"Sparta" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nation does not arise, under gentile institutions, until the tribes united under the same government have coalesced into one people, as the four Athenian tribes coalesced in Attica, three Dorian tribes at Sparta, and three Latin and Sabine tribes at Rome. Federation requires independent tribes in separate territorial areas; but coalescence unites them by a higher process in the same area, although the tendency to local separation by gentes and by tribes would continue. ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... An hundred able men meanwhile let fall The weights behind, the engine tumbled down And battered flat the battlements and wall: So fell Taigetus hill on Sparta town, It crushed the steeled shield in pieces small, And beat the helmet to the wearers' crown, And on the ruins of the walls and stones, Dispersed left their ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... case as substantive is noticeable. — THEMISTOCLES ETC.: Cicero borrows the story from Plato (Rep. 329 E et seq.), but it was first told by Herodotus, 8, 125 who gave a somewhat different version. Themistocles had received great honors at Sparta when Athenian ambassador there; an envious man declaring that the honors were paid really to Athens and not to Themistocles, the statesman answered [Greek: out an ego, eon Belbinites] (i.e. an inhabitant of the ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Depart he cannot; ship, arrayed with oars, And seamen has he none, to bear him o'er The breast of the broad ocean. Nay, even now, Against his well-beloved son a plot Is laid, to slay him as he journeys home From Pylos the divine, and from the walls Of famous Sparta, whither he had gone To gather tidings of his father's fate." Then answered her the ruler of the storms: "My child, what words are these that pass thy lips? Was not thy long-determined counsel this, That, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... More—Sir Thomas More died laughing, you remember. Also in the Absurdities of Ravisius Textor, there is a long list of characters who came to the same magnificent end. Do you know, however," continued he musingly, "that at Sparta (which is now Palae; ochori,) at Sparta, I say, to the west of the citadel, among a chaos of scarcely visible ruins, is a kind of socle, upon which are still legible the letters 7!9. They are undoubtedly part of '7!9!. Now, at Sparta were a thousand temples and shrines to a thousand different ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... world, he said that the third was the most beautiful—her name was Venus. The two others departed in great displeasure; but Venus bid him put on his knightly armour and his helmet adorned with waving feathers, and then she led him to a famous city called Sparta, where ruled the noble Duke Menelaus. His young Duchess Helen was the loveliest woman on earth, and the sorceress offered her to Paris in return for the golden apple. He was most ready to have her and wished for nothing better; but he asked how ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... spirit with whom I entered into discourse was the famous Leonidas of Sparta. I acquainted him with the honors which had been done him by a celebrated poet of our nation; to which he answered he was very much obliged to him. We were presently afterwards entertained with the most delicious voice I had ever heard, accompanied by a violin, equal to Signior Piantinida. ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... came the youths Castor and Polydeuces. They came riding on white horses, two noble-looking brothers. From Sparta they came, and their mother was Leda, who, after the twin brothers, had another child born to her—Helen, for whose sake the sons of many of Jason's friends were to wage war against the great city of Troy. These were the first heroes who ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... Religion." Many strange customs in some Greek Mysteries, such as the daubing of the initiate with clay, the use of the [Greek text] (the Australian Tundun, a small piece of wood whirled noisily by a string), the general suggestion of a new life, the flogging of boys at Sparta, their retreat, each with his instructor (Australian kabbo, Greek [Greek text]) to the forests, are precisely analogous to things found in Australia, America, and Africa. Now savage rites are often associated with what we think ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... through all that we have made a part of our nature by education and custom. We would give more to know what Xenophon's soldiers gossiped about round their camp-fires, than for all the particulars of their retreat. Sparta becomes human to us when we think of Agesilaus on his hobby-horse. Finding that those heroic figures romped with their children, we begin for the first time to suspect that they ever really existed ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... himself into all manner of forms with more ease than the chameleon changes his colour.... Thus at Sparta he was all for exercise, frugal in his diet, and severe in his manners. In Asia he was as much for mirth and pleasure, luxury and ease."—Plutarch, Alcibiades, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... pleasure in seconding the resolution which has just been read. The eminent historian of the Dutch Republic, who has made the story of its earlier days as interesting as that of Athens and Sparta, and who has infused into the narrative the generous glow of his own genius, has the highest of titles to be heard with respectful attention by the citizens of a community which, in its origin, was an offshoot of that ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... has disappeared. Couchant lion type with snake tail has been found at Olympia and Sparta. In general brooches cease ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... Sparta, the Ephoroi, once every nine years, watched the sky during a whole cloudless, moonless night, in profound silence; and, if they saw a shooting star, it was understood to indicate that the kings of Sparta ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... he that is not superiour, is not supreme; that is to say not Soveraign. The Soveraignty therefore was alwaies in that Assembly which had the Right to Limit him; and by consequence the government not Monarchy, but either Democracy, or Aristocracy; as of old time in Sparta; where the Kings had a priviledge to lead their Armies; but the Soveraignty ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... raving ocean from its bound, Shattered and rent by sacrilegious hands, The first mad billow leaps upon the sands,— Then to the Future's awful page we turn, And what we question hardly dare to learn. Still let us hope! for while we seem to tread The time-worn pathway of the nations dead, Though Sparta laughs at all our warlike deeds, And buried Athens claims our stolen creeds, Though Rome, a spectre on her broken throne, Beholds our eagle and recalls her own, Though England fling her pennons on the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... executive power, with the nobility and people in counterpoise in each scale. Thus the kingdom of Media is represented by Xenophon before the reign of Cyrus; so Polybius tells us, the best government is a mixture of the three forms, regno, optimatium, et populi imperio: the same was that of Sparta in its primitive institution by Lycurgus, made up of reges, seniores, et populus; the like may be asserted of Rome, Carthage, and other states: and the Germans of old fell upon the same model, from whence the Goths ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... goes to Ithaca to rouse Telemachus, who is just entering manhood, to be a second Ulysses. He is to give the divine warning to the guilty suitors; then he is to go to Pylos and Sparta in order to inquire about his father, who is the great pattern for the son. Thus we have a book of education for the Homeric youth whose learning came through example and through the living word of wisdom from the lips of the old ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... recited; and the men who excelled all the rest were carried high in air with shouts of joy, and crowned with wreaths of laurel, bay, oak, or parsley, one of the greatest honours a Greek could obtain. Of all the cities, Athens had the ablest men, and Sparta the most hardy; and these two had been the foremost in beating and turning back the great Persian armies of Darius and Xerxes; but since that time there had been quarrels between these two powers, and they grew weak, so that Philip, King of Macedon, ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... in Sparta about 650 B. C. His mother was a Lydian slave in Sardes, and he came into the possession of Agesides, who gave him his freedom. His beautiful songs soon procured him the rights of a Lacedaemonian citizen. He was appointed to the head-directorship in the entire department of music in Lacedaemon ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in high esteem in Greece. To be sure, barbaric Sparta made a bold stand for equality, and almost instituted a gynecocracy, but the usual idea was that a woman's opinion was not worth considering. Hence the caricaturists of the day made sly sport of the love of Pericles and Aspasia. These two were intellectual ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... feeble children who could scarce have been mar- ried at Sparta, and those provident states who studied strong and healthful generations; which happen but contingently in mere pecuniary matches or marriages made by the candle, wherein notwithstanding there is little redress to be hoped from an astrologer or a lawyer, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... When to Sparta there came Paris, with eyes blue as the sea, and hair that gleamed like gold on his purple robe, gallant and brave, and more beautiful than any mortal man, glad was the welcome that ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... was once in Sparta a great legislator named Lycurgus, who attempted to introduce a kind of human selection into the laws. He wished to make the Spartans a strong nation, because at that time bodily strength was almost the only ideal of the people. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Solon regulated the use of the gymnasia, and for very many years these laws were strictly enforced. It appears that married women did not attend the gymnasia, and unmarried women only in some parts of Greece, such as Sparta, but this custom was relaxed in ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... to him, and Aphrodite order Aeneas to sail with him, while Cassandra prophesies as to what will happen afterwards. Alexandrus next lands in Lacedaemon and is entertained by the sons of Tyndareus, and afterwards by Menelaus in Sparta, where in the course of a feast he gives ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... brilliant delusion of the possibility of a republic in France. A royalist by inborn inclination, I have now, in France, become one from conviction. For I am convinced that the French could never tolerate any republic, neither according to the constitution of Athens or of Sparta, nor, least of all, to that of the United States. The Athenians were the student-youths of mankind; their constitution was a species of academic freedom, and it would be mere folly to seek to introduce it in this our ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... world" and the utter absorption of the ascetic by the intangible world beyond. The vision of "Queen Hellas," the classic age of Greece, is followed by the conquering spirit of Hellenism spreading triumphantly from the democracies of Athens and Sparta to the Golden ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... in her endless talks with Sylvia and Jermain about themselves, had hit upon an expression and a turn of phrase which was to have more influence on Sylvia's development than its brevity seemed to warrant. She had, one day, called Sylvia a little Athenian, growing up, by the oddest of mistakes, in Sparta. Sylvia, who was in the Pater-reading stage of development, caught at her friend's phrase as at the longed-for key to her situation. It explained everything. It made everything appear in the light she wished for. Above all it enabled her to clarify her attitude towards ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... killed I know not; but in Etolia they killed all the senators, five hundred and fifty in number. Brutus was "the noblest Roman of them all," but to reanimate his soldiers on the eve of Philippi he similarly promises to give them the cities of Sparta and Thessalonica to ravage, if they win ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... out for Greece on a tour of inspection: and when you get to Sparta, Helen will see you; and for the rest—her falling in love, and going back with you—that ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... merchant of Smyrna. It is in the softest shades of rose and blue, with a lustrous sheen. The texture is as fine as velvet, and the medallion in the centre is most gracefully designed. Many rugs are sold under the name of Cassaba, which are really woven at Sparta. ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... the measured cadences of the Panegyric, the effort to lead Athens towards some higher enterprise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some uniting power, civic or imperial, another empire than that which fell in Sicily, and moved by a loftier ideal. The serious admiration of Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism, not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of Kleon or of Kritias. History never again beheld such ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... each element by combining it with the others would avert the natural process of self-destruction, and endow the State with perpetual youth. But this harmony of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy blended together, which was the ideal of many writers, and which they supposed to be exhibited by Sparta, by Carthage, and by Rome, was a chimera of philosophers never realised by antiquity. At last Tacitus, wiser than the rest, confessed that the mixed Constitution, however admirable in theory, was difficult to establish and impossible to maintain. His disheartening ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... was prevailing among the Athenians during this time; but as to the Lacedemonians he heard that they had escaped from great evils and had now got the better of the Tegeans in the war. For when Leon and Hegesicles were kings of Sparta, the Lacedemonians, who had good success in all their other wars, suffered disaster in that alone which they waged against the men of Tegea. Moreover in the times before this they had the worst laws of almost all the Hellenes, ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... of Sparta, the wisest legislators have disapproved an agrarian law as a false and dangerous innovation. Among the Romans the enormous disproportion of wealth surmounted the ideal restraints of a doubtful tradition and an obsolete ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... conducted the war as to have ended it with advantage and honour to my country. For, having secured to her the sovereignty of the sea by the defeat of the Samians, before I let her engage with the power of Sparta, I knew that our enemies would be at length wearied out and compelled to sue for a peace, because the city, from the strength of its fortifications and the great army within it, being on the land side ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... Voltaire, "attempted to abrogate slavery. Society was so accustomed to this degradation of the species, that Epictetus, who was assuredly worth more than his master, never expresses any surprise at his being a slave." Egypt, Sparta, Athens, Carthage, and Rome had their thousands of slaves. In the Bible, the best and chosen servants of God owned slaves, while in profane history the purest and greatest men did the same. In the very nation over whose devoted head hung the curse of God, slavery, ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... of the whole world," has sunk under the power of Sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for Balaustion and her Euthukles. The bark that bears them is bounding Rhodesward, and the verse has in it the leap and race of the prow. Balaustion, stricken at heart, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... that of Menelaus, for both the European and the Asiatic heroes have had their wives carried off from them—although Sita, the bride of Rama, is chaste as an icicle from Diana's temple, while Helen is the infamous type of wanton wives, ancient and modern. The Hindoo Lanka is Troy, and Ayodhya is Sparta. The material civilization of the cities in the Hindoo epic is more luxurious and gorgeous than that which Homer attributes to Greece in the heroic age. Such splendor and refinement as invests social life at Lanka and Ayodhya never appear amid ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... years. Its object was to punish Paris, son of the King of Troy, for eloping with Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and taking away a shipload of treasures to boot. The subject of Homer's Iliad is popularly supposed to be this Trojan War; in reality, however, it covers less than two months (fifty-two days) of those ten years, and its theme, as the first lines indicate, is the wrath of Achilles—the ruinous ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... besides these I met with Lycurgus the Spartan, Phocion and Tellus of Athens, and all the wise men except Periander. {123c} I saw also Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, prating with Nestor and Palamedes; near him were Hyacinthus of Sparta, Narcissus the Thespian, Hylas, and several other beauties: he seemed very fond of Hyacinthus. Some things were laid to his charge: it was even reported that Rhadamanthus was very angry with him, and threatened to ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... light. "Ten years beguiled!" he said, "but now it seems Thou art——" She shook her head. "Nay, now come dreams; Nay, now I think, remember, now I see." "What callest thou to mind?" "Hermione," She said, "our child, and Sparta my own land, And all the honour that lay to my hand Had I but chosen it, as now I would"— And sudden hid her face up in her hood, Her courage ebbed in grief, all hardness drowned In bitter weeping. Noble pity crowned The greater man in him; so for a space They wept together, she for loss; ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... thing on which he is not resolved himself; he inspires you not with courage, for he himself has none; the other animates and inflames you. I never read an author, even of those who treat of virtue and of actions, that I do not curiously inquire what kind of a man he was himself; for the Ephori at Sparta, seeing a dissolute fellow propose a wholesome advice to the people, commanded him to hold his peace, and entreated a virtuous man to attribute to himself the invention, and to propose it. Plutarch's writings, if well understood, sufficiently bespeak their author, and so ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... into Aethalides; Mercurius his son, Where it had the gift to remember all that ever was done. From thence it fled forth, and made quick transmigration To goldy-lock'd Euphorbus, who was killed in good fashion, At the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta. Hermotimus was next (I find it in my charta) To whom it did pass, where no sooner it was missing But with one Pyrrhus of Delos it learn'd to go a fishing; And thence did it enter the sophist of Greece. From Pythagore, she went into a beautiful piece, Hight Aspasia, the meretrix; and the ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... noticed during my first visit. They were portraits of great men of history who had spent their lives in perpetual devotion to a great human ideal: Thaddeus Kosciusko, the hero whose dying words had been Finis Poloniae;* Markos Botzaris, for modern Greece the reincarnation of Sparta's King Leonidas; Daniel O'Connell, Ireland's defender; George Washington, founder of the American Union; Daniele Manin, the Italian patriot; Abraham Lincoln, dead from the bullet of a believer in slavery; and finally, that martyr for the redemption of the black race, John Brown, hanging from his ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... taken a little journey, and already we want to take a longer one. Whither? To Sparta, to Mycene, to Delphi? There are a hundred places at whose names the heart beats with the desire of travel. On horseback we go up the mountain paths, through brake and through brier. A single traveller makes an appearance like a whole caravan. He rides forward with ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... on this bold adventure on June 27, 1863, with a force of several thousand mounted men, and with four pieces of artillery. The start was made from Sparta, Tennessee, where the swollen Cumberland was crossed in boats and canoes on the 1st and 2d of July, the horses, with some difficulty, being ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Constantinople haunts her dreams. She stirs up Greek against Ottoman, and her trumpeter Voltaire heralds a new Sparta and Athens; she calls her grandson Constantine, and surrounds him with Greek nurse and servants. Her famous progress southward, the most eccentric pageant in history, is typical of Patiomkin's regime. This extraordinary man—mountebank, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... constitution, that of the active citizen, but the function of an elector is not a right. I repeat, society has the right to determine its conditions. Those who misunderstand the nature as they do the advantages of representative government, remind us of the governments of Athens and Sparta, ignoring the differences that distinguish them from France, such as extent of territory, population, etc. Do they forget that they interdicted representative government? Have they forgotten that the Lacedemonians had the right to vote in the assemblies ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... will go to Ithaca, and stir up the spirit of his son Telemachus [Footnote: Te-lem'-a-chus.], that first he speak out his mind to the suitors of his mother who waste his substance, [Footnote: substance, property.] and next that he go to Sparta and to Pylos [Footnote: Py'-los.], seeking tidings of his father. So shall the youth win good report ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... Zeus and Leda, and the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; the most beautiful of women, who was carried off to Troy by Paris, to revenge whose abduction the princes of Greece, who had pledged themselves to protect her, made war on Troy, a war which lasted ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... very popular god, yet his tricksy ways caused him to be looked upon with suspicion. Every one was anxious to stand well with him. In some of the cities of ancient Greece, as Sparta and Athens, he was worshipped with great solemnity, and every five years festivals were held in ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... thoroughly, as I have,—I who was passing more than two years from the hands of one guide to those of another? Hast thou been in Rhodes to examine the site of the Colossus? Hast thou seen in Panopeus, in Phocis, the clay from which Prometheus shaped man; or in Sparta the eggs laid by Leda; or in Athens the famous Sarmatian armor made of horse-hoofs; or in Euboea the ship of Agamemnon; or the cup for whose pattern the left breast of Helen served? Hast thou seen Alexandria, Memphis, the Pyramids, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... sacrificing their children to appease the gods. Just as there has been an evolution in tools, in laws and in institutions, so has there been an evolution of the intellectual element in conscience. Thucydides tells us that the time was in Sparta when stealing was right. In that far-off time a boy was praised for exhibiting skill and dexterity in pilfering. Stealing was disgraceful and wrong only when it was found out, and, if the theft was large and skillfully done, it won honor—a condition of things that ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and their proper places. The Greeks had come to Egypt to stay. We have learned from the remains of Naukratis that throughout the Persian domination, which superseded the Saitic before the close of the sixth century, a constant importation of products of Ionia, Attica, Sparta, Cyprus and other Hellenic centres was maintained. The place was in full life when Herodotus visited Egypt, and it continued to prosper until the Greek race, becoming rulers of all the land, enthroned Hellenism at Alexandria ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... with your justice ye shall purify it; with your clemencies ye should it chasten and amerce. Ye ask me to be a queen. Shall I be a queen and not such a queen? No, I tell you; if a woman may swear a great oath, I swear by Leonidas that saved Sparta and by Christ Jesus that saved this world, so will I come by my queenship and so act in it that, if God give me strength the whole world never shall find speck upon mine honour—or upon thine if I may ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... Greece, by reason of Cenchreas and Lecheus, those excellent ports, drew all that traffic of the Ionian and Aegean seas to it; and yet the country about it was curva et superciliosa, as [560]Strabo terms it, rugged and harsh. We may say the same of Athens, Actium, Thebes, Sparta, and most of those towns in Greece. Nuremberg in Germany is sited in a most barren soil, yet a noble imperial city, by the sole industry of artificers, and cunning trades, they draw the riches of most countries to ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... and militia, and every citizen, like those of ancient Sparta, joined the military to the civil character. The officers of the militia are appointed by the Governor, who commonly nominates such men from among the inhabitants to command the rest as are most distinguished for their courage and capacity. All men of the military age being registered in the militia ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... is at the same time to the poetry which was almost always associated with music, and made its meaning and expression more definite. Thus, we can realize how Terpander could, by the power of his song, reconcile the political factions in Sparta, and how Plato could write, in the "Republic," that "any musical innovation is full of danger to the state and ought to be prevented." He looked upon music as a tonic which does for the mind what ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other? Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries. Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage were all republics; two of them, Athens and Carthage, of the commercial kind. Yet were they as often engaged in wars, offensive and defensive, as the neighboring monarchies of the same times. Sparta was little better than a wellregulated ...
— The Federalist Papers
... Peloponnesus, was also divided into eleven provinces, of which the more important were Arcadia, embracing the central part of the peninsula; Achaia, the northern part; Argolis, the eastern; and Messenia and Laconia, the southern. The last district was ruled by the city of Sparta, the great ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... to him, because he feared that Enarsphorus the son of Hippocoon would take her by force, she being only a child at the time. But the most probable story and that which most writers agree in is the following: The two friends, Theseus and Peirithous, came to Sparta, seized the maiden, who was dancing in the temple of Artemis Orthia, and carried her off. As the pursuers followed no farther than Tegea, they felt no alarm, but leisurely travelled through Peloponnesus, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... jingling over her arm came shivering into the room. "Oo-oo-ooh!" Her teeth chattered. "Wynnie's freezing. Do shut that window and turn on the heat, Agnes. It is hard lines to live in a double with a regular Polar bear direct from the land of Sparta. You ought to keep it up as high as ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... loftiest virtue to a debasement beneath calculation. They disgrace honor; they trample upon justice. They transform the legions of Rome into a band of singers. They prostrate the sons of Athens and of Sparta at the feet of cowards. They make man abjure his birth right, bind himself to another's will, and give that into a tyrant's hands which he received as a deposit from Heaven—his reason, his conscience, and his soul. Think on this, and then, if you ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Tyndarus, had sent her to be kept by him, for fear of Enarophorus, the son of Hippocoon, who would have carried her away by force when she was yet a child. But the most probable account, and that which has witnesses on its side, is this: Theseus and Pirithous went both together to Sparta, and, having seized the young lady as she was dancing in the temple of Diana Orthia, fled away with her. There were presently men in arms sent to pursue, but they followed no farther than to Tegea; and Theseus and Pirithous being now out of danger, having passed through Peloponnesus, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... can sustain yourself until this time. I can hardly conceive of the enemy breaking through at Kingston and pushing for Kentucky. If they should, however, a new problem would be left for solution. Thomas has ordered a division of cavalry to the vicinity of Sparta. I will ascertain if they have started, and inform you. It will be entirely out of the question to send you ten thousand men, not because they cannot be spared, but how would they be fed after they got even ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Of course this is meant only of the modern citizen or country-gentleman, as compared with a citizen of Sparta or old Florence. I leave it to others to say whether the "neglect of the art of war" may or may not, in a yet more fatal sense, be predicated of the English nation. War, without art, we seem, with God's help, able ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... for duty in the North, and has made several patrols in very cold weather." Other men well known in that district were non-commissioned officers like Sergeants Handcock, Belcher, Currie, Mellor, LaNauze, Jones and several Constables. And, like the army of Sparta, which was the wall around that country, ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... contest of eight years, between the feeble colonies and the strong mother-land, of a courage that ancient Sparta would ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... of Sparta that the last was always regretted as the best the country had ever had. Colonel Wetherall's merit did not depend on his being the last of a series. Phrases such as 'he was worshipped by the men' have become so hackneyed ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... others, like the Ionians, and most of the barbarians, disapprove of them; partly because they are aware of the political dangers which ensue from them, as may be seen in the instance of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. At Athens and Sparta there is an apparent contradiction about them. For at times they are encouraged, and then the lover is allowed to play all sorts of fantastic tricks; he may swear and forswear himself (and 'at lovers' perjuries they say Jove laughs'); he may be a servant, ...
— Symposium • Plato
... temper of his heart. "The personal appearance of Captain Nelson at this period of his life, owing to his delicate health and diminutive figure, was far from expressing the greatness of his intellectual powers. From his earliest years, like Cleomenes, the hero of Sparta, he had been enamoured of glory, and had possessed a greatness of mind. Nelson preserved, also, a similar temperance and simplicity of manners. Nature, as Plutarch adds of the noble Spartan, had given a spur to his mind which ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... with Hercules and Cadmus once. When in a wood of Creete they bayed the Beare With hounds of Sparta; neuer did I heare Such gallant chiding. For besides the groues, The skies, the fountaines, euery region neere, Seeme all one mutuall cry. I neuer heard So musicall ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... fully convinced that he had now no alternative, but must besiege the city, sent persons to bring up all the marine forces from Gythium; and, in the mean time, rode himself, with some military tribunes, round the walls, to take a view of the situation of the place. In former times, Sparta had no wall; of late, the tyrants had built walls in the places where the ground Was open and level; but the higher places, and those more difficult of access, they secured by placing guards of soldiers instead of fortifications. When ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... the fellow was a thief. And therefore an impertinent jeerer makes the whole company seem ill-natured and abusive, as being pleased with and consenting to the scurrility of the jeer. It was one of the excellent laws in Sparta, that none should be bitter in their jests, and the jeered should patiently endure; but if he took offence, the other was to forbear, and pursue the frolic no farther. How is it possible therefore to determine such raillery as shall delight and please the person ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Ocean in another direction, and 500 years of prosperity, dead. Dead, answer the "Pillars of Hercules" and the rocks on which the Tyrian fishermen spread their nets. Athens—after Phidias, after Demosthenes, after Miltiades, after Marathon—dead. Sparta—after Leonidas, after ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... war, occupying with his household a turret of the wall, as Thucydides describes—one of many picturesque touches in that severe historian—could well remember the ancient provincial life which this conflict with Sparta was bringing to an end. He could recall his boyish, half-scared curiosity concerning those Persian ships, coming first as merchantmen, or with pirates on occasion, in the half-savage, wicked splendours of their decoration, the monstrous figure-heads, their glittering freightage. Men ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... death with his naval ally, Demosthenes; and his troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. When this bad news reached Rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of Athens, and resolved to side with Sparta. Balaustion[96:1] was there, and she passionately protested against this decision, crying to "who would hear, and those ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... an effect of the social contract it is precarious like the contract itself; a new stipulation suffices to limit it or to destroy it. "The sovereign[3423] may legitimately appropriate to himself all property, as was done in Sparta in the time of Lycurgus." In our lay convent whatever each monk possesses is only a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... master of the Medes and Persians, and Croesus, fearing his power, was fain to go up against him, being deceived by an oracle; but first he sought to make alliance with the chief of the states of Hellas. In those days, Pisistratus was despot of Athens; but Sparta was mighty, by the laws of Lycurgus. Therefore Croesus sent envoys to the Spartans to make alliance with them, which was done very willingly. But when Croesus went up against Cyrus, his army was put to flight, and Cyrus besieged ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... The Zaconic dialect of Lacedaemon is the sole exception. It is not derived from the Koine, but stems directly from the Doric dialect of Sparta.] ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... testimony. We find in his works no evidence that he had read the masters in political economy; not even Adam Smith, whose reputation was at its height during the' first half of his public life. In history he was the merest smatterer, though it was his favorite reading, and he was always talking about Sparta, Athens, and Rome. The slenderness of his far tune prevented his travelling. He never saw Europe; and if he ever visited the Northern States, after leaving college, his stay was short. The little that he knew of life was gathered in three places, all of which were ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... and north of the peninsula of Pallene. It was colonized by a people from Chalcis in Euboea, and commanded a large district called Chalcidice, in which there were thirty-two cities. Over all this tract the sway of Olynthus was considerable, and she had waged wars anciently with Athens and Sparta, and been formidable to Philip's predecessors on the throne of Macedon. Soon after Philip's accession, the Olynthians had disputes with him, which were at first accommodated, and he gratified them by the cession of Anthemus. They then joined him in a war against ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... that Pericles loved? Where are the youths that were Socrates' friends? There was a town where all learnt What the wisest had taught! Why had crude Sparta such treasonous force? Could Philip of Macedon Breed a true Greek of his son? What honour to conquer a world Where Alcibiades failed, Lead half-drilled highland hordes Whose lust would inherit the wise? There is nothing art's industry ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... yet I was not always thus,—a hired butcher, a savage chief of still more savage men. My ancestors came from old Sparta, and settled among the vine-clad rocks and citron groves of Syrasella. My early life ran quiet as the brooks by which I sported; and when, at noon, I gathered the sheep beneath the shade, and played upon the shepherd's flute, there was a friend, the son of a neighbor, to join me in the pastime. ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... unrelenting tribe, took possession of the southern extremity of the peninsula, called the Peloponnesus; and the city of Sparta was the head of their State. There were other States, too, in Greece, and each had its king and separate government. But although jealous of each other and almost always at war, they worshipped the same deities, consulted the same Oracles, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 25, April 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... political web with singular lucidity. Here it must be sufficient to say that, after the death of Pyrrhus, a conflict between Macedonia and Egypt, which stood at the head of an anti-Macedonian coalition of which Athens, Epirus, and Sparta were the principal members, became inevitable. The rivalry between the two States led to the Chremonidean war—so called because in 266 the Athenian Chremonides moved the declaration of war against Antigonus. The result of the war was that on land Antigonus remained the complete master of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the armure on the backes of citezeins, or subjectes, given by the disposicion of order and lawe, did never harme, but rather alwaies it doeth good, and mainteineth the citee, moche lenger in suretie, through helpe of this armure, then without. Rome continued free CCCC. yeres, and was armed. Sparta viii.C. Many other citees have been disarmed, and have remained free, lesse then xl. For as moche as citees have nede of defence, and when thei have no defence of their owne, thei hire straungers, and the straunges defence, ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... back from the Isthmus, he then no longer paid obedience to their commands, but sailed away to the Hellespont, 4. and was in consequence condemned to death, for disobedience, by the chief magistrates at Sparta. Being then an exile, he went to Cyrus; and by what methods he conciliated the favour of Cyrus, has been told in another place. Cyrus presented him with ten thousand darics; 5. and he, on receiving that sum, did not give himself up to idleness, but having collected an army with the money, ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... did a difference of the colour of the skin constitute always, as it now does, a most marked distinction between the master and the slave, so as to increase this stigma and to perpetuate antipathies between them. Nor did the slaves of antiquity, except perhaps once in Sparta, form the whole labouring population of the land; nor did they work incessantly, like the Africans, under the whip; nor were they generally so behind their masters in cultivated intellect. Neither ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... of one thousand one hundred and eighty-six ships and an army of more than one hundred thousand Greeks, under the command of Agamemnon, lay before King Priam's city of Troy to avenge the wrongs of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and to reclaim Helen, his wife, who had been carried away by Priam's son Paris, at the ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... prerogatives, well-meaning men and women may taste many of the good things and be able to bear some of the hardships of the common life. But to compass in permanent form its aspirations in this direction, as in many others, nature is incompetent. The terrible if wonderful success of Sparta is what can be attained, and tells at what cost. The economy of the bee-hive, which kills or drives away its superfluous members, and the polity of Sparta, which put the cripples and the aged to death, are essential to permanent success in the venture of communism in the natural ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... those of paganism; its supernatural marvels are more than a compensation for the loss of pagan mythology. The time chosen for his epopee in prose is the reign of the persecutor Diocletian; Rome and the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, Egypt, the deserts of the Thebaid, Jerusalem, Sparta, Athens, form only portions of the scene; heaven and hell are open to the reader, but Chateaubriand, whose faith was rather a sentiment than a passion, does not succeed in making his supernatural habitations and personages credible even to the fancy. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... economic organisation incredible, our minds play freely about possibilities that would have struck the men of the Academy as outrageous extravagance, and it is in regard to politico-social expedients that our imaginations fail. Sparta, for all the evidence of history, is scarcely more credible to us than a motor-car throbbing in the agora would have been ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... jurisdiction in the kingdom, if by any means a misgovernment should any way fall upon it, the subjects of this kingdom are left without all manner of remedy. To the same purpose the president Montesquieu, though I trust too hastily, presages[e]; that as Rome, Sparta, and Carthage have lost their liberty and perished, so the constitution of England will in time lose it's liberty, will perish: it will perish, whenever the legislative power shall become more ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... or forced to fly into strongholds." On the second of April, the flag of independence was hoisted in Achaia. On the ninth, a Grecian senate met at Calamata, in Messenia, having for its president Mavromichalis, Prince or Bey of Maina, a rugged territory in the ancient Sparta, famous for its hardy race of robbers and pirates. [Footnote: These Mainates have been supposed to be of Sclavonian origin; but Mr. Gordon, upon the authority of the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitos, asserts that they are of pure Laconian blood, and became Christians ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... is said to have visited a temple at Heraclea, where he had her spirit called up and implored her pardon. She duly appeared, and told him that "he would soon be delivered from all his troubles after his return to Sparta"—an ambiguous way of prophesying his death, which occurred soon afterwards. She was certainly avenged in the ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... our Sparta; ye "Gave with vine that leaps and runs "O'er her slopes, these slaves to be "Mocks ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... of their leaders were greatly versed in ancient as well as modern learning, and were even enthusiastically attached to the great names of antiquity; but they never conceived the wild project of assimilating the government of England to that of Athens, of Sparta, or of Rome. They were content with applying to the English constitution, and to the English laws, the spirit of liberty which had animated and rendered illustrious the ancient republics. Their first object was to obtain redress of ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... 5 Lycurgus fashion'd Sparta's fame, And Pompey to the Roman name Gave universal sway: Where are they?—Homer's reverend page Holds empire to the thirtieth age, And ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside |
