"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... process of Empathy, a few inches of painted canvas, will sometimes allow us to realise completely and uninterruptedly. And it is no poetical metaphor or metaphysical figment, but mere psychological fact, to say that if the interlacing circles and pentacles of a Byzantine floor-pattern absorb us in satisfied contemplation, this is because the modes of being which we are obliged to invest them with are such as we vainly seek, or experience only to lose, in our scattered ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... the other from the sunny South, and they divide the east of Europe between them. That pompous, formal old man, whose small heart and head are stuffed full of etiquette, and who lives and breathes only in a sense of his own importance, is the ruler of the Byzantine Empire. He was born in the purple chamber, and wears the purple; he eats purple, drinks purple, sleeps purple—only as the Emperor does he exist—he could live as well without his head, as without his crown. He is so imbued with notions of his own dignity that he would prove a tough ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... Shitamrat may answer to the ruins of the fortress of Rum-kaleh, which protected a ford of the Euphrates in Byzantine times. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... scarcely removed from the classical forms appear continuously through the Byzantine era and in Islam as soon as it recovered from the first shocks of its formation. Procopius (died ca. 535) describes a monumental water clock which was erected in Gaza ca. 500.[17] It contained impressive jackwork, such as a Medusa head which rolled its eyes every hour on the ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... intellectual armour. Once they tried him on the rarer British hemipterous homoptera, but soon discovered that he was a very fair entomologist. Next evening the conversation veered to ancient Scandinavian burial rites, but here again he could give them points. The Byzantine coinage of Cyprus was, of course, well known to him while he had himself worked on the oolitic foraminifera of the blue marl at Biarritz. His experiments on the red colouring matter of drosera rotundifolia had formed the subject of a monograph, and he ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Classics," besides several hundred assorted volumes of various other series. And when I heard of the new "Everyman's Library," projected by that benefactor of bookmen, Mr. J.M. Dent, my first impassioned act was to sit down and write a postcard to my bookseller ordering George Finlay's "The Byzantine Empire," a work which has waited sixty years for popular recognition. So that I cannot be said to be really ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... manuscripts is as old as Egypt; but we need not linger over the beautiful papyri, which are silent books to all but a few Egyptologists. Greece, out of all her tomes, has left us but a few ill-written papyri. Roman and early Byzantine art are represented by a "Virgil," and fragments of an "Iliad"; the drawings in the latter have been reproduced in a splendid volume (Milan 1819), and shew Greek art passing into barbarism. The illumination of MSS. was a favourite art in ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... primitive vigour and for the perfect preservation in which they have come down to us. The deep recess of a round-arched porch of the twelfth century is covered with quaint figures which have not lost a nose or a finger. An angular Byzantine-looking Christ sits in a diamond-shaped frame at the summit of the arch, surrounded by little angels, by great apostles, by winged beasts, by a hundred sacred symbols and grotesque ornaments. It is a dense embroidery of sculpture, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... is worth while to be acquainted with the two kinds of sauce. The simple consists of sweet oil; which it will be proper to mix with rich wine and pickle, but with no other pickle than that by which the Byzantine jar has been tainted. When this, mingled with shredded herbs, has boiled, and sprinkled with Corycian saffron, has stood, you shall over and above add what the pressed berry of the Venafran olive yields. The Tiburtian yield to the Picenian apples in juice, though ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... effort to penetrate the galleries; I had no heart to urge my friend. For us the whole of Venice had become one bridge of sighs, and we sat in the shade of the piazza, not watching the pigeons, and listening very little to the music. There are times when St. Mark's seems to glare at you with Byzantine cruelty, and Venice is too hot and too cold. So it was then. Evening found us staring out at the Adriatic from the terrace of a cafe' on the Ledo, our coffee cold before us. Never was a greater difference than that in my companion from ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... kind of prose romance which professes to delineate the scenery, sentiments, and incidents of shepherd life,[1] is, like most other literary forms, Greek in origin. It goes back at least to the "Daphnis and Chloe" of Longus, the Byzantine romancer of the fifth century A.D. Longus represents the romantic spirit in expiring classicism, the longing of a highly artificial society for primitive simplicity, and the endeavor to create a corresponding ideal. Indeed the pastoral has always been a product of a highly artificial ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... branch structure shown at b, Fig. 18, p. 68), we shall have the form Fig. 42. This I consider the perfect general type of tree structure; and it is curiously connected with certain forms of Greek, Byzantine, and Gothic ornamentation, into the discussion of which, however, we must not enter here. It will be observed, that both in Figs. 41 and 42 all the branches so spring from the main stem as very nearly to suggest their united radiation from the root R. This is by no means universally the case; ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... been produced by Dr. Thayer, of Cambridge, on New Testament Greek; by Professor Francis Brown, of New York, in conjunction with Canon Driver, of Oxford, on the languages of the Old Testament; and by Dr. Sophocles, of Cambridge, on the Byzantine Greek. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... had died out,—for instance, in the Byzantine and early Italian pictures from the eighth to the middle of the thirteenth century,—presents the strongest contrast to all that had gone before. The morose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudeness of these figures seems like contempt not only of beauty, but of all natural ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... top of it. Instead of a mirror, there was on the mantelpiece a pyramid-shaped whatnot, displaying on its shelves an entire collection of curiosities, old silver trumpets, Bohemian horns, jewelled clasps, jade studs, enamels, grotesque figures in china, and a little Byzantine virgin with a vermilion ape; and all this was mingled in a golden twilight with the bluish shade of the carpet, the mother-of-pearl reflections of the foot-stools, and the tawny hue of the walls covered with maroon leather. In the corners, on little ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... victories of Omar, and the other successors of Mahomet had in a manner stripped the court of Constantinople of all its provinces, the Byzantine history dwindles into an object petty and minute. In order to vary the scene, and enhance the dignity of his subject, the author occasionally takes a prospect of the state of Rome and Italy, under the contending powers of the papacy and the new empire of the West. When the ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... kings and princes as few men have spoken to them, and pour out his inmost convictions before those whom he revered and loved. But at Berlin, though he might have learnt to bow and to smile and to use Byzantine phraseology, his voice faltered and was drowned by noisy declaimers; the diamond was buried in a heap of beads, and his rays could not shine forth where there was no heavenly ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... relate, but persistent efforts to maintain the disinterested claim on American friendship which we Germans have always (when in need of it) advanced, continue to be misrepresented in that stronghold of atheistical materialism and Byzantine voluptuousness, New York. To the gifted Professor von Schwank's challenge, that he could not fill a single "scrap of paper" with the record of acts of war on our part which were incompatible with Divine guidance and the promulgation of the higher culture, the effete and already discredited ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... faces were mere glabrous disks, from which eyes and nose had completely vanished; only the mouth remained, a toothless gap fringed with straggling hairs. Some had faces abnormally bloated, with powerful foreheads and heavy jowls, which gave them an expression of stony immobility like Byzantine lions. All were fearfully dirty and covered with sores ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... the Byzantine historians, was born at Caesarea in Palestine towards the beginning of the sixth century of the Christian era. After having for some time practised as a "Rhetorician," that is, advocate or jurist, in his native land, he seems to have migrated early to Byzantium or Constantinople. There he ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... it lay the Roman Empire; and its temples became their churches, its halls of justice their cathedrals, its tongue the only language understood of the gods. It is unthinkable that a people who were already in the twelfth century the possessors of a marvellous decadent art in the painting of the Byzantine school, who, finding again the statues of the gods, created in the thirteenth century a new art of painting, a Christian art that was the child of imperial Rome as well as of the Christian Church, who re-established sculpture and produced the only sculptor of the first rank in the modern world, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the residence of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, and nearly opposite rises the tall tower of St. Michael's, the oldest church in Southampton. The building is open all day (the keys being obtainable on inquiry), and contains a remarkable carved black marble font, reputed to be of Byzantine origin, and a fine eagle lectern ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... professional student I may observe that I have relied on the authority of de Goeje in adhering to my own original opinion that the word Mukaukas is not to be regarded as a name but as a title, since the Arab writers to which I have made reference apply it to the responsible representatives of the Byzantine Emperor in antagonism to the Moslem power. I was unfortunately unable to make further use of Karabacek's researches as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... delight to the few archaeologists who find their way to the almost forgotten village of Carennac. The composition, which fills the tympan of the scarcely-pointed arch, represents Christ surrounded by the twelve Apostles. The influence of Byzantine art is perceptible in the treatment. Very few such masterpieces of twelfth-century carving have been so well preserved as this. The seated figure of Christ in the act of blessing His Apostles, the right hand upraised, the left resting upon a clasped book, impresses ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... full measure of the risk Italy has faced in undertaking this war for an idea. With a Latin lucidity she has counted every risk, and with a Latin idealism she has taken her place by the side of those who fight for a liberal civilisation against a Byzantine imperialism. ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... in their beginnings; whether they are Buddhist or Byzantine, Greek or Egyptian, Assyrian or Mexican, their primitives have two qualities in common, profundity and directness. And in their histories, so far as we may judge from the scanty records of ancient civilizations, all have a general resemblance. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of the original Exodus from China and the retrogressive Exodus from Russia. With respect to the designation adopted for the Russian Emperor, either it is built upon some confusion between him and the Byzantine Caesars, as though the former, being of the same religion with the latter (and occupying in part the same longitudes, though in different latitudes), might be considered as his modern successor; or else it refers simply ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... "Thus they carried with them the religion, the poetry, and the laws of their race, and on this desolate volcanic island they kept these records unchanged for hundreds of years, while other Teutonic nations gradually became affected by their intercourse with Roman and Byzantine Christianity." These records, carefully collected by Saemund the learned, form the Elder Edda, the most precious relic of ancient Northern literature, without which we should know comparatively little of the religion ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... ruled by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. This leader had succeeded to the headship of the Ostrogoths on the death of his father Theodomir in 474. For a time he was a pensioner of the Byzantine court, with the duty of defending the lower Danube; but in 488 he determined to invade Italy and become a sovereign subordinate to no one. By the defeat of Odoacer in 489 he accomplished that end; and desiring to conciliate the Senatorial party ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... a mighty Byzantine hail, which loses itself upward in a lofty, vaulted dome, from which light streams downward and illumines the interior. Under the dome, within a colonnade, are two tables, each a segment of a circle. Into ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... there, no question there whether or no the ground on which you tread was not first called "the mount" by some Byzantine Sophia; whether tradition respecting it can go back further than Constantine; whether, in real truth, that was the hill over which Jesus walked when he travelled from the house of Lazarus at Bethany to fulfil his mission in the temple. No: let me take any ordinary ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... that concerned the Holy Mother, of whom she was never weary of hearing. Jean had a rude drawing of the Madonna and Child, given him by Father Austin: the figures had the angularity and rigidity of Byzantine art, but the artist had represented his subject with reverence, and no lack of skill, and she loved to dwell on the pure mother's face, and on the longing look in the eyes of the Child. She accepted wholly the idea of a ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... where Guthrun, the Christian king, built a church for the wanderers, and richly endowed it. Both Athelstane and "Edmund, the Magnificent," visited the tomb, and rendered homage to the saint. The latter brought valuable presents to the shrine, consisting of Byzantine workmanship, and two bracelets, which he took from his own arms. Edred also ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... ARIOSO or a sweet CANTIABLE from some of the stanzas of LE CHALE NOIR, or the TALISMAN. The ancient Sclavonic, which is the language of the Eastern Church, possesses great majesty. More guttural than the idioms which have arisen from it, it is severe and monotonous yet of great dignity, like the Byzantine paintings preserved in the worship to which it is consecrated. It has throughout the characteristics of a sacred language which has only been used for the expression of one feeling and has never been modulated or fashioned by ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... background. This element is non-existent in the earliest examples of pictorial art. The figures in Pompeiian frescoes are limned upon a blank bright wall, most frequently deep red in color. The father of Italian painting, Cimabue, following the custom of the Byzantine mosaicists, whose work he had doubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a background devoid of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work of his greater and more natural pupil, Giotto, the element of background remains comparatively insignificant. What interests ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... smallest wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and tempted alternately to fanaticism and strong drink? We must, in the great majority of cases have the corpus sanem if we want the mentem sanem; and healthy ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Commander of the Faithful Harun al-Rashid, to Nicephorus the Roman dog. I have read thy writ, O son of a miscreant mother! Thou shalt not hear, thou shalt see my reply." Nor did he cease to make the Byzantine feel the weight of his arm till he "nakh'd"[FN260] his camel in the imperial Court-yard; and this was only one instance of his indomitable energy and hatred of the Infidel. Yet, if the West is to be believed, he forgot his fanaticism in his diplomatic dealings ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... have brought home Egyptian civilization; the "old masters," that of Europe in the fifteenth century; the ruins of the Colosseum, Roman art and barbarism, as they never were by Livy or Gibbon. Lady Russell's letters tell us of the Civil War in England,—Saint Mark's, at Venice, of Byzantine taste and Oriental commerce,—the Escurial and the Alhambra, Versailles, a castle on the Rhine, and a "modest mansion on the banks of the Potomac," of their respective eras and their characteristics, social, political, religious,—more than the most elaborate register, muster-roll, or judicial ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... thirsty soil, under the ill-paved streets, under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with the Carthaginians they had borne down under the mighty pressure of their phalanx; and the Byzantine ranks were dust, side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer. And here, above the graves of two thousand centuries, the little light feet of Cigarette danced joyously in that triumph of the Living, who never remember that they also are dancing onward ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... for this essence subsequently resolved itself into the desire to effect the transmutation of metals, more especially the base metals, into silver and gold. It seems that this secondary principle became the dominant idea in alchemy, and in this sense the word is used in Byzantine literature of the 4th century; Suidas, writing in the 11th century, defines chemistry as the "preparation of silver and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... chain of motor-cars and being ground through the revolving doors like grist in the hopper of an unhallowed mill, the men all in evening dress, the women in garments whose insolence outrivalled the most Byzantine nights of ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... to the chapel, wondering to himself how she had come to take refuge in prayer. On the left there lay in the meadow between the park and the road, a lonely, weather-beaten, half-ruined wooden chapel, adorned with a picture of the Christ, a Byzantine painting in a bronze frame. The ikon had grown dark with age, the paint had been cracked in many places, so that the Christ face was hardly recognisable, but the eyelids were still plainly discernible, and the eyes looked out ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... CX No. 1. In 1453 by order of Sultan Mohamed II. the Golden Horn was crossed by a pontoon bridge laid on barrels (see Joh. Dukas' History of the Byzantine Empire XXXVIII p. 279). —The biographers of Michelangelo, Vasari as well as Condivi, relate that at the time when Michelangelo suddenly left Rome, in 1506, he entertained some intention of going to Constantinople, ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... tradition, there would be an end of its pretentious counterfeits. The alphabet, decrepit with its long and vast labors, would at last be released. The whole army of writers would take their place among the curiosities of history. The Alexandrian thaumaturgists, the Byzantine historians, the scholastic dialecticians, the serial novelists, and the daily dissertationists, strung together, would make a glittering chain of monomaniacs. Social life is a mutual joy; reading may be rarely indulged without danger ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... that alone can strike a responsive thrill from his exacting nerves. 'Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, in order to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangeness demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route, and sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or of solid form, according to the state of his ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... by going eastward. By following the course of the Obi two versts further, he reached a picturesque little town lying on a small hill. A few churches, with Byzantine cupolas colored green and gold, stood up against the gray sky. This is Kolyvan, where the officers and people employed at Kamsk and other towns take refuge during the summer from the unhealthy climate of the Baraba. According to the latest news obtained by the Czar's courier, Kolyvan could not be ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... the times that attended and followed the crumbling of the Roman world were favorable neither to the production of letters nor to the enjoyment of a literary heritage. Goth, Byzantine, Lombard, Frank, German, Saracen, and Norman made free of the soil of Italy. If men were not without leisure, they were without the leisure of peaceful and careful contemplation, and lacked the buoyant heart without which assimilation of art is hardly less possible than creation. Ignorance ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... the impost and building the lower portion of it vertical, as shown in Fig. 98. This device of stilting the smaller arches to raise their crowns to the level of those of the larger arches was in constant use in Byzantine and early Romanesque architecture, in the kind of manner shown in the sketch, Fig. 99; and a very clumsy and makeshift method of dealing with the problem it is; but something of the kind was inevitable as long as nothing but the round arch was available for covering ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... of a small peasant state, most of whose present leaders were born under a foreign yoke. Nor is Greece a serious candidate for the vacant post. The Greeks, of course, unlike the Bulgarians, have a definite claim, based on the traditions of the Byzantine Empire, and there is a large Greek population in the city—at present close upon 350,000, though their numbers are likely to be materially reduced before this war is over. But in their case also Constantinople ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... a poor priest who had scarcely the wherewithal for necessary food, the sanctuary was falling into ruin. There was nothing in the interior but a simple altar of masonry, and by way of reredos one of those byzantine crucifixes still so numerous in Italy, where through the work of the artists of the time has come down to us something of the terrors which agitated the twelfth century. In general the Crucified One, frightfully lacerated, with bleeding wounds, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... persevering absorption and incorporation of all this ceaseless torrent of heterogenous elements into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State is an achievement that neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church, neither Byzantine Empire nor Russian, not Charles the Great nor Charles the Fifth nor Napoleon ever ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Cimabue, 1240-1302, "ends the long Byzantine succession in Italy. . . . In him 'the spirit of the years to come' is decidedly manifest; but he never entirely succeeded in casting off the hereditary Byzantine asceticism."—Heaton. Giotto was his pupil. Ghiberti: Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great Florentine sculptor, 1381-1455; ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... the piece of Byzantine sculpture, Fig. 20, with the more elaborate treatment of foliage shown in Fig. 21, from late Gothic capitals, in Southwell Minster, it will be seen how an increasing desire for imitative resemblance has taken the place of a patterned foundation, and how, ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... refectory, and the abbot deigned to come in and talk about Pitsoonda. His was an ancient and beautiful monastery, built by the same hand that erected St. Sophia at Constantinople, Justinian the First. It was indeed a replica of that famous building, a fine specimen of Byzantine architecture. It had changed hands many times, belonging to the Greeks, the Turks, the Cherkesses, and finally to the Russians. Here formerly stood the fortified town of Pitius, scarcely a stone of which was now standing, ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... constructed almost entirely of glass, upon a framework of steel, is the prominent feature of the Palace of Horticulture. It is French Renaissance, influenced by Byzantine, and its proportions (it is one hundred and fifty-two feet in diameter and one hundred and eighty-two feet high) are almost perfect. The spires and porticos, the colonnades and entrances are replete with rococo decorations. There are garlands of girls used in ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... derivation. Understand this, once for all: if you hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all the types of successive architectural invention upon it like so many beads. The Doric and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all Romanesque, massy-capitaled buildings—Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and what else you can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic, Early English, French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe: those old Greeks gave the shaft; Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... time in the works of Abulpharagius, who flourished in 1264. Six hundred years had elapsed. It is as if a story about the crusades of Louis IX. were to be found for the first time in the writings of Mr. Bancroft. The Byzantine historians were furiously angry with the Saracens; why did they, one and all, neglect to mention such an outrageous piece of vandalism? Their silence must be considered quite conclusive. Moreover we know "that the caliphs had forbidden under severe penalties the ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... more weary centuries were added to the fruitless slumbers of Ideal Beauty among the temples of Greece. Meanwhile, in turn, the Byzantine, the Northman, the Frank, the Turk, and finally the bombarding Venetian, left their rude invading footprints among her most cherished haunts, and defiled her very sanctuary with the brutal touch of barbarous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... according to the architectural authorities. Its effect is really rich and splendid; and it rather dazzled us with its maze of pillars, its upper and lower columns, its galleries, complicated capitals, arches on arches, and Byzantine intricacies. To the student of the very early ecclesiastical art, it must be an object of more interest than even of wonder. But what I cared most to see were the mosaics in the choir, executed in the time of Justinian, and as fresh and beautiful as on the day they were made. The mosaics ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Doubts have been expressed as to the correctness of the statement made by this second-rate compiler, and it has been claimed that the transformation in question took place under the Antonines. This is erroneous. The testimony of inscriptions corroborates that of the Byzantine writer.[13] In spite of his love of archaism, it was Claudius who permitted this innovation to be made, and we believe that we can divine the motives ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... own observations, both in Italy and during his travels as far as Egypt. For several hundred years it was a popular and standard book on zooelogy; and even as late as the fourteenth century, Manuel Philes, a Byzantine poet, founded upon it a poem on animals. Like the 'Varia Historia', it is scrappy and gossiping. He leaps from subject to subject: from elephants to dragons, from the liver of mice to the uses of oxen. There was, however, method in this disorder; for as he says, he sought ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of St. George will illustrate the peculiar arrangement of their religious edifices. Following the example of the older Egyptian Byzantine churches, the nave and tribune are uncovered and the side aisles have galleries. The nave has three divisions: first, a vestibule; second, a section set apart for women; and third, another section for men. There are the usual choir, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... poor Warwick Crescent, which must do its best to make me forget my new abode. I forget you don't know Venice. Well then, the Palazzo Manzoni is situate on the Grand Canal, and is described by Ruskin,—to give no other authority,—as 'a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance: its warm yellow marbles are magnificent.' And again—'an exquisite example (of Byzantine Renaissance) as applied to domestic architecture.' So testify the 'Stones of Venice'. But we will talk about the place, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... by the symbolic animal, usually assigned to him, occupy nearly the whole of their respective pages. They are taken from Byzantine models, of which, as Westwood points out, nothing remains but the attitudes, the fashion of the dress and the form of the seats. There can be little doubt that these illuminations were copied from a MS. brought into England by the missionaries sent from ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... diaper of Greek crosses has been cut. The lower part is a plain, hollowed chamfer moulding. Though the small columns in the jambs are new, and also parts of the inner reveal of the jamb, yet the old carved capitals are still in position and also the bases. These capitals bear distinct traces of Byzantine feeling in the design of them. Above the doorway is a billet-moulded string-course, which stops against the circular shafts by the buttresses, and forms the sill of the window. The design of this opening is like that ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... dispersed after a fashion of which it would amuse Miss Gostrey to hear. He was sorry again, gratefully sorry she was so out of it—she who had really put him in; but she had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault. It was just now, as happened, that for so fine a sense as hers a near view would have begun to pay. Within three days, precisely, the situation on which he was to report had shown signs ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... substances which produce peculiar effects of this nature on particular constitutions cure the same symptoms in people in general. Then in another note to the same paragraph he quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it has left no name, and no relics of the old civilization have been discovered here. Catanzaro was founded in the tenth century, at the same time that Taranto was rebuilt after the Saracen destruction; an epoch of revival for Southern Italy under the vigorous Byzantine rule of Nicephorus Phocas. From my point of view, the interest of the place suffered because I could attach to it no classic memory. Robert Guiscard, to be sure, is a figure picturesque enough, and might give play to the imagination, but I care little for him after all; he does not belong to ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... to go through several sheet-shrouded salons and came out into a thoroughly comfortable room. Its general aspect of decoration had a Byzantine look, and on the floor were several magnificent bear skins, while around the walls low bookcases with quantities of books stood. And above them many arms were crossed. Over the mantlepiece a famous Rembrandt frowned, and another from the opposite ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... years a practical submergence of that morality which we believe to be distinctively American, and get throughout the older hemisphere a type of society based upon authority, reproducing it may be some features of past civilizations, Mongol, Asiatic, or Byzantine. If that were to happen, if Europe were really to become a mere glorified form of, say, certain Asiatic conceptions that we all thought had had their day, why, then, of course America could not escape a like transformation of outlook, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... service, the Sultan gave to Etrogruhl a large piece of territory, and he became the chief of a clan in this beautiful tract of land, which was all his own, bordering on the Byzantine Empire (as it was then called), and almost within sight of the Bosphorus ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 22, April 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the hoe as the Bessarabian or the Bokhariot, or whatever the fashionable breed is, but they have qualities of pluck, good humour, and a certain well-wearing virtue which are not altogether bad. They will not hold aloof from the life of the land, nor pray in unknown tongues to Byzantine saints; while the very tenacity and caution which made them cleave to England this long, help them to root deeply elsewhere. They are more likely to bring their women than other classes, and those women will make sacred and individual homes. A little-regarded Crown Colony has a proverb ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... know it's a Russian season?" she instructed him. "Dancers and music and hats—those high fur ones—and perfumes? And all that Byzantine embroidery? ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Italy a great artist. The schools of Spain were budded on a full-bearing tree. Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared Jittle for the crude efforts of the awkward pencils of the necessary men who came before Raphael. There is not a Perugino in Madrid. There is nothing Byzantine, no trace of Renaissance; nothing of the patient work of the early Flemings,—the art of Flanders comes blazing in with the full splendor of Rubens and Van Dyck. And even among the masters, the representation is most unequal. Among ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... surrounded by low dwellings, which were formerly (and are still to some extent) occupied by monks, and now serve as the residences of the Court and its attendants. The two curtilages are really one divided across the centre, and in each division is a small Byzantine church, in which the service of the Orthodox Greek faith is conducted. At the further extremity of the convent are the apartments of the King and Queen, and it is hardly necessary to add that everything ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... the Venetians and Genoese, and throughout the world's history no point possessed a more constant and unchangeable attraction from its geographical position and natural advantages than the island of Cyprus, which in turn was occupied by Phoenicians, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Byzantine rulers, Saracens, Byzantine rulers again, English, Lusignans, Venetians, Turks, and once more ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... and the Christian Church meet and blend in the Byzantine Empire, the later history of which appeared to Gibbon 'a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery'. Its services to civilization and the greatness of many of its rulers were revealed to the world by Finlay, whose narrative was acclaimed by Freeman as ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... to me. He had the loveliest set of Byzantine mosaics and pearls which he wished to give me; and when I would not accept them he seemed so hurt that I did not like to refuse this trifle. What do you suppose is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... as to the special allowances made for the class, and, since she saw them, when young, as effete and overtutored, inevitably ironic and infinitely refined, one must take it for amusing if she inclined to an indulgence verily Byzantine. If one could only be Byzantine!—wasn't that what she insidiously led one on to sigh? Milly tried to oblige her—for it really placed Susan herself so handsomely to be Byzantine now. The great ladies of that race—it would be somewhere in Gibbon—weren't, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... perhaps in the temples of the pagans, or have known the strange faces of the gods of Egypt and of ancient Greece and Rome; they have been in the churches of the early Christians, or have seen the statues of tortured martyrs, and the images of the transfigured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine aureole. They have been present at battles, at the downfall of kingdoms, at hecatombs, at sacrileges; and now brought together promiscuously in these mosques, they behold on the walls of the sanctuary simply ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... or pondering on the site of Alexandreia Eschate. It is you who owe me an account of yourself; nevertheless, I am prompted to write, if only to tell you that I have just got the complete set of the Byzantine Historians. A catalogue tempted me, and ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... over the darkening face of the dying day, like the strange, spectral smile that only sheds its cold, supernatural light on lips twelve hours dead, Salome's fair face and graceful pose was as softly defined against the western sky as some nimbussed saint or madonna on the golden background of old Byzantine pictures. Her small straw hat, wreathed with scarlet poppies, lay at her feet; and around her shoulders she had closely folded a bright plaid flannel cloak, which tinted her complexion with its ruddy hues, as firelight flushes ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... fine bronze gates crusted with a beautiful hard polished coin-like patina, would repay the excursion, even were the interior less fine. Here we have columns from whose high architraves the Gothic arch springs vigorously; walls perfectly covered with old Byzantine mosaics; a roof of marvellous lightness, and almost modern elegance; still the critic, who is bound by metier to find fault with violated canons, will, we must own, be at no loss for a text in the church of Monreale—a building which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... depravities far surpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or that Juvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more deserve to be ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... fourteenth century it became known in Florence that Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350-1415), a Byzantine of noble birth, a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy at Constantinople, and the most accomplished Greek scholar of his age, had arrived in Venice as an envoy from the Eastern Emperor. Florentine ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... any relations with civilized Europe. The necessity of concentrating all her strength on fighting the Mongolians laid the corner-stone of a sort of semi-Asiatic political autocracy. Besides, the influence of the Byzantine clergy made the nation hostile to the ideas and science of the Occident, which were represented as heresies incompatible with the orthodox faith. However, when she finally threw off the Mongolian yoke, and when she found herself face to face with Europe, Russia was led to enter ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... finished: the sculptor was working at the statues that adorned their fronts; the painter was still touching the external frescoes; and the scaffold of the architect was not in every instance withdrawn. Everywhere was the hum of art and artists. The Byzantine style of many of these buildings was novel to me in its modern adaptation, yet very effective. The delicate detail of ornament contrasted admirably with the broad fronts and noble facades which they adorned. A church with ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... independent Christian city, when all the other cities of Asia Minor were under the power of the Saracen sword. It held out against the Ottoman power until the year 1390 A.D., when it surrendered to Sultan Bayazid's mixed army of Ottoman Turks and Byzantine Christians (?). This was six years after the death of Wickliffe, "the morning star of the reformation," who opposed the corruptions of the Papacy, gave the world the first English translation of the Bible, and sowed the seeds that soon grew and produced a Huss, a Jerome, and a ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... these increasing demands for ancient documents of any kind spread over Europe and portions of Asia, bringing into Florence a great quantity of them, as well as many scholars and copyists. Shiploads of the works of the Byzantine historians arrived from the Golden Horn, and the city became a vast manufactory for duplicating or forging ancient MSS. Parchment and vellum were too costly to employ very much, so most of them were of paper. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... was succeeded by the age of criticism and Alexandria began to take the place of Athens as the centre of culture for the Hellenistic world, Homeric dictionaries and glossaries seem to have been constantly published. Indeed, Athenaeus tells us of a wonderful Byzantine blue-stocking, a precieuse from the Propontis, who wrote a long hexameter poem, called Mnemosyne, full of ingenious commentaries on difficulties in Homer, and in fact, it is evident that, as far as the language is concerned, such a phrase as 'Homeric simplicity' would have rather ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... prince, a knez. The bad result of this profoundly democratic spirit was that the Slavs, not knowing how to keep united, fell under the yoke of other nations. From the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and others, which have been collected in Monimenta Sclavenica by Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... By the end of the Byzantine period, the fork of the river lay at some distance south of Shetnufi, the present Shatanuf, which is the spot where it now is. The Arab geographers call the head of the Delta Batn-el-Bagaraji, the Cow's Belly. Ampere, in his Voyage en Egypte ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... buckler knew as soon as spied The cavalier, whose arms that blazon bear, For him that routed the Byzantine side; By hand of whom so many slaughtered were. He hurried to the palace, and applied For audience, weighty tidings to declare; And, to Ungiardo led forthwith, rehearsed What shall by men ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... roadside, it seems; the day breaking, the atmosphere cold, steel-blue, and misty. Rubbing the pane, a few surviving lights are seen twinkling—a picture surely something Moslem. For there, separated by low-lying fields, rise clustered Byzantine towers and belfries, with strangely-quaint German-looking spires of the Nuremberg pattern, but all dimly outlined ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... brick architecture of the Lombard cities took its origin—whether from the precepts of Byzantine aliens in the earliest middle ages, or from the native instincts of a mixed race composed of Gallic, Ligurian, Roman, and Teutonic elements, under the leadership of Longobardic rulers—is a question for antiquarians to decide. There can, however, be no doubt that the monuments ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... beloved names; though the authoress, who was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has actually consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about the book, and the whole treatment is in the pre-historical-novel style. Indeed the writer of the Veillees was altogether of the veille—the day just expired—or of the transitional and half-understood present—never of the past seen in some perspective, of the real ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... ultra-Shakespearean. "Fars" (whence "Persia") is the central Province of the grand old Empire now a mere wreck, "Rum" (which I write Roum, in order to avoid Jamaica) is the neo-Roman or Byzantine Empire, while "Yunan" is the classical Arab term for Greece (Ionia) which unlearned Moslems believe to be now ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... destined to be a plaything for men—such a thing has existed; such a thing exists even now. In simple and savage times such a thing constituted an especial trade. The 17th century, called the great century, was of those times. It was a century very Byzantine in tone. It combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity—a curious variety of civilization. A tiger with a simper. Madame de Sevigne minces on the subject of the fagot and the wheel. That century traded a good deal in children. Flattering historians have concealed ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... to the Geist of the Age he lives in, though it appear to him less rational." As regards the height of the dome, we are the gainers because he was compelled to do this. It is not, indeed, the whole of St. Paul's or its only important feature; for St. Paul's is not a Byzantine church in which the dome is practically not a part, but the whole. It is the most magnificent member of a magnificent building, and with its graceful equipoise and conscious evidence of stability stands alone and in a class by itself amongst the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople. Though in no single instance has the Greek original been discovered of any of these romances, the mere name of their heroes would be in most cases sufficient to prove their Hellenic or Byzantine origin. Heracles, Athis, Porphirias, Parthenopeus, Hippomedon, Protesilaus, Cliges, Cleomades, Clarus, Berinus—names such as these can come but from one quarter of Europe, and it is as easy to guess ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... attractions of Gafsa, beside the oasis, are the tall minaret with its prospect over the town and plantations, and the Kasbah or fortress, a Byzantine construction covering a large expanse of ground and rebuilt by the French on theatrical lines, with bastions and crenellations and other warlike pomp; thousands of blocks of Roman masonry have been wrought into its old walls, which are now smothered under a modern layer of plaster divided into square ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... the dinner-bell reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast. This transient glance served rather to irritate than to appease my curiosity; and as soon as I returned to Bath I procured the second and third volumes of Howel's History of the World, which exhibit the Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my attention; and some instinct of criticism directed me to the genuine sources. Simon Ockley, an original in every sense, first opened my eyes; and I was led from one book to another, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... armes, were indeede Saracens, [Sidenote: A great ship of Saracens taken by king Richard.] secretly sent with wilde fire [Footnote: Greek Fire was the name given to a composition which was largely used by the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire in their wars with the Mohammedans. Its nature was kept a profound secret for centuries, but the material is now believed to have been a mixture of nitre, sulphur, and naphtha. It burned with terrible fury wherever it fell, and it possessed the property of ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... council who passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen thought, be lovely people, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... occurred which abolished forever the authority of the Byzantine Emperors in Italy, and established on a sure and lasting basis the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... and vault, lunette and medallion, presenting new spaces for the surface designer, and new suggestions of ornamental line (see illustration, p. 117[f069]). It is noticeable how, with the round-arched architecture under Roman, Byzantine (see illustration, p. 118[f070]), and Renaissance forms, the scroll form of ornament developed, the reason being, I think, that it gave the necessary element of recurring line, whether used in the horizontal frieze in association with round arches, or in spandrils ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... marvellous beauty that Bierstadt and I simultaneously exclaimed,—"Oh that the master-builders of the world could come here even for a single day! The result would be an entirely new style of architecture,—an American school, as distinct from all the rest as the Ionic from the Gothic or Byzantine." If they could come, the art of building would have a regeneration. "Amazing" is the only word for this glorious work of Nature. I could have bowed down with awe and prayed at one of its vast, inimitable doorways, but that the mystery of its creation, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... for approval to Don Elijio, who is the head of the firm of Bosch Brothers, our operations begin. The order of architecture which we adopt partakes of the Norman and the early Gothic, with a 'dash,' so to speak, of the Byzantine, to give it a cheerful aspect. It might remind the learned in these matters of York Minster, Temple Bar, or a court in the Crystal Palace; but the Senores Bosch Brothers—whose acquaintance with architectural master-pieces ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... the palatial apartments of verdantique and porphyry. But of those comparatively at liberty, but whose liberty was circumscribed by the hallowed precincts of Studius, every soul was plotting. And never, perhaps, in the corrupt Byzantine Court, where true friendship had been unknown since Theodora quarrelled with Antonia, had so near an approach to it existed as in this asylum of villains. A sort of freemasonry came to prevail in the sanctuary: every one longed to know how his neighbour's plot throve, ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... necropolis, with massive tombs in masonry, and a Christian catacomb, and a little farther south a tomb in two stories, a mixture of Doric and Ionic architecture, belonging probably to the 2nd century B.C., though groundlessly called the Tomb of Theron. A village of the Byzantine period has been explored at Balatizzo, immediately to the south of the modern town (Notizie degli scavi, 1900, 511-520). The walls of the dwellings are entirely cut out of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the golden background of a cherished Byzantine picture, memory held untarnished every tint and outline of that blessed day, when she and her father had looked for the last time on the sunny sea they ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... neighboring forces of the Roman and Persian empires, whose vassals respectively they were. And so, before many months, Abu Bekr found his generals opposed by great and imposing armies on either side. He was, in fact, waging mortal combat at one and the same moment with the Kaiser and the Chosroes, the Byzantine emperor and the great king of Persia. The risk was imminent, and an appeal went forth for help to meet the danger. The battle-cry resounded from one end of Arabia to the other, and electrified the land. Levy after levy, en masse, started up at the call from every quarter of the peninsula, ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... months. Notwithstanding the labors required by all these occupations he found time to write for Didot's Univers Pittoresque a history of Carthage from the second Punic war to the Vandal invasion, a history of the Vandal rule and the Byzantine restoration, another of the African Church, and one of the Church of Ancient Syria. He also furnished many important articles to the Encyclopedic Dictionary, wrote often for the National newspaper, and for two years was chief editor ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... found in Egyptian, Assyrian, Byzantine, Scandinavian, Celtic, Persian, Indian, Gothic, Chinese, and Japanese design. For intimate study of these various styles and periods the reader is referred to the various books listed ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... there is a large number of sacred pictures placed there for the occasion by the hunters. One of them, which represented St. Nicholas, was very valuable, the material being embossed silver gilt. Before the lamps hung large dinted old copper lamps or rather light-holders, resembling inverted Byzantine cupolas, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... facing South Gardens, the Tower of Jewels, by Thomas Hastings, of Carrere & Hastings, New York. Developed from Italian Renaissance architecture, with Byzantine modifications, and designed to suggest an Aztec tower; 433 feet high; original intention to ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... azimuth, parallax, sidereal periods, satellitic inclinations, and synodic revolutions. D, with a turn for symbols and history, sees in it something of the "ornaments like the moon" that Gideon captured from the Sheikhs Zebah and Zalmunna, something of Byzantine siege, Ottoman ensign, the Crusades, the Knighthood of Selim, the battle of Tours, and the city of New Orleans. . . . . . ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... later a Byzantine corn-ship brought from Amorgos to Peiraeus two survivors of the Solon,—the only ones to escape the swamping of the pinnace. Their story cleared up the mystery of the fate of "Glaucon the Traitor." "The gods," ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... advance and decline. The case is somewhat different when attempts are made by positive efforts to prevent the operation of bad mores, or to abolish them. The historians have familiarized us with the notion of corrupt or degenerate mores. Such periods as the later Roman empire, the Byzantine empire, the Merovingian kingdom, and the Renaissance offer us examples of evil mores. We need to give more exactitude to this idea. Bad mores are those which are not well fitted to the conditions and needs of the society at the time. But, as we have seen, the mores produce ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... with its balsamic perfumes, and the blossomy trees of white and light-purple peeping over the walls of the cloistered painted houses, and all those lichened tombs—those granite menhirs and regions of ancient marble tombs between the quarters, Greek tombs, Byzantine, Jew, Mussulman tombs, with their strange and sacred inscriptions—overwaved by their cypresses and vast plane-trees.' And for weeks I would do nothing: but roamed about, with two minds in me, under the tropic brilliance of the sky by day, and the vast dreamy nights of this place that are like nights ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... come to the throne, Mohammed II., one of the greatest sovereigns of the house of Othman. He began his reign with the occupation of Constantinople (1453), and thus destroyed the last refuge of the Byzantine Empire. At the news of this event all Europe burst into a chorus of lamentation. The whole importance of the Eastern Question at once presented itself before the nations of Christendom. It was at once understood that the new conqueror would not remain idle within the crumbling walls ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... warmly, and laboriously, with the apostolic emblematic Ephesus, and to end with the "shall He find faith on earth" of lukewarm Laodicea: thus Smyrna would symbolize the state of the church under Diocletian, the "tribulation ten days:" Pergamus, perhaps the Byzantine age, "where Satan's seat is" the Balaam and Balak of empire and priesthood; Thyatira, the avowed commencement of the Papacy, "Jezebel," &c.; Sardis, the dreary void of the dark ages, the "ready to die;" Philadelphia, the rise of Protestantism, "an open door, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of the Second Crusade was 1147-1149. Louis and Conrad each commanded a great army, but they made the mistake of working separately. Conrad reached Constantinople first, and partly in consequence of the faithless conduct of Manuel, the Byzantine emperor—who, like his predecessor Alexius, in the time of the First Crusade, threw obstacles in the way of the western hosts—the whole German army was cut to pieces in Asia Minor, only the Emperor himself, with a few followers, escaping. Louis, soon arriving ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... amassed enormous wealth, without troubling themselves to place the government finances on a satisfactory basis. We see, however, a semblance of financial organization in the institutions of Alaric and his successors. Subsequently, the great Theodoric, who had studied the administrative theories of the Byzantine Court, exercised his genius in endeavouring to work out an accurate system of finance, which was adopted ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... romance of the Byzantine Empire, showing, with vivid imagination, the possible forces behind the internal decay of the Empire that hastened ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... the Greek empire would have brought it to utter ruin at a much earlier date but for the degeneration which overtook Mohammedanism. Incidentally the Crusades helped the Byzantine power at first to strengthen its hold on some of its threatened possessions; but the so-called fourth crusade replaced the Greek Empire by a Latin one with no elements of permanency. When a Greek dynasty was re-established, and the crusading spirit of Western Europe was already ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... observed a drunken-looking soldier staggering about the pavement. He came up to me and said, 'Buy my silver cross, sir! You shall have it for fourpence—it's real silver.' I looked, and there he held a cross, just taken off his own neck, evidently, a large tin one, made after the Byzantine pattern. I fished out fourpence, and put his cross on my own neck, and I could see by his face that he was as pleased as he could be at the thought that he had succeeded in cheating a foolish gentleman, and away he went to drink the value of his cross. At ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us!' was a regular part of the litany of the unhappy French. They settled Iceland and Greenland and prematurely discovered America; they established themselves as the ruling aristocracy in Russia, and as the imperial body-guard and chief bulwark of the Byzantine empire at Constantinople; and in the eleventh century they conquered southern Italy and Sicily, whence in the first crusade they pressed on with unabated vigor to Asia Minor. Those bands of them with whom we are here concerned, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... theatre, then in process of excavation by Mr. Wood, who has since published an elaborate account of his discoveries. Far toward the west stretched the ruins where had been the markets, the stadium and the ports, with crumbling walls and towers of all stages of antiquity, Greek, Roman and Byzantine. One of the towers or forts, on an elevation to the westward, and of somewhat cyclopean construction, passes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... pushed inflation to hyperinflationary levels in late 1993. Ukraine's dependence on Russia for energy supplies and the lack of significant structural reform have made the Ukrainian economy vulnerable to external shocks. Ukrainian government officials have taken some steps to reform the country's Byzantine tax code, such as the implementation of lower tax rates aimed at bringing more economic activity out of Ukraine's large shadow economy, but more improvements are needed, including closing tax loopholes and eliminating tax privileges and exemptions. Reforms in ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... THE policy of the Byzantine court had given to primitive Christianity a paganized form, which it had spread over all the idolatrous populations constituting the empire. There had been an amalgamation of the two parties. Christianity had modified ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... nothing, save a vague instinct of repulsion, then the seed of victory might be sown. This is hard indeed to do; yet if we ponder upon a chapter of ancient or mediaeval history, it seems to me some glimmer of a chance of doing so breaks in upon us. Take for example a century of the Byzantine Empire, weary yourselves with reading the names of the pedants, tyrants, and tax-gatherers to whom the terrible chain which long- dead Rome once forged, still gave the power of cheating people into thinking that they were necessary lords of the world. ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... and the short of it, that you have been circumventing me half unconsciously into answering a question which has silently been insinuated by you." Freedom of communication, unfettered movement of thought, there can be none under such a ritual, which tends violently to a Byzantine, or even to a Chinese result of freezing, as it were, all natural and healthy play of the faculties under the petrific mace of absolute ceremonial and fixed precedent. For it will hardly be objected, that the privileged condition of a few official councillors and state ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... diplomatic sympathy will cordially be bestowed upon any nation and cause which promises to become hostile to England (or, on a given time, to France), on Nena Sahib no less than on Abraham Lincoln. The never-discarded aim of Russia to plant its double cross on the banks of the Byzantine Bosporus, and its batteries on those of the Hellespont, and thus to transfer its centre of gravity from the secluded shores of the Baltic to the gates of the Mediterranean; the never-slumbering dread of this expansion, which has made the integrity of Turkey an inviolable ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... and struggling spirit, had felt this pressure, and had honestly and successfully combated the lusts of the flesh. Grown up though he was, among murderers and sybarites, in the extravagant luxury of the Byzantine Court, where, for example, he had at first possessed a thousand barbers and a thousand cooks, he had abandoned luxury, lived like a Christian ascetic, acted justly, and was high-minded. He had a perfect comprehension ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... To Byzantine architecture one may not be very sympathetic; the visitor may come to Venice with the cool white arches of Milan still comforting his soul, or with the profound conviction that Chartres or Cologne represents the final word in ecclesiastical beauty and fitness; ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... in the Byzantine empire, and the cognate tribes who dwelt nearer the Danube, like the Moravians, had long been in sore need of a Slavonic translation of the Scriptures and the Church books, since they understood neither ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... all over the top for potsherds, to find the latest period of the town. Look around the mound for any early potsherds. Sherds on the slopes are worth less; as they have probably slipped down. Red burnt brick in Egypt is all Roman or Arab; in Greece and Asia Minor, red brick and mortar is Roman, Byzantine, or later. ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... Florence (Mr. Kirkup) throws out such names for them as Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Giottino, a crucifixion painted on a banner, Giottesque, if not Giotto, but unique, or nearly so, on account of the linen material, and a little Virgin by a Byzantine master. The curious thing is that two angel pictures, for which he had given a scudo last year, prove to have been each sawn off the sides of the Ghirlandaio, so called, representing the 'Eterno Padre' clothed in a mystical garment and encircled ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... all great art reposes upon a foundation of personal and national greatness. Critics of Ruskin will show you that he began Modern Painters while he was yet ignorant of the classic Italians; that he wrote The Stones of Venice without realizing the full indebtedness of the Venetian to the Byzantine architecture; that he proposed to unify the various religious sects although he had no knowledge of theology; that he attempted a reconstruction of society though he had had no scientific training in political economy; but in all this neglect ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... realization, in draperies, gestures, postures, rather than beauty of form. We miss in Giotto much that had been attained before him. What Madonna of his can rank with Giovanni Pisano's? The Northern cathedral-sculptures, even some of the Byzantine carvings, have a dignity that is at least uncommon in his pictures. Especially the faces are generally wooden,—destitute alike of individuality and of the loveliness of Duccio's and even of some of Cimabue's. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various |
