"Pillars of Hercules" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an afternoon than you in a twelvemonth. What, I suppose you have seen the Pillars of Hercules, and perhaps the walls of Carthage. Nay, you may have heard Scylla, and seen Charybdis; you may have entered the closet where Archimedes was found at the taking of Syracuse. I suppose you have sailed among the Cyclades, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... another dialogue called the Critias, which remains only as a fragment. In it is contained a description of the celebrated visionary kingdom of Atlantis, lying far beyond the pillars of Hercules, a land of splendour and luxury and power, a land also of gentle manners and wise orderliness. "The fiction has exercised a great influence over the imagination of later ages. As many attempts have been made to find the great island as to discover ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... guiding point for mariners in the whole northern Aegean.[425] For the ancient Greeks Cape Malia was long the boundary stone to the unknown wastes of the western Mediterranean, just as later the Pillars of Hercules marked the portals to the mare tenebrosum of the stormy Atlantic. So the Sacred Promontory (Cape St. Vincent) of the Iberian Peninsula defined for Greeks and Romans the southwestern limit of the habitable world.[426] Centuries later the Portuguese marked ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of a great ocean, such as Nearchus had discovered the Persian and Red Seas to be. He had formed a resolution that his fleet should attempt the circumnavigation of Africa, and come into the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules—a feat which, it was affirmed, had once been ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... harbor, the ship passed slowly along between the "Pillars of Hercules," for so many centuries the western limit of the Old World, and entered the blue Mediterranean. And was this low dark line on the right really Africa, the Dark Continent, which until then had seemed only a dream—a far-away ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... offender I was doomed to imprisonment at Ceuta, an old Moorish seaport town in Morocco, opposite Gibraltar and upon the side of the ancient mountain Abyla. This mountain forms one of the 'Pillars of Hercules,' the Rock of Gibraltar being the other. It is almost impregnable, and is used by Spain as Siberia is used by Russia, only it is far, far more horrible. The town was built by the Moors in 945, and nowhere else on earth are there to ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... believed to exist somewhere in the vague and mysterious East. Many philosophers, among whom was Columbus himself, thought the globe much smaller than it really is; but it was Columbus who was apparently charged with a divine mission to teach the world that sailing due westward from the Pillars of Hercules would bring the voyager to the dominions of Prester ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... plant Carthaginians, that are the worst and bloodiest of men, so much the nearer to us? whereas you should rather wish there were many more Sicilies to lie between them and Greece. Have you so little sense as to believe, that they come hither with an army, from the Pillars of Hercules and the Atlantic Sea, to hazard themselves for the establishment of Hicetes? who, if he had had the consideration which becomes a general, would never have thrown out his ancestors and founders to bring in the enemies ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Saracenic conquests end until the Arabs of the desert had penetrated southward into India farther than had Alexander the Great, and westward until they had subdued the northern kingdoms of Africa, and carried their arms to the Pillars of Hercules; yea, to the cities of the Goths in Spain, and were only finally arrested in Europe by the heroism of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... Pompey, as the leader who had been prosperous in all his undertakings. In 67 B.C. a law was proposed appointing a commander (who, however, was not named), who should have absolute power for three years over the sea as far as the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar), and the coast for fifty miles inland, and who should be furnished with two hundred ships, as many soldiers and sailors as he wanted, and more than a million pounds in money. The ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... beauty, no sublimity even, can make me insensible to a bird note. Just at the entrance to the Pillars of Hercules, two towering walls of perpendicular rock that approach each other almost threateningly, as if they would close up and crush between them the rash mortal who dared to penetrate farther,—in that impressive spot, while I lingered, half ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... to obtain his assistance. And there is room to think, that the pillars and obelisks were made use of for beacons, and that every temple was a Pharos. They seem to have been erected at the entrance of harbours; and upon eminences along the coasts in most countries. The pillars of Hercules were of this sort, and undoubtedly for the same purpose. They were not built by him; but erected to his honour by people who worshipped him, and who were called Herculeans. [794][Greek: Ethos gar palaion huperxe to tithesthai toioutous orous, kathaper hoi Reginoi ten stelida ethesan, ten ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... bridges handsome, the swans elegant in their deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast horse's winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so by clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my new property,—but it cost me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules of the fashionable quarter. What it will be by and by depends on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as Brookline is ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is meaningless. To the mathematician it has the value of a zero from which the periphery has gone. But at the Pillars of Hercules early geographers put on their maps: Hic deficit orbis—Here ends the world. They had no suspicion that beyond that world there stretched another twice as great. Materialists may be equally naif. On the other hand, they may ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... kings, invaded Egypt and dominated that territory for two hundred years. Later the Phoenicians became the great sea-going people of the world and extended their colonies along the coasts through Greece, Italy, northern Africa, and Spain. So there was the Semitic influence from the Pillars of Hercules far east to the River Indus, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... It rests on the northern side of Fishergate-hill; between Bow-lane and Jordan-street, is surrounded with houses, has two entrances with gateposts which might, owing to their solidity, have descended lineally from the pillars of Hercules; is entirely out of sight on the eastern side; and from the other points of the compass can be seen better a mile off with a magnifying glass than 20 yards off without one. There is something venerable and monastic, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... the provinces in every point of the compass. Rome herself had been menaced repeatedly. And a still more awful indication of the coming storm had been felt far to the south of Rome. One long wave of the great German deluge had stretched beyond the Pyrenees and the Pillars of Hercules, to the very soil of ancient Carthage. Victorious banners were already floating on the margin of the Great Desert, and they were not the banners of Caesar. Some vigorous hand was demanded at this moment, or else the funeral knell of Rome was on the point of sounding. Indeed, there is every reason ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... (as I conjecture, inferring things unknown from things known) it sets out from a point corresponding with the Ister. For the Ister, beginning from the Celts, and the city of Pyrene, divides Europe in its course; but the Celts are beyond the pillars of Hercules, and border on the territories of the Cynesians, who lie in the extremity of Europe to the westward; and the Ister terminates by flowing through all Europe into the Euxine Sea, where a Milesian colony is settled in Istria. Now the Ister, as it flows through a well-peopled country, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Persians, Chaldeans, Arabians, so as almost all nations of might and fame resorted hither; of whom we have some stirps and little tribes with us at this day. And for our own ships, they went sundry voyages, as well to your straits, which you call the Pillars of Hercules, as to other parts in the Atlantic and Mediterranean Seas; as to Paguin (which is the same with Cambalaine) and Quinzy, upon the Oriental Seas, as far as to the borders of the ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... coasts of America and of their settlements in America long before the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Even in the time of the Greeks and Romans there were traditions and legends of sailors who had gone out into the 'Sea of Darkness' beyond the Pillars of Hercules—the ancient name for the Strait of Gibraltar—and far to the west had found inhabited lands. Aristotle thought that there must be land out beyond the Atlantic, and Plato tells us that once upon a time a vast island lay off the coasts of Africa; he calls it Atlantis, and ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... Gibraltar as a rendezvous, shall of course have a most favourable position for assailing it, and the consequence will be, that the whole focus of the war will be drawn away from our own coasts, and the Mediterranean will be the arena of all the fighting. The struggle must be before the Pillars of Hercules. The more we increase our fleets, the larger must her force be, and she will have no squadron to spare to send out to annoy our trade and colonial possessions. But as this is a digression, and has nothing to do with my narrative, I beg pardon and ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... series of brilliant campaigns, had made the Roman nation the most powerful on the face of the globe. The Roman legions were not only victorious on land, extending their conquests into Iberia, farther Gaul, and still farther Britain, but the Roman triremes also swept the Mediterranean, from the Pillars of Hercules to the shores of Syria and Egypt. Wealth poured into the country from all sides, and the people reveled ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... for a time in Venice, and that town led the way in spreading the principles of commerce along the shores of the Mediterranean, being closely followed by Genoa, Florence, and Pisa. The tide, which then set westward, and continued its course beyond the Pillars of Hercules, was met in later years by another stream of commerce from the shores of the Baltic.(2) Small wonder, then, if the City of London was quick to profit by the continuous stream of traffic passing and repassing its very door, and vindicated its title to be called—as the Venerable Bede had ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... reached the shores of the first land encountered beyond the Pillars of Hercules, perhaps it may not be out of place to say something of the motives which might have provoked war between the Catholic King, Ferdinand of Spain, and Emanuel of Portugal, had they not been father-in-law and son-in-law. Note that I say Portugal and ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... counted in Europe. This science will stop short where the Bernouillis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the Fontaines, the D'Alemberts, the Lagranges have left it. They will have fixed the Pillars of Hercules. People will go no further." Those who have read Comte's angry denunciations of the perversions of geometry by means of algebra, and of the waste of intellectual force in modern analysis,[210] will at least understand ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, and stretching out their arms eastward and westward, the extent of their commerce took in all the known world, and wafted it to the coast of Spain, of Mauritania, of Gaul, and beyond the straits and pillars of Hercules. They sailed to all countries, in order to buy at a cheap rate the superfluities of every nation; which, by the wants of others, became necessaries; and these they sold to them at the dearest rates. From Egypt the Carthaginians fetched fine ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... are described from a statue in the Museum Florentinum, and from an antique gem; and the grasping Anteus to death in his arms as he lifts him from the earth, is described from another antient cameo. The famous pillars of Hercules have been variously explained. Pliny asserts that the natives of Spain and of Africa believed that the mountains of Abyla and Calpe on each side of the straits of Gibraltar were the pillars of Hercules; and that they were reared by the hands of that god, and the sea admitted between them. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... Great Sea, the Broad Sea, the Boundless Sea; the Ethiopians, "dwelling far away, the most distant of men," and the Cimmerians, "covered with darkness and cloud," where "baleful night is spread over timid mortals." Phoenicia was a sore journey, Egypt simply unattainable, while the Pillars of Hercules marked the extreme edge of the universe. Ulysses was nine days in sailing from Ismarus the city of the Ciconians, to the country of the Lotus-eaters—a period of time which to-day would breed anxiety in the hearts of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the land seemed to terminate, and it appeared impossible to proceed further, maritime nations have feigned pillars of Hercules. Those celebrated by the Frisians must have been at the extremity of Friesland, and not in Sweden and the ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... conquerors of the Byzantine emperors. 'With the Koran in one hand,' says Macaulay, 'and the sword in the other, they went forth conquering and converting eastward to the Bay of Bengal, and westward to the Pillars of Hercules.' They became a terror to the nations that had beheld with contempt their rising greatness. Amid the expiring glories of the Roman world they made Constantinople the capital of their empire. It was all that the oriental imagination could desire. Rendered by its fortifications impregnable, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Marcellinus, Tertullian, Engel, Scherer, Tournefort, Buffon, and d'Avezac; I had this land right under my eyes, furnishing its own unimpeachable evidence of the catastrophe that had overtaken it! So this was the submerged region that had existed outside Europe, Asia, and Libya, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, home of those powerful Atlantean people against whom ancient Greece had waged ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... famine. This at last led them to send Pompey to clear the sea of pirates. Gabinius, one of Pompey's intimate friends, proposed the decree, which created him not admiral, but monarch, and invested him with absolute power. The decree gave him the empire of the sea as far as the Pillars of Hercules, and of the land for 400 furlongs from the coasts. There were few parts of the Roman empire which this commission did not take in; and the most considerable of the barbarous nations, and most powerful kings, were moreover comprehended ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... characteristic of God which they saw reflected in his light, and fancied they saw in its originality the changelessness of Deity. He had seen thrones crumble, earthquakes shake the world and hurl down mountains. Beyond Olympus, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, he had gone daily to his abode, and had come daily again in the morning to behold the temples they built to his worship. They personified him as BRAHMA, AMUN, OSIRIS, BEL, ADONIS, MALKARTH, MITHRAS, and APOLLO; and the nations that did so grew old and died. Moss grew ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... eyes and gladdened the hearts of its first inhabitants. They had voyaged past the fair and sunny isles of that "tideless sea," the home of the Phoenician race from the earliest ages. They had escaped the dangers of the rough Spanish coast, and gazed upon the spot where the Pillars of Hercules were the beacons of the early mariners. For many days they had lost sight of land, and, we may believe, had well-nigh despaired of finding a home in that far isle, to which some strange impulse had attracted them, or some old tradition—for the world even then was old enough for legends ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... horizontal bands of red (top), yellow (double width), and red with the national coat of arms on the hoist side of the yellow band; the coat of arms includes the royal seal framed by the Pillars of Hercules, which are the two promontories (Gibraltar and Ceuta) on either side of the eastern end of the ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and which are partly constructed of the cedrela and the mahogany of the island of Cuba, might, at the entrance of the Mexican Mediterranean, menace the opposite coast, as the fleets that sail from Cadiz command the Atlantic near the Pillars of Hercules. In the meridian of the Havannah the Gulf of Mexico, the old channel, and the channel of Bahama unite. The opposite direction of the currents and the violent agitations of the atmosphere at the setting-in of winter impart ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... use Shakespeare's word, of the oddest contradictions,—the most diverting eccentricities. He has Aristotle's Politics at his fingers' ends, but he knows nothing of the daily Gazetteers; he is perfectly familiar with the Pillars of Hercules, but he has never even heard of the Levant. He travels to London to sell a collection of sermons which he has forgotten to carry with him, and in a moment of excitement he tosses into the fire the copy of AEschylus which it has cost him years to transcribe. He gives irreproachable advice ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... ruled France were inflamed by a fanaticism resembling that of the Mussulmans who, with the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other, went forth, conquering and converting, eastward to the Bay of Bengal, and westward to the Pillars of Hercules. The higher and middle classes of England were animated by zeal not less fiery than that of the Crusaders who raised the cry of Deus vult at Clermont. The impulse which drove the two nations to a collision ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reached at length the frontiers of Libya and Europe, where he raised the two mountains of Calpe and Abyla, as monuments of his progress, or, according to another account, rent one mountain into two and left half on each side, forming the straits of Gibraltar, the two mountains being called the Pillars of Hercules. The oxen were guarded by the giant Eurytion and his two-headed dog, but Hercules killed the giant and his dog and brought away the oxen ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... embodiment, the incarnation, if I may so speak, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which through long centuries they have attained to and won. It stands like the Pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these. The mighty moral instincts which ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... in arms, as well as in arts, was then at the height. Half a century earlier, the career of Alexander had excited the admiration and terror of all nations from the Ganges to the Pillars of Hercules. Royal houses, founded by Macedonian captains, still reigned at Antioch and Alexandria. That barbarian warriors, led by barbarian chiefs, should win a pitched battle against Greek valor guided by Greek science, seemed as incredible ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and honor to the noble tribune of the army, and to thee, lord," said Chilo, entering. "May your happiness be equal to your fame, and may your fame course through the world from the pillars of Hercules to ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... not very large sphere; for otherwise the difference would not be so obvious to persons making so small a change of place. Wherefore we may judge that those persons who connect the region in the neighborhood of the pillars of Hercules with that towards India, and who assert that in this way the sea is one, do not assert things very improbable. They confirm this conjecture moreover by the elephants, which are said to be of the same species towards each ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... | sermones et signa librum usque ad | tempus statutum / pertransibunt | plurimi et multiplex erit scientia | | This quotation is repeated on the | title page of NOVUM ORGANUM. Together | with the allegorical content of the | pillars of Hercules, this passage | clearly is to be interpreted in an | apocalyptical sense: The time has come | and is ripe for a re-construction of | Adams's paradisical dominion over the | world.—The pillars of Hercules ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... the name Calpe was applied to the rock of Gibraltar and Abyla to the eminence in Africa on the opposite side of the strait, and both of these eminences formed the renowned Pillars of Hercules. For centuries no ships navigating the Mediterranean dared sail ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson |
