(10) or pictures of other lands, the "Etruscan Woman," the "Gauls," the "Cretan," "Alexandria"; or descriptions of popular festivals, as the "Compitalia," the "Saturnalia," "Anna Perenna," the "Hot Baths"; or parodies of mythology, as the "Voyage to the Underworld," the "Arvernian Lake." Apt nicknames and short commonplaces which were easily retained and applied were welcome; but every piece of nonsense was of itself privileged; in this preposterous world ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... based on the life and work of an agricultural folk, and we may by all means guess that its many agricultural rites existed beforehand in the earlier social life; but into detail we may not venture. As Varro, however, has mentioned the Saturnalia in the same sentence with the Compitalia, we may guess that that famous jovial festival was a part of the rustic winter rejoicing. And here, too, I may mention another festa of that month, of which a glimpse is given us by Horace, another country-loving poet, who specially mentions ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... themselves to the extraordinary assumption that nothing is to be believed outside of the pages of Josephus. A splash or two of 'blood of poor innocents,' more or less, found on the Idumean tyrant's bloody skirts, could be of little consequence in the eyes of those who knew what a long saturnalia of horrors his reign had been; and the number of the infants under two years old in such a tiny place as Bethlehem would be small, so that their feeble wail might well fail to reach the ears even of contemporaries. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... wonder how the earth she knew That lay so long wrapped deep in dark and dew, Should wear upon her breast a star so white. The festivals of Babylon were dark With flaring flambeaux that the wind blew down; The Saturnalia were a wild boy's lark With rain-quenched torches dripping thru the town— But you have found a god and filched from him A fire that neither wind nor rain ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... good old king. It was wrong not to keep up the thing as it was of yore with dinners, and claret, and squibs, and crackers, and saturnalia. The thoughts of the subjects require sometimes to be turned to the sovereign, were it but only that they may remember there is such ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of winter, when the blessings of the granary are especially manifest (December 15, -Consualia-; December 19, -Opalia-); between these two latter days the thoughtfulness of the old arrangers of the festivals inserted that of seed-sowing (Saturnalia from -Saeturnus- or -Saturnus-, December 17). In like manner the festival of must or of healing (-meditrinalia-, October 11), so called because a healing virtue was attributed to the fresh must, was dedicated to Jovis as the wine-god ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... embrace this scandalous profession, under pain of infamy, or, what was more dreaded by those profligate wretches, of exile. The tyrants allured them to dishonor by threats and rewards. Nero once produced in the arena forty senators and sixty knights. See Lipsius, Saturnalia, l. ii. c. 2. He has happily corrected a passage of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... it is a thing of the past; but it was also accompanied with a degree of grossness and brutality much less pleasant to regard, and of which the occasional popular amusements of bull-running, cock-fighting, cock-throwing, the saturnalia of Plough-Monday, and such like, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles |
