"Tacitus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pride induced the Romans to conceal the fact that the city was surrendered to Porsenna; Tacitus, however, expressly declares that it was, and Pliny informs us of the severe conditions imposed by the conqueror; one of the articles prohibited them from using iron except for the purposes of agriculture. Plutarch, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... "dead sea." In the valley of Siddim were five—Adrah, Zeboin, Zoar, Sodom and Gomorrah. Stephen of Byzantium mentions eight, and Strabo thirteen (engulphed) —but the last is out of all reason. It is said (Tacitus, Strabo, Josephus, Daniel of St. Saba, Nau, Maundrell, Troilo, D'Arvieux), that after an excessive drought, the vestiges of columns, walls, etc., are seen above the surface. At 'any' season, such remains may be discovered by looking down into the transparent ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... Tacitus, too, has described with singular minuteness the struggle between the people of these regions and the power of Rome, overwhelming, although tottering to its fall; and has moreover, devoted several chapters of his work upon Germany to a description of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... hazarded an opinion, that with all his merit for penetration, shrewdness of judgement, and terseness of expression, he was too compact, too much broken into hints, as it were, and therefore too difficult to be understood. To my great satisfaction, Dr. Johnson sanctioned this opinion. 'Tacitus, Sir, seems to me rather to have made notes for an historical work, than to have written ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the Moon as having happened soon after the death of Augustus. This has been identified with the eclipse of September 27, A.D. 14. Tacitus says:—"The Moon in the midst of a clear sky became suddenly eclipsed; the soldiers who were ignorant of the cause took this for an omen referring to their present adventures: to their labours they compared the eclipse of the planet, and prophesied 'that if to the distressed goddess ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... larks. I'll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come: Of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, of which some May yet be there; and godwit if we can; Knat, rail, and ruff too. Howsoe'er my man Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus, Livy, or of some better book to us, Of which we'll speak our minds, amidst our meat; And I'll profess no verses to repeat; To this if aught appear, which I not know of, That will the pastry, not my paper, show of. Digestive cheese, and fruit there sure will be; But ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... and in modern times, the greatest of great historians, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Caesar, Tacitus, Macchiavelli, and Clarendon, have written, and some have themselves published, the annals of the passing age and of the events in which they participated. I do not venture on such an ambitious work; the day of history has not yet arrived for us, of complete, free, and unreserved history, either ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus. The facts which are within the ordinary course of nature, you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy and Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... lived in learned times a great while ago, are very pressing in their desires to be acquainted with me — one Plato, one Thucydides, and one Mr. Tacitus, for instance." ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... continuously in the back of his head. To go away without Julie was impossible. Under ordinary circumstances her situation as a prisoner would not be alarming. Germans regarded women with respect. They had done so from the earliest times, as he had learned from the painful study of Tacitus. Von Arnheim had received a deep impression from Julie's beauty and grace. John could tell it by his looks, but those looks were honest. They came from the eyes and heart of one who could do no wrong. But the other! The man of the ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... are not the most generally admired. This simplicity, however, to be truly effective must be unstudied; it will not do to write with affected terseness, a charge which, I think, may be fairly preferred against Tacitus; such a style if ever effective must be so from excess of artifice and not from that artlessness of simplicity which I should wish to see prevalent ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... occasion him to desert his studies, or will carry him heavily through them, with much labour, delay, and despondence. These originals should be traced to their fountains, as well as our distance will permit; to the customs of the Britons and Germans, as recorded by Caesar and Tacitus; to the codes of the northern nations on the continent, and more especially to those of our own Saxon princes; to the rules of the Roman law, either left here in the days of Papinian, or imported by Vacarius and his followers; ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,—these every lover of letters will desire to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list of such classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... said, that Marshal Brune was just the man to accomplish such a transformation without friction; in him the frankness and loyalty of an old soldier were combined with other qualities more solid than brilliant. Tacitus in hand, he looked on at modern revolutions as they passed, and only interfered when the, voice of his country called him to her defence. The conqueror of Harlem and Bakkun had been for four years forgotten ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... get of Saxon blood in history is that line of Tacitus in his 'Germany,' which reads, 'In all grave matters they consult their women.' Years hence, when robust Saxon sense has flung away Jewish superstition and Eastern prejudice, and put under its foot fastidious ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... The barditus of Tacitus, or the "din" made by the Norse "bards" (skalds) on shields and with shouts as they rushed into battle. It is not in Molbech, but Snorro frequently uses it in his Chronica, 1633.—43. Kalevala: Title of the great Finnish epic, of which the hero is Woinomoinen.—43. Polak: Polander or ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... what the French call the style coupe,—short sentences, like those of Tacitus, which ensure the interest by their recurring shocks. He writes history with the pen of a reviewer, and gives verdicts with the authority of a judge. He seems to say, Believe the autocrat; do not ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Genius required to Write a History perfectly, it is nevertheless not requisite that a Historian shou'd always make use of all his Wit, nor that he shou'd strain himself, in Nice and Lively Reflexions; 'tis a Fault which is reproach'd with some Justice to Cornelius Tacitus, who is not contented to recount the Feats, but employs the most refin'd Reflexions of Policy to find out the secret Reasons and hidden Causes of Accidents, there is nevertheless a distinction ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... contrast, however, to this beggarly benevolence, let us look at the Protestant Charter Schools; to them you have lately granted 41,000l.: thus are they supported, and how are they recruited? Montesquieu observes on the English constitution, that the model may be found in Tacitus, where the historian describes the policy of the Germans, and adds, "This beautiful system was taken from the woods;" so in speaking of the charter schools, it may be observed, that this beautiful system was taken from the gipsies. These schools are recruited in the same manner as the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... years since Poland first was quartered by a nefarious act of combined royalty, which the Swiss Tacitus, John Mller, well characterized by saying that "God permitted the act, to show the morality of kings;" and it is twenty-four years since down-trodden Poland made the greatest—not the last—manifestation of her imperishable vitality, which the cabinets of Europe were either too ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... revolting habit of fattening their fish. Old Izaak would have abhorred the very thought of casting a line for such prey: sickening thoughts of cannibalism would have filled him with horror. But C.P.C. consented to hunt one day, so he writes to Tacitus. Did he ride after the dogs, spear in hand, to kill the fierce wild-boar? Not he. He; sat down by the nets with tablets on his knee, under the quiet shade, and meditated and enjoyed the solitude, and scribbled to his heart's content. Here a doubt arises. Let us whisper it: Did he inherit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... he believed Dr. Johnson to be the greatest of men: the Doctor's words were constantly in his mouth; and he never travelled without Boswell's Life. Besides these, he read Caesar and Tacitus, "with translations, sir, with translations—I'm thankful that I kept some of my Latin from Grey Friars;" and he quoted sentences from the Latin Grammar, apropos of a hundred events of common life, and with perfect simplicity and satisfaction to himself. Besides the above-named books, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Tacitus and Suetonius record miracles alleged to have been performed by Vespasian. He is said to have anointed the eyes of a blind man at Alexandria with the royal spittle, and to have restored his sight. Another case was that of a man who ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... secret ongoings, the entire gossip of the place, was like a woman's; moreover, every personage great or small, heroic or comic, in Homer—whose poems he made it a matter of conscience to read once every four years—Plautus, Suetonius, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Lucian, down through Boccaccio and Don Quixote, which he knew by heart and from the living Spanish, to Joseph Andrews, the Spectator, Goldsmith and Swift, Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Ferrier, Galt and Sir Walter,—he was as familiar with, as with David Crockat the nailer, or the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... vessels were often terribly overcrowded; one ship, it is said, brought no less than 1200 passengers from Alexandria. That on which St. Paul was wrecked had 276 souls on board, and one upon which Josephus once found himself had as many as 600. It is incidentally stated in Tacitus that a body of troops, who had been both sent to Alexandria and brought back thence by sea, were greatly debilitated in mind and body by that experience. On the other hand, as has been already stated, there ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... once for all, so far as our story goes, let it be known that German historians have always laid stress on the respect of Teutonic tribesmen, from ancient days, for the leadership of a strong fighting man. Tacitus, the earliest writer of importance, detailing the lives of Teutonic tribes, sets forth that it was the custom of the German warriors in times of crises to select their strong man and endow him with the power of rulership; looking to ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... She wore a long dress of red velvet, worked around the breast-lines with little silver anchors and hearts, and her hood was of black lawn and fell near to her hips behind. And she had read and learned by heart passages from Plutarch, from Tacitus, from Diodorus Siculus, from Seneca and from Tully, each one inculcating how salutary a thing in a man was the love of justice. Therefore she felt herself well prepared to try a fall with the chief enemy of her faith, and awaited with impatience his summons to speak with him. For she ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... said, it had so much WOMAN in it, —MULIEBRITY, as well as FEMINEITY;—no self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture of fifty generations. Sharp business habits, a lean soil, independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things for the larynx. Still, you hear noble voices among us,—I have known families famous for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... south seem to have regarded, as a phenomenon, those blue eyes, which with us are so common, and, indeed so characteristic of beauty, as to form an indispensable requisite of every Daphne of Grub Street. Tacitus, however, from whom Juvenal perhaps borrowed the expression, adds an epithet to crulean, which makes the common interpretation doubtful. 'The Germans,' he says (De Mor. Ger. 4.), 'have truces et crulei oculi, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... me to prove that the admiral my father was honourably descended, although his parents, through the fickleness of fortune, had fallen into great poverty. Those persons required me to prove that his ancestors descended from Junius Colomus, who, as Tacitus relates, brought Mithridates a prisoner to Rome, for which service he was raised by the Roman people to the consulate. They would likewise have induced me to give an account at large of the two illustrious Colomi his predecessors, who gained a great victory ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... you search the history of the world, you will not find an act of tyranny and fraud to surpass this; if you read all past histories, peruse the Annals of Tacitus, read the luminous page of Gibbon, and all the ancient and modern writers, that have searched into the depravity of former ages to draw a lesson for the present, you will not find an act of treacherous, deliberate, cool cruelty ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Britain in the reign of Claudius, and contributed to its subjugation: the vexillation of this legion was in the army of Suetonius Paulinus when he made that victorious stand in a fortified pass, with a forest in his rear, against the insurgent Britons. The position is sketched by Tacitus, and antiquaries well know that on the high ground above Battle Bridge there are vestiges of Roman works, and that the tract of land to the north was formerly a forest. The veracity of the following passage of Tacitus is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various
... which the belief inspired. The multitude, convinced that the Christians were atheists who ate human flesh and thought incest no crime, displayed against them a fury so passionate as to embarrass and alarm their rulers. The severe expressions of Tacitus, exitiabilis superstitio—odio humani generis convicti,[217] show how deeply the prejudices of the multitude imbued the educated class also. One asks oneself with astonishment how a doctrine so benign as that of Jesus Christ ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Roman historian who is theatrical, melodramatic, solemn, full of grand gestures. He also creates an atmosphere of suspicion, of falsehood. Tacitus has something of the inquisitor in him, of the fanatic in the cause of virtue. He is a man of austere moral attitude, which is a pose that a thoroughgoing scamp finds ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the licentiousness of the Roman woman rests mainly on the statements of two satirical writers, Juvenal and Tacitus. Great pains have been taken to refute the charges they make, and the old view is not now accepted. Dill,[309] who is quoted by Havelock Ellis, seems convinced that the movement of freedom for the ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... offspring. In this age, when women are going out into the world to compete with men it is highly important that they be physically strong if they are to stand the stress successfully. It was from rough barbarians, the rude war-loving Teutonic men and women described by Tacitus, that the Anglo-Saxon race inherited those splendid qualities of mind and body that have made their descendants masters ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... as within my powers, nor should I dare now to do so. In the matter of Sallust, which you refer to me, I will say freely, since you wish me to tell plainly what I do think, that I prefer Sallust to any other Latin historian; which also was the almost uniform opinion of the Ancients. Your favourite Tacitus has his merits; but the greatest of them, in my judgment, is that he imitated Sallust with all his might. As far as I can gather from what you write, it appears that the result of my discourse with you personally on this subject has been that you are now nearly of the same ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... slaughter of Varus and his three legions. See the first book of the Annals of Tacitus. Sueton. in August. c. 23, and Velleius Paterculus, l. ii. c. 117, &c. Augustus did not receive the melancholy news with all the temper and firmness that might have ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... those quaint times, and authors were actually authorities. Gentlemen appealed to Virgil or Lucan in the Courts or the House of Commons. What said Statius, Juvenal—let alone Tully or Tacitus—on such and such a point? Their reign is over now, the good old Heathens: the worship of Jupiter and Juno is not more out of mode than the cultivation of Pagan poetry or ethics. The age of economists and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the defeated princes, under certain restrictions, to enjoy their former rights and jurisdictions, was perfectly in accordance with the usual policy of the Romans, as we may learn from the testimony of Tacitus, who remarks, in reference to the British king Cogidunus, that they granted to him certain states according to ancient custom, and the reason assigned is that they might have even kings as instruments of slavery. ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... Tacitus; Natural Philosophy, (Electricity, Optics, Magnetism, Galvanism); Astronomy, Chemistry, Mineralogy, and Geology; Compend of Political Economy; ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... mentioned. And our histories of the early Church are too often warped by an unfortunate bias. Christianity has been judged at its best, paganism at its worst. The rhetorical denunciations of writers like Seneca, Juvenal, and Tacitus are taken at their face value, and few have remembered the convention which obliged a satirist to be scathing, or the political prejudice of the Stoics against the monarchy, or the non-representative character of fashionable life in the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... book, 'Now, lads,' said he, 'have at them in the morning with heavy hands and light consciences.' He then kindly greeted Mac-Ivor and Waverley, who requested to know his opinion of their situation. Why, you know Tacitus saith, "In rebus bellicis maxime dominalur Fortuna," which is equiponderate with our vernacular adage, "Luck can maist in the mellee." But credit me, gentlemen, yon man is not a deacon o' his craft. He damps the spirits of the poor lads ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... with them their earnings; others are freedmen who have either purchased their liberty from their savings, or have been manumitted by their owners. You see many of the most popular writings, such as those of Caesar, Tacitus, Livy, or the poets Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, are constantly in demand, and scores of copies must be kept on hand. Then again many of the Greek authors are greatly in request. The manuscripts wear out and must be replaced, ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... Fairlie, who, with all his attention to agriculture, finds time both for the Classicks and his friends, assures me they are a distinct species, and that, when any of their calves have horns, a mixture of breed can be traced. In confirmation of his opinion, he pointed out to me the following passage in Tacitus, Ne armentis quidem suus honor, aut gloria frontis (De mor. Germ. Section 5) which he wondered ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... exuberant, unrestrained, and, like some of the greatest actors on the stage of human affairs, he had associated his own personality with the prevalence of right ideas and good influences. In Turgot, on the other hand, we discern something of the isolation, the sternness, the disdainful melancholy of Tacitus. He even rises out of the eager, bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of the Voltairean age with some of that austere moral indignation and haughty astonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn ways of men centuries ...
— Burke • John Morley
... show Faith, Hope, and Charity; figures not unworthy of a Botticelli or a Filippino Lippi. The occupations of the Duke are represented on a smaller scale by armour, batons of command, scientific instruments, lutes, viols, and books, some open and some shut. The Bible, Homer, Virgil, Seneca, Tacitus, and Cicero, are lettered; apparently to indicate his favourite authors. The Duke himself, arrayed in his state robes, occupies a fourth great panel; and the whole of this elaborate composition is harmonised by emblems, badges, and occasional ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... so proud, humoursome, and dry as the Englishman; not so indolent, bigoted, and niggardly as the Italian; but a plain, faithful, modest fellow, indefatigable, staid, quiet, intelligent and brave, yet almost always misknown, purely from his constitution. The words of Tacitus still are true: "nullos mortalium armis aut fide ante Germanos." Should you class the four most cultivated nations of Europe, according to the temperaments, the German would be Phlegma; and as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... are of small importance. The geographical and historical nomenclature of the ancients was never clearly defined. It was always more or less of a floating quantity, especially for those countries which to Herodotus or Diodorus, to Pliny or to Tacitus, were dimly perceptible on the extreme limits of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... together in a narrow and uneven area, the necessary manoeuvres were impracticable; and though many companies still fought on desperately, wherever the moonlight showed them the semblance of a foe, [THUC. vii. 44. Compare Tacitus's description of the night engagement in the civil war between Vespasian and Vitellius: "Neutro inclinaverat fortuna, donec adulta nocte, LUNA OSTENDERET ACIES, FALERESQUE." —Hist. Lib. iii. sec. 23.] they fought without concert or subordination; and not ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... also.'' The significant thing for us is that "the absolutely new does not stimulate''— a matter often overlooked. If I tell an uneducated man, with all signs of astonishment, that the missing books of Tacitus' "Annals'' have been discovered in Verona, or that a completely preserved Dinotherium has been cut out of the ice, or that the final explanation of the Martian canals has been made at Manora observatory,— ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Greece for a stake, presents more than one analogy with that which we ourselves are waging and teaches lessons that should make us reflect. The counsels which it gives us are all the more precious, all the more striking or profound inasmuch as the war is narrated to us by a man who remains, with Tacitus, despite the striving of the centuries, the progress of life and all the opportunities of doing better, the greatest historian that the earth has ever known. Thucydides is in fact the supreme historian, at the same time swift and detailed, scrupulously sifting his ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of that? There—surely there, in Sleswick—had been discovered for us our august mother's marriage lines; and if the most of that bright assurance came out of an old political skit, the "Germania" of Tacitus, who recked at the time? For along followed Mr Stopford Brooke with an admirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct the meanest of us in our ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Germany has suffered from war. Without that fatal gift of beauty, "a dowry fraught with never-ending pain," which tempted the foreigner to Italy, her lot has been hardly less wretched; but Germany has differed from Italy in the successful bravery with which she repelled the invader. Tacitus says of her people, that, "surrounded by numerous and very powerful nations, they are safe, not by obsequiousness, but by battles and braving danger"; [Footnote: "Plurimis ac valentissimis nationibus cincti, non ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... silver plate, their valuable furniture, and other superfluities, heaped up by their predecessors, and banished from their tables all expensive delicacies. These princes, together with Vespasian, Pertinax, Alexander, Severus, Claudius the Second, and Tacitus, who were raised to the empire by their merit, and whom all ages have admired as the greatest and the best of princes, were always fond of the greatest plainness in their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... that; but even he, greatest of historians since Tacitus, is not enough careful to mark for us the growth of national character, as distinct ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Tacitus recites that chastity was a controlling virtue among the Teutons, ranking among women as bravery among men, yet all Teutons bathed in the streams together. In Japan both sexes bathe in public in natural ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... beyond her: and there is a great difference of being Poeta and nimis Poeta, if we believe Catullus, as much as betwixt a modest behaviour and affectation. The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us; but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was auribus istius temporis accommodata. They who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries: there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... acumen peculiar to northern criticism, he asks, "Where has Mr. Hope hidden all his eloquence and poetry up to this hour? How is it that he has, all of a sudden, burst out into descriptions which would not disgrace the pen of Tacitus, and displayed a depth of feeling and vigour of imagination which Lord Byron could not excel? We do not shrink from one syllable of this eulogy." The subjects upon which Mr. Hope had previously written were not calculated to call ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... country, which reaches from Syria, and particularly from the mountains Albanus, and Libanus: and all the region, which from thence extends towards the sea, even as far as the Ocean. Of these emigrants Tacitus has given a curious account, which has never been sufficiently heeded. He takes notice of those who settled in Canaan, as well as those who passed higher towards the north. [1259]Sunt, qui tradant Assyrios convenas, indigum agrorum populum, parte AEgypti potitos, ac mox [1260]proprias ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... than French. This contrast is carried out in the style of their writers. Those in Nahuatl were lovers of amplification, of flowing periods, of Ciceronian fullness; the Mayas cultivated sententious brevity, they are elliptical, often to obscurity, and may be compared rather to Tacitus, in ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... from Xylander to Dindorf gave "six lictors", erroneously, as was pointed out by Mommsen (Romisches Staatsrecht, 12, p. 369, note 4). Boissevain is the first editor to make the correction. (See the latter portion of chapter 17, Book Fifty-seven, which should be compared with Tacitus, Annals, II, 47, 5.) ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... attire by the priesthood, however, was not confined to the worshippers of Venus Urania; it was widely spread throughout Heathendom; so widely that, as we learn from Tacitus, the priests of the Naharvali (in modern Denmark) officiated in the dress of women. Like many other heathenish customs and costumes, traces of this have descended to our own times; such, for example, may have been the exchange of dresses on ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... Ignorance and barbarism unfortunately seized on Roman manuscripts, and industriously defaced pages once imagined to have been immortal! The most elegant compositions of classic Rome were converted into the psalms of a breviary, or the prayers of a missal. Livy and Tacitus "hide their diminished heads" to preserve the legend of a saint, and immortal truths were converted into clumsy fictions. It happened that the most voluminous authors were the greatest sufferers; these were preferred, because their volume being the greatest, most profitably repaid ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... mixed with flattery, you can lead them, like so many children, almost as you please;" but, he adds, "the devil from h—l, with fire in one hand, and faggots in the other, cannot drive them." Neither Caesar, nor Tacitus ever drew a more true and concise character of the Gauls, or Germans, than this. Here is seen the transplanted Englishman, enjoying "Indian freedom," and therefore a little wilder than in his native soil of Albion; and yet it is surprising that a people, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... wholesome as I deem it for the mind to apricate in the shelter of epistolary confidence, were it not that a considerable, I might even say a large, number of individuals in this parish expect from their pastor some publick expression of sentiment at this crisis. Moreover, Qui tacitus ardet magis uritur. In trying times like these, the besetting sin of undisciplined minds is to seek refuge from inexplicable realities in the dangerous stimulant of angry partisanship or the indolent narcotick of vague and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... oratory and history; and as the supreme orators are only two, one a Greek and the other a Roman, so the supreme historians, however tightly we may restrict the selection, will include a Greek, Thucydides, and a Roman, Tacitus. With them, and not inferior, stands Gibbon; and perhaps these three, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, are all about whom there would be nowhere any dispute. But there is need to note that Taine held Macaulay to be in no wise inferior to Gibbon. Again, it may be ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Tacitus, who was followed by Probus, as the latter was by Carus: this emperor being killed by a thunder storm, his sons, Carnious and Numerian, succeeded him, and during all these reigns the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... called themselves, though they were much alike in appearance, the Cimbri and the Teutones. They defeated the Roman armies sent against them, and, turning to the south and west, went on their way along the north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now France. They had no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they could neither read nor write: "Literarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant." Very little is to be found concerning them in the Roman writers. The books of Pliny which treated of this time are lost. It was toward the ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... age he had read Vergil, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid, Juvenal and Catullus. He had also mastered trigonometry, surveying, navigation, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... corner-stone of important edifices was laid with impressive ceremonies. These are well described by Tacitus, in his history of the rebuilding of the Capitol. After detailing the preliminary ceremonies which consisted in a procession of vestals, who with chaplets of flowers encompassed the ground and consecrated it by libations ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... 'Now, lads,' said he, 'have at them in the morning, with heavy hands and light consciences.' He then kindly greeted Mac-Ivor and Waverley, who requested to know his opinion of their situation. 'Why, you know, Tacitus saith, "IN REBUS BELLICIS MAXIME DOMINATUR FORTUNA," which is equiponderate with our vernacular adage, "Luck can maist in the mellee." But credit me, gentlemen, yon man is not a deacon o' his craft. He damps the spirits of the poor lads he commands, by keeping ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... father was again immersed in Horace, which (with Tacitus) was his chief joy. Then Jo leaned nearer to Agnes Anne and whispered the dread news about the Haunted House. My sister paled, gasped, and clutched at the desk. Jo, fearful that she would begin, according to the sympathetic school phrase, "to cluck ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... would have roused their opposition. Most of these reflections were beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the time; but they left seed behind, which germinated in due season. At this time I also read the whole of Tacitus, Juvenal, and Quintilian. The latter, owing to his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which many parts of his treatise are made up, is little read, and seldom sufficiently appreciated. His book is a kind of encyclopaedia of ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... back to my quarters after dinner, make up a good fire and there, alone, ensconced behind my screen and beside my little lamp, to read until eight or nine o'clock; then to go to bed, in order to save wood, and continue reading to midnight. In this way I re-read Tacitus and Xenophon and many of the classical Greek and Roman authors; I revised the history of Rome and of France, and the principle countries of Europe. My time, shared between my mother, my work at the school, a little good society and my beloved ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... escapes notice and redress. I see in the newspaper this morning that a pedagogue has brutally chastised his pupil. It is a fact known over all England. We must not forget that a principle of government is reserved for our days that we shall not find in our Aristotles, or even in the forests of Tacitus, nor in our Saxon Wittenagemotes, nor in our Plantagenet parliaments. Opinion is now supreme, and Opinion speaks in print. The representation of the Press is far more complete than the representation of Parliament. Parliamentary ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... advantages before him. But so practical and thorough was he in all his proposals and means, that ere half-an-hour was gone, he had begun to go over his Rudiments again. He now wrote a version, or translation from English into Latin, five times a week, and read Caeser, Virgil, or Tacitus, every day. He gained permission from his grandmother to remove his bed to his own garret, and there, from the bedstead at which he no longer kneeled, he would often rise at four in the morning, even when the snow lay a foot thick on the skylight, kindle his lamp by means of a tinder-box and a ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... so with Germany—our earliest information comes from a Roman writer, Julius Caesar; but in the case of Germany, this information has been greatly amplified by a later and noble treatise from the pen of Tacitus. Tacitus paints a splendid picture of the domestic virtues and personal valor of these tribes, holding them up as examples that might well be useful to his countrymen. Caesar found many Teutonic tribes, not only in the Rhine Valley, but well established in lands ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... Epistle to the Romans—when the old light was lost, the old faiths extinct, the old reverence for the laws of family and national life, destroyed, yea even the natural instincts themselves perverted; that chaos whose darkness Juvenal, and Petronius, and Tacitus have proved, in their fearful pages, not to have been exaggerated by the more compassionate though more ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... first lecture to give you some general conception of the causes which urged our Teutonic race to attack and destroy Rome. I shall take for this one lecture no special text-book: but suppose you all to be acquainted with the Germania of Tacitus, and with the 9th Chapter of Gibbon. And I shall begin, if you will allow me, by a parable, a myth, a saga, such as the men of whom I am going to tell you loved; and if it seem to any of you childish, bear in mind that what is childish need not therefore be shallow. I know that it is not history. ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... up. This young person asked me 'how I liked the Germania?' Taking it for granted that such a badly dressed young woman must be a school teacher, with perhaps classical tastes, I replied that it was one of the most pleasing compositions of Tacitus, and that I occasionally read it of a morning. 'Oh, it's not very taciturn,' she replied; 'I mean the band.' 'Very true,' said I, 'he says agmen, which you translate band very happily, though I might possibly say 'body' in a familiar reading.' 'Oh dear,' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... historian in the original.[15] There was a translation of Livy by the Prior of St. Eloi and late abridgments of Sallust, Suetonius, Lucan, and Caesar,[16] with a French version of Valerius Maximus, but nothing of Tacitus. Doubtless these versions and a volume called Les faits des Romains were used as text-books to teach the young count about the world's conquerors. The last mentioned book shows what travesties of Roman history were gravely read ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... TACITUS. Printed by I. de Spira. Folio. Edit. Prin. This is the whitest and soundest copy, of this not very uncommon book, which I have seen. It has however lost something of its proper dimensions by the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... we are inclined to be almost afraid of the excess of chivalry which possesses us, there may be useful corrective in these words of Lieutenant-General Sir William Butler, K.C.B. There has been much searching of old history books of late to find out what was said in the days of Tacitus against the Germans.[54] (What Tacitus said in their favour is not considered.) Perhaps on the other side there are investigators searching their history books for ancient opinions of the English. "Strike well these English," said Duke William to his Normans, "show no weakness towards these ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... definite branches of knowledge, but literatures". Under this head we have such glowing sentences as these: "Think of the many elements of thought a boy comes in contact with when he reads Caesar and Tacitus in succession, Herodotus and Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle". "See what is implied in having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides or Demosthenes; what light will have been shed on the essence and ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Ocean; and on the North to the Danube and the Rhine; including the best part of the then known world. The Romans, therefore, were not improperly called rerum domini [266], and Rome, pulcherrima rerum [267], maxima rerum [268]. Even the historians, Livy and Tacitus, (156) actuated likewise with admiration, bestow magnificent epithets on the capital of their country. The succeeding emperors, in conformity to the advice of Augustus, made few additions to the empire. Trajan, however, subdued ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... miseras patet Immensa mortes? hinc miserabili Quassata terrarum tumultu Stare pavent titubantq; regna, Unaq; tandem funditus obruunt Cives ruina. Stat tacitus cinis, Cui serus inscribat viator: Cum populo jacet hic & ipso Cum Rege Regn[um]. Quid memorem super- Infusa totis aequora portubus Urbes inundare, & repenti Tecta Deum sonuisse fluctu. Regumq; Turres, & pelago Casas Jamjam latentes? ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... to the preachers who have given their opinion of me. In the first place I am obliged to them for acting as my agents. I think Mr. Hogan has been imposed upon. Tacitus is a poor witness—about like Josephus. I say again that we have not a word about Christ written by any human being who lived in the time of Christ—not a solitary word, and Mr. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of the magistrate were still surviving as mere constitutional fossils, and were not destined to share largely in Augustus' heroic attempt to put fresh life into the ius divinum. Vile damnum, as Tacitus said of the foreign quacks banished to Sardinia by Tiberius; for neither in the sphere of religion nor later in that of politics can the art of divination be said to ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... dispersion regarded kinship through the mother as the sole, or chief, basis of blood-kinship, and all their family rights were governed by this principle." There is much conflict of opinion on this matter, and it would, perhaps, be rash to make any definite statement. We may recall what Tacitus says of ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Elizabeth that there was no treason in Hayward's Henry IV, but 'very much felony', because Hayward 'had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus' (Apophthegms, 58). Hayward and Bacon had a precursor in the author of The History of King Richard the Thirde, generally attributed to Sir Thomas More, and printed in the collection of his ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... being young and very beautiful and very wholesome, for you are every one of these things, and I know you'll forgive me for saying so when I tell you that I have two strapping young fellows for sons who are almost old enough to make love to you. Come, Peter, show me that copy of Tacitus you wrote me about. Is it in good condition?" They were out of Jack's hearing now, Morris adding, "Fine type of Southern beauty, Peter. Big design, with broad lines everywhere. Good, too—good as gold. Something ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... down by order of the king after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rebuilt on the declaration of religious liberty by the National Assembly. Gazing on that inscription and the little crowd of worshippers, a sentence of Tacitus came into my mind. Recording how not only the biographers of good men were banished or put to death, but their works publicly burnt by order of Domitian, the historian, whose sentences are volumes condensed, adds: "They fancied, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Tacitus, quoted Take me with you Take in Tarleton Tarriers Tell Tale, the, (MS. play) Tent Termagant The Fryer was in the—(See Appendix) Three Cranes Thumb, to bite the Ticktacks Tickle minikin ( play on the fiddle) Timeless ( untimely) ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... believe to be right in eschewing the word "Triumvirate." I know no mention of it by any Roman writer as applied to this conspiracy, though Tacitus, Suetonius, and Florus call by that name the later coalition of Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus. The Langhornes, in translating Plutarch's life of Crassus, speak of the Triumvirate; but Plutarch himself says that Caesar ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... forget to remember me to Mr. Otway. I was much pleased with him and with your fellow-traveller Mr. Nimmo, as I should have been, no doubt, with the young Irishman, had not our conversation taken so serious a turn. The passage in Tacitus which Milton's line so strongly resembles is not in the 'Agricola,' nor can I find ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... marriage ring, of what style and material it was, and whether formerly, as now, consecrated by prayers to God. Its pattern appears to have been one which has gone out of use, viz. right hands joined, such as is often observed on ancient coins. Tacitus (Hist. i. ll.) calls it absolutely dextras, right hands. Among us it was called a faith (una fede. Comp. Eng. "Plight my troth"), and not without precedent, for on the coins of Vitellius, &c. right hands thus joined bear the motto Fides. An esteemed ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... of Quinet and of Michelet. One fine morning, he declares, by decree, Greek and Latin to be under suspicion, and, so far as he can, forbids all intercourse with the ancient poets and historians of Athens and of Rome, scenting in AEschylus and in Tacitus a vague odour of demagogy. With a stroke of the pen, for instance, he exempts all medical men from literary qualification, which causes Doctor Serres to say: "We are dispensed, by decree, from knowing how to read ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... that if, as I said, he had died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VIII., like that Roman Emperor said by Tacitus to have been consensu omnium dignus imperii nisi imperasset, would have been considered by posterity as formed by Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would have been deplored as a perpetual calamity. We must allow him, therefore, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... subject is illustrated by the most apposite quotations from the works of different travellers and historians. It is the writer's opinion that in uncivilized life, the degradation of woman, though common, is not universal. The celebrated passage in Tacitus is quoted in support of this position; and among other less interesting extracts, is the following account of Galway by Hardiman, a country which, so great is the blessing of a paternal and judicious government, may furnish, in the nineteenth century, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Terence. Tacitus. 2 Vols. Livy. 2 Vols. Cicero's Orations. Cicero's Offices, Laelius, Cato Major, Paradoxes, Scipio's Dream, Letter to Quintus. Cicero On Oratory and Orators. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, The Nature of the Gods, and The Commonwealth. Juvenal. Xenophon. Homer's Iliad. ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... that success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men. For the masses, success has almost the same profile as supremacy. Success, that Menaechmus of talent, has one dupe,—history. Juvenal and Tacitus alone grumble at it. In our day, a philosophy which is almost official has entered into its service, wears the livery of success, and performs the service of its antechamber. Succeed: theory. Prosperity ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... have that penetration of judgment as he can discern what things are to be laid open, and what to be secreted, and what to be showed at half-lights, and to whom and when, (which indeed are arts of state and arts of life, as Tacitus well calleth them,) to him a habit of dissimulation is a hindrance and a poorness. But if a man cannot obtain to that judgment, then it is left to him generally to be close, and a dissembler. For where a man cannot choose or vary in particulars, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... prostitute, an adulteress, a murderer. Thus the English have memorials of the several reigns, but no such thing as a history. There is, indeed, now living, one Mr. Gordon (the public are obliged to him for a translation of Tacitus), who is very capable of writing the history of his own country, but Rapin de Thoyras got the start of him. To conclude, in my opinion the English have not such good historians as the French have no such thing as a real ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... these precautions for securing his rear, he advanced northwards, and, penetrating into Caledonia as far as the river Tay, he there built a praetentura, or line of forts, between the two friths, which are in that place no more than twenty miles asunder. The enemy, says Tacitus, was removed as it were into another island. And this line Agricola seems to have destined as the boundary of the Empire. For though in the following year he carried his arms further, and, as it is thought, to the foot of the Grampian Mountains, and there defeated a confederate ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of the influences that formed them are the histories of Livy, of Sallust, and of Tacitus. They wrote in a language that had been sublimated into electric clouds by the warm and splendid diffuseness of Cicero, and reduced to a granite-like strength by the cold and exquisite simplicity of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... scarcely less notable for style than for ideas. With characteristic intellectual independence Bacon strikes out for himself an extremely terse and clear manner of expression, doubtless influenced by such Latin authors as Tacitus, which stands in marked contrast to the formless diffuseness or artificial elaborateness of most Elizabethan and Jacobean prose. His unit of structure is always a short clause. The sentences are sometimes short, sometimes consist of a number of connected clauses; but they are always essentially ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... letter to him; and he is in the right. I am a very indifferent author; and there is nothing so vexatious to an indifferent author as to be confounded with another of the same class. I should be sorry to have his eloges and translations of scraps of Tacitus laid to me. However, I can forgive him any thing, provided he never translates me. Adieu! my dear Sir. I am apt to laugh, you know, and therefore you will excuse me, though I do not treat your friends up to the pomp ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the cards and talking at the same time]. For me there exists but one ideal. That which Tacitus described as it once prevailed among the old Teutons. Quamquam severa illic matrimonia nec ullam morum partem magis laudaveris. [He lets Bolland cut and then deals.] The most praiseworthy trait of the Teutons was the strictness of their ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... North's translation of Plutarch and dramatise his subject without further inquiry. Jonson was a scholar and a classical antiquarian. He reprobated this slipshod amateurishness, and wrote his "Sejanus" like a scholar, reading Tacitus, Suetonius, and other authorities, to be certain of his facts, his setting, and his atmosphere, and somewhat pedantically noting his authorities in the margin when he came to print. "Sejanus" is a tragedy of ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... sixty. Strabo (iv. p. 292) included within the Hercynia Silva all the mountains of southern and central Germany, from the Danube to Transylvania. Later, it was limited to the mountains round Bohemia and extending to Hungary. (See Tacitus, 'Germania', 28, 30; and Pliny, 'Historia Naturalis', iv. 25, 28.) A trace of the ancient name is retained in the 'Harz' mountains, which are clothed everywhere ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... only to be eaters of human flesh but also ass-worshippers, and among the Roman graffiti, the most famous is the one found on the Palatino, showing a man worshipping a cross on which is suspended a figure with the head of an ass (see Minucius Felix, "Octavius" IX.; Tacitus, "Historiae" v. 3; Tertullian, "Apologia", etc.). Nietzsche's obvious moral, however, is that great scientists and thinkers, once they have reached the wall encircling scepticism and have thereby learned ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Scaevola thrust his hand into the burning coals, and Regulus returned to Carthage, and Epicharis sustained the rack silently, in the torments of which she knew that she would speedily perish, rather than betray the conspirators to the tyrant [Footnote: Tacitus.]; these illustrious persons certainly made a small estimate of their private interest. If it be said that they sought posthumous fame; instances are not wanting in history which prove that men have even defied infamy for the sake of good. But there is a great error in the world with respect to ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of the Caledonians in the first century were, according to Tacitus, long, large, and blunt at the point, and hence in all probability made of iron, whence came the sharp-pointed leaf-shaped bronze swords so often found in Scotland, and what is the place and date of their manufacture? Were they earlier? And what ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... Fancy a woman of superlative beauty, of the highest courage and calmness, a woman of many resources, of genius, brought up by a petty princelet of a father, upon Tacitus and Sallust, and the tales of the great Malatestas, of Caesar Borgia and such-like!—a woman whose one passion is conquest and empire—fancy her, on the eve of being wedded to a man of the power of the Duke of Stimigliano, claimed, carried off by a small fry of a Pico, locked ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Tacitus has observed, that voluntary slaves make more tyrants, than tyrants make slaves. When we recollect the officiousness, the meannesses, and the adulation, of certain nobles, who had become the courtiers of Napoleon, we are astonished, that it never entered his head ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... down to study, which it is rather singular I was able to do with as strong zest and as unwearied application as ever; as will appear when I mention that in those fifteen months I read through in the evenings the whole of Cicero, Tacitus, the Corpus Ptarurn (Latinorum), Bothius, Scriptores Histori Augustin, Homer, Corpus Grcarum Tragediarum, a great part of Plato, and a large mass of philological works. In fact, in the evening I generally felt comparatively well, not being troubled with many of the above symptoms. ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... beyond the bounds of truth. In the present case, however, nothing needs to be disguised, and exaggerated praise is unnecessary. It is an observation of the younger Pliny, in his epistle to his friend Tacitus, that history ought never to magnify matters of fact, because worthy actions require nothing but the truth: "nam nec historia debet egredi veritatem, et honeste factis veritas sufficit." This rule, the present biographer promises, shall guide his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... impressionable races who, rather by good fortune than by choice, escaped the vices in missing the lessons of Roman civilisation. The Franks and the Saxons, as we find them described by Gregory of Tours and the Venerable Bede, were far from resembling the noble savage imagined by Tacitus and other idealists. But they were trained for future empire in the hard ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... as trophies of victory, on the rocks of the conquered countries. Herodotus speaks of having seen two of these inscriptions himself (II. 102-106.) and two are still to be found not far from Bairut. His conquests brought vast sums of tribute into Egypt. Tacitus annal. II. 60. and these enabled him to erect magnificent buildings in the whole length of his land from Nubia to Tanis, but more especially in Thebes, the city in which he resided. One of the obelisks erected by Rameses at Heliopolis is now standing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Humor and pathos, tragedy and comedy, all find their place and glimpses of the pageant of human history flit through the pages. It would seem as if it were impossible to read extracts from Thucydides and Tacitus and Gibbon and not long to go to their histories and learn all that could be said by such men about the life of man upon earth, about Athens and Rome and the rise and fall of empires. Selections are unsatisfying and the better they are ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... has its limitations and types distinctive from every other. The very name "tribe" suggests to us something different from the conditions of a modern nation. Caesar and Tacitus were accustomed to speak of the Germanic tribes as nationes, although with no such fulness of meaning as we attach to our modern nations. The Germanic, like the Grecian, tribe is founded upon two cardinal principles, and is a natural ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... beginning of the red-headed banditti of Mawddwy, Tacitus states in his Life of Agricola, ch. xi., that there were in Britain men with red hair who he surmises were of German extraction. We must, therefore, look for the commencement of a people of this description long before the twelfth century, and the Llanfrothen legend either dates ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... neither among them nor among those writers who are peculiarly the delight of the spuriously literate: Sallust, who is less colorless than the others; sentimental and pompous Titus Livius; turgid and lurid Seneca; watery and larval Suetonius; Tacitus who, in his studied conciseness, is the keenest, most wiry and muscular of them all. In poetry, he was untouched by Juvenal, despite some roughshod verses, and by Persius, despite his mysterious insinuations. In neglecting Tibullus and Propertius, Quintilian and the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... difference between Mohawks and Mexicans; and the same may be said of the people of Israel and Judah in contrast with the Arabs of the desert, or of the imperial Romans in comparison with their Teutonic kinsmen as described by Tacitus. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... of England: called by Tacitus, Londinium; by Ptolemy, Logidinium; by Ammianus Marcellinus, Lundinium; by foreigners, Londra, and Londres; it is the seat of the British Empire, and the chamber of the English kings. This most ancient city is the the ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... formal proposal to that effect to the senate, and succeeded, not without difficulty, in getting it adopted. The speech that he delivered on this occasion has been to a great extent preserved to us, not only in the summary given by Tacitus, but also in an inscription on a bronze tablet, which split into many fragments at the time of the destruction of the building in which it was placed. The two principal fragments were discovered at Lyons, in 1528, and they are now deposited ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... interest is attached to those Teutonic races who ultimately became the conquerors of the empire! They were more warlike, persevering, and hardy, than the Celts, who had been incorporated with the empire. Tacitus has painted their simple manners, their passionate love of independence, and their religious tendency of mind. They occupied those vast plains and forests which lay between the Rhine, the Danube, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... which we are affected, so it was often the fashion of more intellectual states to extol the institutions of which they saw only from afar and through a glass the apparent benefits, without examining the concomitant defects. An Athenian might laud the Spartan austerity, as Tacitus might laud the German barbarism; it was the panegyric of rhetoric and satire, of wounded patriotism or disappointed ambition. Although the ephors made the government really and latently democratic, yet the concentration of its action made it seemingly oligarchic; ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hunting, looked to be forty years old. He had reached the last stages of the malady of which he died, the symptoms of which were such that many reflecting persons were justified in thinking that he was poisoned. According to de Thou (the Tacitus of the Valois) the surgeons found suspicious spots—ex causa incognita reperti livores—on his body. Moreover, his funeral was even more neglected than that of Francois II. The body was conducted from Saint-Lazare to Saint-Denis by Brantome and a few archers of the guard under command ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... distance is almost infinite?' It is singular that Seneca, who was well acquainted with the uniform character of the planetary motions, seems to have entertained no doubt respecting their influence. Tacitus expresses some doubts, but was on the whole inclined to believe in astrology. 'Certainly,' he says, 'the majority of mankind cannot be weaned from the opinion that at the birth of each man his future destiny is fixed; though some things may fall out differently from the predictions, by the ignorance ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... various extra-academic enterprises, was a member of the Burschenschaft, that democratic-patriotic organization so gravely suspected by the reactionary governments, and made many friends. He duly studied history and law; he heard Ernst Moritz Arndt interpret the Germania of Tacitus; but more especially did he profit by official and personal relations with A.W. Schlegel, who taught Heine what he himself knew best, namely, the secret of literary form and the art of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the account of it by Tacitus. Nero had made all the preparations; had arranged a barge, that of a sudden its deck might fall heavily upon those in the cabin, and crush them in an instant. He meant thus to give to the murder which he planned ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... somewhat deficient in a part of its anatomy. But we flattered ourselves he should be held so high that no Roman eye, if disposed, could carp and criticise. When lo! just as the banner was ready to unfold its young glories in the home of Horace, Virgil, and Tacitus, an ordinance appeared prohibiting the display of any but the ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... King Albert, who they say is the greatest warrior and king that Belgium has ever seen. The Belgians of to-day will not rank him second to even Claudius Civilis, the companion of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, nor to any of those heroes of Tacitus, who took up arms for Belgian liberty against the Romans, nor yet to Charlemagne, the great conqueror ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... between the lessening of men which is occasioned by the loftiness of the platform whence the observation is made, and that which is produced by the malignant envy of the observer; between the gloomy judicial ferocity of a Pope or a Tacitus, and the villain levity which revels in the contemplation of imputed faults, or that fiendishness of feeling which gloats and howls over the ruins of reputations which itself ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... progenitor of mankind with the German Mannus: "Celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae et annalium genus est, Tuisconem deum terra editum, et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque." TACITUS, Germania, Cap. II. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... time after, Edward III. (ob. 1377) was regarded as the first English monarch who had coined gold.(717) How little a barbarous people are in a condition to make use of very costly material as money, is proved by the account which Tacitus gives of the ancient Germans, who preferred silver to gold in trade.(718) England presents us with an instance of the other extreme. Since 1816, silver, in that country, has been used only as a species of change, and the circulation of gold governs ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... body shou'd wonder, how the Word Graecis crept into Caesar's Text, I will instance you the like Mischance in Pliny, lib. 7. cap. 57. where 'tis thus written,—"Gentium consensus tacitus primum omnium conspiravit ut IONUM literis uterentur." And afterwards,—"Sequens gentium consensus in tonsoribus fuit." And again,—"Tertius consensus est in Horarum observatione." Now who is there that sees ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... insfitutions. The language was pure Saxon; even the names of places, which often remain while the tongue entirely changes, were almost all affixed by the conquerors; the manners and customs were wholly German; and the same picture of a fierce and bold liberty, which is drawn by the masterly pen of Tacitus, will suit those founders of the English government. The king, so far from being invested with arbitrary power, was only considered as the first among the citizens; his authority depended more on his personal qualities than on his station; he was even so far on a level with ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... for slavery," as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say of them; "the chosen people among the nations," as they themselves say and believe—the Jews performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums. Their prophets fused into ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of basing their investigations upon a diligent study of public records, state-papers, and notes of contemporary observers.[3] The same men prepared themselves for the task of criticism by a profound study of ethical and political philosophy in the works of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Tacitus.[4] They examined the methods of classical historians, and compared the annals of Greece, Rome, and Palestine with the chronicles of their own country. They attempted to divine the genius and to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Tiridates on the throne of Armenia, they propitiated the river according to the rites of their country by the suovetaurilia, the sacrifice of the hog, the ram, and the bull. Tiridates did the same by the sacrifice of a horse. Tacitus does not mention the river god, but the river itself, as propitiated (see [Annals,] book vi, chap. 37).[3] Plato makes Socrates condemn Homer for making Achilles behave disrespectfully towards the river Xanthus, though acknowledged to be a divinity, in offering to fight him,[4] and towards ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... adhering to the leaves, indicate by their columnar ascent, impelled by vapors, the termination of every great eqrthquake. This is the magnificent phenomenon which Pliny the younger, in his celebrated letter to Cornelius Tacitus, compares, in the case of Vesuvius, to the form of a lofty and thickly-branched and foliaceous pine. That which is described as flames in the eruption of scoriae, and the radiance of the glowing red clouds that hover over the crater, can not be ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... unequally suggestive to me. Classic literature has only few paths outwards for me—Tacitus, Lucretius, Juvenal, Homer, and Saint-Simon excepted. I read the other authors of this class partly for themselves, without making a comparison. On the other hand, the reading of Dante, Shakespeare, St. Jerome's compact verses on the Hebrew, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... great blaze, how easily from one thing they are transformed into another; especially news of this kind, which do suit and feed the bad humour of the vulgar. 'Tis obvious to any man how true that is of Tacitus, how void of consideration, of judgment, of equity, the busy and talking part of mankind is. Whoever therefore gives heed to flying tales, and thrusts himself into the herd of those who spread them, ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... therefore look to Christian books for the history of early Christianity. At the close of the first century after the Saviour's Birth there were living three great writers who were united in close friendship, viz. the younger Pliny, and the historians Tacitus and Suetonius. Suetonius wrote lives of the first twelve Caesars, and, in his history of Nero (A.D. 54-68), mentions the punishment of Christians, "a set of men of a new and mischievous superstition." Tacitus, describing the same reign[1], and the burning ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... owing to his old age it did not heal properly. But his funeral was a source of glory to the Emperor, to the age in which he lived, and even to the Roman Forum and the rostra. His panegyric was pronounced by Cornelius Tacitus, and Virginius's good fortune was crowned by this, that he had the most eloquent man in Rome ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... Greek, and in view of the fact that many of the chief Greek authors had been printed before his death. It seems likely that his Greek books had been dispersed. But the change is apparent in the excellent series of Latin classics, which included Tacitus and Lucretius, and in the number of books by Italian writers, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ficino, Filelfo, Lorenzo della Valle, Aeneas Sylvius, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... sacrifices of the Gauls on cruel altars not a whit milder than those of Diana, and he speaks of "altars piled with offerings" in the sacred grove at Marseilles.[965] Cicero says that human victims were sacrificed on altars, and Tacitus describes the altars of Mona smeared with human blood.[966] "Druids' altars" are mentioned in the Irish "Expedition of Dathi," and Cormac speaks of indelba, or altars adorned with emblems.[967] Probably many of ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... has been at Epsom, to avoid Good Friday and Easter Sunday. He forced me to-day to dine with him; and tells me there are letters from Ireland, giving an account of a great indiscretion in the Archbishop of Dublin, who applied a story out of Tacitus very reflectingly on Mr. Harley, and that twenty people have written of it; I do not believe it yet.(3) I called this evening to see Mr. Secretary, who has been very ill with the gravel and pain in his back, by burgundy and champagne, added to the sitting up all night ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... belong to another world. The men of my profession are so little of my profession! There is hardly anyone except Victor Hugo with whom I can talk of what interests me. Day before yesterday he recited by heart to me from Boileau and from Tacitus. That was like a gift to me, the thing is so rare. Moreover, the days when there are not politicians at his house, he is an ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert |
