"Thebaid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seen, had spent a part of his youth with the monks of the desert. It was his proudest boast that he had acted as acolyte to the great St. Antony. He resolved, therefore, to visit the district known as the Thebaid, where St. Pachomius, the father of monasticism in the East, had founded many monasteries and drawn up a rule for ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... Moliere travelled through France as the manager of a company of strolling players. It is said that with the natural turn of young authors, who are more desirous to combine scenes of strong emotion than of comic situation, he attempted to produce a tragedy called "The Thebaid." Its indifferent success disgusted him with the buskin; and it may be observed, that in proportion as he affects, in other compositions, anything approaching to the tragic, his admirable facility of expression seems to abandon him, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... religious fervour, aided by persecution, drove them farther and farther away from the abodes of men into mountain solitudes or lonely deserts. The deserts of Egypt swarmed with the "cells'' or huts of these anchorites. Anthony, who had retired to the Egyptian Thebaid during the persecution of Maximin, A.D. 312, was the most celebrated among them for his austerities, his sanctity, and his power as an exorcist. His fame collected round him a host of followers, emulous of his sanctity. The deeper he withdrew into the wilderness, the more numerous his disciples ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... corner of a valley in the Thebaid. On the right hand of the stage is a cavern. In front of the cavern ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... effect. Shapely trees with contrasting foliage grew here and there. Grottos had been ingeniously contrived; and broad terraced walks, now in ruin, though the steps were broken and the balustrades eaten through with rust, gave to this sylvan Thebaid a certain character of its own. The art of man and the picturesqueness of nature had wrought together to produce a charming effect. Human passions surely could not cross that boundary of tall oak-trees which shut out the sounds of the outer world, and screened ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... Many childish incidents were treasured up which, had her life proved different, would have been forgotten, or have found their proper place among the catalogue of common things. Thus on one occasion, after hearing of the hermits of the Thebaid, she took it into her head to retire into the wilderness, and chose for her dwelling one of the caverns in the sandstone rock which abound in Siena near the quarter where her father lived. We merely see in this event a sign of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than the whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one. Foolish and fruitless as it has ever been to hunt through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets on the false scent of a fantastic trail, to put thaumaturgic trust in a dark dream of tracking his untraceable personality through labyrinthine ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... came from the temple he told me all that had happened to him. And he said, 'I shall go to Koptos, for I must fetch this book; I will not stay any longer in the north.' And I said, 'Let me dissuade you, for you prepare sorrow and you will bring me into trouble in the Thebaid.' And I laid my hand on Na.nefer.ka.ptah, to keep him from going to Koptos, but he would not listen to me; and he went to the king, and told the king all that the priest had said. The king asked him, 'What ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... their wonder that so pure a man thought himself so great a sinner. But a sinner he was, as we all; and to avert the just anger of God he fasted, prayed, and mortified himself like an anchorite of the Thebaid. And yet ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... funeral Mysa and her mother were thrown into a flutter of excitement by a message which arrived from Bubastes. Some months before the sacred cat of the great temple there—a cat held in as high honor in Lower Egypt as the bull Apis in the Thebaid—had fallen sick, and, in spite of the care and attendance lavished upon it, had died. The task of finding its successor was an important and arduous one, and, like the bull of Apis, it was necessary not only ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Mother-loving gods, being (as by law appointed): and the prize-bearer of Berenice the Beneficent, and the basket-bearer of Arsinoe the Brother-loving, and the priestess of Arsinoe the Father-loving, being as appointed in the metropolis (of Alexandria); and in (Ptolemais) the royal city of the Thebaid? the guardian priest for the year? of Ptolemy Soter, and the priest of king Ptolemy the Father-loving, and the priest of Ptolemy the Brother-loving, and the priest of Ptolemy the Beneficent, and the priest of Ptolemy the Mother-loving; ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... fatal Roman baths, the innumerable strigulae, used by the bathers to polish their skins, bear sad testimony to the suicidal cleanliness of that doomed race. And just compare your strigula-polished Roman, morally and physically, with his contemporary, the filth-encrusted anchorite of the Thebaid—the former flickering briefly in a puerile, semi-vital way, and going out with a sulphurous smell; the latter, on a ration of six dates per week, attaining an interminable longevity, and possessing the power of striking scoffers dead, or ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... "the Religious Orders," were of later institution. From the oriental deserts of the Thebaid, where Saint Anthony had early practised the austerities of monkish life, Saint Martin drew his inspiration for the monasticism of the West. But it was not until the last of the IV century that he founded, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... daughters, to the lonely Thebaid. I have received the padre's letter, and am happy to receive his friends as my honored guests for a month, if you can support the solitude so long," he added, smiling. "And, now, which is the signora, and which the Signorina Giulia and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... powder on her hair, and hastily got together a few beguiling devices, and went into the Thebaid. Jurgen went back to the Library, and the System of Worshipping a Girl, and the unique manuscripts of Astyanassa and Elephantis and Sotades, and the Dionysiac Formulae, and the Chart of Postures, and the Litany of the Centre of Delight, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell |
