"Pillars of Hercules" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knowledge, as is commonly said, dispels the darkness of ignorance. In the void which is ignorance, the fancy easily wanders, just because it lacks the support which would enable it to rise to a higher level. Thus the Pillars of Hercules disappeared when the Straits of Gibraltar became the gates of the oceans; and no Columbus could now persuade the Red Indians, whom the great American spirit of democracy receives into its civilizing schools, that the heavens are obedient to him, darkening the sun at his command; ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... should survive when those seas were daily crossed in all directions? How was it possible that the notion of a flat earth, bounded by the horizon and bordered by the circumfluous ocean, could maintain itself when colonies were being founded in Gaul, and the Phoenicians were bringing tin from beyond the Pillars of Hercules? Moreover, it so happened that many of the most astounding prodigies were affirmed to be in the track which circumstances had now made the chief pathway of commerce. Not only was there a certainty of the destruction ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... of the Iberian Peninsula were more alluring than the spices of India or the tin of Britain. So upon the Spanish coast they made permanent settlements and built cities. As early as 1100 B.C. they had founded beyond the "Pillars of Hercules," the City of Gades (Cadiz), a walled and fortified town, and had taught the Keltiberians how to open and work their gold and silver mines systematically; and in exchange they brought an old civilization, with new luxuries, new ideas and customs ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... at the pillars of Hercules, over to Europe, and when I reviewed the southern and northern provinces, I crossed from northern Asia over the polar glaciers to Greenland and America, traversed both parts of that continent, and the winter which already reigned in the south drove me ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Charles the Fifth boasted that his empire saw no setting sun. It included Spain and all her vast American provinces, over large part of which to-day wave our own Stars and Stripes. The national escutcheon bore two globes; and the coin, the two Pillars of Hercules, the then acknowledged boundary of the Eastern world, with the motto "More beyond." Spain, under Philip Second, dictated law, learning, religion, especially religion, to unknown millions, not alone in Europe, but in North ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... from partial examples: the light of day is confidence, yet sudden bursts of light distress and blind. The poet is rapt, and follows thought; he leaves his meat, and by some transubstantiation feeds on the wind; he no longer sees the pillars of Hercules on a sixpence; he is mad for the hour, if a majority shall say what is madness. Meanwhile his field is unploughed; and if he falls from this ecstasy, look to see an harassed, embittered man. The birds sing as they pick ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Persians, Chaldeans, Arabians; so as almost all nations of might and fame resorted hither; of whom we have some stirps, and little tribes with us at this day. And for our own ships, they went sundry voyages, as well to your straits, which you call the Pillars of Hercules, as to other parts in the Atlantic and Mediterrane Seas; as to Paguin, (which is the same with Cambaline,) and Quinzy, upon the Oriental Seas, as far as to the borders of ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... horizontal bands of red (top), yellow (double width), and red with the national coat of arms on the hoist side of the yellow band; the coat of arms includes the royal seal framed by the Pillars of Hercules, which are the two promontories (Gibraltar and Ceuta) on either side of the eastern end of the ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in its youth, did not hesitate, shortly after, all alone, to guarantee the independence of all the American countries, placing before the great powers of the world the pillars of Hercules of the Monroe Doctrine, forming an impassable gateway to a free and ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... there is an elaborate description of the strange tribes and other wonders of India. Porus fights again in Bactria and is again beaten, after which Alexander pursues his allies Gog and Magog and shuts them off by his famous wall. An arrangement with Porus and a visit to the Pillars of Hercules follow. The return is begun, and marvels come thicker and thicker. Strange beasts and amphibious men attack the Greeks. The "Valley from which None Return" presents itself, and Alexander can only obtain passage for his army by devoting himself, though he manages to escape ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Voyages of Polo and the Travels of Mandeville were widely read. By the beginning of the fourteenth century the compass had been perfected, in Naples, and a great era of exploration had been begun. In 1402 venturesome sailors, out beyond the "Pillars of Hercules," discovered the Canary Islands; in 1419 the Madeira Islands were reached; in 1460 the Cape Verde Islands were found; in 1497 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the southern tip of Africa; and in 1497 Vasco da Gama discovered the long-hoped-for sea route ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... quite satisfied with the etymology of "muffin," in p. 205., though brought by Urquhart from Phoenicia and the Pillars of Hercules, I am desirous of seeking additional illustration. Some fancy that "coffee" was known to Athenaeus, and that he saw it clearly in the "black broth" of the Lacedaemonian youth. In the same agreeable manner we are referred to that instructive and entertaining ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... which has had no parallel in ancient or modern times, and which was erected on the ruins of all the powerful states of antiquity. It was a most wonderful centralization of power, spreading its arms of hopeless despotism from the Pillars of Hercules to the Caspian Sea; from the Rhine and the Danube to the Euphrates and Tigris; from the forests of Sarmatia to the deserts of Africa. The empire extended three thousand miles from east to west, and two thousand from north to south. It stretched over thirty-five degrees ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... may be said that he came into the world at a special time and for a special object. The old religions were dead, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Euphrates and the Nile, and the principles on which human society had been constructed were dead also. There remained of spiritual conviction only the common and human sense of justice and morality; and out of this sense some ordered system of government had to be constructed, under ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... felt and used names like trumpets. 'The reader's greatest joy is in the writer's own joy,' he says, 'when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on some resounding names, such as Hildebrand or Charlemagne, the eagles of Rome or the pillars of Hercules. As with Sir Walter Scott, some of the best things in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. That is exactly where Macaulay is great. He is almost Homeric. The whole triumph turns upon mere names.' We have all ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... Gibraltar lie between Morocco and Spain, and the Pillars of Hercules, about which you have probably heard, are the promontories of Europe and Africa which jut out into the Mediterranean Sea at the Straits, and are but ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 39, August 5, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Those who have a general view of the whole map of human knowledge, perceive how many unexplored regions are yet to be cultivated by future industry; nor will they implicitly submit to the reports of ignorant voyagers. No imaginary pillars of Hercules, will bound their enterprises. There is no presumption in believing, that much more is possible to science than ever human ingenuity has executed; therefore, young people should not be ridiculed for that sanguine temper which excites to great inventions. They should be ridiculed ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... away, the most distant of men," and the Cimmerians, "covered with darkness and cloud," where "baleful night is spread over timid mortals." Phoenicia was a sore journey, Egypt simply unattainable, while the Pillars of Hercules marked the extreme edge of the universe. Ulysses was nine days in sailing from Ismarus the city of the Ciconians, to the country of the Lotus-eaters—a period of time which to-day would breed anxiety in the hearts of the underwriters ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... in an afternoon than you in a twelvemonth. What, I suppose you have seen the Pillars of Hercules, and perhaps the walls of Carthage. Nay, you may have heard Scylla, and seen Charybdis; you may have entered the closet where Archimedes was found at the taking of Syracuse. I suppose you have sailed among the Cyclades, and passed the famous straits which take their ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... allies and conquerors of the Byzantine emperors. 'With the Koran in one hand,' says Macaulay, 'and the sword in the other, they went forth conquering and converting eastward to the Bay of Bengal, and westward to the Pillars of Hercules.' They became a terror to the nations that had beheld with contempt their rising greatness. Amid the expiring glories of the Roman world they made Constantinople the capital of their empire. It was all that the oriental imagination could desire. Rendered by its fortifications ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... A. Sayre was to medicine what Columbus was to geography. Neither Strabo nor Herodotus had anything to say regarding what existed beyond the pillars of Hercules, and neither Hippocrates nor Galen had anything in regard to this preputial Merlin, which in their day, even, had its existence. Neither did Tissot nor Bienville, the two pioneers in the field of our knowledge regarding onanism and nymphomania, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... for my freedom from anxiety; and therefore, upon the whole, it was satisfactory to my mind that my brother's opinion of me, after any little transient oscillation, gravitated determinately back towards that settled contempt which had been the result of his original inquest. The pillars of Hercules, upon which rested the vast edifice of his scorn, were these two—1st, my physics; he denounced me for effeminacy; 2d, he assumed, and even postulated as a datum, which I myself could never have the face to refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... called in the Moorish tongue, Gibil Muza, or the hill of Muza, from the circumstance of its containing the sepulchre of a prophet of that name. This is one of the two excrescences of nature on which the Old World bestowed the title of the Pillars of Hercules. Its skirts and sides occupy the Moorish coast for many leagues in more than one direction, but the broad aspect of its steep and stupendous front is turned full towards that part of the European continent where Gibraltar lies like a huge monster stretching far into the brine. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... according to this historian, soon after Nechos, king of Egypt, had finished the canal that united the Nile and the Arabian Gulf, he sent some Phoenicians from the borders of the Red Sea, with orders to keep always along the coast of Africa, and to return by the pillars of Hercules into the northern ocean. Accordingly the Phoenicians embarked on the Erythrean Sea, and navigated in the southern ocean. When autumn arrived, they landed on the part of Libya which they had reached, and sowed corn; here they remained till harvest, reaped the corn, and then re-embarked. In this manner ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... of a religious, Gilles the weeds of a pilgrim from Jerusalem. Then Cogia bought them asses in Gratz and led them down to Trieste. They found a ship going to Bordeaux, went on board, had a fair passage, passed the Pillars of Hercules on their tenth day out, and were in the Gironde in five more. At Bordeaux they separated. Gilles went to Poictiers in a company of pilgrims; Jehane, having learned that Queen Berengere was at Cahors, turned her face to the Gascon hills. But she had left behind ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... martial tribes of the Lusitanians and Spaniards escape; no more could the ocean, with its tide, which yet was terrible to the ancient inhabitants. Nay, the Romans have extended their arms beyond the pillars of Hercules, and have walked among the clouds, upon the Pyrenean mountains, and have subdued these nations. And one legion is a sufficient guard for these people, although they were so hard to be conquered, and at a distance so remote from Rome. Who is there among ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... or on Putney Heath, ever glad to escape from the great overgrown city, which was now licking up every stretch of green sward, and every flowery hedgerow west of St. James's Street. Soon there would be no country between the Haymarket and "The Pillars of Hercules." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... certain meed of success,* and his achievements in this quarter won for him in after time so much popularity among the Egyptians, that they extolled him to the Greeks as one of their most illustrious conquering Pharaohs; they related that he had penetrated as far as the Pillars of Hercules in the west, and that he had invaded ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... progenitors having never been the aborigines of Europe prior to the first Aryan emigration, as supposed). Frightened by the frequent earthquakes and the visible approach of the cataclysm, this tribe is said to have filled a flotilla of arks, to have sailed from beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and, sailing along the coasts, after several years of travel to have landed on the shores of the Aegean Sea in the land of Pyrrha (now Thessaly), to which they gave the name of Aeolia. Thence they proceeded on business with the gods to Mount Olympus. It may be stated here, at the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... in arms, as well as in arts, was then at the height. Half a century earlier, the career of Alexander had excited the admiration and terror of all nations from the Ganges to the Pillars of Hercules. Royal houses, founded by Macedonian captains, still reigned at Antioch and Alexandria. That barbarian warriors, led by barbarian chiefs, should win a pitched battle against Greek valor guided by Greek science, seemed as incredible ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... study Roman and Greek history, they learn there the names of generals, poets, artists, sculptors, statesmen, and historians. Books do not dwell upon that long list of thriving colonies which filled the Grecian archipelago with traffic, and reached east and west to the shores of Asia and to the Pillars of Hercules. The Filipinos learn that Rome nourished her generals and her emperors upon the spoils of war, but they do not reflect that the predatory age—at least in the Roman sense—is past. Their imaginations seize upon the part played by the little ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... I was doomed to imprisonment at Ceuta, an old Moorish seaport town in Morocco, opposite Gibraltar and upon the side of the ancient mountain Abyla. This mountain forms one of the 'Pillars of Hercules,' the Rock of Gibraltar being the other. It is almost impregnable, and is used by Spain as Siberia is used by Russia, only it is far, far more horrible. The town was built by the Moors in 945, and nowhere else on earth are there to be found an equal number of devices for the torture ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... mysterious East. Many philosophers, among whom was Columbus himself, thought the globe much smaller than it really is; but it was Columbus who was apparently charged with a divine mission to teach the world that sailing due westward from the Pillars of Hercules would bring the voyager to the dominions of Prester John, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... by-and-by joined him, after a wonderful voyage, of which he wrote an account, which has not come down to our times, so that we only know that no Greek believed in it. Alexander meant to try if he could sail through this strange sea, and return to Greece by the Pillars of Hercules, as we now know would ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the three great divisions of the world known to the ancients, is separated from Asia on the east by the river Nile, and on the west from Europe by the Pillars of Hercules or the Straits of Gibraltar. The entire northern coast along the Mediterranean is now called Barbary, and is inhabited by the Moors. The inner part is called Lybia and Ethiopia. Lesser Africa, in which stood the noble city of Carthage, has Numidia on ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... with reproductions from old maps—old primitive maps, with a real Adam and Eve standing in the Garden of Eden, with Pillars of Hercules guarding the Straits of Gibraltar, with Paradise in the east, a realistic Jerusalem in the centre, the island of Thule in the north, and St. Brandon's Isles of the Blest in ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... knife-blade; you could move her neither by love nor by threats. This man had sinned against this daughter; here he was brought up against an implacability. He was omnipotent in everything else; this was his Pillars of Hercules. So she exerted herself to be pleasant with him, and at one moment of the afternoon he stretched out a great hand to the cinnamon cakes and placed one in his own mouth. He sat still, and, his great jaws moving slowly, he said that he scarcely doubted that, if he himself could set sail ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... of commerce, the Mediterranean Sea. It was a great centre long ago, when the Phoenician traversed it, and, passing through the Pillars of Hercules, sped on his way to the distant, and then savage, Britain. It was a great centre when Rome and Carthage wrestled in a death-grapple for its possession. But at the present day England is as much at home on the Mediterranean as if it were one of her ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... discovery of America the Spanish dollar was marked with the pillars of Hercules and ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... faith of God. Speaking of this fact, Dr. Goode says: "We behold a flood of noonday bursting all at once over every quarter of the horizon and dissipating the darkness of a thousand years; we behold mankind in almost every quarter of Europe, from the Carpathian Mountains to the pillars of Hercules, from the Tiber to the Vistula, waking as from a profound sleep to a life of activity and bold adventure; ignorance falling prostrate before advancing knowledge; brutality and barbarism giving way to science and polite letters; vice and anarchy ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... The Queen journeyed to Egypt, to the mountains of the South, and the cities of the desert; to the Pillars of Hercules and to the islands of the West. Wherever she went her fame spread like fire, and men fought and died for a glimpse of her marvellous beauty; and wherever she passed she left behind her strife and sorrow like a burning trail. After many voyages she returned home and lived prosperously. ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... gone back as far as three thousand years before Christ. Frobenius, perhaps fancifully, identified this African coast with the Atlantis of the Greeks and as part of that great western movement in human culture, "beyond the pillars of Hercules," which thirteen centuries before Christ strove with Egypt and the East. It is, at any rate, clear that ancient commerce reached down the west coast. The Phoenicians, 600 B.C., and the Carthaginians, a century or more later, record voyages, ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... strangling the lion and tearing his jaws asunder, are described from a statue in the Museum Florentinum, and from an antique gem; and the grasping Anteus to death in his arms as he lifts him from the earth, is described from another antient cameo. The famous pillars of Hercules have been variously explained. Pliny asserts that the natives of Spain and of Africa believed that the mountains of Abyla and Calpe on each side of the straits of Gibraltar were the pillars of Hercules; and that they were ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... He is "compact," to use Shakespeare's word, of the oddest contradictions,—the most diverting eccentricities. He has Aristotle's Politics at his fingers' ends, but he knows nothing of the daily Gazetteers; he is perfectly familiar with the Pillars of Hercules, but he has never even heard of the Levant. He travels to London to sell a collection of sermons which he has forgotten to carry with him, and in a moment of excitement he tosses into the fire the copy of AEschylus which it has cost him years to transcribe. He gives irreproachable advice to ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... far afield since we looked at them last. By founding Carthage more than half-way towards the Pillars of Hercules the city of Tyre completed her occupation of sufficient African harbours, beyond the reach of Egypt, and out of the Greek sphere, to appropriate to herself by the end of the ninth century the trade of the western Mediterranean basin. ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... identifying them originally of the African race—no doubt being a remnant of the Africans who, with the Carthaginian expedition, were adventitiously cast upon this continent, in their memorable excursion to the "Great Island," after sailing many miles distant to the West of the Pillars of Hercules. ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... at the Mountains of the Moon. Afterwards he went around into Palestine, then wandered on into Europe, and at last when his money was all spent, and he was in rags, wretchedness and poverty, he stood on the shore of that bay in Barcelona, Spain, when a tidal wave came rolling through the Pillars of Hercules and the poor afflicted, suffering man could not resist the awful temptation to cast himself into that incoming tide, and he sank beneath its foaming crest, never to rise ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... colonies, she pushed forward an ever-widening girdle of empire, finally conferring the blessings of the pax Romana on districts as far remote as the Tyne, the Lower Rhine and Danube, the Caucasus, and the Pillars of Hercules. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... meridian.[3] Ptolemy reduces the proportion to one half. Allowing for the supposed vast extent of this unknown country to the eastward, it was evident that its remotest shores approached our Western World. But, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the dark and stormy waters of the Atlantic[5] forbade adventure. The giant minds of those days saw, even through the mists of ignorance and error, that the readiest course to reach this distant land must lie toward the setting sun, across the western ocean.[6] From over this vast watery ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... out our reckoning. Twenty-four hours, fifteen degrees to each, in all three hundred and sixty degrees. It is held that the Greeks and the Romans knew fifteen of these hours. They stretched their hand from Gibraltar and Tangier, calling them Pillars of Hercules, to mid-India. Now in our time we have the Canaries and the King of Portugal's new islands—another hour, mark you! Sixteen from twenty-four leaves eight hours empty. How much of that is water and how much is earth? Where ends Ocean-Sea and where begins India ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... horizontal bands of red (top), yellow (double width), and red with the national coat of arms on the hoist side of the yellow band; the coat of arms includes the royal seal framed by the Pillars of Hercules which are the two promontories (Gibraltar and Ceuta) on either side of the eastern end ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... three centuries and a half ago, in the mid spring-time of 1492, we are sure that the angel of the dawn, as he travelled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the summits of the Caucasus across all the snowy Alpine ridges to the dark nakedness of the Western isles, saw nearly the same outline of firm land and unstable sea—saw the same great mountain shadows on the same valleys as he has seen to-day—saw ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... scope of their own memories is one could perhaps confidently say only in Basque if one could say anything. Of course, in the nature of things, the Phoenicians must have been there and the Greeks, doubtless, if they ever got outside of the Pillars of Hercules; the Romans, of course, must have settled and civilized and then Christianized the province. It is next neighbor to that province of Asturias in which alone the Arabs failed to conquer the Goths, and from which Spain was to live and grow again and recover all her ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... The number and fertility of its islands, the serenity of its climate, the smoothness of its waters, the smallness of its entrance, which although of itself sufficient to indicate to the skilful pilot the proximity of the ocean, is still more clearly defined by the Pillars of Hercules, towering on each side of it, and forming land-marks not to be mistaken by the timid, the inexperienced, or the bewildered. Such are the main causes why the Mediterranean continued until the discovery and application of the properties of the ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... from North America to Europe. It would reach Japan via the Aleutians and a relay-ship, by wire from Japan to all Asia and—again relayed—to Australia. South Africa would get the coverage by land-wire down the continent from the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean basin, the Near East, Scandinavia, and even Iceland would see the spectacle. Detailed instructions were given to Gail to give to ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... the Pillars of Hercules, the rocks of Gibraltar and Ceuta which command the Strait, and ventured on the Atlantic, taking a southerly course. Two days after passing the Straits, Hanno anchored on the coast, and laid the foundation ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... years the passage has been called the Strait of Gibraltar. But the two great rocks at the entrance of the strait are called "The Pillars of Hercules." ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... eyes and radiant smile received them in her small bark, and they were soon flying over the sea, marvelling at the rich cities and vast fleets by which they passed. Leaving rich Cadiz and the Pillars of Hercules, they sped out into the unknown sea, while the maiden told them of how some day Columbus would venture into unknown seas to find a new continent. On, on they flew, past the Happy Isles, the Fortunate, long the song of the poet; where the ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... Timaeus is associated another dialogue called the Critias, which remains only as a fragment. In it is contained a description of the celebrated visionary kingdom of Atlantis, lying far beyond the pillars of Hercules, a land of splendour and luxury and power, a land also of gentle manners and wise orderliness. "The fiction has exercised a great influence over the imagination of later ages. As many attempts have been made to find the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... in regard to the Gymnesian islands. Dio Cocceianus, however, says they are near the Iberus river and near the European Pillars of Hercules,—which islands the Greeks and Romans alike call the Gymnesian, but the Spaniards Valerian or Healthful Islands. (Isaac Tzetzes on Lycophron, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... Hercules, on his way to the performance of this tenth labor, formed the Pillars of Hercules—those two rocky steeps that guard the entrance to the Straits of Gibraltar, i.e., Calpa (Gibraltar) and Abyla (Ceuta)—by rending asunder the one mountain these two rocks are said to have formed, although now they are ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... to plant Carthaginians, that are the worst and bloodiest of men, so much the nearer to us? whereas you should rather wish there were many more Sicilies to lie between them and Greece. Have you so little sense as to believe, that they come hither with an army, from the Pillars of Hercules and the Atlantic Sea, to hazard themselves for the establishment of Hicetes? who, if he had had the consideration which becomes a general, would never have thrown out his ancestors and founders to bring in ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Siculus lived before the Christian era, and how was this known to him and others more than fifteen hundred years before America was discovered by Columbus? He tells us as follows: "The Phoenicians (Tyrians) having found out the coasts beyond the Pillars of Hercules, sailed along by the coast of Africa. One of their ships, on a sudden, was driven by a furious storm far off into the main ocean. After they had lain under this violent tempest many days, they at length arrived at ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... Proclus, taken from a work now lost, which is quoted by Boeckh in his commentary on Plato, mentions islands in the exterior sea, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and says it was known that in one of these islands "the inhabitants preserved from their ancestors a remembrance of Atlantis, all extremely large island, which for a long time held dominion over all the islands of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... can look at them where they quietly rest upon the waters of the great northwest. In such as these one hundred and twenty men sailed on an unknown ocean, they knew not where. They lived where for two thousand years the pillars of Hercules had marked the end of the world. They had been taught to believe in the four corners of the earth, and that all beyond was a boundless waste of waters, into which no one had ventured beyond the Canary Islands and the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... yet it is little more than two years ago. A stranger, on coming to the ground, is struck with wonder when for the first time he obtains a near view of the vast piles of masonry towering majestically above all the surrounding objects—strong as the pillars of Hercules, and apparently as endurable—his eyes wander instinctively to the ponderous tubes, those masterpieces of engineering constructiveness and mathematical adjustment; he shrinks into himself as he gazes, and is astonished when he thinks ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... strange that a gentleman of fine education, a traveller, who had visited the famous European capitals, London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Vienna; who had passed between the Pillars of Hercules, and voyaged upon the blue Mediterranean, far as the Greek Archipelago; who had wandered through the galleries of the Vatican, and mused within the courts of the Alhambra; who had seen the fire-works ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... conjecture, inferring things unknown from things known) it sets out from a point corresponding with the Ister. For the Ister, beginning from the Celts, and the city of Pyrene, divides Europe in its course; but the Celts are beyond the pillars of Hercules, and border on the territories of the Cynesians, who lie in the extremity of Europe to the westward; and the Ister terminates by flowing through all Europe into the Euxine Sea, where a Milesian colony is settled in Istria. Now the Ister, as it flows through a well-peopled country, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Placidia. There are those also who consider that in his absence the Numidian lion might be prevailed on to become the yoke-fellow of the Egyptian crocodile; and a farm which, ploughed by such a pair, should extend from the upper cataract to the Pillars of Hercules, might have charms even for a philosopher. But while the ploughman is without a nymph, Arcadia is imperfect. What were Dionusos without his Ariadne, Ares without Aphrodite, Zeus without Hera? Even Artemis has her Endymion; Athens alone remains unwedded; but only because Hephaestus ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... southern cromlech province, covers most of the western Mediterranean; it does not cover, nor even approach, Italy or Greece or Egypt, the historic Mediterranean lands. We must look for its origin in the opposite direction—towards Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules. ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... republican advocates of independence had incurred suspicion. On the other hand, the poets were prohibited as redolent of paganism. To mingle philosophy with rhetoric was counted a crime. Thomas Aquinas had set up Pillars of Hercules beyond which the reason might not seek to travel. Roman law had to be treated from the orthodox scholastic standpoint. Woe to the audacious jurist who made the Pandects serve for disquisitions on the rights of men and nations! ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... traditions owe their origin, not to mere geological reveries, but to the remembrance of some ancient catastrophe, we may conceive the central elevated plain of Spain resisting the efforts of these great inundations, till the draining of the waters, by the straits formed between the pillars of Hercules, brought the Mediterranean progressively to its present level, lower Egypt emerging above its surface on the one side, and the fertile plains of Tarragona, Valencia, and Murcia, on the other. Everything that relates to the formation of that sea,* (* Some of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt |
