"Semele" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is considered so great and propitious a god amongst the Greeks, and from them he was introduced among us, and his worship has extended even to the very ocean itself. This is how it was that Bacchus was deified, the offspring of Semele; and from the same illustrious fame we receive Castor and Pollux as gods, who are reported not only to have helped the Romans to victory in their battles, but to have been the messengers of their success. What shall we say of Ino, the daughter ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... of Verona was so wondrous fair and of so perfect a grace of body, that the learned of the city, they who had knowledge of history and legend, were used to call her lady mother by the names of Latona, Leda and Semele, making implication thereby of their belief that the fruit of her womb had been framed in her by a god, Jupiter, rather than by any mortal man, such as were her husband and lovers. But the wiser heads, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... to the fiercest of her foes. Naked, the Graces guarded you from all Dangers abroad; and now your thunder shall. Princes that saw you, diff'rent passions prove, For now they dread the object of their love; 30 Nor without envy can behold his height, Whose conversation was their late delight. So Semele, contented with the rape Of Jove disguised in a mortal shape, When she beheld his hands with lightning fill'd, And his bright rays, was with ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... of Hercules coming back in triumph from his visit to Pluto's seat, and, on dying, rising to the assembly of immortals and taking his equal place among them; secondly, of Dionysus going into the under world, rescuing his mother, the hapless Semele, and soaring with her to heaven, where she henceforth resides, a peeress of the eldest goddesses. Cicero expresses the same thought when he affirms that "a life of justice and piety is the path to heaven, where ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... simple intuition? That was Semele's ambition. . . . You recollect the end of that myth. You recollect, too, as you have read the Neo-Platonists, the result ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Shades to recover the lost Virgin of the Zodiac, to bring back his mother to the sky as Thyone; or what has the same meaning, to consummate his eventful marriage with Persephone, thereby securing, like the nuptials of his father with Semele or Danaë, the perpetuity of Nature. His under-earth office is the depression of the year, the wintry aspect in the alternations of bull and serpent, whose united series makes up the continuity of Time, and in which, physically speaking, the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... transfigured some reminiscence of these scenes in a passage of such heavenly beauty as custom cannot stale. Another episode, and one not even indirectly connected with the labors of Hercules, is the story of Semele, handled with the same simple and straightforward skill of dramatic exposition, the same purity and fluency of blameless and spontaneous verse, that distinguish all parts alike of this dramatic chronicle. The second of the five plays composing it closes with the rescue of Proserpine by Hercules, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... time when Juno was wroth because of Semele against the Theban blood, as she showed more than once, Athamas became so insane, that seeing his wife come laden on either hand with her two sons, cried out, "Spread we the nets, so that I may take the lioness and the young lions at the pass," and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... satyric heroes) with the re-awakening of the dead Earth in spring and the return of human souls to their tribe. Dionysus was, of all the various Kouroi, the one most widely connected with resurrection ideas, and the Satyrs are his attendant daemons, who dance magic dances at the Return to Life of Semele or Persephone. And Heracles himself, in certain of his ritual aspects, has similar functions. See J.E. Harrison, Themis, pp. 422 f. and 365 ff., or my Four Stages of Greek Religion, pp. 46 f. This tradition explains, to start with, what Heracles—and this particular sort of ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... Beatrice, who has grown more and more beautiful as they rise, explains, when Dante again gazes upon her, that she no longer dares smile, lest he be consumed like Semele when she beheld Jove. The magnetic power of her glance suffices again, however, to transfer him to the seventh heaven, that of Saturn (revolved by Thrones). This sphere is the abiding place of contemplative and abstinent ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... I also admired Semele, dying of fear and admiration at the frowns of a wrathful Jove, but her least of all, because I am terrified ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... lowliest and most humble sphere produced one far more marvellous than the mother of Proserpina or the son of Semele. Out of the Carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely enough, destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and the real beauties of the lilies of the field ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... in love with the wife of Ixion who bore me Pirithous, peer of gods in counsel, nor yet with Danae the daintily-ancled daughter of Acrisius, who bore me the famed hero Perseus. Then there was the daughter of Phoenix, who bore me Minos and Rhadamanthus: there was Semele, and Alcmena in Thebes by whom I begot my lion-hearted son Hercules, while Semele became mother to Bacchus the comforter of mankind. There was queen Ceres again, and lovely Leto, and yourself—but with none of these was I ever so much enamoured as ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... capable of indefinite extension. The same process continued under the Ptolemies when the religion of Egypt came into contact with Greece. Isis was identified simultaneously with Demeter, Aphrodite, Hera, Semele, Io, Tyche, and others. She was considered the queen of heaven and hell, of earth and sea. She was "the past, the present and the future,"[42] "nature the mother of things, the mistress of the elements, born at the beginning of the centuries."[43] ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Eschylus appears—prepare For new abortions, all ye pregnant fair, In flame like Semele be brought to bed, Whilst opening hell spouts wildfire ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... this we have from the legends of the historic AEolus only; but, besides these, there is the beautiful story of Semele, the mother of Bacchus. She is the cloud with the strength of the vine in its bosom, consumed by the light which matures the fruit; the melting away of the cloud into the clean air at the fringe of its edges being exquisitely ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin |
