"Eumenides" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... printer who mistook the Oxford professor's allusion to the Eumenides, and quoted him as speaking of "those terrible old Greek goddesses—the Humanities,'' was still ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... covered with redwoods, and then the sharply cut peak of Tamalpais, from which on clear days we not only may see the good St. Helena, but alas, as in all the world, Diablo, himself, is in view, black and barren, though we do sometimes call him San Diablo, as the old Greeks did the Eumenides, in propitiatory compliment. ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... was very worrying, and one cannot think without impatience of the annoyances to which he was subjected. The king could not understand why he shrank from writing music to the choruses of AEschylus's "Eumenides." Other composers would do it by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the world learns to regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis, to be treated by a rest-cure. Three hideous political murders, that would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have thrown scarcely a shadow on the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... in that respect makes the nearest approach of all English tragedies to the Grecian model;) he does not fear to introduce, for the same appalling effect as that for which Aeschylus introduced the Eumenides, a triad of old women, concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque peculiarity in the popular creed of that day,—that although potent over winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, they yet stood in awe of the constable,—yet relying on his own supreme ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... be recollected, too, that, in other respects, the author applies the lash of moral satire very successfully. That group of slanderers who, like the Chorus of the Eumenides, go searching about for their prey with "eyes that drop poison," represent a class of persons in society who richly deserve such ridicule, and who—like their prototypes in Aeschylus trembling before the shafts of Apollo—are here made to feel the full force of the archery ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... girls. They were the terrible and ancient Eumenides, black with the curdled blood of Uranus. They were the inexorable Furies, who were wont to fawn about my feet, with the adders quivering in their tresses, tormenting me for the spoils of victory. What does it mean? Why are they in white? As we came hither in the ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... one. She, feeling proud of the preference, grew so arrogant as to swear by Pluto that the whole of the human brood should soon people his domains. But Jupiter did not approve of the vow this member of the Eumenides had sworn, and he sent her back to Hades. At the same time he launched a thunderbolt upon one particularly perfidious race of men. This, however, being hurled by a father's arm, mercifully fell in a desert, causing less ruin than alarm. What followed ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... white hair streaming unkempt over her wild eyes, her cheeks all pale, her arms bruised by the beating of her anguished hands, bearing an olive-branch hung with black wool, came forth from the gates in semblance like to the eldest of the Eumenides, in all the majesty ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... with her origin, and in another on being asked how she became a nightmare; and the lady in the Esthonian tale warns her husband against calling her Mermaid. In this connection it is obvious to refer to the euphemistic title Eumenides, bestowed by the Greeks on the Furies, and to the parallel names, Good People and Fair Family, for fays in this country. In all these cases the thought is distinguishable from that of the Carnarvonshire ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Evolutionist in 1830: many playwrights, even young ones, are still untouched by Creative Evolution in 1920. Ibsen was Darwinized to the extent of exploiting heredity on the stage much as the ancient Athenian playwrights exploited the Eumenides; but there is no trace in his plays of any faith in or knowledge of Creative Evolution as a modern scientific fact. True, the poetic aspiration is plain enough in his Emperor or Galilean; but it is one of Ibsen's distinctions that nothing ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Necromancers have had private interviews with visitors who had no right to be seen this side the Styx. The Witch of Endor and the raising of Samuel were literal facts. Above all others, the Nemesis and Eumenides were facts not to be withstood. And, philosophize as we may, ghosts have been seen at dead of night, and not always under the conduct of Mercury;[6] even the Salem witchcraft was very far from being a humbug. They are all true,—the gibbering ghost, the riding hag, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... whisper, thou sworn sister of the Eumenides?" cried I,— the irritating aestrum of the woman's objurgation totally counterbalancing the sedative effects both of pipe ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... seven extant plays, Supplices, Persae, Septem contra Thebas, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides, five can fortunately be dated with certainty, as the archon's name is preserved in the Arguments; and the other two approximately. The dates rest, in the last resort, on the didaskaliai, or the official records of the contests, of which we know ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant ones of Pan, Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of names which have already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or nouns,—the Sibyls, the Eumenides, the Parcae, the Graces, the Muses, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... budded; I told how he watched it grow large and more large, And wondered how much for the show he should charge,— She had listened with utter indifference to this, till I told how it bloomed, and, discharging its pistil 1390 With an aim the Eumenides dictated, shot The botanical filicide dead on the spot; It had blown, but he reaped not his horrible gains, For it blew with such force as to blow out his brains, And the crime was blown also, because on the wad, Which was paper, was ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... condemned to roll up a hill a stone that ever rolled back Sisyphus heard the music that Orpheus played, and for a while he sat still upon his stone. And even those dread ones who bring to the dead the memories of all their crimes and all their faults, even the Eumenides had ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... red wine. I think there must be, in a story of which the flavour has the true romantic magic, something darkly and inexplicably fatal. I think it is necessary that one should hear the rush of the flight of the Valkyries and the wailing upon the wind of the voices of the Eumenides. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... was produced in the archonship if Philocles (458 B.C.). The first prize was won by Aeschylus with the "Agamemnon", "Libation-Bearers", "Eumenides", ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... usual companions. Methought the charm would be broken if I were seen, but I heard the music of her voice and was happy. I gave to each heroine of whom I read, her beauty and matchless excellences—such was Antigone, when she guided the blind Oedipus to the grove of the Eumenides, and discharged the funeral rites of Polynices; such was Miranda in the unvisited cave of Prospero; such Haidee, on the sands of the Ionian island. I was mad with excess of passionate devotion; but pride, tameless as fire, invested my nature, and prevented me from ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... They were induced by the archon Megacles, one of the illustrious family of the Alcmaeonidae, to quit the altar on the promise that their lives should be spared; but directly they had left the temple they were put to death, and some of them were murdered even at the altar of the Eumenides or Furies. ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... they change their tone and (in Strophic Lyrics) promise all good to the land, Athene making acknowledgment on behalf of the city (in marching rhythm as signifying exultation). Finally Athene offers to conduct them at once to their homes, the cave-chapels where the Eumenides were worshipped. ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... admitting Hecate to be one also, who was the daughter of Asteria, Latona's sister? Certainly she is one, if we may judge by the altars erected to her in Greece. And if Hecate is a Goddess, how can you refuse that rank to the Eumenides? for they also have a temple at Athens, and, if I understand right, the Romans have consecrated a grove to them. The Furies, too, whom we look upon as the inspectors into and scourges of impiety, I suppose, must have their divinity too. As you hold ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... characteristic of her people, until she had reached the road. Two or three hounds in the garden started joyously to follow her, but she drove them back with a portentous frown, and an ill-aimed stone, and a suppressed voice. Yet in that backward glance she could see that her little Eumenides—Mammy Judy's children—were peering at her from below the wooden floor of the portico, which they were grasping with outstretched arms and bowed shoulders, as if they were black caryatides supporting—as indeed their race had done for many a year—the ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... them all had come upon her as the outcome of Aphrodite's gifts. She thought with a shudder of the murdered Roman, and remembered the moment when Eulaeus had told her that her Bithynian lover had been killed by wild beasts. She rushed from one door to another—the victim of the avenging Eumenides—shrieked from the window for rescue and help, and in that one hour lived through a whole year of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... labored apology of Dr. Zimmermann and the swift action of the Kaiser in pardoning those who were condemned with Miss Cavell indicate that the Prussian officials have heard the beating of the wings of those avenging angels of history who, like the Eumenides of classic mythology, are the avengers of the innocent ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... place, he bent over, or rather threw himself upon, a geographical map of Europe. There he found all his fears concentrated. In the north, the south, the very centre of the kingdom, revolutions appeared to him like so many Eumenides. In every country he thought he saw a volcano ready to burst forth. He imagined he heard cries of distress from kings, who appealed to him for help, and the furious shouts of the populace. He fancied he felt the territory of France trembling and crumbling beneath his feet. His feeble ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... already stated, the mother-right made earliest room for the father-right, but, as it seems, under strong opposition from the women, the transition is portrayed touchingly and in all the fullness of its tragic import, in the "Eumenides" of Aeschylus. The story is this: Agamemnon, King of Mycene, and husband of Clytemnestra, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, upon the command of the oracle on his expedition against Troy. The mother, indignant at the sacrifice of her daughter, takes, during her husband's absence, Aegysthos for ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... 20. Furies. The Eumenides, or avengers of evil. They are variously represented by the poets. schylus describes them as having black bodies, hair composed of twining snakes, and ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... in recounting his adventures on a visit to the infernal regions, tells us that he saw, in the hands of the cruel Eumenides, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... whose magic aid the youth, found resting on a bank of lunary, is bewitched to sleep until old age. Not for this crime but for a minor one, Tellus is sentenced by Cynthia to imprisonment under the care of Corsites. Eumenides, the loyal friend of Endymion, seeks everywhere for the means to awaken his comrade, until he finds a clue in the magic fountain of Geron, husband to old Dipsas, but banished by her wicked power. With this clue, which is interpreted as requiring ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... greatest villain of the eighteenth century. We may be wrong; but we cannot be far wrong. Talk of knouting indeed! which we did at the beginning of this paper in the mere playfulness of our hearts—and which the great master of the knout, Christopher, who visited men's trespasses like the Eumenides, never resorted to but in love for some great idea which had been outraged; why, this man knouted his way through life, from bloody youth up to truculent old age. Grim idol! whose altars reeked with children's blood, and whose dreadful eyes never smiled except as the stern goddess of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... that Proserpina, when carried away, long before the time of Narcissus, gathered that flower in the fields of Enna; and that the same flower was sacred to her. Persons sacrificing to the Furies, or Eumenides, used to wear chaplets made of the Narcissus, because that flower commonly grew about ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... EUMENIDES. What the Immortals Confide to thy keeping, Tell unto no man; Waking or sleeping, Closed be thy portals To ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... before him. Here, if time did not press, he might have tarried to pay respectful reverence before a deep fissure cleft in the side of the rock. In front of this fissure stands a little altar. All Phormion's company look away as they pass the spot, and they mutter together "Be propitious, O Eumenides!" (literally, Well-minded Ones). For like true Greeks they delight to call foul things with fair and propitious names; and that awful fissure and altar are sacred to the Erinyes (Furies), the horrible maidens, the trackers of guilt, the avengers of murder; and above their cave, on these ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... the pernicious flames gained strength, she said, "Let this funeral pile consume my entrails." And as she was holding the fatal billet in her ruthless hand, she stood, in her wretchedness, before the sepulchral altars,[68] and said, "Ye Eumenides,[69] the three Goddesses of punishment, turn your faces towards these baleful rites; I am both avenging and am committing a crime. With death must death be expiated; crime must be added to crime, funeral to funeral; by accumulated calamities, let ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling. "It is good," sing the old Eumenides, in Aeschylus, "that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom—good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else how shall they learn to revere the light?" That guardianship may become needless; but only when all outward law ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... him the flowers grow plucked and bound into nosegays; passion has no existence outside the Porte-Saint-Martin; the universe is a place of rhymes and rhythms, the human heart a supplement to the dictionary. He delights in babbling of green fields, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Eumenides, and the 'rire enorme' of the Frogs and the Lysistrata. But it is suspected that he loves these things rather as words than as facts, and that in his heart of hearts he is better pleased with Cassandra and Columbine than with Rosalind and Othello, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... of these, The Persians, Prome'theus, and Agamemnon, we have given extracts descriptive of historical and mythological events. The latter is the first of three plays on the fortunes of the house of A'treus, of Myce'nae; and these three, of which the Choeph'oroe and Eumenides are the other two, are the only extant specimen of a trilogy. The Agamemnon is the longest, and by some considered the grandest, play left us by AEschylus. "In the Agamemnon," says VON SCHLEGEL, "it was the intention of AEschylus to exhibit to us a ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... antiquity; the latter had all the requisites for bringing it into bold relief in all its purity and strength. Consequently, every particular in the whole narrative is borrowed immediately from the ancient world, especially the appearance and the song of Eumenides. The chorus as employed by AEschylus is so artistically interwoven with the modern poetic form, both in the matter of rhyme and the length of the metre, that no portion of its ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Was not I predestined to be born in a gaol and reared in a gutter, educated among swindlers and scoundrels, fed upon stolen victuals, and clad in garments never to be paid for? Did no Eumenides preside over the birth of Richard Savage, so set apart for misery that the laws of nature were reversed, and even his mother hated him? Did no dismal fatality follow the footsteps of Chatterton? ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Greek actors wore buskins and a long mask, the gigantic stature of the chorus is in itself no indubitable proof of the supernatural origin of this chorus. Thus the spectators are unable to decide, whether they actually see the Eumenides or only a chorus impersonating them. This is the meaning of 145 and 146. This doubt yields to certainty as ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... by intoxicating the sisters with wine. The sequel to this incident has been given in Mr. Browning's transcript from "Alkestis"; and the present poem is introduced by references to that work of Euripides, to the "Eumenides" of AEschylus and to Homer's "Hymn to Mercury": the general sense of the passages ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... we have seen, the paternal family succeeded the maternal clan. In his Orestia, AEschylus puts in opposition before Pallas Athene the right of the mother and the right of the father. The chorus of the Eumenides, representing the people, defends the position of the mother; Apollo pleads for the father, and ends by declaring, in a fit of patriarchal delirium, that the child is not of the blood of the mother. "It is not the mother who begets what is called her child; she is only the nurse ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... them drunk with wine. (Aesch. Eumenides, 728.) As the allusion would doubtless be clear to the Greek audience, I have added a mention of wine which is not in the Greek. Libations to the Elder Gods, such as the Fates and Eumenides, had to be "wineless." Historically this probably means that the worship dates from a time before ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... into each other, which we all remember in Rachel, indicated a common origin. It needed not the added eloquence of words and the sombre music of the voice to tell the tragic story of the victim of the Eumenides. After listening to the recitation, I was not surprised to learn that the young student was to appear, under the auspices of his teacher, at the Theatre Francais, during the approaching winter,—an honor never before conceded ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... going on, and noted the extraordinary precautions against any interference with the secrecy of the ballot. Also to the Cavendish physical laboratory, which, like the mechanical laboratory, was far inferior in equipment to ours at Cornell. In the evening to the Greek play,—the "Eumenides" of Aeschylus,—which was wonderfully well done. The Athena, Miss Case of Girton College, was superb; the Apollo imposing; the Orestes a good actor; and the music very effective. I found myself seated next Andrew Lang, so well known for his literary activity ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... even of veneration, till these so indomitable beings are unable to withstand the charm of her mild eloquence. They are to have a sanctuary in the Athenian land, and to be called no more Furies (Erinnys), but Eumenides—the well-conditioned—the kindly goddesses. And all ends with a solemn procession round the orchestra, with hymns of blessing, while the terrible Chorus of the Furies, clothed in black, with blood-stained girdles, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... that the good name might so react on the evil nature that it should not remain evil altogether, but might be induced, in part at least, to conform itself to the designation which it bore. Here we have an explanation of the title Eumenides, or the Well-minded, given to the Furies; of Euxine, or the kind to strangers, to the inhospitable Black Sea, 'stepmother of ships,' as the Greek poet called it; the explanation too of other similar transformations, of the Greek Egesta transformed ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench |
