"Nero" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said hoarsely. "But not a criminal ring. An inspired master criminal—who apparently has more executive ability in one ear lobe than all your bribe-bloated bureaucrats—and his female assistant. They pulled the entire job by themselves. His name, or undoubtedly pseudoname, is Pepe Nero. The girl is ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... a strong will and most courageous bearing, If to be cruel as the Roman Nero; If all that's chivalrous, and all that's daring, Can make a hero, then ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the English gentleman, who shall be virtuous and beneficent, and just in all his ways, before he leaves home, and after he returns home, shall, during his temporary sojourn within its influence become a very Nero for cruelty, and have his warm heart of flesh smuggled out of his bosom, by some hocus pocus, utterly unintelligible to any unprejudiced rational being, or indurated into the flint of the nether millstone, or frozen into a ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... lower spine, and the blasphemous strut of tragic play-actors, I went. For here was no harmless burning which I did—but the crime of arson; and a most fiendish, though vague, malevolence, and the rage to burn and raven and riot, was upon me like a dog-madness, and all the mood of Nero, and Nebuchadnezzar: and from my mouth proceeded all the obscenities of the slum and of the gutter, and I sent up such hisses and giggles of challenge to Heaven that day as never yet has man let out. But this ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Romans, and the legal encouragements of suicide. The bodies of condemned criminals were exposed to public ignominy, and their children, a more serious evil, were reduced to poverty by the confiscation of their fortunes. But if the victims of Tiberius and Nero anticipated the decree of the prince or senate, their courage and despatch were recompensed by the applause of the public, the decent honors of burial, and the validity of their testaments. The exquisite avarice and cruelty of Domitian appear ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... by him. But civil government cannot exist, if each individual may, at his pleasure, forcibly resist its injunctions. Therefore Christians are required to submit to the powers that be, whether a Nero or a slave-catching Congress. But obedience to the civil ruler often necessarily involves rebellion to God. Hence we are warned by Christ and his Apostles, and by the example of saints in all ages, in such cases, not to obey, but to submit and suffer. We are to hold ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... moved his camp to Nola. The consul, as soon as he was aware of his approach, sent for Pemponius the propraetor, with the troops he had in the camp above Suessula; and then prepared to meet the enemy and to make no delay in fighting. He sent out Caius Claudius Nero in the dead of night with the main strength of the cavalry, through the gate which was farthest removed from the enemy, with orders to make a circuit so as not to be observed, and then slowly to follow the enemy as they moved along, and as soon as he ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... "If to smoke you turn I shall not cease to fiddle while you burn." To Nero Rome replied: "Pray do your worst, 'Tis my excuse that ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... has long been recognized as the most charming of Saturnalian gift-books, and the Rev. L. A. Seneca, formerly private tutor in His Majesty's household. Should H.I.M. decide to abdicate, it is anticipated that He will edit our Boeotian contemporary the Oracle, which is sadly in need of new blood. Nero will give it that. The meetings held at the Palazzo Pisone ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... friendly fortifications, in which lie the keys of the place. Historically, Besancon is a place of great interest. It witnessed the catastrophe of Julius Vindex, who had made terms with Rufus, the general sent against him by Nero, but was attacked by the troops of Rufus before they learned the alliance concluded between the two generals. Vindex was so much grieved by the slaughter of his troops, and the blow thus struck, by an unhappy accident, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... rapidly in Britain, though in a bad form. The early existence of lawyers and money-lenders shew this. During the reign of Domitian the advocates of Britain were known to the satirists of Rome; and, as early as that of Nero, the calling-in of a loan by the philosopher Seneca helped to create the great revolt under Boadicea. But except in respect to the use of the Roman language, it is doubtful whether the culture was much different from that which had developed itself under Cynobelin—a ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... was the action, Nero saw an opportunity in it whereof he took advantage, for he pounced upon the well-bitten tart, and bore it away ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... this Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it adieu forever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has ever happened to it from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site of it had been obliterated before ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... joke about them, too, I suppose," Quirk retorted. "An excellent subject for a joke—the safety of the country! A capital subject for a merry jest; Nero ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... ten years old. I have no pets now, but I had a Newfoundland dog named Nero, and a pussy named Major. On the 14th of April I was in the woods, and I found two buttercups. They were the first wild flowers I ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... fetch another musket. Samson, you and Nero guard these two while we're gone; and if you let them ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... result of iffluenza God forbid. Fanny is down now, and the last link that bound me to my fellow men is severed. I sit up here, and write, and read Renan's Origines, which is certainly devilish interesting; I read his Nero yesterday, it is very good, O, very good! But he is quite a Michelet; the general views, and such a piece of character painting, excellent; but his method sheer lunacy. You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and Nannies for children that don't want a ponyback ride. But I was getting the goats ready to put in the stable for the night, and I'd taken off the saddles. I had my back turned, and the first I knew I heard a shout. I turned and saw this boy on Nero's back, heading for the merry-go-round. I followed as fast as I could. Nero is a gentle goat, but I couldn't tell what he'd do when he got mixed up with the wooden ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Christmas Tree Cove • Laura Lee Hope
... Agrippina's speeches. These were afterwards altered by Mason, in accordance with West's suggestions; but Gray was discouraged, and has left "Agrippina" a Torso. The subject was unpleasing. To have treated adequately the character of Nero, would have required more than the genius of Gray; and the language of the fragment is distinguished rather by rhetorical burnish than by poetical spirit and heat. We have not thought it necessary to reprint it, nor several besides of the fragmentary and inferior productions of this poet, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... He's going on to tell her some more about what he feels like, but Vernabelle is now greeting Oswald Cummings, the pagan of splendid sins, from the Elite Bootery. She tells Oswald there is a cold cruelty in the lines of his face that reminds her of the emperor Nero. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... female slave faithful to Nero in his fall. It was this hetaera who wrapped the dead body in cerements, and saw ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... chain of the slave, and the voice of the informer, when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to merit his displeasure, it seems to be the historian's duty to avenge the people. The prosperity of Nero is in vain, Tacitus is already born in the empire, he grows up unknown by the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just providence has delivered to an obscure child the glory of the master of the world.' My accent was doubtless impressive and full of emotion, for ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... Church. At the outset Christianity was socialistic, and its spread among the poor was apparently caused by the pressure of servile competition; for the sect only became of enough importance to be persecuted under Nero, contemporaneously with the first signs of distress which appeared through the debasement of the denarius. But socialism was only a passing phase, and disappeared as the money value of the miracle rose, and brought wealth to the Church. Under the Emperor Decius, about 250, the magistrates ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... the successors of Augustus splendor increased to almost fabulous limits, as, for instance, in the vast extent and the prodigality of ivory and gold in the famous Golden House of Nero. After the great fire in Rome, presumably kindled by the agents of this emperor, amore regular and monumental system of street-planning and building was introduced, and the first municipal building-law was decreed by him. To the reign of Vespasian (68-79 A.D.) we owe the rebuilding in Roman style ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... is, that the source of all the misfortune which now weighs so heavily upon my bleeding fatherland, is in two ladies—Catharine of Russia, and Sophia of Hapsburg, the ambitious mother of this second Nero, Francis-Joseph. You know that one hundred and fifty years ago, Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, the bravest of the brave, foreseeing the growth of Russia, and fearing that it would oppress and overwhelm civilization, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... centre wall was a large painting representing Antium, the home of Nero and Temple of Fortuna, with the Appollo Belvidere on a pedestal in the foreground, flanked with two standing vases with burning incense. Above the painting was the motto "Gaudeamus Igitur," resting on a gilt lyre and torch. Medallions representing Spring, Summer, Autumn, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... son Agrippa, during whose time Felix and Festus were procurators in Judea, while Nero was Roman emperor. This Agrippa finished the Temple by the work of 18,000 men. The war of the Jews and Romans began through the oppression by Gessius Florus, who secured the procuratorship by the friendship of his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell forever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site had been obliterated before I ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... his opinion, that on the next night Ursicinus should be seized and carried away from the sight of the soldiers, and so be put to death uncondemned, just as formerly Domitius Corbulo, that faithful and wise defender of our provinces, is said to have been slain in the miserable period of Nero's cruelty. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... there was, and a fair show of material life, beautiful shoulders generously exposed to view, and a genius for making their beauty and even their ugliness a lure for the men. An artist would have recognized in some of them the old Roman type, the women of the time of Nero, down to the time of Hadrian. And there were Palmaesque faces, with a sensual expression, heavy chins solidly modeled with the neck, and not without a certain bestial beauty. Some of them had thick curly hair, and bold, fiery eyes: they seemed ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... consider that they pay them at all. For the merchant is easy, being sensible he does not pay them for himself; and the consumer, who really pays them, confounds them with the price of the commodity: in the same manner as Tacitus observes, that the emperor Nero gained the reputation of abolishing the tax on the sale of slaves, though he only transferred it from the buyer to the seller; so that it was, as he expresses it, "remissum magis specie, quam vi: quia cum venditor pendere ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... not the quality of the food, that makes the feast; that there can be no such thing as a feast, indeed, without a real not factitious appetite; and that there can be no real appetite without toil or some prolonged and vigorous exercise. Nero ransacked his whole kingdom, and expended millions for delicacies; and yet he never experienced, probably, one-half the enjoyments of the palate that were experienced from the coarsest fare by his poorest laboring subject. No, the men of ease and idleness ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... Cantonment, and soon afterwards Meliboeus came running to meet us, preceded by the blood-hound at full gallop. The dogs greeted one another with much apparent satisfaction. Little Fig was evidently anxious to inform his big friend of all that he had done, but Nero was much too dignified and important to attend to him, and bestowed all ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... was born in the early part of the reign of Nero, and near the middle of the first century in the Christian Era. The probability is, that he was the son of Cornelius Tacitus, a man of equestrian rank, and procurator of Belgic Gaul under Nero; that he was born at Interamna in Umbria, ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... as I find him, coz: a Julian, or a Caracalla: a Constantine, or a Nero. Then, if he will play the fiddle to a conflagration, he shall play it well: if he must be a disputatious apostate, at any rate he shall understand logic and men, and have the habit ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... secretary, "The character of Napoleon was not a cruel one. He was neither rancorous nor vindictive. None but those who are blinded by fury, could have given him the name of Nero or Caligula. I think that I have stated his real fault with sufficient sincerity to be believed upon my word. I can assert that Bonaparte, apart from politics, was feeling kind, and accessible to pity. He was very fond of children, and a bad ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... succeeded in breaking through to the Pyrenees with reinforcements for Hannibal. The attempt, however, was checked for the moment; and before it could be renewed, the fall of Capua released twelve thousand veteran Romans, who were sent to Spain under Claudius Nero, a man of exceptional ability, to whom was due later the most decisive military movement made by any Roman general during the Second Punic War. This seasonable reinforcement, which again assured the shaken grip on Hasdrubal's ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... threw up its hands. It didn't have any first aid to the annihilated in its chest. Besides, Professor Sillcocks hadn't played the game. He had just grabbed the cards. It was about to pass resolutions hailing Sillcocks as the modern Nero, when Rearick began to come down with an idea. Nowadays people pay him five thousand dollars apiece for ideas, but he used to fork them out to us gratis—and they had twice the candle-power. As soon as ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... bas-reliefs representing various sovereigns paying homage to the beautiful Hathor, is one of a young man, crowned with a royal tiara shaped like the head of a uraeus. He is shown seated in the traditional Pharaonic pose and is none other than the Emperor Nero! ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... composers could be heard more frequently than they are at present. There is no doubt that some of our quartette clubs would find much to interest themselves and their audiences among the works of the famous musical women. According to Nero, music unheard is valueless, and all musicians would rejoice to see the fullest possible value thus placed, by frequent performance, ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... gray, were bent over their labors. Hecubas and Helens worked side by side; maulsticks everywhere gave the scene the appearance of a winter-denuded thicket; plaster hands, feet and torsos hung upon the walls; bull-headed Nero swelled upon a shelf beside the mutilated Venus which is a revelation of the glory that merely human beauty can attain without a gleam borrowed from the divine; fat Vitellius seemed to snore open-eyed beside lean and wakeful Julius Caesar; a mask of Medusa leaned lovingly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the first century A. D. He was a Greek military surgeon of Cilician origin who served under Nero, and in him the Greek intellect is obviously beginning to flag. His work is prodigiously important for the history of botany, yet so far as rational medicine is concerned he is almost negligible. He begins at the wrong end, either giving lists of drugs with the symptoms that they ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... "Nero was nothing to me.—Now, gentlemen, just a word or two with the rest of my nursery folk, and then I must order ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... the foregoing explanation, either the fine colonnade of Bernini, or the dancing fountains, or that Egyptian obelisk which, according to Pliny, was set up by the Pharaoh at Heliopolis, and transferred to Rome by Caligula, who set it up in Nero's Circus, where it remained till 1586. Now, as Nero's Circus was situate on the very ground where St. Peter's now stands, and the base of this obelisk covered the actual site where the vestry now is, it looked like a ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the government the sense to let these people alone? After all their revolutions and convulsions, they have sunk into perfect political indifference, and literally care not a straw whether they are governed by Napoleon, Nero, or Nebuchadnezzar. To be always appealing to them with Bonapartist demonstrations and manifestoes, is to awaken political sentiments, in them, and so to create a danger which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... thee as thou art in them. Certainly those men prepare a way of speaking negligently or irreverently of thee, that give themselves that liberty in speaking of thy vicegerents, kings; for thou who gavest Augustus the empire, gavest it to Nero too; and as Vespasian had it from thee, so had Julian. Though kings deface in themselves thy first image in their own soul, thou givest no man leave to deface thy second image, imprinted indelibly in their power. But thou knowest, O God, ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... In a dark recess in that part of the room stood a bronze statue, some six feet in height. It portrayed the great mystic in a long habit fashioned after a monkish cowl, and his hair and face reminded me of a bust of Nero I had once seen in the gallery of the Louvre. Ombos told me that the life of Albert Magnus had been written by Dr. Sighart. This Dominican, magnus in magia, major in philosophia, maximus in theologia, was distinguished alike for his knowledge of the ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... pearl worth over thirty thousand. Mark Antony's house was sold to Messala for over half a million, and Scaurus's villa was burned at a loss of over twelve millions. Otho spent over fourteen millions in finishing the wing of a palace commenced by Nero. One of Caligula's dinners cost a million dollars; and one of Heliogabalus's breakfasts, twenty-seven thousand dollars, Oesopus, the actor, swallowed a pearl worth eleven thousand dollars, and Apicius, the gourmand, ate over seventy-seven millions during his worthless life, and then ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy;—and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw these people out of the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them passions! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... "Even Nero had his weaknesses," Sir Timothy remarked, waving the dogs away. "My animals' quarters are well worth a visit, if you have time. There is a small hospital, too, which is quite ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... number of ten persecutions has been determined by the ecclesiastical writers of the fifth century, who possessed a more distinct view of the prosperous or adverse fortunes of the church, from the age of Nero to that of Diocletian. The ingenious parallels of the ten plagues of Egypt, and of the ten horns of the Apocalypse, first suggested this calculation to their minds.' Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ch. xvi, ed. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Berenike exclaimed: "But you know that the panther lies still and gathers himself up before he springs; or, if you do not, you may see it to-morrow at the Circus. There is to be a performance in Caesar's honor, the like of which not even Nero ever saw. My husband bears the chief part cf the cost, and can think of nothing else. He has even forgotten his only child, and all to please the man who insults us, robs and humiliates us! Now that men kiss the hands which maltreat them, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... got into the back yard cannot get out again. She is in a Quandary, for she fears the dogs will bite her—though their chains are not long enough. Keeper, the mastiff, is a noble fellow, and would not hurt women or children; neither would Nero, the bull-dog; he would rather face a lion or a wild ox: whilst Snap, the terrier, barks and snarls in the company of his ...
— The Royal Picture Alphabet • Luke Limner
... capacity of people for citizenship who prefer to carry on government by pronunciamientos, who never acknowledge the rights of majorities, who are ready to start civil war on the slightest pretext, and who, when in power, exercise a despotism more persistent and cruel than any since Nero and Caligula. No Russian autocrat, claiming to govern by divine right, has ever dared to commit the high-handed cruelties which are common in sundry West Indian and equatorial republics. I felt that the great thing was to gain time before doing anything which ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... Europe men of distinguishing ability have seemed to revel in this form of inquiry and to have prosecuted it without the slightest reference to the cruel and revolting features associated with it. They have made of it a school of Nero in which brutality became ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... to her; you might let her hear from your consecrated lips that she is not a castaway because she is a Roman; that she may be a Nero and yet a Christian; that she may owe her black locks and dark cheeks to the blood of the pagan Caesars, and yet herself be a child of grace; you will tell her this, won't you, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... another; and to prove it, that every act of my administration would be tortured, and the grossest and most insidious misrepresentations of them be made, by giving one side only of a subject, and that too in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero—to a notorious defaulter—or even ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... daring experiments, and, when bathing at Baiae on a very hot day, and seeing a bivalve which had rashly opened its jaws in the sun, he dexterously inserted a stone and conveyed the contents to his mouth on the point of the pin of his fibula. He was subsequently created a proconsul by NERO. The only drawback connected with this account is the fact that oysters were recognised as delicacies in Rome at least a hundred years before NERO. It is right to add that the genuineness of Bulbo's Gastronomica has been seriously impugned, the best ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... to the reign of Seinei in a much abbreviated form, but the account given in the Chronicles commands the greater credence. The Chronicles, however, represent Muretsu as a monster of cruelty, the Nero of Japanese history, who plucked out men's nails and made them dig up yams with their mutilated fingers; who pulled out people's hair; who made them ascend trees which were then cut down, and who perpetrated other hideous excesses. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... administration would be tortured and the grossest and most insidious misrepresentations of them be made, by giving one side only of a subject, and that too in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket. But enough of this. I have already gone further in the expression of my feelings ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... austere and cruel people with whom you cannot treat or converse. They are large of person, clad in skins of seals and other wild animals tied together, and are marked with certain lines, made with fire, on the face and as it were striped with color between black and red, (tra il nero & berrettino) and in many respects as to face and neck, are like those of our Barbary, the hair long like women, which they gather up on top of the head as we do with a horse's tail. Their arrows are bows with which they shoot very dexterously, ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... were driven back, and the line of the Ebro was held in the meanwhile, till Rome gained time to send a new army and a new general. Fortunately the turn of the war in Italy, where Capua had just fallen, allowed this to be done. A strong legion—12,000 men—arriving under the propraetor Gaius Claudius Nero, restored the balance of arms. An expedition to Andalusia in the following year (544) was most successful; Hasdrubal Barcas was beset and surrounded, and escaped a capitulation only by ignoble stratagem and open perfidy. But Nero was not the right general ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... There is Caligula's Bridge. What a glorious place! Everything that we have ever read of in classic story gathers about us here. Cicero, Caesar, Horace, Virgil, Tiberius, and Juvenal, seem to live here yet. Nero and Agrippina, Caligula and Claudius,—every old Roman, good or bad. And look, Clive, that is land out there. As I live, that is Capraea! And see,—O, see, Clive,—that ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... then, but for your majesty to call for a fiddle, and amuse yourself, like Nero, while your city ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... written when Racine was twenty-eight years old, brought him immediate fame. During the next ten years (1667-77) he produced a series of masterpieces, of which perhaps the most interesting are Britannicus, where the youthful Nero, just plunging into crime, is delineated with supreme mastery; Bajazet, whose subject is a contemporary tragedy of the seraglio at Constantinople; and a witty comedy, Les Plaideurs, based on Aristophanes. Racine's ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... her antipodal nature. She had lived riotously through seven imperial reigns, gambling, owning and exhibiting pantomimes, nourishing all manner of luxurious whims, whether the state lay gasping under a Nero or Domitian, or breathed once more in the smile of Trajan. Her liking for Calpurnia was of a piece, her acquaintances thought, with her bringing up of her grandson. No boy in Rome had had an austerer training. He was never allowed ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... conversation, or read them cited in an English book, each reader must decide for himself. Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick out what he wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay of the tutor of Nero. ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... ... One should not judge ... Charity, my girl. What was it Nero said?—"With malice toward none, with charity ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the vast Flavian Amphitheatre, or, as it is also called, Coliseum. After a period of civil war and confusion, Vespasian began the Flavian dynasty, and entered upon his reign by filling up the spaces made by the demolitions of Nero, and by the fire, with large buildings, the most conspicuous and massive of them being the Coliseum. It is not known whether this name was given to it from its tremendous size or from the Colossus of Nero which ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... anomalies often govern the acts of hysterical persons and other psychopaths. The Roman emperors, Nero, Tiberius and Caligula were almost certainly sadists and enjoyed sexual pleasure at the sight of the sufferings of their victims. Valerie, Messalina and Catherine de Medici were also female sadists. Under the hypocritical veil of religion, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... emperor did not belong to the family of the great Caesar. That family became extinct with Nero, the sixth emperor. Like Trajan and Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius derived his remote origin from Spain, although he was born in Rome. His great-grandfather was a Spaniard, and yet attained the praetorian rank. His grandfather reached the consulate. His father died while praetor, and when he himself ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... as Junie in Britannicus, with Mounet-Sully, who played admirably as Nero. In this delicious role of Junie I obtained an ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... 117, et passim. See also the Tocsain contre les massacreurs, which, although published as late as 1579, was written before the death of Charles the Ninth (see the address of the printer, dated June 25, 1577), where the king is directly compared to the Emperor Nero. Archives curieuses, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... excesses to which absolute power may lead, we usually name the wicked emperors of Rome, among whom Nero stands most notorious as a monster of cruelty. Modern history has but one Nero in its long lines of kings and emperors, and him we find in Ivan IV. of Russia, surnamed ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... immediate care, Haydon set to work on the second picture of his series, 'Nero playing the Lyre while Rome was burning.' The effect of his conception, as he foresaw it in his mind's eye, was so terrific that he 'fluttered, trembled, and perspired like a woman, and was obliged to sit down.' Under all the anxiety, the pressure, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything: as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous—which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... A month or two later They made him dictator, In place of the elderly king: He was lauded by pulpit, and boomed by press, And no one had ever a chance to guess, Beholding this hero Who ruled like a Nero, His valor was zero, Or ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... his providence. It is not by chance, nor through the uncontrolled agency of men, but by divine ordination that any government exists. The declaration of the apostle just quoted was uttered under the reign of Nero. It is as true of his authority as of that of the Queen of England, or that of our own President, that it was of God. He made Nero Emperor. He required all within the limits of the Roman empire to recognize ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer; Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers. I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to "that ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... an ornament composed of ovals and circles, and other things of that kind, together with an infinite number of little birds and children, so well wrought that nothing more could be desired. Close to this, in like manner, are Hanno the Carthaginian, Hasdrubal, Laelius, Massinissa, C. Salinator, Nero, Sempronius, M. Marcellus, Q. Fabius, the other Scipio, and Vibius. At the end of the book there is seen a Mars in an antique chariot drawn by two reddish horses. On his head he has a helmet of red and gold, with two little wings; on his left arm he has an antique shield, which he ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the Beau Tenebreux of the Hotel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable Endymion by the supposed transparence of his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved the amorous exaltations of his Ariane, a tale of the time of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These are books on which the dust gathers thick ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... (M268) Nero was now on the imperial throne, and stringent measures were adopted to suppress the revolt of the Jews, now goaded to desperation by the remembrance of their oppressions, and the conviction that every ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... saying, That Nero the Emperors Nurse had been very much addicted to Drinking; which Habit Nero received from his Nurse, and was so very particular in this, that the People took so much notice of it, as instead of Tiberius Nero, they call'd him Biberius Mero. The same Diodorus also relates of Caligula, Predecessor to Nero, that his Nurse used to moisten the Nipples of her Breast frequently with Blood, to make Caligula take the better Hold of them; ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the coldness of the pit. He protested that it was Racine's chef d'oeuvre; that the ancients had never written any thing finer; that neither Tacitus nor Corneille had ever produced any thing more forcible. He had like to have quarrelled with Subligny, because in the scene where Nero hides behind a curtain to listen to Junia, he could not restrain a burst of laughter, which was echoed all over the house. Perhaps this bad play will furnish him with the materials for another 'Folle Querelle,'[3] ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... through all the city. Xenophon, you and I are in this death Eternally bound. This husband have I slain To lift unto the windy chair of the world Nero, my son. Your silence I will buy With endless riches; but ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... astonishment rather than contrition, bowed by a will yet stronger than his own, Howel fell on his knees beside his cousin, and listened to a prayer for pardon and help, that might have melted the heart of a Nero. ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... think as he wrote. He had a purpose to serve; and in an age when to act like a freeman was no longer possible, he determined at least to write in that character. It is probable, also, that he wrote with a vindictive or a malicious feeling towards Nero; and, as the single means he had for gratifying that, resolved upon sacrificing the grandeur of Caesar's character wherever it should be found possible. Meantime, in spite of himself, Lucan for ever betrays his lurking consciousness of the truth. Nor are there ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... force to fire in the front and on the flank which required a steady falling back until the entire Italian army was moving towards newly-established positions farther West. The commanding height of Monte Nero, which the Italians had occupied after deeds of great valor, was defended against onslaughts from three sides which gradually resulted in envelopment and the capture of many thousands of Italian troops and ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... terminating the poor creature's agonies abruptly, any more than he would swallow whole a bon-bon till he had well sucked it. Inherent cruelty may be obscured by after impressions, or may be kept under moral restraint; the person who is constitutionally a Nero, may scarcely know his own nature, till by some accident the master passion becomes dominant, and sweeps all before it. A relaxation of the moral check, a shock to the controlling intellect, an abnormal condition of body, are sufficient to allow the ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... us back from fire to store. No fine firm fabric ever yet grew like a gourd. Nero's House of Gold was not raised in a day; nor the Mexican House of the Sun; nor the Alhambra; nor the Escurial; nor Titus's Amphitheater; nor the Illinois Mounds; nor Diana's great columns at Ephesus; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... like enjoying one's dizziness on the brink of a precipice, or the pangs of sickness without seeking a remedy. But to poetize the tragedy of others, to fiddle while Rome is burning, is brutal. Nevertheless, though it is not commonly possible to do things on Nero's scale, precisely the same attitude is the commonest thing in the world, and is fostered by the whole aesthetic bias of the race. The meanness of savage life, the squalid poverty of the slums, suffice in their picturesqueness to make a holiday for ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... I put in, rather impressively, 'just remember one thing. You are talking to a gentleman, and I don't take remarks of that sort from anybody, spook or otherwise. I don't care if you are the ghost of the Emperor Nero, if you give me any more of your impudence I'll dissipate you to the ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... were still crowned at Nepata, Meroe gradually became the real capital and supported at one time four thousand artisans and two hundred thousand soldiers. It was here that the famous Candaces reigned as queens. Pliny tells us that one Candace of the time of Nero had had forty-four predecessors on the throne, while another Candace ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... For instance, she was very much in love with herself, and therefore called me the most egoistical of men. She drank, and called me a drunkard; she rarely changed her linen and said I was dirty; she was jealous, even of my men friends, and called me Othello. She was masterful and called me Nero. Niggardly and called ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... the regime of Sir John Colborne. At first this couple had a tolerably easy time of it. The Captain was not exigeant, and allowed them to run the establishment pretty much as they chose. He always rose late, and went out immediately after breakfast, accompanied by his large Newfoundland dog Nero, the only living possession he had brought with him from beyond the sea. Master and dog were seen no more until dinner-time, which was five o'clock. Between seven and eight in the evening the pair would betake themselves to the George, where the Captain drank and howled himself hoarse ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... cook, speaking very slowly and distinctly. "A nero in real life, a chap wot, speaking for all for'ard, we're proud to have aboard along ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... practical purposes Browning was, our critic thinks, a deliberate artist. The suggestion that Browning cared nothing for form is for Chesterton a monstrous assertion. It is as absurd as saying that Napoleon cared nothing for feminine love or that Nero hated mushrooms. What Browning did was always to fall into a different kind of form, which is a totally different thing to saying he ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... dawn. There are wild vagaries of the mind, taking shape in fantastic heresies. There is the degeneracy of a faith held in pureness and peril into a popular and fashionable religion. There are enthroned monsters like Nero and Commodus; "Christian" emperors, like Constantine, ambitious, crafty, and blood-guilty; and noble "heathen" emperors like Trajan and Aurelius. There is the peace of the Empire in its best days, with some wide diffusion of prosperity and content. There are incursions ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... fusse macerato e nero, D'aspri flagelli percosso, e vergato, Di Christo il sacro corpo in ogni parte, Vi ha sculto ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... the Roman Empire, we find a counterfeit Agrippa, after him a counterfeit Nero; and before them two counterfeit Alexanders, in Syria. But never was a nation so troubled with these mock kings as England; a counterfeit Richard II. being made in the time of Henry IV.; a counterfeit Mortimer in the time of Henry VI.; a counterfeit Duke of York; a counterfeit Earl ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... Nero, the most infamous of the emperors, committed rapes on the stage of the public theaters of Rome, disguised as ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... faithful reflection of her loveliness as it is in truth. I found it— this will interest you—in the Catacombs. You would not think the early Christians had so much vanity! Yet it was a mirror into which the virgin-martyrs-to-be of the time of Nero looked each day. As they looked, let Donna Violante look. Say to her from me—'Look long and well into this mirror, and profit by what you see.'—Humbly your friend, Don Vincenzio." . . . Is not that a ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... play are those in which Agrippina has the principal part, and, notwithstanding some flaws and inconsistencies in the character, which is evidently meant to be complete and homogeneous, the whole impression is very forcible and single. Her final menace (Act ii., Scene 5) when Nero defies her, the terrible scene in which she tries to regain her failing influence by kindling unholy fire in his blood, her rage at the inaction and ignorance of her forced retirement, her monologue when she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... of the turnout, it was thought he might be some official favorite or famous prince. Such an appearance was not inconsistent with exalted rank. Kings often struggled for the crown of leaves which was the prize of victory. Nero and Commodus, it will be remembered, devoted themselves to the chariot. Ben-Hur arose and forced a passage down nearly to the railing in front of the lower seat of the stand. His face was earnest, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... determine, and shall therefore only say, that to any man who holds the negative, I would demand the liberty of putting the case as strongly as I please. I will suppose a prince limited by laws like ours, yet running into a thousand caprices of cruelty like Nero or Caligula. I will suppose him to murder his mother and his wife, to commit incest, to ravish matrons, to blow up the senate, and burn his metropolis, openly to renounce God and Christ, and worship the devil. These and the like exorbitances are in the power of a single person to commit ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... manifest token that he had dwelt there." The worshippers of Poseidon, even at his temple among the hills, might still feel the earth fluctuating beneath their feet. And in care for divine things, he tells us, the Athenians outdid all other Greeks. Even in the days of Nero it revealed itself oddly; and it is natural to suppose that of this temper the demes, as the proper home of conservatism, were exceptionally expressive. Scattered in those remote, romantic villages, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of Miles Warrington, junior, I saw nothing of him, and heard of my paternal relatives but rarely. Sir Miles was assiduous at court (as I believe he would have been at Nero's), and I laughed one day when Mr. Foker told me that he had heard on 'Change "that they were going to make my uncle a Beer."—"A Beer?" says I in wonder. "Can't you understand de vort, ven I say it?" says the testy old gentleman. "Vell, veil, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said "pig-headed"—attitude in respect to a certain dispute about a right-of-way. It was Lady Caroline, and not the easy-going peer, who was really to blame in the matter; but the impression that George got from the house-agent's description of Lord Marshmoreton was that the latter was a sort of Nero, possessing, in addition to the qualities of a Roman tyrant, many of the least lovable traits of the ghila monster of Arizona. Hearing this about her father, and having already had the privilege of meeting her brother and studying him at ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... mistake me for a Nero. The claims of a certain degree of blood-relationship I not only admit, but welcome as a sacred joy. Their experience is unhappy for whom the bonds of parentage, of sisterhood and brotherhood, will not always have a sort of involuntary religion. If a man should not exactly be tied ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... may be illustrated by a reference to the life and character of the Roman emperor, Nero. Few persons ever had greater means and opportunities for self-gratification. From the senator to the slave, everybody in the empire crouched in servile subjection before his throne. Enormous revenues from the provinces were poured into his coffers, and no one dared ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... have been undeceived by sad experience. But if he reflected that this expectation could not be justifiable unless from the same evidence he was warranted in concluding some general proposition, as, for instance, that all Roman emperors are just rulers; he would immediately have thought of Nero, Domitian, and other instances, which, showing the falsity of the general conclusion, and therefore the insufficiency of the premises, would have warned him that those premises could not prove in the instance of Commodus, what they were ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... dulcimer, and all kinds of music; he seems to have forgotten that it was a music and a dance-loving damsel that chose, as a recompense for her elegant performance, the bloody head of John the Baptist, brought to her in a charger; he seems to have forgotten that, while Rome burned, Nero fiddled: he did not know, perhaps, that cannibals always dance and sing while their victims are roasting; but he might have known, and he must have known, that England's greatest tyrant, Henry VIII., had, as his agent in blood, Thomas Cromwell, expressed ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... emperors. They were not all good and wise, like most of those named. Some of the descendants of Yu became tyrants and pleasure-seekers, their palaces the seats of scenes of cruelty and debauchery surpassing the deeds of Nero. Two emperors in particular, Kee and Chow, are held up as monsters of wickedness and examples of dissoluteness beyond comparison. The last, under the influence of a woman named Ta-Ke, became a frightful example of sensuality and cruelty. Among the inventions of Ta-Ke was a cylinder ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... eloquence, Are th' other's ruin, but the common curse; And each day's ill waits on the rich man's purse; He, whose large acres and imprison'd gold So far exceeds his father's store of old, As British whales the dolphins do surpass. In sadder times therefore, and when the laws Of Nero's fiat reign'd, an armed band Seiz'd on Longinus, and the spacious land Of wealthy Seneca, besieg'd the gates Of Lateranus, and his fair estate Divided as a spoil: in such sad feasts Soldiers—though not invited—are ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... that words cannot express I turn from this scene—in which, though latent at this moment, there lie all the horrors of the Roman amphitheatre, and wars of the legions of Scipio, Marius, Tiberius, Caesar, Nero, Severus, Decius, Valerianus, of Alaric, Attila, and Genghis Khan—to the dawn of liberty, peace, and enlightenment on the American continent, where, though old forms and institutions may survive, their interior nature or life is changed,—where the apostate church is slowly relinquishing ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... Pen, with some sadness. "Perhaps I am a coward,—perhaps my faith is unsteady; but this is my own reserve. What I argue here is that I will not persecute. Make a faith or a dogma absolute, and persecution becomes a logical consequence; and Dominic burns a Jew, or Calvin an Arian, or Nero a Christian, or Elizabeth or Mary a Papist or Protestant; or their father both or either, according to his humour; and acting without any pangs of remorse,—but, on the contrary, notions of duty fulfilled. Make dogma absolute, and to inflict or to suffer death becomes easy ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as that tyrant old, The mocking witness of his crime, In thee shall loathing eyes behold The Nero of our time! ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that the undersigned doth here and now publicly declare himself ashamed of the said opinions, and doth abjure them: And doth declare his Majesty George III. the greatest of kings since Dionysius of Syracuse and Nero; and his great measure, the Stamp Act, the noblest legislation since the edict of Nantz. And further, the undersigned doth uphold the great Established Church, and revere its ministers, so justly celebrated for their piety and card-playing, their ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... Nero played the violin accompaniment to the burning of Rome, down, through the ages, to 5:15 a. m., April 18, 1906, and up to the present date, the San Francisco disaster is the most prominent recorded in history. It ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks
... Nero intended to take his life, had no fear. He knew that he could defeat the Emperor. He knew that "at the bottom of every river, in the coil of every rope, on the point of every dagger, Liberty sat and smiled." He knew that it was his own fault if he allowed himself to ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... end of each of the six arms the spheres were clustered thick, studded with the pyramids—again in gigantic, awful, parody of the spiked gloves of those ancient gladiators who fought for imperial Nero. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... the Roman and Greek stage. His reason is, that the lyre was used in the Greek chorus, as appears, he says, from Sophocles himself playing upon this instrument himself in one of his tragedies. And was it not used too in the Roman chorus, as appears from Nero's playing upon it in several tragedies? But the learned critic did not apprehend this matter. Indeed from the caution, with which his guides, the dealers in antiquities, always touch this point, it should seem, that they too had no very clear conceptions of it. The case ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... the Roman historian, records the attempt of Nero to charge the Christians with the burning of Rome, he has patience for no more than the cursory remark that the sect originated with a Jew who had been put to death in Judea during the reign of Tiberius. ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... principles standing prominently before the people: Republicanism and Protestantism. And what can be more just, and innocent, and lamb-like, than these? And here, also, is the secret of our strength and power. Had some Caligula or Nero ruled this land, we should look in vain for what we behold to-day. Immigration would not have flowed to our shores, and this country would never have presented to the world so unparalleled an example ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... off in a way the attack of those who assailed him in the direction of Libya: but near the mouth of the Nile they deceived many of his men by using signal fires as if they too were Romans, and captured them, so that the rest no longer ventured to coast along until Tiberius Claudius Nero at length sailed up the river itself, conquered the foe in battle, and rendered the approach less terrifying to his ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... noble, it will be estimated great, it will be ranked good, it will be considered sublime, in a Socrates, in an Aristides, in a Cato: it will be thought abject, it will be viewed as despicable, it will be called corrupt, in a Claudius, in a Sejanus, in a Nero: its energies will be admired, we shall be delighted with its manner, fascinated with its efforts, in a Shakespeare, in a Corneille, in a Newton, in a Montesquieu: its baseness will be lamented, when we behold mean, contemptible men, who flatter tyranny, or who servilely ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... his own hired house under the very palace of Nero, so Hus preached Christ to all who came to his humble house and with a few friends maintained daily worship, close to the Pope's palace. Greater than emperors and popes, princes and prelates from all Europe that crowded Constance, was the humble Bohemian Hus; they are seen today ...
— John Hus - A brief story of the life of a martyr • William Dallmann
... that the admiring young gentlemen who listened to him stood to their fellow-countrymen in the relation of the early Christians to the heathen Romans? Or that Queen Victoria's Government was to the Church of England what Nero's or Dioclesian's was to the Church of Rome? It may have been so. I know that men used to suspect Dr. Newman,—I have been inclined to do so myself,—of writing a whole Sermon, not for the sake of ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... detestible licentiousness. Cato commended young men for visiting houses of ill-fame. Such was the very best phase of morals and public manners in the purest state of Roman society. What must have been the worst? The worst! Well, I will give you an idea of it. The Emperor Nero drove through the streets of the capital with his mistress in a state of nudity; and the Emperor Commodus first seduced and then murdered his own sister. Here reason, blinded by lust, was their guide. These people were not troubled with that terrible book called the ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... of the preceding, born at Cordova, and brought to Rome when a child; practised as a pleader at the bar, studied philosophy, and became the tutor of Nero; acquired great riches; was charged with conspiracy by Nero as a pretext, it is believed, to procure his wealth, and ordered to kill himself, which he did by opening his veins till he bled to death, a slow process and an agonising, owing to his age; he ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 of Rome (A.D. 64), {107} shows that Nero tried to throw the blame from himself, by accusing and punishing ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... preferred a mixed constitution to a purely popular government. Chrysippus thought it impossible to please both gods and men; and Seneca declared that the people is corrupt and incapable, and that nothing was wanting, under Nero, to the fulness of liberty, except the possibility of destroying it. But their lofty conception of freedom, as no exceptional privilege but the birthright of mankind, survived in the law of nations and purified the equity ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... this war have been fought, and I have managed to keep out of them!" might the shoulder-strapped, belted, fatigue-capped, strutting mock-soldier of our own time say with a corresponding chuckle. God help us!—Rome had but one Nero fiddling when it burned, if history tells us true: we have had ten thousand military fiddlers playing away to admiring ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... reason of thy being within that fatal Grove. I know thy reason will be good, and thou shalt appeal to Nero. I will see to it that it shall be so, and, further, that thou shalt live—free! Now, my dear fellow, speak out, and give me hope. Speak, Chios; the house of Venusta languisheth to aid thee. Nika would have come, but I thought it better to be ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... the death of Romulus there was darkness for six hours. In the history of the Caesars occur portents of all three kinds; for at the death of Julius the earth was shrouded in darkness, the birth of Augustus was heralded by a star, and the downfall of Nero by a comet. So, too, in one of the Christian legends clustering about the crucifixion, darkness overspread the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour. Neither the silence regarding it of the only evangelist who claims to have been present, nor the fact that observers like Seneca and Pliny, who, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... are or would seem as sick Of repetitions nicknamed Classic. For my part all men must allow Whatever I was, I'm classic now. I saw and left my fault in time, And chose a topic all sublime— Wondrous as antient war or hero— Then played and sung away like Nero, Who sang of Rome, and I of Rizzo: The subject has improved my wit so, The first four lines the poet sees Start forth in fourteen languages! Though of seven volumes none before Could ever reach the fame ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... sector, relieving with the 7th Battalion. The trenches here were very bad, so shallow that it was almost impossible to get round by day, and considerably overlooked by the enemy, particularly from the tower of Fosse 14. Their names began with the letter N, the best known being "Nero," "Novel," "Netley," and "Nash." They were old Boche trenches taken in the recent advance. The whole sector had a very desolate appearance and life was not pleasant there. The discomfort was increased by the enormous number of wing bombs and rifle grenades ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... Nero was guilty of burning Rome. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. Barbara Frietchie actually existed. Sheridan never made the ride from Winchester. Homer ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... of the town (colonia he calls it) in southern Italy where the scene of Trimalchio's supper is laid; probably a Greek city by origin, Croton or Cumae. A translation of this passage will be found in Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 133. The most useful words in it for our purpose are "Jovem ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... portraying that you are the character. If you are to play Napoleon, and you are sincere and determined to be Napoleon, Napoleon will not permit you to be any one but Napoleon, or Richard III. Richard III., or Nero Nero, and so on. He would be a poor, miserable pretence of an actor who in the representation of any historical personage were otherwise than firmly convinced, after getting into the man's skin (which means the exhaustive study of all that was ever known about him), that he is living ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... position as organist, and he was also a fine clavecin player and a good violinist. A few years later we find him at Hamburg, where he played the clavecin in the orchestra and was sometimes conductor. Here he produced several operas—"Nero," "Daphne," "Florindo," "Almira"—with so much success that in 1707 he made a journey to Italy for further perfecting himself in the Italian style. Accordingly he spent some months in Florence, three months in Rome, thence back to Florence to produce a new opera, and by the new year of ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... them; people were hoodwinked by the silken robes and handsome mask, by the fluting and piping and the fine voices, which served to set off what in itself was nothing. The leading pantomime of the day—this was in Nero's reign—was apparently a man of no mean intelligence; unsurpassed, in fact, in wideness of range and in grace of execution. Nothing, I think, could be more reasonable than the request he made of Demetrius, which was, to reserve his decision till he had witnessed ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... once was a brave cavalier, Commanded by Cupid to bow; And his mistress, though lovely, I hear Had a very Sultana-like brow; In battles and sieges he fought With many a Saracen Nero, Till back to his mistress he brought The fame and the heart of a hero: But when he presumed to demand The hero's reward in all story, His mistress, in accents most bland— Desired him to gather more glory ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... men and women were making the ground quake and the woods ring with their unrestrained jollity. Marc Antony was rattling away at the bones, Nero fiddling as if Rome were burning, and Hannibal clawing at a banjo as if the fate of Carthage hung on its strings. Napoleon, as young and as lean as when he mounted the bridge of Lodi, with the battle-smoke ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... descried two large Dutch ships edging towards Puloroon. On seeing our ships in the road, they bore away to leeward for Nero, and next day another of their ships hove in sight, which went to the same place. The 28th, a Dutch pinnace stood right over for Puloroon, and came bravadoing within gun-shot of our fort, having the Dutch ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... violence otherwise possible only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness. Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange COUP DE THEATRE of morality—things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice. The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets, to the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... battalions everywhere; with the white elephants and the painted horses, the dark engines and the dreadful mounted bowmen of the moving empires of the East, with all that evil insolence in short that rolled into Europe in the youth of Nero, and after having been battered about and abandoned by one Christian nation after another, turned up in England with Disraeli and was christened ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... a main authority for our knowledge of the Stoics. A.D. Philo of Alexandria came on an embassy to Rome 39 The works of Philo are saturated with Stoic ideas and he displays an exact acquaintance with their terminology Seneca Exiled to Corsica 41 Recalled from exile 49 Forced by Nero to commit suicide 65 His Moral Epistles and philosophical works generally are written from the Stoic standpoint though somewhat affected by Eclecticism Plutarch Flor. 80 The Philosophical works of Plutarch which have most ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... nearly a thousand years, and it cost about thirteen centuries of revolutions and barbaric invasions before it was undermined and finally extinguished. If its earlier annals were disgraced by the crimes of a Tiberius, a Nero, and a Domitian, they could boast of the virtues and abilities of a Titus, a Trajan, a Nerva, a Hadrian, the two Antonini, &c.; though it must be admitted that latterly the balance sadly preponderated on the side of vice and corruption. If a Justinian or a Constantine appeared, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... the city. But it is the numismatic evidence which clearly parts off the history of the fortress from the general history of the city. Jublains has no inscriptions to show, but its numismatic wealth is great. Among the many coins found, not many are earlier than the time of Nero, and those which there are are chiefly coins of Germanicus. From Nero to Constantine coins of all dates are common. It is M. Barbe's inference that it was in Nero's reign that the place began to be of importance, and that its great temple was built. But the numismatic stores of the ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... Diana of the Ephesians and her craftsmen; he "meddled" with the "beasts" there; he "meddled" with idolatry on Mars Hill at Athens, I being witness; he has been beaten, stoned, imprisoned, and is now the second time before Nero for his life. Afraid to "meddle" with slavery! I am ashamed of the man who makes the suggestion. He who thinks it, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... the composite is as usual better looking than any of the components, none of which, however, give any indication of her reputed beauty; in fact, her features are not only plain, but to an ordinary English taste are simply hideous. (5) Nero, from eleven; (6) A combination of five different Greek female faces; and (7) A singularly beautiful combination of the faces of six different Roman ladies, forming a ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... are named for various celebrities who flourished at a later date than the second Apicius. It is noteworthy, however, that neither such close contemporaries as Heliogabalus and Nero, notorious gluttons, nor Petronius, the arbiter of fashion of the period, are among the persons thus honored. Vitellius, a later glutton, is well represented in the book. It is fair to assume, then, that the author or collector of ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... Claudius played like an imbecile, and Nero like a madman. The former would send for the persons whom he had executed the day before, to play with him; and the latter, lavishing the treasures of the public exchequer, would stake four hundred thousand sestertii (L20,000) on a single throw of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... decency. She was thinking of other things. As she had stood before the window she had felt that her soul had never been so black as it was when she turned away from Miles Hugo's portrait—never, never. She wanted to hurt people. Perhaps Nero had felt as she did and was not so hideous ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ours were residing in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, and we took a small house, Villa Valsovano, about half-way between the town and Monte Nero, where we remained during the summer. Our villa was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... NERO (first name forgotten). A Roman emperor who thought nothing burned like a good tarred Christian. Also made fire departments a necessity in the Eternal City. Ambition: A good show in the Colosseum. Recreation: Fiddling. Clubs: Chorus Girls. Epitaph: ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... mentioned in scriptural history as having been heated seven times hotter than it could be heated, in honor of the tripartite alliance of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. One of her most illustrious ancestors performed in Rome on the occasion of the Emperor Nero's famous violin obligato, and subsequently appeared in London when a large part of that large metropolis succumbed to the fiery element. This artist is known and respected in every community where there is a fire department, and the lurid flames ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the last shout and the gathering storm of excitement that, after all, it was to be a race They were well in sight now; Nero the Second and Iris, racing neck-and-neck, drawing rapidly away from the others. The air shook with the sound of ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to pursue their favourite studies. For my part, I will not say that I think myself wholly unqualified for the eloquence of the bar. It may be true, that I have some kind of talent for that profession; but the tragic muse affords superior pleasure. My first attempt was in the reign of Nero, in opposition to the extravagant claims of the prince [a], and in defiance of the domineering spirit of Vatinius [b], that pernicious favourite, by whose coarse buffoonery the muses were every day disgraced, I might say, most impiously ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... learn, like Epictetus the heroic slave, the slave of Epaphroditus, Nero's minion—and in what baser and uglier circumstances could human being find himself?—to find out the secret of being truly free; namely, to be discontented with no man and no thing save himself. To say not—"Oh that I had this and that!" but "Oh that I were this ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... his Cataline, Sallust has painted excellently this complete revolution in the Roman education. The younger Pliny in his letters furnishes ample material to illustrate to us this pursuit of belles-lettres. In Nero it became idiotic. We should transgress our prescribed limits did we enter here into particulars. An analysis would show the perversion of the aesthetic into the practical, the aesthetic losing thereby its proper nature. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz |
