"Scythian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... religion that the priestly legislation of the Vendidad, with all its puritanical regulation of life, is to be ascribed. (The practice of exposing the bodies of the dead to be devoured by birds of prey is probably of Scythian origin.) In this period also, remote from the origin of the religion, we find a new view of Zarathustra himself and of his revelation. In the earlier sources Zarathustra composes his hymns in a natural manner; he is not an absolute lawgiver, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... which he copied was that on the celebrated rock of Behistun—a perpendicular rock rising abruptly some 1700 feet from the plain, the lower part bearing inscriptions for the space of about 300 feet in three languages—Persian, Scythian, and Assyrian. Comparison of the known with the unknown, of the language which survived with the language that had been lost, enabled this cadet to acquire some knowledge of the cuneiform character, and even to ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... elephant, but has a projecting horn at the very tip of its nose and through this fact has received its name. Besides the introduction of these beasts Dacians and Suebi fought in throngs with each other. The latter are Celts, the former a species of Scythian. The Suebi, to be exact, dwell across the Rhine (though many cities elsewhere claim their name), and the Dacians on both sides of the Ister. Such of them, however, as live on this side of it and near the Triballic country are ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... same way among the Scythians a house has no value because they have no use for a house, nor would a Scythian set so much store on the finest house in the world as on a leather coat, because he could use the one and not the other. Or again, the Carthaginian coinage is not wealth in our eyes, for we could not employ it, as we can silver, to procure what we need, and therefore ...
— Eryxias • An Imitator of Plato
... inly the doom of Thebes. They see the Centaurs in the upper glens of Pelion, on the streams where the red-berried ashes fringe the clear brown shallow pools; with streaming flanks and heads reared proudly, snuffing the mountain wind. They see the Scythian on the wide steppe, unharnessing his wheeled house at noon; he tethers his beast down and makes his meal, mare's milk and bread baked on the embers; all around the boundless waving grass plains stretch, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... protected by a Roman alliance, till the just claims and formidable power of Rugilas were effectually urged by the voice of Eslaw his ambassador. Peace was the unanimous wish of the senate: their decree was ratified by the Emperor; and two ambassadors were named, Plinthas, a general of Scythian extraction, but of consular rank; and the quaestor Epigenes, a wise and experienced statesman, who was recommended to that office by his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... goat-herd, nor neat-herd, nor gardener? His looks are harsh and gloomy, and I cannot read in his eyes the love of the gods and goddesses that people the wide sky, the woods and mountains. He wears a barbarous habit; perhaps he is a Scythian. Let us approach the stranger, my sisters, and make sure he is not come as a foe to sully our fountains, hew down our trees, tear open our hill-sides and betray to cruel men the mystery of our happy lurking places. Come with me, Mnais; ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... of the fir and pine In the night sun are cast, And the deep heart of many a Norland mine Quakes at each riving blast; Where, in barbaric grandeur, Moskwa stands, A baptized Scythian queen, With Europe's arts and Asia's jewelled hands, The North and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... MSS read {Skuthai}, Scythians; if this is correct, it is only the technical name for "archers." Cf. Arrian, "Tact." ii. 13. The police at Athens were technically so called, as being composed of Scythian slaves. ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... conviction, to represent rapid movement, the true poses of which defied satisfactory reproduction. And it is also the fact that the "flying gallop," which appeared in Mycenaean art thirty-seven centuries ago, and then travelled by a "Scythian" route through Tartary to China, and came back to Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, is also—so far as it has any real representative in the action of the horse—only approached by a brief ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... clothes not rich, their garments were not gay, But weapons like the Egyptian troops they had, The Arabians next that have no certain stay, No house, no home, no mansion good or bad, But ever, as the Scythian hordes stray, From place to place their wandering cities gad: These have both voice and stature feminine, Hair long and black, black ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... February, 1889, I read extracts and notices from Catholic sources with regard to the universality of that church organization that 'knows neither North, South, East or West, that knows neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek, Barbarian nor Scythian,' and emphasizing the fact that a colored priest had celebrated mass in company with two ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 4, April, 1889 • Various
... her, as if I loved not, And like a burden grieved the bed that moved not. Though both of us performed our true intent, Yet could I not cast anchor where I meant. She on my neck her ivory arms did throw, Her[381] arms far whiter than the Scythian snow. And eagerly she kissed me with her tongue, And under mine her wanton thigh she flung, 10 Yea, and she soothed me up, and called me "Sir,"[382] And used all speech that might provoke and stir. Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk, It mocked me, hung down ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... do nothing to thwart the happiness of her youngest and favorite son. When she sees that he will not give up Sappho,—that his smiling face, in which she adores the image of her great husband Cyrus, becomes clouded, I verily believe she would be ready to sanction his taking even a Scythian woman to wife, if it could restore him to cheerfulness. Neither will Cambyses himself refuse his consent if his mother press the point ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... dominion, war and labor; Might to right the statue gave; Laws are in the Scythian's sabre; Where the Mede reigned—see the slave! Peace and meekness grimly routing, Prowls the war-lust, rude and wild; Eris rages, hoarsely shouting, Where the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... not a Hellene but a Scythian visitor. By his own admission he is no authority on Grecian cookery, but as a reporter ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... the knell is rung Of us or them; Wide o'er their march the pomp is flung Of gold and gem. What collar'd hound of lawless sway, To famine dear— What pension'd slave of Attila, Leads in the rear? Come they from Scythian wilds afar, Our blood to spill? Wear they the livery of the Czar? They do his will. Nor tassell'd silk, nor epaulet, Nor plume, nor torse— No splendour gilds, all sternly met, Our foot and horse. But, dark and still, we inly glow, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shephearde by his rare and woonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, The Scourge of God. Deuided into two Tragicall Discourses, as they were sundrie times shewed vpon Stages in the Citie ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... the Scythian or northern nations to which we have referred were called the Massagetae. They formed a very extensive and powerful realm. They were governed, at this time, by a queen named Tomyris. She was a widow, past middle life. She had a son named Spargapizes, who had, like ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... into the air and uttered thrice the word: "Marha, Marha, Marha!" swept the Roman legions from the face of Pannonia; he had learnt from the Spanish historian all about Ferdinand VII., who chased the Moors from the Alhambra where they had held sway for hundreds of years; he had read of the Scythian Bertezena, who, starting in life as a simple smith had delivered his race from the grinding yoke of the Geougs;—and finally he had not only read but learnt by heart all the great works of our savants in which it is demonstrated with the most exact scholarship and the most inflexible logic, ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... a great distance, in the midst of fogs, do you perceive that giant with yellow beard who lets fall a sword red with blood? He is the Scythian Zalmoxis between two planets—Artimpasa, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... most timid, who could be dragged into the field; and the Emperor was happy in his own good luck, when he found it possible to conduct a defensive war on a counterbalancing principle, making use of the Scythian to repel the Turk, or of both these savage people to drive back the fiery-footed Frank, whom Peter the Hermit had, in the time of Alexius, waked to double fury, by the powerful influence ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... check a whole army." Napoleon then crossed his arms with a look of consternation, hung his head, and remained as if overwhelmed with the deepest dejection. "His army was victorious and himself conquered. His route was intercepted, his manoeuvre, thwarted: Kutusoff, an old man, a Scythian, had been beforehand with him! And he could not accuse his star. Did not the sun of France seem to have followed him to Russia? Was not the road to Malo-Yaroslawetz open but the preceding day? It was not his fortune then that had failed him, but he who ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... against a formidable invasion of the Massagetae. [67] Alarmed by this intelligence, he hastily relinquished the siege, and marched with rapid diligence from the banks of the Tigris to those of the Oxus. The danger and difficulties of the Scythian war engaged him soon afterwards to conclude, or at least to observe, a truce with the Roman emperor, which was equally grateful to both princes; as Constantius himself, after the death of his two brothers, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the river. The King himself, with his land forces, marched through Thrace; and, crossing the bridge, placed it under the care of the Greeks, telling them that, if he did not return within sixty days, they might break it down, and sail home. He then left them, and penetrated into the Scythian territory. The sixty days had already passed away, and there was yet no sign of the Persian army; but shortly afterwards the Greeks were astonished by the appearance of a body of Scythians, who informed them that ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... Homer is right: for he was speaking of chariots, as you were speaking of the Scythian cavalry, who have that way of fighting; but the heavy-armed Greek fights, as I say, ...
— Laches • Plato
... circuit, if one should measure it as one would measure an island, sailing along its shores, is 23,000 furlongs according to Eratosthenes, Hecataeus, and Ptolemy, and other accurate investigators of subjects of this kind, resembling, by the consent of all geographers, a Scythian bow, held at ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... country which we now call the Crimea, was known by the name of the Taurica Chersonnesus. It was colonized by Greek settlers, who, finding that the Scythian inhabitants had a native divinity somewhat resembling their own Artemis, identified her with the huntress-goddess of the mother-country. The worship of this Taurian Artemis was attended with the most barbarous practices, for, in ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... and sent the Holy Ghost to make the Church at Pentecost out of Arabians and Medes and Elamites—to break down the partition-walls, as the apostle tells us,—that there be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian—and to establish one vast kingdom (which for that very reason we name Catholic), to destroy differences between nation and nation, by lifting each to be of the People of God—to pull down Babel, the City of Confusion, and build Jerusalem ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... procession (not the mention the chiefs of the pirates) were the son of Tigranes, king of Armenia, together with his wife and daughter; Zosima, the wife of Tigranes himself; Aristobulus, king of Judaea; the sister of Mithridates, with her five sons, and some Scythian women. The hostages of the Albanians and Iberians, and of the king of Commagene also appeared in the train; and as many trophies were exhibited as Pompey had gained victories, either in person or by his lieutenants, the number of which ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... haire an others, and that frisled, her gestures enforced, her lookes premeditated, her backe bolstred, her breast bumbasted, her shoulders bared and her middle straite laced, and then is she in fashion!" Of course this does not apply to English, but to Scythian and Assyrian ladies. This description is followed, as in Lyly, by a proper antidote, and with a number of rules to be observed by all the honest people who desire to escape the ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... stone. Thus ruin filled the mountain: day by day The forest torment deepened; louder roared The great aisles of the devastated woods; Black cave replied to cave; and oaks, whole ranks, Colossal growth of immemorial years, Sown ere Milesius landed, or that race He vanquished, or that earliest Scythian tribe, Fell in long line, like deep-mined castle wall, At either side God's warrior. Slowly died At last, far echoed in remote ravines, The thunder: then crept forth a little voice That shrilly whispered to him thus in scorn: "Two ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... though she were already his own, was an exultation, a rapture. When he reflected on the indignities he had suffered in the citadel rage burned his throat, and Aurelia, all bitterness at the loss of her treasure, found words to increase this wrath. A Hun! A Scythian savage! A descendant perchance of the fearful Attila! He to represent the Roman Empire! Fit instrument, forsooth, of such an Emperor as Justinian, whose boundless avarice, whose shameful subjection to the base-born Theodora, were known to every one. To this had ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... meeting called of all the several trades and professions,... and all were required to declare their sense concerning God, do you think that the painter would say one thing, the sculptor another, the poet another, and the philosopher another? No; nor the Scythian neither, nor the Greek, nor the hyperborean. In regard to other things, we find men speaking discordantly one to another, all men, as it were, differing from all men... Nevertheless, on this subject, you may find universally throughout the world one agreeing ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... who, in the war of Charles the First, took arms at the call of the heroic Montrose, and were, in one of his battles, almost all destroyed. The women that were left at home, being thus deprived of their husbands, like the Scythian ladies of old, married their servants, and the ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... are the representative cultivating caste of the Punjab. They are probably the descendants of one of the Scythian invading hordes who entered India shortly before and after the commencement of the Christian era. The Scythians, as they were called by Herodotus, appear to have belonged to the Mongolian racial family, as also did the white Huns who came subsequently. The Gujar and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... families contained in the whole area being fifty-eight. It is believed that the families of languages represented upon the map can not have sprung from a common source; they are as distinct from one another in their vocabularies and apparently in their origin as from the Aryan or the Scythian families. Unquestionably, future and more critical study will result in the fusion of some of these families. As the means for analysis and comparison accumulate, resemblances now hidden will be brought to light, and ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... enlightens every man that comes into this world, how is it that so many are without light? For not all know Christ. Most assuredly He illumines, so far as He is concerned.... For grace is poured out over all. It flees or despises no one, be he Jew, Greek, barbarian or Scythian, freedman or slave, man or woman, old or young. It is the same for all, easily attainable by all, it calls upon all with equal regard. As for those who neglect to make use of this gift, they should ascribe their blindness ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... surrounding, So by the soft leaves screened, the porch might flourish in verdure. Follows hard on his track with active spirit Prometheus, Bearing extenuate sign of penalties suffer'd in bygones. 295 Paid erewhiles what time fast-bound as to every member, Hung he in carkanet slung from the Scythian rock-tor. Last did the Father of Gods with his sacred spouse and his offspring, Proud from the Heavens proceed, thee leaving (Phoebus) in loneness, Lone wi' thy sister twin who haunteth mountains of Idrus: 300 For that the Virgin ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... but having stopped on the road for some necessary occasion, his guards preserved a respectful distance, and Martialis, approaching his person under a presence of duty, stabbed him with a dagger. The bold assassin was instantly killed by a Scythian archer of the Imperial guard. Such was the end of a monster whose life disgraced human nature, and whose reign accused the patience of the Romans. [39] The grateful soldiers forgot his vices, remembered only his partial liberality, and obliged the senate to prostitute their own dignity ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... to herself, in the Fifteenth Century, Russia constituted her own art from these various sources. But this variety of sources is more apparent than real. It is enough to examine Scythian ornamentation to recognize that it is of a pronounced Indo-Oriental character. Byzantine taste has exerted a preponderating influence upon Russia. But it has been recognized that this Byzantine style is itself composed of very varied elements ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... sharpness of definition, or any general or well-established principle in the division of these groups. The extremes of form and color are certainly separated, but without regard to the races, which can not be included in any of these classes, and which have been alternately termed Scythian and Allophyllic. Iranian is certainly a less objectionable term for the European nations than Caucasian; but it may be maintained generally that geographical denominations are very vague when used to express the points of departure of races, more especially ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... adoring admiration does St Paul gaze at the delightful spectacle of Jew and Gentile made one new man in Christ Jesus—"where," he cries, "there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, but Christ is all, and ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... Lean used little food except the flesh of the animals which they drove away from the Lowlands; bread itself was a delicacy seldom thought of, because hard to be obtained, and all the domestic accommodations of milk, poultry, butter, etc., were out of the question in this Scythian camp. Yet it must not be omitted that, although Alice had occupied a part of the morning in providing those accommodations for her guest which the cavern did not afford, she had secured time also to arrange her own person in her best trim. Her finery was very simple. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... therefore sacred and religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our little mother-island sunk beneath the sea, or, worse, were she conquered by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakespeare would be an immortal England, and would conquer countries, when the bones of her last sailor had kept their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... wing was composed of the Coelosyrians and Mesopotamians, the Medes, the Parthians, the Sacians, the Tapurians, Hyrcanians, Albanians, and Sacesinae. In advance of the line on the left wing were placed the Scythian cavalry, with a thousand of the Bactrian horse and a hundred scythe-armed chariots. The elephants and fifty scythe-armed chariots were ranged in front of the centre; and fifty more chariots, with the Armenian and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... era Kanishka carried his victorious arms down to the Gangetic plain, where Buddhism still held its own in the region which had been its cradle; and, according to one tradition, he carried off from Pataliputra a famous Buddhist saint, who converted him to Buddhism. But as these Indo-Scythian kings had not been long enough in India to secure admission to the social aristocracy of Hinduism by that slow process of naturalisation to which so many ruling families have owed their Kshatrya pedigrees, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... ancient name of the country of Turkistan, appears from Des Guignes, to be the source and fountain of all the celebrated Scythian nations, which, under the name of Goths and Vandals, subsequently overran the Roman empire. Iran and Turan, according to the Oriental historians, comprehended all that is comprised in upper Asia, with the exception of India and China. ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... turned back the conquering Scythians from their contemplated invasion of Egypt, some stragglers of the rear-guard plundered the temple of Venus Urania at Ascalon. The goddess punished this sacrilege by inflicting on the Scythian nation the "female disease." Herodotus, from whom we ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... generally confessed, makes the great desert, which had already been fatal, according to some accounts, to the Assyrian Semiramis, the ruin also of the founder of the Persian Empire. He tells us that Cyrus led an army against the Scythian tribes (Massagetae, as they were called), who were stationed to the east of the Caspian; and that they, on finding him prepared to cross the river which bounded their country to the South, sent him a message which well illustrates the hopelessness of going to war ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Khazars during the eighth century, or Palestinian exiles subjugated by their Slavonian conquerors and assimilated with them, it is indisputable that they inhabited what we know to-day as Russia long before the Varangian prince Rurik came, at the invitation of Scythian and Sarmatian savages, to lay the foundation of the Muscovite empire. In Feodosia there is a synagogue at least a thousand years old. The Greek inscription on a marble slab, dating back to 80-81 B.C.E., preserved in the Imperial Hermitage in ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin |
