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More "Spartan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distasteful medicine in the solid—the girl tidied the room. It was the only really well-furnished room in the cottage; Nell's little chamber in the roof was as plain as Marguerite's in "Faust," and Dick's was Spartan in its Character; but a Wolfer—Mrs. Lorton was a distant, a very distant connection by a remote marriage of the noble family of that name—cannot live without a certain amount of luxury, and, as there was not enough ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... that a modern Utopia must differ from the Utopias of any preceding age in being world-wide; it is not, therefore, to be the development of any special race or type of culture, as Plato's developed an Athenian-Spartan blend, or More, Tudor England. The modern Utopia is to be, before all things, synthetic. Politically and socially, as linguistically, we must suppose it a synthesis; politically it will be a synthesis of once widely different forms of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of number and Spartan poverty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... experience with full-opened throat; pretending to be mannish—driven to that extremity by the super-femininity of Henrietta Bryne-Stivers; pretending to be frivolous, to shock rigid Mrs. Pemberton; pretending to be a blue-stocking with a passion for the solid and heavy in literature; pretending to be a Spartan who must rise at dawn and, after a plunge in ice-cold mountain water, climb, with only big Don, the Newfoundland, for company, up to the sluice-box; there to pretend she was an esthete to whom the sunrise, while she communed alone with ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... from that time Captain Yorke had become a marked figure with the boys. Before this, he had not been known to many of them; but now he was pointed out by the few who had been present at the scene at the fountain, as the Spartan grandfather who had not hesitated to deal out punishment to his own flesh and blood, when it seemed to him that justice demanded it. He was often to be seen now in the park, the centre of an admiring and appreciative group, to whom he related thrilling ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... detain'd her father in the field. But while his sov'reign's toil the vet'ren shar'd, His lovely child the fost'ring graces rear'd. D'Etree (that name the favour'd mortal bore), 165 Of ev'ry, charm exhausted Nature's store. Not on Eurota's bank, so beauteous shone The faithless partner of the Spartan throne; Not she who conquer'd, whom the world obey'd, On Cydnus when in pomp of charms array'd, 170 Mortals deceiv'd, in awful rapture gaz'd, And incense to the present goddess blaz'd. Scarce had she gain'd the charming dang'rous ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... Dr. Opimian. The short of it, at any rate. You speak like a Spartan. You come to the point at once. But why do you come to me? I have no control over ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because un-Greek and also very different from anything which existed at all in his age of the world, is the transposition of ranks. In the Spartan state there had been enfranchisement of Helots and degradation of citizens under special circumstances. And in the ancient Greek aristocracies, merit was certainly recognized as one of the elements on which government was based. The founders of ...
— The Republic • Plato
... it?" You oughtn't to have made so much money, and then they'd have had to work." She laughed at Lapham's Spartan mood, and went on to excuse the young people. "Irene's been up two nights hand running, and Penelope says she ain't well. What makes you so cross about the girls? Been ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Spartan mothers with one voice, while the other sisters danced round them, and Kate patted ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... outward Nature and inferior creatures to the disparagement of man,—by no means due to composure and philosophy. The ox is no great hero, after all, for he will bellow at a thousandth part the sense of pain which from a Spartan child wrings no tear ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... opened up once more to those whom long-tick had gradually restricted to a Spartan diet of hard-tack and salt pork. What thoughts of home and the money that could be sent to loved ones far away, suffering, perhaps for lack of that very money—but how to do it,—there was the question. Here we were in the very heart of the Rebel country, ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... already reasoned out, and some of it he reasoned out later. In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a Spartan. He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... you're a weakling!" Halloran snapped. "You are a—sentimentalist. You lack my stern, uncompromising moral fiber. Like him? Pah! What has that to do with it? I have no weakness, no bowels of compassion. I am a Spartan. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the repose of their Spartan pillows. The Captain forgot, in his zeal for Spanish dominion, that daring Sir Francis Drake, in days even then out of the memory of man, piloted the "Golden Hind" into Drake's Bay. He landed near San Francisco in 1578, and remained till the early months of 1579. Under the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... of however long duration, conclusively fatal against a wife; for we meet Helen, after a twenty years' elopement, again the quiet, hospitable mistress in the Spartan palace, entertaining her husband's guests with an easy matronly dignity, and not afraid even in Menelaus's presence to allude to the past—in strong terms of self-reproach, indeed, but with nothing like despairing prostration. Making the worst of this, however, yet even in this ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... health, his perspicacity; and he used to lecture comparative strangers about their duties with incredible insolence. The clergyman's life was made a burden to him, and the doctor's as well. Though he was the most luxurious and comfort-loving old wretch, his great text was the value of Spartan discipline for everyone else. If any dish was not exactly to his mind, he would allow no one to taste it, send it away, and complain bitterly that even his simple wants could not be supplied. Even when he got more infirm and took most of his food in seclusion, he ordered the meals for the rest of ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... nation, who the name, Of all who there together came? From Theseus' town, from Aulis' strand From Phocis, from the Spartan land, From Asia's distant coast, they wend, From every island of the sea, And from the stage they hear ascend The chorus's ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... they passed through, and came to close combat with them. They had linen cuirasses, reaching down to the groin, and, instead of skirts,[228] thick cords twisted. 16. They had also greaves and helmets, and at their girdles a short faulchion, as large as a Spartan crooked dagger, with which they cut the throats of all whom they could master, and then, cutting off their heads, carried them away with them. They sang and danced when the enemy were likely to see them. They carried also ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... the 'Abbad Kattaleen Arabs, but we were safe under the escort of the Saltiyeh instead of the 'Adwan. These 'Abbad are the people who assaulted and plundered some seamen of H.M.S. "Spartan" in 1847, on the Jordan; for which offence they have never yet been chastised, notwithstanding the urgent applications made to the Turkish Pashas of Jerusalem, Bayroot, and Damascus. We did not arrive at the encampment ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... reply, and his silence wounded Lady Lucy to the quick. Was it her fault if her husband, out of an eccentric distrust of the character of his son, and moved by a kind of old-fashioned and Spartan belief that a man must endure hardness before he is fit for luxury, had made her and not Oliver the arbiter and legatee of his wealth? But Oliver had never wanted for anything. He had only to ask. What right had she ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... interest of the body can admit. I have seen a place full of high possibilities and hopes, bestowing a treasure of bright memories of work, of play, of friendship, upon the majority of its members, and upholding a Spartan ideal of personal subordination to the common weal, an ideal not enforced by law so much as sustained by honour, an institution which, if it does not encourage originality, is yet a sound reflection of national tendencies, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... relentless; on, on over the rolling hills swept the famishing troopers, and again the Spartan band turned at bay, firmly intrenched on a bluff as before. This was the last stand—nature was exhausted. The soldiers surrounded them, and Major Wessells turned the handle of the human vise. The command ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... the human being as the human being, nude—apart altogether from money, clothing, houses, properties—should enjoy greater health, strength, safety, beauty, and happiness, I would gladly agree to a discipline like that of Sparta. The Spartan method did produce the finest race of men, and Sparta was famous in antiquity for the most beautiful women. So far, therefore, it fits ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... would have found in 1881 what they discovered only in 1897, that they needed training and concentration to hold their own, and that the path of conquest of their ancient estate was set with obstacles which only Spartan discipline and endurance could clear away. As it has happened, the lesson has been learned only after all the competing elements have had theirs and are on the way to the primacy in the Balkans which the Greeks thought the heritage of their race, but of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... commonly met with a rather cold reception. He repelled everything in the shape of a compliment. Dr. Edward Emerson says somewhere that his father was used to eat whatever was set before him with Spartan-like indifference. This mistake may have arisen from the good quality of Mrs. Emerson's housekeeping, and the excellent fare which she provided for her husband and his friends. Emerson wished to bear the hardships of life without complaining, but he also knew that to make life unnecessarily ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... seldom the heroism which I feel within my own breast. I blame not those who think the heart cannot bleed because it is so strong; but little they dream of what lies concealed beneath the determined courage. Yet mine has been the Spartan sternness, smiling while it hides the wound. I long rather for the Christian spirit, which even on the cross prays, "Father, forgive them," and rises above fortitude ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... chanced often at the parsonage, and, at nine years of age, I reigned king absolute over a nursery full of her Majesty's subjects who called me brother, and quailed before my nod like Helots before the crest of a Spartan. But, as I say, all that is neither here nor ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... and much else, let us note only this small consequence, that young Barbaroux, Advocate, Town-Clerk of Marseilles, being charged to have these things remedied, arrived at Paris in the month of February 1792. The beautiful and brave: young Spartan, ripe in energy, not ripe in wisdom; over whose black doom there shall flit nevertheless a certain ruddy fervour, streaks of bright Southern tint, not wholly swallowed of Death! Note also that the Rolands ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... but weep o'er days more blest? Must we but blush?—Our fathers bled. Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... of the Prussian King as he sat by the piano was anything but prepossessing. A little, crabbed, spare old man, attired with Spartan simplicity, in a faded blue coat, whose red facings were smudged brown with the Spanish snuff he so liberally took; thin lips, prominent jaws, receding forehead, and eyes of supernatural keenness glaring from under shaggy brows; a battered cocked hat, and ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... in the Edinburgh Review (July, 1859) observes that "the Duke's talents seem never to have developed themselves until some active and practical field for their display was placed immediately before him. He was long described by his Spartan mother, who thought him a dunce, as only 'food for powder.' He gained no sort of distinction, either at Eton or at the French Military College of Angiers." It is not improbable that a competitive examination, at this day, might have ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... seeing how the communications of Hippias were received, "that when our Nemesis takes lodgings in the stomach, it's best to act the Spartan, smile hard, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... perhaps for the same reason that the Spartans of old excelled all other nations in physical strength, but with this difference, that nature doles out to the weakly colts the same fate which the Spartan parents apportioned to ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... martyr. It is certainly no light heritage, the knowledge, that his brave blood flows in their veins. For history does not record, that any other of its long and shining line of heroes and martyrs, ever met death, anywhere on this globe, in a holier cause or a sublimer mood, than died this Spartan-like slave, more than three quarters of a ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... rules suggest a new atmosphere and one very different from that in which we passed our stormy youth, for no sentiment of this kind softened life in earlier days or affected our Spartan simplicity. The very sight of a newcomer in a speckless suit, with an irreproachable tie and both tails on his glengarry bonnet, excited a profound emotion in the school and carried it beyond self-control. What could be expected ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... in Nineteen Hundred Two, he bore the blow like a Spartan. Fifty-eight years had they journeyed together. She was a woman of great good sense, and a very handsome woman, even in her old age. Her husband had always depended on her, telling her his plans and thus clarifying them in his own mind. They were companions, friends, chums, lovers—man and wife. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... the centre of culture, refinement, and wealth, we tried to recall the stories of her glorious past. The figures of legend, myth, and history,—mighty warriors, celebrated heroes, eloquent orators, illustrious painters, renowned architects, great historians, immortal poets, and wonderful deities; Spartan mothers, Thermopylae defenders, and Persian invaders; beautiful Helen, muscular Hercules, crusty Diogenes, deformed AEsop, silver-tongued Demosthenes, fleet-footed Mercury, drunken Silenus, stately Juno, and lovely Venus,—a confused procession ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... undergoing the same alarm, and, without further hesitation, engaged herself in the search, beginning with a song, which might be compared to the hymn of battle among the Greeks, or rather more aptly to that which the Spartan females sung round the altar of Diana, surnamed Orthian; for it was attended with strange gesticulations, and, in the course of utterance, became so loud and shrill, that the guests, who were by this ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... of learning,' says Gibbon, 'do not exactly correspond with the precept of a Spartan king, that the child should be instructed in the arts which will be useful to the man; since a finished scholar may emerge from the head of Westminster or Eton, in total ignorance of the business ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... to keep goin' on to school, whereas I should have returned homeward an' cast myse'f upon my parents as a sacred trust. Of course, when I'm in school I don't go impartin' my troubles to the other chil'en; I emyoolates the heroism of the Spartan boy who stands to be eat by a fox, an' keeps 'em to myself. But the views of my late enemy is not to be smothered; they appeals to my young companions; who tharupon puts up a most onneedful riot of coughin's an' sneezin's. But nobody knows me as ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... bred out of the Spartan kinde, So flew'd, so sanded, and their heads are hung With eares that sweepe away the morning dew, Crooke kneed, and dew-lapt, like Thessalian Buls, Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bels, Each vnder each. A cry ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... what has been accomplished to make your city what it is, the aged have done the most. The middle aged may say we will improve upon what has been done; and the young, we shall accomplish still more than our fathers. That, fellow-citizens, was the boast in the ancient Spartan procession—a procession which was divided into three classes—the old, the middle-aged, and the young. They had a saying which each class repeated in turn. ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... eye will be on Occoquan for the next few weeks, to find out how these women bear up under the Spartan treatment that is in store for them. If they have deliberately sought martyrdom, as some critics have been unkind enough to suggest, they have it now. And if their campaign, in the opinion of perhaps the great majority of the public, has been misguided, admiration for their ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... "Spartan girl! Proud Lucy!" she would say, smiling at me. "Graham says you are the most peculiar, capricious little woman he knows; but yet you are excellent; we ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... series of long and bitter tragedies. There is a look in his face of bronze that frightens us, a tone lights up the gamut of his voice that makes it unlike any other voice we have ever heard—a voice that will echo in the tomb of time—a Spartan courage that shall be regnant a millennium beyond ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... go with me to that iridescent music-hall up the street. Chubby's appearance is deceptive. She is diminutive, with a Kenwigs tail of plaited hair down her straight little back. But she is almost twenty; she is amazingly swift behind the bar, and no man has yet bilked her of a penny. There is a Spartan courage about the small maiden, too, which I cannot but admire. Her parents are dead; her sisters both died the same week a year ago; she must earn her living; but—"No use mopin', is it?" she inquires as she fingers a locket containing photographs which hangs around her ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... him a middle-aged man when first he appears on that stage on which he performed so pure and brilliant a part through seventeen eventful years. Eight years after he first came forward he won the Battle of Leuctra, which shattered the Spartan supremacy forever, and was the most perfect specimen of scientific fighting that is to be found in classical history, and which some of the greatest of modern commanders have been proud merely to imitate. After that action, but not immediately after it, he invaded the Peloponnesus, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... saddle bow an ostrich [36] feather,—emblem of truth,—and the moment his javelin has drawn blood, he sticks it into his tufty pole with as much satisfaction as we feel when attaching a medal to our shell-jackets. It is by no means necessary to slay the foe in fair combat: Spartan-like, treachery is preferred to stand-up fighting; and you may measure their ideas of honor, by the fact that women are murdered in cold blood, as by the Amazulus, with the hope that the unborn child may prove a male. The hero ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... fooled his soldiers; and that the rough-and-ready justice of the camp should be her reward. Had Othello any knowledge or experience in such matters to fall back on, he might anchor to that, and become definitely either the trusting husband or the Spartan judge. But as it is, he is whirled back and forth in a maelstrom of agonized doubt, until compass, bearings, and wisdom lost, he ends all in ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... advertisements as to the danger of reckless young gentlemen skating thereon, and a total absence of sweet sauce and currant-jelly. We paused—we grieved—John Smith saw it—he inquired the cause—we felt for him, but determined, with Spartan fortitude, to speak the truth. Our native modesty and bursting heart caused our drooping eyes once more to scan the ground, and, next to the ground, the wretched Bluchers. But, joy of joys! we saw them all! ay, all!—all—from the seam in the sides to the leech-like fat cotton-ties. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to feel quite tired and sleepy before the doctor returned for him, and his bruises ached badly. Once he would have cried and worried every one about him, if in such an uncomfortable state; but now he bore the pain like a Spartan. ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels
... cells Confine them now, lest bloody civil wars Annoy thy peaceful state. If left at large, The growling rivals in dread battle join, And rude encounter. On Scamander's streams Heroes of old with far less fury fought, For the bright Spartan dame, their valour's prize. Mangled and torn thy favourite hounds shall lie, Stretched on the ground; thy kennel shall appear A field of blood: like some unhappy town 50 In civil broils confused, while Discord shakes ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... assistance nothing pure, nothing correct, can genius produce) do thou guide my pen. Thee in thy favourite fields, where the limpid, gently-rolling Thames washes thy Etonian banks, in early youth I have worshipped. To thee, at thy birchen altar, with true Spartan devotion, I have sacrificed my blood. Come then, and from thy vast, luxuriant stores, in long antiquity piled up, pour forth the rich profusion. Open thy Maeonian and thy Mantuan coffers, with whatever else includes thy philosophic, thy poetic, and ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... painted wooden bedsteads, seemed to her in their very poorness and unpretentiousness to be emblematical of all the virtues. As she lingered in the quiet rooms, while Letty raced along the passages, Anna said to herself that this Spartan simplicity, this absence of every luxury that could still further soften an already languid and effeminate soul, was beautiful. Here, as in the whitewashed praying-places of the Puritans, if there were any beauty and any glory it must all come from within, be all of the ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... thy claims are justly great: Thy milder virtues could my Muse relate, To thee, alone, unrivall'd, would belong The feeble efforts of my lengthen'd song. [xi] 290 Well canst thou boast, to lead in senates fit, A Spartan firmness, with Athenian wit: Though yet, in embryo, these perfections shine, LYCUS! thy father's fame [15] will soon be thine. Where Learning nurtures the superior mind, What may we hope, from genius thus refin'd; When Time, at length, matures thy growing years, How wilt thou tower, above thy ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... unrivalled, can now see a EUGENE SUE whose brow is umbraged by laurels of a more luxuriant and lovely green. Cease your expectorations of bile upon a great people; admit that mastication of the 'odorous vegeble' is a Spartan virtue; and we will again vote you an Anak in the kingdom of pen and paper. Then again shall we be led to believe that your praises and your vituperations are equally unpurchasable. Then once more shall we think you would ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... helped her mount her horse, restraining himself like a Spartan, and they rode home ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... it is and has been a motive of State. Power has been the fetish of kings and emperors from the beginning of political history, and it remains to be seen whether it will not continue to inspire democracies. The passion for empire ruined the Athenian democracy, no less than the Spartan or the Venetian oligarchy, or the Spain of Philip II, or the France of the Monarchy and the Empire. But it still makes its appeal to the romantic imagination. Its intoxication has lain behind this war, and it will prompt many others ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... whereas Doria loved elegant austerity everywhere. So they had a pure Jacobean entrance hall, a Louis XV drawing-room, an Empire bedroom, and as far as I could judge by the barrenness of the apartment, a Spartan study for Adrian. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... of ardent Falernian in the passing stream? Who will tempt the vagrant wanton Lyde from her house? See that you bid her hasten with her ivory lyre, collecting her hair into a graceful knot, after the fashion of a Spartan maid. ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... by no less speedy a fall, and one act of indiscretion stripped the Athenians of all the advantages which they had acquired on the mainland of Greece. In every city of Greece there were always two parties, the wealthy and noble, called oligarchs, and the demos, or commons; and according as Spartan or Athenian influence was in the ascendant the balance of power in each city wavered between the nobles and the people, the Athenians favouring the Many, the Spartans the Few. Accordingly there was always a party living in exile, and waiting ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan;—all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... old-fashioned creative orgy. With one large difference. In the past, copy, layouts, and other campaign ingredients were threshed out in endless conferences, and decisions were made on the basis of an informed group guess. Now, each new idea was exposed at infancy like a Spartan baby to the elemental reaction of Ev & Co., and instantly given ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... coiling serpents; then the loud, clear, triumphant notes, 'Give me liberty,' electrified the assembly. It was not a prayer, but a stern demand, which would submit to no refusal or delay. The sound of his voice, as he spoke these memorable words, was like that of a Spartan paean on the field of Plataea; and, as each syllable of the word 'liberty' echoed through the building, his fetters were shivered; his arms were hurled apart; and the links of his chains were scattered to the winds. ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... See! beauteous Helen, with her Trojan swain— The royal youth that fed his amorous pain, With ardent gaze, on those destructive charms That waken'd half the warring world to arms— Yonder, behold Oenone's wild despair, Who mourns the triumphs of the Spartan fair! The injured husband answers groan for groan, And young Hermione with piteous moan Orestes calls; while Laodamia near Bewails her valiant consort's fate severe.— Adrastus' daughter there laments her spouse Sincere and constant to her nuptial vows; Yet, lured ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... identified himself with their philosophical opinions, and would have revived Greek customs and modes of life. He used to give suppers after the manner of the ancients, and used to astonish his guests by the ancient cookery of Spartan broth, and of mulsum. He was an enthusiastical Platonist. On a visit to Oxford, he was received with great respect by the scholars of the University, who were much interested in meeting with one who had studied ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... delay the psychic restraint which should early preponderate over the physical. But will-culture for boys is rarely as thorough as it should be without more or less flogging. I would not, of course, urge the extremes of the past. The Spartan beating as a gymnastic drill to toughen, the severity which prevailed in Germany for a long time after its Thirty Years' Wars,[2] the former fashion in many English schools of walking up not infrequently to take a flogging as a plucky thing to do, and with no notion ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... reserved, he always was friendly and courteous to his comrades, grateful for every mark of friendship and kindness, and always ready to protect the young and feeble against the overbearing and the strong, censuring with grave authority every injustice, and with Spartan harshness throwing his contempt into the very face of him who, according to his standard, had offended against honor, the lofty spirit and the ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... nations going over the top—the same nations who had been over so many times; they wanted to see their sons and brothers at once given the opportunity to share the wounds and the danger. Their attitude was Spartan and splendid; they demanded a curtailment of their respite that they might find themselves afloat on the crimson tide. The cry of the civilians in America was identical with that of their men in France. "Let them take off our khaki or else hurry us into the ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... maturest thoughts on education, on government, on the type of man,—a rare type, alone fitted for leadership. The figure of his hero, Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire, known to him by story and legend, is modelled on the Spartan king Agesilaus, whom he loved and admired, and under whom he served in Persia and in Greece (op. cit. Vol. II., see under Agesilaus, Index, and Hellenica, Bks. III.-V. Agesilaus, an Encomium, passim). Certain traits are also taken from the younger Cyrus, whom Xenophon followed ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... tale who saves himself from cobra or rattler by letting the serpent crawl its slow way over his perfectly controlled body might have withheld even a quiver of the flesh, but I am no Spartan. At my convulsive shudder each horrid claw gripped a death-hold. In one swift motion I seized a corkscrew that lay nearby, pried loose with a quick jerk every single pede and threw the odious thing a dozen yards. A trail of red, inflamed spots rose where it had stood and remained painful ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... willing to improve and conform its entire framework to the increased light of God's word and Providence? It was Luther's deep sense of obligation to the Bible, as paramount to all human authority, which enabled him and his Spartan band of coadjutors, under God, to reform the church of Germany from so many Romish errors, and nothing short of the same noble principle can conduct the church safely in her high and holy mission of converting the world. Whilst, therefore, we love Luther much, let us, my brethren, ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... tributary to success and triumph began to suffer dissolution; each separate interest became a prominent centre of a distinct political crystallization; and it was in this way that certain elements of barbarism, inherent in Spartan civilization, now for the first time arrayed it in direct opposition to the Athenian. It was this defection, on the part of Sparta, from the cause of freedom, which cut the world off from those benefits that it was in the power of Greece to confer. Athens, whatever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Whatever agreement you make with Murray, if satisfactory to you, must be so to me. There need be no scruple, because, though I used sometimes to buffoon to myself, loving a quibble as well as the barbarian himself (Shakspeare, to wit)—'that, like a Spartan, I would sell my life as dearly as possible'—it never was my intention to turn it to personal, pecuniary account, but to bequeath it to a friend—yourself—in the event of survivorship. I anticipated that period, because we happened ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... of the painter's thoughts, and, collecting all the manhood that he possessed, seized the opportunity of profiting by his enemy's consternation. Striking his sword and pistol together, he advanced in a sort of trot, raising a loud howl, in which he repeated, in lieu of the Spartan song, part of the strophe from one of Pindar's Pythia, beginning with ek theon gar makanoi pasai Broteais aretais, etc. This imitation of the Greeks had all the desired effect upon the painter, who seeing the physician running towards him like a fury, with a pistol in his right hand, which ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Editor. "I never gave a picnic before, and I'm weighed down by responsibility. My brother refuses to help me, and Mrs McNab is a Spartan, and nips my suggestions in the bud. She thinks we ought to be satisfied with bread and butter; I want cakes and fruit; I want her to bake, and she says she has no time to bake; I want to send over to Rew on the chance of ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was still read and quoted. On 12 December, 1786, Horace Walpole writes to the Countess of Upper Ossory, 'I am going to Mrs. Cowley's new play,[59] which I suppose is as instructive as the Marriage of Figaro, for I am told it approaches to those of Mrs. Behn in Spartan delicacy; but I shall see Miss Farren, who, in my poor opinion is the first of all actresses.' Sir Walter Scott admired and praised her warmly. But the pinchbeck sobriety of later times was unable to ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... were Spartan women, as the story-books say, I wonder if their blood died with them! ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... and loitering in others, though he had become a perfectly undisciplined man himself, he would limit me strictly to the time necessary for my journey, a time that I never ventured to exceed. In some respects the education that he was giving me, though of Spartan severity, was not ill calculated for the formation of a manly character. He quite understood the importance of applying the mind completely to the thing which occupied it for the moment. If he saw me taking several books together that had no connection with each other, he would say, "Take ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... 47). In the Achaean League (q.v.) the name is given to ten elective officers who presided over the assembly, and Corinth sent "Epidemiurgi" every year to Potidaea, officials who apparently answered to the Spartan harmosts. In Plato [Greek: dmiourgos] is the name given to the "creator of the world" (Timaeus, 40) and the word was so adopted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... us in broken English, and the others laugh and talk incessantly. My inkstand, pen, and small handwriting amuse them very much. Miss K., the typical American travelling lady, who is encountered everywhere from the Andes to the Pyramids, tireless, with an indomitable energy, Spartan endurance, and a genius for attaining everything, and myself, a limp, ragged, shoeless wretch, complete the group, and our heaps of saddles, blankets, spurs, and gear tell of real travelling, past and future. It is a most picturesque sight by the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... attainment, at least, he is the peer of the child who sees. But in order to bring this about, the early years of the child must be carefully supervised, and his training calculated to fit him for the tremendous task awaiting him, a task requiring the courage of a Spartan, the wisdom of Solomon, and the patience of Job. Unfortunately, the parents of blind children rarely understand the importance of this early training. They are too often too absorbed in their own sorrow at having a ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... Senator two years ago the Press, especially the Press of the Right, saluted his nomination as strengthening the Senate by the accession to it of a person of impeccable virtue, of enlightened intellect, and of a character cast in antique moulds of noble simplicity and Spartan courage. You think, my brother, that this favourite of fortune is likely to favour your plea for ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... settled. He turned to Silvia with a genial smile. "Score one more victory for the Feminists," he said. "I wonder if there ever has been a time, anywhere on earth, where women were actually and aggressively noncombatants. The Spartan woman handing over her husband's shield is typical. Whenever and wherever there has been a cause worth fighting for, worth dying for—always and forever we can see the figure of the woman, shield on arm and javelin ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... to do but grin and bear it. I set my teeth, squatted down under the shade of the parapet of the fort, and stood it silently and sullenly. For the first time in my life I thoroughly appreciated the story of the Spartan boy, who stole the fox and suffered the animal to tear his bowels out rather than give a sign which would lead to the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... give more decided proofs that he knows what he wants, and will have it if crying and passion will get it." At a year his mother resolves that "this will be cured by a good whipping when he can understand what it is," and we know that she carried out her Spartan resolve. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... the other in sheer wickedness. Captain Teach considered it rare sport to lock his men in the ship's hold and then set sulphur afire to ascertain how long they could withstand asphyxiation. Yet his greatest "bravery" was displayed (and herein he developed commendable Spartan fortitude) when he married fourteen times with a fearlessness highly worthy of a better purpose! His wickedness was as great as his fearlessness was unbounded, but wickedness was voted manly in a pirate and assured the esteem ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... undertaking, even supposing it to be possible, to bring together the pieces again. And a vaguer but even more insistent voice, prompted, "Then suppose he does believe me? What will it mean to Johnny Montgomery?" It seemed to me that I had been enough of a Spartan as far as ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... may be a blank; but it is your duty not to let any one perceive it. Imitate the young Spartan, who smiled although the fox, hidden under his cloak, was gnawing his vitals. Let us avoid ridicule, my friend. In society there is nothing that provokes laughter more than a disappointed lover, who rolls his eyes about ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... over it; Dumouriez laughed at it. "Ah, well then, really, gentlemen," he said to the courtiers, "since there is no more etiquette there is no more monarchy." This jocose mode of treating the thing had at once removed all the anger of the court, and all the effect of the Spartan pretensions of Roland. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Smith was head until 1831, when he was succeeded by the more celebrated Dr. Gaisford, always described by Mr. Gladstone as a splendid scholar, but a bad dean. Gaisford's excellent services to the Greek learning of his day are unquestioned, and he had the signal merit of speech, Spartan brevity. For a short time in 1806 he had been tutor to Peel. When Lord Liverpool offered him the Greek professorship, with profuse compliments on his erudition, the learned man replied, 'My Lord, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the popular idea that beef is necessary for strength is not a correct one, is well illustrated by Xenophon's description of the outfit of a Spartan soldier, whose dietary consisted of the very plainest and simplest vegetable fare. The complete accoutrements of the Spartan soldier, in what we would call heavy marching order, weighed seventy-five pounds, exclusive of the camp, mining, and bridge-building tools and the rations of bread ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... ideas. The latter ceremonies correspond, in short, to confirmation, and they are usually of a severe character, being meant to test by fasting (as Plutarch says) and by torture (as in the familiar Spartan rite) the courage and constancy of the young braves. The Greek mysteries best known to us are the Thesmophoria and the Eleusinia. In the former the rites (as will appear later) partook of the nature of savage "medicine" or magic, and were mainly intended to secure fertility in husbandry and in the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... opposition either of open contempt, or of malicious irony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an opposition regardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives it sacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was not prepared, like the Spartan of old, to return either with his shield or ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... these there were numerous special temples or places where the souls of the dead, which were universally thought to possess a knowledge of the future, could be called up and consulted—e.g., the temple at Phigalia, in Arcadia, used by Pausanias, the Spartan commander;[53] or the [Greek: nekyomanteion], the oracle of the dead, by the River Acheron, in Threspotia, to which Periander, the famous tyrant of Corinth, had recourse;[54] and it was here, ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... that Emma revealed the real source of her Spartan calm. The wedding was over. There had been a quiet little celebration, after which Jock McChesney had gone West with his very lovely young wife. Emma had kissed her very tenderly, very soberly after the brief ceremony. "Mrs. McChesney," she had said, and her voice shook ever so little; ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... the swift-footed Celtic hounds are called in the Celtic tongue [Greek: oueztragoi]; not deriving their name from any particular nation, like the Cretan, Carian, or Spartan dogs, but, as some of the Cretans are named [Greek: diaponoi] from working hard, [Greek: itamai] from their keenness, and mongrels from their being compounded of both, so these Celts are named from ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... of the gentleman been confined to England only—polite and ceremonious France has felt her change. The Revolution brought in coarse and uncivilised manners. The awkward and unsuccessful attempt at Spartan and Roman republican manners; the citizen succeeding to Monsieur; the blasphemous, incredulous, atheistical principles instilled into the then growing generation of all classes; the system of equality, subversive of courtliness, and the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... what this quest of the Cave of Gold might mean—hardships, dangers, even death for those she loved. But she was of pioneer stock, had often seen her dearest go forth to face the dangers of the unknown wilderness; and, at last, with something of Spartan-like fortitude, ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... water which bubbled up from a boss of cresses by the roadside completed his Spartan breakfast. His next step was to examine his surroundings. "From the top of this hill," said Lynde, "I shall probably be able to see where I am, if that will be any comfort ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... travelled second-class! A few weeks before he would have thought it impossible as well as disgusting to bunk with a stranger whom he had never seen; but as he said to himself, with a shrug of the shoulders which tried to be Spartan, "Misfortune makes strange bedfellows." Max was disciplining himself to put up with hardships of all sorts which would probably become a part of everyday life. His own hand-luggage, a suitcase with his name marked on it, had been dumped down by some steward ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... sheer defiance of worldly prudence, that made him feel kindly towards the young Dane. Denmark's taking up arms, with its two million inhabitants, against a great power like Prussia, roused his enthusiasm. "It is great, it is Spartan!" he exclaimed. It must certainly be admitted that this human sympathy was not a prominent characteristic, and he wearied me with his hateful verdicts over all those whom I, and by degrees, all Europe, esteemed and admired ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... suspected, and when there was no greater and more exceptional crime than that of discussing the gods, the laws and the customs of the city? What did such a word as "fatherland" signify to an Athenian or Spartan unless it were the cult of Athens or Sparta, and in no wise that of Greece, composed of rival cities always at war with each other? What meaning had the same word "fatherland" among the ancient Gauls, divided ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... that the Spartan Burr, whose life was one of incessant labor and whose kindliness toward every one was so well known, should have deserved a commentary like this. The charge of immorality is so easily made and so difficult of disproof that it has been flung promiscuously at all the great men of history, including, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... person's house, but insisted on elegant austerity in his own home, whereas Doria loved elegant austerity everywhere. So they had a pure Jacobean entrance hall, a Louis XV drawing-room, an Empire bedroom, and as far as I could judge by the barrenness of the apartment, a Spartan study for Adrian. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... rite was worked at Quiyough-cohanock, Strachey adds that Sir George Percy (who was with Smith) "was at, and observed" a similar mystery at Kecoughtan. It is plain that the rite was not a sacrifice, but a Bora, or initiation, and the parallel of the Spartan flogging of boys, with the retreat of the boys and their instructors, is very close, and, of course, unnoted by classical scholars except Mr. Frazer. Strachey ends with the critical remark that we shall not know all ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... had to sew up a bad cut in Hester's arm. She sat all through school without a word to me, and then I could not close the wound with sticking-plaster, so there was no alternative. She behaved like a Spartan—her black skin made it easier for me, but not for her, I fancy. So much for my first attempt at surgery. It was ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... man; from the top of the deck plumb down to the hock kyard, he's nothin' but Jackson. This yere attitood of my grandsire, an' him camped in the swarmin' midst of a Henry Clay country, is frootful of adventures an' calls for plenty nerve. But the old Spartan goes through. ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... myself upon the bed, but my mind was so agitated, that I could not for a time close my eyes in sleep. The pride and contempt with which the monkeys regarded me, provoked me almost to rage. A more than Spartan patience was needed to listen with indifference to their sneers. At last I slumbered. How long I know not, for in the firmament there is no division of night and day. It is never dark, except at a certain period, when ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... out the temple where the dead Are honour'd by the nations—let it be, And light the laurels on a loftier head, And be the Spartan's epitaph on me: "Sparta had many a worthier son than he"; Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need; The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted—they have torn me—and I bleed: I should have known what fruit would spring from such ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the Senate, even if elected. The Democratic party, being in the minority, offered but little opposition, and watched with great amusement this unequal contest between the great dominant party on the one side, and the little Spartan band on the other. The contest was as exciting as it was brief, and despite the great odds of money, official power, political superiority, and the perfect machinery of party organization in favor of her opponents, Mrs. Gordon received about 200 votes, besides as many ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... faggots, had the cattle driven up the mountains in the night, in order to make the enemy believe he was about to decamp. But this was only a false alarm, for he himself very well knew what his scheme was. When Theopompus the Spartan, by changing clothes with his wife, made his escape out of prison, the deception was not imposed upon himself, but upon his guards. Thus, when an orator speaks falsehood instead of truth, he knows what he is about; he does not yield to it himself, his intention being to ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... silence your Spartan tales— Says bravely, hushing a moan: 'I have yet one left. My boy! go on; Rear freedom's banner high in the sun!' Then sits in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... the boy, and then looked quickly away. "You are a strange lad, my little Spartan," said he. "I don't think I ever knew a boy quite ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... coincident to the fall of the old regime, the people, from an ignorance which was more their misfortune than their fault, confounded art with luxuries more than questionable, in which their whilom superiors had indulged while they lacked bread. With the curious assumption of Spartan virtue which rings with an almost convincing sound of true metal through so many of the resolutions passed by the National Convention of France, in the days following the holocaust of the Reign of Terror, there was serious debate as to whether ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... of social defects in the principle of the State, the heroes of the French Revolution rather perceived in social defects the source of political abuses. Thus Robespierre saw in great poverty and great riches only an obstacle to pure democracy. Consequently, he desired to establish a general Spartan frugality. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... remembered that a modern Utopia must differ from the Utopias of any preceding age in being world-wide; it is not, therefore, to be the development of any special race or type of culture, as Plato's developed an Athenian-Spartan blend, or More, Tudor England. The modern Utopia is to be, before all things, synthetic. Politically and socially, as linguistically, we must suppose it a synthesis; politically it will be a synthesis of once widely different forms of government; socially and morally, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... a grave nod of her head. Ever since the artillery had commenced to roar she had been watching eagerly for her son's return, but she was a Spartan mother, and concealed her gnawing anxiety under a cloak of brave silence. And then she remembered what was the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Notwithstanding all the Spartan rigor and severity to which he was subjected in his youth, for the purpose of dispelling exaggerated pride of birth and station, he feels assured that the rights and privileges which he enjoys above his fellow-men are of Divine origin. Although ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... a beauty yet. At any rate she can put on flesh and not be the scarecrow she is." And thus, while her more favoured sisters were revelling in the gaieties of Court life, Marie was sent to tell her beads and to spend Spartan days ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... The Spartan lawgiver has been censured for the toleration of theft and adultery. Among that race of barbarians these habits were too general to admit of total prevention or universal punishment. By vesting all property in the commonwealth, instead of encouraging theft, he ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... was hurrying o'er the deep His Spartan hostess in the Idaean bark, Old Nereus laid the unwilling winds asleep, That all to Fate might hark, Speaking through him:—"Home in ill hour you take A prize whom Greece shall claim with troops untold, Leagued by an oath your marriage tie to break And Priam's kingdom old. ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... good for him. I have seen a physician examining a patient's chest stop all at once, as he brought out a particular sound with a tap on the collarbone, in the attitude of a pointer who has just come on the scent or sight of a woodcock. You remember the Spartan boy, who, with unmoved countenance, hid the fox that was tearing his vitals beneath his mantle. What he could do in his own suffering you must learn to do for others on whose vital organs disease has fastened ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... pea-soup. The very sight of it raises my gorge. Nor have I any special relish for potatoes, unless they are of good quality and well cooked. I therefore munched the brown bread, and washed it down with cold water. It was a Spartan meal, but a very indigestible one, as I can certify from painful experience. Why a prisoner's stomach should be so grossly abused by a sudden change of diet passes my comprehension. Surely it would not be difficult ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... religious sanction of ancestor-worship affect the social "mores" that, as is shown so clearly in Spartan history, no man could shirk his duty of marriage and of parenthood without social opprobrium. The well-known anecdote related by Plutarch of the youth who, educated rigorously to show respect to the aged fathers, is praised for flouting a grey-haired bachelor and refusing ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... than those of monarchies. But if the wars of kings are less cruel, their peace is terrible; better be their foe than their subject.] This defect is inevitable, but of little importance. The great thing is to be kind to our neighbours. Among strangers the Spartan was selfish, grasping, and unjust, but unselfishness, justice, and harmony ruled his home life. Distrust those cosmopolitans who search out remote duties in their books and neglect those that lie nearest. Such philosophers will love the Tartars to ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... thousand fields of incident, adventure, and bitter trials, they had proved their stanch heroism and their fortitude; they had lived and endured nobly. I remember the enthusiasm with which they responded to my appeals; I remember their bold bearing during the darkest days; I remember the Spartan pluck, the indomitable courage, with which they suffered in the days of our adversity. Their voices again loyally answer me, and again I hear them address each other upon the necessity of standing by the 'master.' Their boat-song, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... frown of insulted virtue effaces the smile of complacency, which his eloquent periods are wont to raise, when I read his voluptuous reveries. Is this the man, who, in his ardour for virtue, would banish all the soft arts of peace, and almost carry us back to Spartan discipline? Is this the man who delights to paint the useful struggles of passion, the triumphs of good dispositions, and the heroic flights which carry the glowing soul out of itself? How are these mighty sentiments lowered when he describes the prettyfoot and enticing airs of his ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... though the whole is a work of vivid imagination. We cannot verify, obviously, the facts and motives which led to the siege of Troy, although Herodotus appears to agree that the cause of that war was a Spartan woman's abduction, and only examines the point whether the Asiatic or the European Greeks were first to blame in the matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth growing out of the strife ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... present will tell you where you are, and what you have now to depend upon. It may produce a respectable division in America, and unanimity at home: it will give America an option; she has yet had no option. You have said, 'Lay down your arms,' and she has given you the Spartan answer, 'Come, take.'" Lord Chatham here read his motion, which he afterwards said, if earned, would prove the herald of peace, and would open the way for treaty. In conclusion, he again urged the necessity of making peace with America before France ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... friend Achates, sallied forth from the camp at dawn, to learn, if possible, something of the land on which they had been thrown. They had gone but a little way in the depths of the forest when they met Aeneas's mother, Venus, in the guise of a Spartan maid, her bow hung from her shoulders, her ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... country, sleeping at rough inns, and on their arrival searching for an attic in some bleak tenement in a noisy street. Here they were to live almost entirely on the baskets of home produce sent through the carriers at intervals by their thrifty parents. It was and is a Spartan discipline, and it turns out men who have shown their grit and independence in all lands where the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... of the tale who saves himself from cobra or rattler by letting the serpent crawl its slow way over his perfectly controlled body might have withheld even a quiver of the flesh, but I am no Spartan. At my convulsive shudder each horrid claw gripped a death-hold. In one swift motion I seized a corkscrew that lay nearby, pried loose with a quick jerk every single pede and threw the odious thing a dozen yards. A trail of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... establishment will be found in Hone's "Every-Day Book"; its plan seems to have been unexceptionable. But Dr. James Johnson, writing his "Economy of Health" ten years after, declared that these German exercises had proved "better adapted to the Spartan youth than to the pallid sons of pampered cits, the dandies of the desk, and the squalid tenants of attics and factories," and also adds the epitaph, "This ultra-gymnastic enthusiast did much injury to an important branch of hygiene by carrying it to excess, and consequently by causing its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the daughter of Jove brushed it aside with her hand, as a mother doth a fly from her sleeping child. The bow does not appear to have been extensively used in later times in either the Greek or Roman armies. The ferocious Spartan preferred the close combat with manual weapons, the Athenian won his glory upon the sea, and it was with the pike that Alexander overcame the hosts of Persia. The Cretans, who were the most celebrated archers in Europe, sometimes formed a ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the child, and the woman caressed its face and said, "she shall be the fairest woman in Sparta." And from that day the fashion of its countenance was changed, "and the child became the fairest of all the Spartan women." ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... Leonidas and the Spartan minority did not make such a stand at Thermopylae, as we did. Do you know, we had like to have been the majority? Xerxes[1] is frightened out of his senses; Sysigambis[1] has sent an express to Luton to forbid ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... sought the repose of their Spartan pillows. The Captain forgot, in his zeal for Spanish dominion, that daring Sir Francis Drake, in days even then out of the memory of man, piloted the "Golden Hind" into Drake's Bay. He landed near San Francisco in 1578, and remained till the early months of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... me," said Chaumette. "It is a Spartan breakfast. If I had a root I would give you half."—[Lamartine's "History of the Girondists," edit. ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... the living-quarters of the crew, kept spotlessly clean and tidy, yet Spartan-like in their simplicity. Two of the men were sound asleep in their bunks. Three more, who were playing cards at a plain deal table, glanced up from their game as the British lads passed by; but their interest was of ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... he simply worshipped, and who finally brought him around to their way of thinking. Markelov had read little, mostly books relating to the thing that chiefly interested him, and was especially attached to Herzen. He retained his military habits, and lived like a Spartan and a monk. A few years ago he fell passionately in love with a girl who threw him over in a most unceremonious manner and married an adjutant, also a German. He consequently hated adjutants too. He tried to write a series of special articles on the shortcomings of our artillery, but had ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... firm, but two or three words can dishearten it. There is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress. Isocrates described his art, as "the power of magnifying what was small and diminishing what was great";—an acute, but partial definition. Among the Spartans, the art assumed a Spartan shape, namely, of the sharpest weapon. Socrates says, "If any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedaemonians, he will at first find him despicable in conversation; but, when a proper opportunity offers, this same person, like a skilful jaculator, will hurl a sentence worthy of attention, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... this woman about Winkelberg. I became poignant and moving on the subject of Winkelberg's misfortunes, his trials, sufferings and, above all, his Spartan stoicism. It pleased me to do this. I felt that I was making some amends and that the thing ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... mythology the wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus, who was visited by Zeus in the form of a swan and became the mother of Castor and Pollux; was frequently ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... it would have been destroyed. Undoubtedly, however, he would have sympathized with the unknown critic in his complaint of the unsuitableness of sumptuous meals to youths who were destined for the hardships of the camp. At Brienne he had been dubbed "the Spartan," an instance of that almost uncanny faculty of schoolboys to dash off in a nickname the salient features of character. The phrase was correct, almost for Napoleon's whole life. At any rate, the pomp of Paris served but to root his youthful ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... senseless luxury, the result of wealth which has increased faster than the power of rightly using it, has attained such enormous proportions, and is threatening, in commercial communities especially, to drown all noble aspirations, and Spartan simplicity, and Christian self-devotion, in its muddy flood. Surely never was Gideon's test more wanted for the army of the Lord of hosts ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... even Aunt Hitty was not proof against the magic of Araminta's smile. The girl's face had the creamy softness of a white rose petal, but her cheeks bloomed with the flush of health and she had a most disconcerting trick of blushing. With Spartan thoroughness, Miss Mehitable constantly strove to cure Araminta of this distressing fault, but as yet she had ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... the banner, and the field, Glory and Greece, around me see! The Spartan, borne upon his ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... the Government of Sparta, slaves to tradition, could not grasp the idea of the plans proposed by the great Athenian. They were half persuaded to recall Leonidas, but hesitated to act until it was too late. The Spartan chief and his few hundred warriors died at their post in self-sacrificing obedience to the letter of their orders. The Persians poured over the Pass and inundated the plains of Attica. The few Athenians who had persisted in defending ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... if it can learn from its own sufferings, Germany has reason enough to cherish with a passionate devotion her late achieved unity. And German brutality, which is not the less brutality because Germans regard it as quite natural and right, has its origin in German history. The Prussian is a Spartan, a natural brute, but brutal to himself as well as to others, capable of extremes of self-denial and self-discipline. From the Prussians the softer and more emotional German peoples of the South received the gift of national unity, and they repaid the debt ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... but that the citizens would have to defend themselves as best they could. Benjamin Clifford took command of the volunteers, and Captain William Anderson organized a small body of sharpshooters called the Spartan Band. As cannon were badly needed, the brethren got two hollow steamboat shafts, cut them in two, plugged up one end, and thus made some cannon. They had no cannon balls, but they used scraps of iron and lead tied up ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... though slightly stooping figure, whose name among strangers was King Friedrich II., or Frederick the Great of Prussia, and at home among the common people was Vater Fritz—Father Fred. A king every inch of him, though without the trappings of a king; in a Spartan simplicity of vesture. In 1786 his speakings and his workings came to finis in this world of time. Editors vaguely account this man the creator of the Prussian monarchy, which has since grown so large in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... against his father. The young prince was seduced by the offers made him, and Egypt became plunged in a civil war. But for the courage and conduct of Agesilaues, which were conspicuously displayed, Tacho would have yielded to despair and have given up the contest. In two decisive battles the Spartan general completely defeated the army of the rebels, which far outnumbered that of Tacho, and replaced the king on his ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... eastern pediment. There is a substantial resemblance in the drapery, even to the arbitrary little fold in the neck; but the garment here is entirely open on the right side, after the fashion followed by Spartan maidens, whereas there it is sewed together from the waist down; there is here no girdle; and the broad, flat expanse of cloth in front observable there is here narrowed by two folds ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... to her husband that Emma revealed the real source of her Spartan calm. The wedding was over. There had been a quiet little celebration, after which Jock McChesney had gone West with his very lovely young wife. Emma had kissed her very tenderly, very soberly after the brief ceremony. "Mrs. McChesney," she had said, and her voice shook ever so ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... cunning art shall here her triumphs bring, And laurel'd bards their choicest anthems sing. Here, honor'd age shall bare its wintery brow, And youth to freedom make a Spartan vow. Here, ripened manhood from its walks profound, Shall come and halt, as ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... knew what this quest of the Cave of Gold might mean—hardships, dangers, even death for those she loved. But she was of pioneer stock, had often seen her dearest go forth to face the dangers of the unknown wilderness; and, at last, with something of Spartan-like fortitude, ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... it is true that he is engaged to Miss Stuart," replied Anne, with Spartan composure, "but it is certainly true ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to be seized by the discursive and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not have been so barren where the Athenian was so prolific. But beauty is felt, not intellectually apprehended or logically deduced. Its presence is acknowledged by a gush from the soul, by a joyous sentimental recognition, not by a discernment of the understanding. When we exclaim, How beautiful! ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... be so solemnly issued, but I believe that the higher authorities in Germany earnestly desired that the people, and, especially, the officers of the army and navy, should learn not to enjoy themselves too much. A great endeavour was always made to keep them in a life, so far as possible, of Spartan simplicity. For instance, the army officers were forbidden to play polo, not because of anything against the game, which, of course, is splendid practice for riding, but because it would make a distinction in the army ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... patriotism, and of justice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul, he could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason. He felt that the austere glories of his country, as a Spartan regimen might have preserved them, would not benefit that baser part of him which alone remained. Political virtue seemed a useless tax on his material profit and freedom. The tedium and distrust proper to a disintegrated society ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... give to usurpation grace, And from his natural rights my son debar? Not so! let him—and none shall be more prompt Than I to help—raise his Messenian friends; Let him fetch succours from Arcadia, gain His Argive or his Spartan cousins' aid; Let him do this, do aught but recommence Murder's uncertain, secret, perilous game— And I, when to his righteous standard down Flies Victory wing'd, and Justice raises then Her ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... his escape. This is the uncompromising minute in the Journals: 'Oct. 16. The letters of Slatin have arrived. I have no remarks to make on them, and cannot make out why he wrote them.' In the afternoon, indeed, he betrays some pity; but it is the pity of a man for a mouse. 'He is evidently not a Spartan... he will want some quarantine... one feels sorry for him.' The next day he is again inexorable, and gives his reasons clearly. 'I shall have nothing to do with Slatin's coming here to stay, unless he has the Mahdi's positive leave, which he is not likely to get; his ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... little dinner upstairs, sir. I am a moderate man, and can live, if need be, like a Spartan; but to join such good company I will gladly use the knife and fork again. You will excuse the traveller's dress? I keep a room here, which I use only occasionally, and am at present ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dinners and other domestic amusements. Having been brought up on very simple fare, I fully enjoyed the dinners which the Old East India Company gave, when we sat down about 400 people, and, as I was told, four pounds was paid for each guest. I mention this because I feel that not only has the Spartan diet of my early years given me a relish all through life for convivial entertainments, even if not quite at four pounds a head, but that the general self-denial which I had to exercise in my youth has made me feel a constant gratitude ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... did I fear, but thought he had no weapon; For he was great of heart. LODOVICO. [To Iago.] O Spartan dog, More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea! Look on the tragic loading of this bed; This is thy work:—the object poisons sight; Let it be hid.—Gratiano, keep the house, And seize upon the fortunes of the Moor, For they succeed on you.—To ...
— Othello, the Moor of Venice • William Shakespeare
... Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan;—all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... notice him he would plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that bud of a tail, and looking up, with his head a little to the one side. His master I occasionally saw; he used to call me "Maister John," but was laconic as any Spartan. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... nature) he felt himself greatly shaken in his allegiance to the chief, by recollecting the effect produced on his valour by a single glance from the instrument of law. He had not yet lived long enough to be aware that men are sometimes the Representatives of Things; that what the scytale was to the Spartan hero, a sheriff's writ often is to a Waterloo medallist: that a Bow Street runner will enter the foulest den where Murder sits with his fellows, and pick out his prey with the beck of his forefinger. That, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... my superior officer, I wondered whether blood as brave and good dyed the heather at Bannockburn, or streamed down the mountain-gorge where Tell met the Austrians at Morgarten, or stained with crimson glare the narrow pass held by the Spartan three hundred. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... by the Athenians under Nicias; being hard pressed, Syracuse appeals to the other Greek states; Cylippus, the Spartan commander, comes with a fleet to the aid of the city. See "DEFEAT OF THE ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... "Yes!" answered the Spartan mothers with one voice, while the other sisters danced round them, and Kate patted the curly ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... the constitution! But apart from physical inconvenience, the idea of forsaking their homes and husbands was too ridiculous. The notion of living in tents on potted beef and adamantine biscuits was shuddered at. The whole project was voted a wild-cat scheme (and Mr. Rhodes agreed). After the spartan bravery they had displayed for two months, the ladies regarded this new and wanton strain on their loyalty as inhuman. Their protest was loud and dignified; and when the women are concerned in a public protest ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... of the chasm is the curse of every race, As it saps and kills its manhood ere it reach the zenith-place; Spartan valor, Grecian learning, Roman honor had their day, But land plunder rose among them, dooming death by ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... a luscious sea-pie for the sailors, and in various inviting shapes during the following week to the inmates of the cabin. This loss of property was recorded by Mr. Thompson in the ship's log-book, with his accustomed accuracy, and with Spartan brevity. The language he invariably used was, "A sheep ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Thermopylae the Peloponnesian Greeks commenced to fortify the isthmus of Corinth with the view of defending it with their small army against the invading host of Xerxes. The Spartan troops were under the command of Cleombrotus, the brother of Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae. He had been consulting the oracles at Sparta, and Herodotus states that "while he was offering sacrifice to know ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... the matter, dear?" asked auntie, tenderly. "Are you in such pain?" for she knew that Cricket was a little Spartan in respect ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... be.'—'Heh!' said I, 'and what about your daughter?'—'Bah!' says he, 'she is only a woman! And she is quite too much of a Hulot. Valerie has a horror of them all.—My son-in-law has never chosen to come to this house; why has he given himself such airs as a Mentor, a Spartan, a Puritan, a philanthropist? Besides, I have squared accounts with my daughter; she has had all her mother's fortune, and two hundred thousand francs to that. So I am free to act as I please.—I shall judge of my son-in-law and Celestine ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... were standing only a couple of yards behind me, ready to dodge behind some of the great rocks on the comb of the ridge, and I believe that in those days I possessed so much of the Spartan fortitude which pervaded our school, that I would sooner have been blown up than show fear. So I sheltered my match, bending lower and lower, till I could bring it to a level with the powder-smeared rag, which caught at once, and began to sparkle ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... well this Spartan-like education, which inured him to the severity of the seasons. Without this training he certainly would have perished in savage and freezing Siberia, where he lived in exile for ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... floor. Samuel Smith was head until 1831, when he was succeeded by the more celebrated Dr. Gaisford, always described by Mr. Gladstone as a splendid scholar, but a bad dean. Gaisford's excellent services to the Greek learning of his day are unquestioned, and he had the signal merit of speech, Spartan brevity. For a short time in 1806 he had been tutor to Peel. When Lord Liverpool offered him the Greek professorship, with profuse compliments on his erudition, the learned man replied, 'My Lord, I have received your letter, and accede to the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... paths of earth and sea, who sailed upon the mainland, and walked upon the deep—him did Spartan valour hold back, with just three hundred spears. Shame ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the property of the twelve gentlemen, whom the decree of the Spanish tribunal had convicted of rebellion, afford interesting proofs of the Spartan simplicity which existed in the colony. Thus the furniture of the bed-room of Madam Villere, who was the wife of one of the most distinguished citizens of Louisiana, and the grand-daughter of De Lachaise, who came to the colony in 1723 as ordaining ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... "You're a Spartan," said her brother in awe, as he looked on that thin, stern face. "Terry is your theory. If he disappoints you, he'll be simply a theory gone wrong. You'll cut him out of your life as if he were an algebraic equation and never think of ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... Median war, where so many of the nobles were killed in a battle by the lapygi, that from a free state the government was turned into a democracy; and at Argos, where so many of the citizens were killed by Cleomenes the Spartan, that they were obliged to admit several husbandmen to the freedom of the state: and at Athens, through the unfortunate event of the infantry battles, the number of the nobles was reduced by the soldiers being chosen from the list of citizens in the Lacedaemonian wars. ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... were as shy and conveyed less information. The work was hard, the hours long, his accommodation Spartan. They were in huts on Salisbury Plain. Sometimes he confessed himself too tired to write more than a few lines. He had a bad cold in the head. He was better. They had inoculated him against typhoid and had allowed him two or three slack days. The first time ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... fully fifteen, if not twenty, years since my father commenced the composition of an historical romance on the subject of Pausanias, the Spartan Regent. Circumstances, which need not here be recorded, compelled him to lay aside the work thus begun. But the subject continued to haunt his imagination and occupy his thoughts. He detected in it singular opportunities for effective exercise of the gifts most ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Horace Walpole writes to the Countess of Upper Ossory, 'I am going to Mrs. Cowley's new play,[59] which I suppose is as instructive as the Marriage of Figaro, for I am told it approaches to those of Mrs. Behn in Spartan delicacy; but I shall see Miss Farren, who, in my poor opinion is the first of all actresses.' Sir Walter Scott admired and praised her warmly. But the pinchbeck sobriety of later times was unable to tolerate her freedom. She was condemned in no small still voice as immoral, loose, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... you L. Stephen's letter which is certainly very kind and jolly to get[14]. I wrote some stuff about Lord Lytton, but I had not the heart to submit it to you. I sent it direct to Morley, with a Spartan billet. God knows it is bad enough; but it cost me labour incredible. I was so out of the vein, it would have made you weep to see me digging the rubbish out of my seven wits with groanings unutterable. I certainly mean to come to London, and likely before long if all goes well; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Murray, if satisfactory to you, must be so to me. There need be no scruple, because, though I used sometimes to buffoon to myself, loving a quibble as well as the barbarian himself (Shakspeare, to wit)—'that, like a Spartan, I would sell my life as dearly as possible'—it never was my intention to turn it to personal, pecuniary account, but to bequeath it to a friend—yourself—in the event of survivorship. I anticipated that period, because we happened ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... feel quite tired and sleepy before the doctor returned for him, and his bruises ached badly. Once he would have cried and worried every one about him, if in such an uncomfortable state; but now he bore the pain like a Spartan. ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels
... Pausanias, a Spartan general, was the son of Cloembrotus, the king of Sparta, killed at the battle of Leuctra. Pausanias commanded at Plataea; but having conducted a treasonable correspondence with Xerxes, was starved to death ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... necessary to plead anything; war justifies itself. To fight for the experimental purpose of trying the proportions of martial merit, but (to speak frankly) for the purpose of publishing and renewing to Europe the proclamation of French superiority—that is the object of French wars. Like the Spartan of old, the Frenchman would hold that a state of peace, and not a state of war, is the state which calls for apology; and that already from the first such an apology must wear a ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... are far from indicating that any injustice will be done the prisoners. I'm sure that neither Master Cap nor myself has any cause of complaint since we have given ourselves up to Master Arrowhead, who reminds me of a Roman or a Spartan by his virtues and moderation; but ye'll be remembering that usages differ, and that our scalps may be lawful sacrifices to appease the manes of fallen foes, unless you ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... subsequent national degradation. You find, in the first place, that the nations which possessed a refined art were always subdued by those who possessed none: you find the Lydian subdued by the Mede; the Athenian by the Spartan; the Greek by the Roman; the Roman by the Goth; the Burgundian by the Switzer: but you find, beyond this—that even where no attack by any external power has accelerated the catastrophe of the state, the period in which any given people reach their highest power ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... lady on the right, please come to the piano." The girl indicated, a dignified senior, obeyed the summons, coolly handed the professor her music, stationed herself at his side and awaited trial with the air of a Spartan. After a short prelude she began to sing a popular air that was at that time going the round of Sanford. She sang one verse, then the professor dropped his hands from the keys, inquired her name, made a memorandum on a ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... same way were the worst Spartan natures displayed in a heroic sense, after they had commenced life by a persistence in dissimulation ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... and his silence wounded Lady Lucy to the quick. Was it her fault if her husband, out of an eccentric distrust of the character of his son, and moved by a kind of old-fashioned and Spartan belief that a man must endure hardness before he is fit for luxury, had made her and not Oliver the arbiter and legatee of his wealth? But Oliver had never wanted for anything. He had only to ask. What right had she to thwart her ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are bred out of the Spartan kind, So flew'd, so sanded; and their heads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew; Crook-knee'd and dew-lap'd like Thessalian bulls; Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells, Each under each. A cry more tuneable Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn, In ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... manufacture of purple. To be Tyrio conspectus in ostro, seemed, in the estimation of the Mantuan poet, essential to his due appearance in honour of Augustus, Geor. 3—17. But several other places in the Mediterranean afforded this precious article. Thus Horace speaks of Spartan purple, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... for all that, deeds which for their sheer daring will ring for ever in the ears of men; of which the bare memory is an inspiration; whereof the fame in their own day roused the emulous courage of every Spartan and of every Englishman, making them ready to face any odds, and chilling the blood of their foes. Vain deeds, when we count the cost and the tangible gain—but very far from vain when we take into account ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... From his great disinclination to pursue the same path with Metastasio, he naturally fell into the opposite extreme: I might not unaptly call him a Metastasio reversed. If the muse of the latter he a love-sick nymph, Alfieri's muse is an Amazon. He gave her a Spartan education; he aimed at being the Cato of the theatre; but he forgot that, though the tragic poet may himself he a stoic, tragic poetry itself, if it would move and agitate us, must never be stoical. His language is so barren of imagery, that his characters seem altogether devoid of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... about barefoot, and, playing the philosopher, even said he might as well go about quite naked like the young of animals. As opposed to the maternal ideas, he had a certain virile idea of childhood on which he sought to mould his son, wishing him to be brought up hardily, like a Spartan, to give him a strong constitution. He sent him to bed without any fire, taught him to drink off large draughts of rum and to jeer at religious processions. But, peaceable by nature, the lad answered only poorly to his notions. His mother always kept him near ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Resurrection of Christ, with a panel containing S. John the Baptist in the midst of certain other saints. The side-walls he painted in his own manner; one with figures of Fabius Maximus, Socrates, Numa Pompilius, F. Camillus, Pythagoras, Trajan, L. Sicinius, the Spartan Leonidas, Horatius Cocles, Fabius, Sempronius, the Athenian Pericles, and Cincinnatus. On the other wall he made the Prophets, Isaiah, Moses, Daniel, David, Jeremiah, and Solomon; and the Sibyls, the Erythraean, the Libyan, the Tiburtine, the Delphic, and the others. Below each of the said ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... aching heart Billy asked herself what now was to be done. For herself, turn whichever way she could, she could see nothing but unhappiness. She determined, therefore, with Spartan fortitude, that to no one else would she bring equal unhappiness. She would be silent. Bertram and Marie loved each other. That matter was settled. As to William—Billy thought of the story William had told her of his lonely life,—of the plea he had made to her; ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... as we went our way,—a modern Spartan slave in a kind of marine pillory,—conveying to the red-legged children of Gotham, as they toddled ashore, a useful lesson on the doubtful relations existing between whiskey ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... everybody had been particularly nice to her that morning. Several girls had given her their addresses and asked her to write to them, Miss Bowes had been kindness itself, and even Miss Teddington, whose conduct was generally of a Spartan order, when bidding her good-bye in the study, had actually bestowed an abrupt peck of a kiss, a mark of favour never before known in the annals of the school. To be sure, she had followed it with a warning against relapsing into loud laughter ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... stripped the Athenians of all the advantages which they had acquired on the mainland of Greece. In every city of Greece there were always two parties, the wealthy and noble, called oligarchs, and the demos, or commons; and according as Spartan or Athenian influence was in the ascendant the balance of power in each city wavered between the nobles and the people, the Athenians favouring the Many, the Spartans the Few. Accordingly there was always a party living in exile, and waiting for a turn of affairs which might enable them to return ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... much pleasure in writing and in having written these essays of mine (which are no hundredth part as beautiful, witty, wise, or brilliant as Hazlitt's), that the leaden showers of drudgery, discouragement, and disillusionment which accompany and follow almost every one of them, and the need of Spartan training for their sake, hardly displace a drop from the bucket of joy that the work brings. Training has meant so much vital overplus to me that I long ago spurted and caught up with my pottle of joy. And, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... a strict disciplinarian to his children in their early years, but his attitude toward himself was truly Spartan. He never visited the theater, for instance, but sought his recreation in various spiritual practices and in reading the BHAGAVAD GITA. {FN1-7} Shunning all luxuries, he would cling to one old pair of shoes until ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... knew how fond I had grown of Lucilla, until I lost sight of the rectory at the turn in the road to Brighton. My natural firmness deserted me; I felt torturing presentiments that some great misfortune would happen in my absence; I astonished myself—I, the widow of the Spartan Pratolungo!—by having a good cry, ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... not told her he was going. He did not mean to tell her till he was leaving, and then only to say casually: "Well, good-by. I'm off for a training-camp to-night." He had always suspected there was something of the Spartan in Sophie Carr's make-up. Even if he had not divined that, he had no intention of making a fuss about his going, of trying to pose as a hero. But he was a normal man, and he wanted his last recollection of her—if it should be his last—to be ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... making any resistance. The Battle of Pydna, which placed the Macedonian monarchy in the hands of the Romans, was decided by a panic befalling the Macedonian cavalry after the phalanx had been broken. At Leuctra and at Mantinea, battles so fatal to the Spartan supremacy in Greece, the defeated armies suffered from panics. The decision at Pharsalia was in some measure owing to a panic occurring among the Pompeian cavalry; and at Thapsus, the panic terror that came upon the Pompeians ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... remember her. I have talked over these things with her many a time; and where I would fain be, she would fain be also. She sent me out with my virgin honor, as the Spartan mother did her boy with the shield, saying, 'Come back either with this, or upon this;' and one or the other I must do, if I would meet her either in this life or in the next. But in the meanwhile do not mistake me; my life is God's, and I promise not ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... loss and of close-impending disgrace was the wolf which this Spartan stockbroker concealed beneath his waistcoat day after day, while the dull common, joyless course of his existence went on; and his shallow wife smiled at him from the opposite side of his hearth, more interested in a new stitch for her crotchet or berlin-wool work than by the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... individuals who have practised them. There is hardly a vice or a crime (according to our own moral standard) which has not at some time or other in some circumstances been looked upon as a moral and religious duty. Stealing was accounted virtuous for the young Spartan, and among the Indian caste of Thugs. In the ancient world, piracy, that is, robbery and murder, was a respectable profession. To the mediaeval Christian, religious persecution was the highest ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... to pay him a great compliment. Among the well-known inscriptions on the rocks in the island of Thera in the Aegean sea there are many which record in deeply graven letters the friendship and devotion to each other of Spartan warrior-comrades; it seems strange at first to find how often such an epithet of praise occurs as Bathycles DANCES WELL, Eumelos is a PERFECT DANCER ([gr aristos orcestas]). One hardly in general expects one warrior to praise another for his dancing! But when one realizes ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... from himself or me how entire the sacrifice must be of private happiness to public duty, of which this parting was the first sample; and he writes of the desolation of domestic prospects in so sad a way that I am obliged to write like a Spartan ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... curtain over the scene of the Spartan mother—we hope you belong to that nearly extinct class—which is to follow. Let us suppose all differences settled, the habit ostensibly given up, and your darling, grown more honest or more artful,—the result is the same to your blissful ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... afternoon of the third day the pass of Thermopyae was forced, thanks to the treachery of a Greek and the contemptible policy of the Spartan government which steadily refused the plea of Leonidas for reenforcements. With Thermopyae taken there was no further reason for the Greek fleet to try to hold the straits north of Euboea, and during the night it retired unobserved. The following ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... To reap the harvest of thy labours past, There found a perjured friend, and faithless wife, Who sacrificed to impious lust thy life; Fast by Arcadia stretch these desert plains, And o'er the land a gloomy tyrant reigns. Next, Macronisi is adjacent seen, 270 Where adverse winds detain'd the Spartan queen; For whom, in arms combined, the Grecian host, With vengeance fired, invaded Phrygia's coast; For whom so long they labour'd to destroy The lofty turrets of imperial Troy; Here, driven by Juno's rage, the hapless dame, Forlorn ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... harmony with the rooms and furniture, consisting only of the strict necessities, cooked with a Spartan disregard for such sybarite foibles as seasoning or dressing. I believe there was a substantial meal somewhere in the early morning hours, but I never succeeded in getting down in time to inspect it. By successful bribery, I induced one of the village belles, who served at table, to bring ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... and then flushed. Mr. Baggs was a very big and strong man and the culprit knew that he must now prepare for the pangs that attended failure. But he bore pain well. He had been operated upon for faulty tendons when he was five and proved a Spartan patient. He stood now waiting for Mr. Baggs. Other victims had reported that it was Levi's custom to use a strap from his own waist when he beat a boy, and Abel, even at this tense moment, wondered whether he would now ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... whole of Europe, that there was nothing invincible about the troops of Napoleon, when they were faced by British regiments properly trained, as Moore trained them at Shorncliff. Just as the destruction of the Spartan Hoplites in the Island of Sphacteria broke the military spell cast by the armies of Sparta, so Moore's victorious retreat to, and action at, Corunna broke the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Contes en vers et posies diverses. The story of the Spartan boy and the fox may be found in Plutarch's Lycurgus, 18. The idea should be compared with the artistic doctrine of ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... French are in my Head; Latin I write, and Greek I— read."] We have also his own authority (in Tom Jones) for supposing that he occasionally, if not frequently, sacrificed "with true Spartan devotion" at the "birchen Altar," of which a representation is to be found in Mr. Maxwell Lyte's history of the College. And it may fairly be inferred that he took part in the different sports and pastimes of the day, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Samos and Thasos; but her mutinous cities in peninsular Chalcidice and isthmian Megara, incited to revolt and aided by their neighbors,[878] were less at her mercy. This principle was recognized by Thucydides,[879] and taken advantage of by the Lacedaemonians during the great war for Spartan supremacy. England has been able to hold Ireland in a vise. Of all her former French territory, she retains only the Channel Isles. Cuba and Porto Rico remained in the crushing grasp of Spain sixty-four years after Mexico and the continental states of Central and ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Having dispatched this Spartan composition by the post, Geoffrey lit his pipe, and waited the event of the interview between Lord Holchester and his ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... office-holders have much substance to spare under these circumstances; but, if the President, Vice-President, and the Secretaries of State, are to live upon an acre or two of land for the rest of their lives, Spartan broth will be indeed a ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... that the Japanese women, who were only yesterday altogether Oriental in habits and ideals, have produced a race of strong men, so far as physical daring and hardihood is concerned. The influence of women on these men ceased with childhood—even then it was a Spartan influence. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... missionaries and promulgated subversive doctrines through the medium of an ever-active press. Transformed by Calvin from its earlier condition of a pleasure-loving and commercial city, it was now what Deceleia under Spartan discipline had been to Athens in the Peloponnesian war—a permanent epiteichismos, perpetually garrisoned and on guard to harry the flanks of Catholics. Faithful to the Roman See in a strict sense of the term, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... of her powerful feelings she sat down, covered her face with her little hands, and—no, she did not burst into tears! Had she been a civilised beauty perhaps she might have done so, but she struggled for a considerable time with Spartan-like resolution to crush down the true feelings of her heart. Old Umqua was quite pleased with the effect of her information, ascribing it as she did to a wrong cause, and felt disposed to be friendly with the captive ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... Thoreau, too, went to the woods because he wanted to live deliberately, and front only the essential facts of life. "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... the smiling tearlessness testify to the more than Spartan discipline of the race. Anciently the people were trained, not only to conceal their emotions, but to speak in a cheerful voice and to show a pleasant face under any stress of moral suffering; and they are obedient to that teaching to-day. It would still be thought a shame to betray personal ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... out thy heart A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three To ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Greece. What little action is narrated may be very briefly indicated. Russia is at war with Turkey and calls upon Hellas to liberate itself. The hero and his friend Alabanda are at the head of a band of volunteers, fighting the Turks. After several minor successes Hyperion lays siege to the Spartan fortress of Misitra. But at its capitulation, he is undeceived concerning the Hellenic patriots; they ravage and plunder so fiercely that he turns from them with repugnance and both he and Alabanda abandon the cause of liberty which they ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... Timaeus, when even men like Xenophon and Plato—the very demi-gods of literature—though they had sat at the feet of Socrates, sometimes forgot themselves in the pursuit of such paltry conceits. The former, in his account of the Spartan Polity, has these words: "Their voice you would no more hear than if they were of marble, their gaze is as immovable as if they were cast in bronze; you would deem them more modest than the very maidens in their ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... their contracts or for special compensation; proprietors of Boarding Schools, or "Academies," as they were generally called, had to modify their terms and to plead for compensation, while the King on his throne found the Civil List insufficient even with that Spartan order adopted by His Majesty, George III., that the bread in his household was to be made of meal and rye mixed, and that the Royal family were to eat the same bread as ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... and talk incessantly. My inkstand, pen, and small handwriting amuse them very much. Miss K., the typical American travelling lady, who is encountered everywhere from the Andes to the Pyramids, tireless, with an indomitable energy, Spartan endurance, and a genius for attaining everything, and myself, a limp, ragged, shoeless wretch, complete the group, and our heaps of saddles, blankets, spurs, and gear tell of real travelling, past and future. It is a most picturesque sight by the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... much. Your uncle would never have consented. But oh, Jock! I'm not a Spartan mother. My heart ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a bed, as formerly, but he wanted feathers and yielding mattresses, and goblets heavier than his sword, for he was now ashamed to drink out of earthenware; and he required marble houses, though it is recorded in ancient histories that a Spartan soldier was severely punished for venturing to appear under a roof at ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... principle of the State, the heroes of the French Revolution rather perceived in social defects the source of political abuses. Thus Robespierre saw in great poverty and great riches only an obstacle to pure democracy. Consequently, he desired to establish a general Spartan frugality. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... spirits of Leonidas and his men, and his wife, Gorgo, was not a woman to be faint-hearted or hold him back. Long before, when she was a very little girl, a word of hers had saved her father from listening to a traitorous message from the King of Persia; and every Spartan lady was bred up to be able to say to those she best loved that they must come home from battle "with the shield or on it"—either carrying it victoriously or borne ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of that week, and through New Year's Day, Lloyd managed to keep her resolution bravely. Even when the time came for the girls to go back to school without her, she went through the farewells like a little Spartan, driving down to the station with tearful Betty, who grieved over Lloyd's disappointment as if it had ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... tears; she asked no mercy, for she was aware that, whatever might be her fate, she was alike prejudged and pre-condemned; but she resigned herself passively into the hands of her persecutors, with a Spartan firmness which she maintained to the last hour of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... and of close-impending disgrace was the wolf which this Spartan stockbroker concealed beneath his waistcoat day after day, while the dull common, joyless course of his existence went on; and his shallow wife smiled at him from the opposite side of his hearth, more interested in a new stitch for her crotchet or berlin-wool work ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... as excellent mathematician and conavigator with Captain Cook, William Wales. All his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments which were expected to be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to be his only aim; to this everything was subordinate. Moral ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... it, 'cuteness, of their equivocating replies. Sometimes (the garcon[53]) the little boy of the family is despatched by his mother to the landlord's neighbouring bog or turf rick, to bring home, in their phraseology, in ours to steal, a few turf; if, upon this expedition, the little Spartan be detected, he is tolerably certain of being whipped by his mother, or some of his friends, upon his return home. "Ah, ye little brat! and what made ye tell the gentleman when he met ye, ye rogue, that ye were going to the rick? And what business ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... citizens the eldest who are passing from the ranks of the "Horsemen," in each year five; and these are bound during that year in which they pass out from the "Horsemen," to allow themselves to be sent without ceasing to various places by the Spartan State. ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... an answer to this. They will argue it is well that life should be Spartan and hard, because of the discipline and its strengthening effects on the character. But the good effects of this sort of discipline will be mixed with sad wreckage. And only creatures incapable of disciplining themselves could thus ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... with an amount of stoicism that would have done credit to a Spartan father. There was no fuss, no scene. On the contrary, an atmosphere ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... midmost waves fume to the sky; And ancient Peneus smokes: Ismenos swift; Caicus, Teuthrantean; and the flood Of Phocis, Erymanthus: Xanthus too, Doom'd to be fir'd again: Lycormas brown; Maeander's sportive oft recircling waves; Mygdonian Melas; and the Spartan flood, Eurotas; with Euphrates burn: and burn, Orontes; and the rapid Thermodoon; Ganges; and Phasis; and the Ister swift. Alpheus boils; the banks of Spercheus burn; And Tagus' golden sands the flames dissolve. Stream-loving swans, whose song melodious ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... had lacked penetration to divine. But the error serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of number and Spartan poverty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first coat, and thou wilt have little reason to be proud of dress or the adorning of thy body. Seek rather the enduring ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, the beauty and the purity of the altar of God's temple, rather than the decoration of its outward walls. For, as the Spartan monarch said of old to his daughter, when he restrained her from wearing the rich dresses of Sicily, 'Thou wilt seem more lovely to me without them,' so shalt thou seem, in thy lowliness and humility, more lovely in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... was widely played and was printed in the Drama League series of plays (1906). His other best-known work here is the present play, and The Price of Coal (1909), a picturing of the hard life of miners' wives and their Spartan firmness in expectation of fatal accidents. He has produced and published a number of other plays, among them those listed in the bibliography. Mr. Brighouse represents in this volume the work of the English Repertory ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... the property of the twelve gentlemen, whom the decree of the Spanish tribunal had convicted of rebellion, afford interesting proofs of the Spartan simplicity which existed in the colony. Thus the furniture of the bed-room of Madam Villere, who was the wife of one of the most distinguished citizens of Louisiana, and the grand-daughter of De Lachaise, who came to ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... generation like ours, in which senseless luxury, the result of wealth which has increased faster than the power of rightly using it, has attained such enormous proportions, and is threatening, in commercial communities especially, to drown all noble aspirations, and Spartan simplicity, and Christian self-devotion, in its muddy flood. Surely never was Gideon's test more wanted for the army of the Lord of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... As to the Spartan women, Aristotle says that they ruled their husbands and owned two-fifths of the land. Surely, had they not approved of infanticide for some very strong reasons of their own, they ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... enough to appease his hunger and reach Grove Lane by the suitable hour. He went out to the little coffee-shop which was his resort in Spartan moods, ate with considerable appetite, and walked over Westminster Bridge to the Camberwell tram. To kill time on the journey he bought ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... end when Carthage and Macedon were overthrown. National danger and the necessity for national effort being removed, self-devotion failed, egotism broke loose, and began to revel in the pillage and oppression of a conquered world. The Roman character was corrupted, as the Spartan character was corrupted when Sparta, from being a camp in the midst of hostile Helots, became a dominant power and sent out governors to subject states; though the corruption in the case of Sparta was far more rapid, because Spartan excellence was more exclusively military, more ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... indeed, in much resembled that of the Spartan in Greece. He had forced a settlement with scanty numbers in the midst of a subjugated and sullen population, surrounded by jealous and formidable foes. Hence sobriety was a condition of his being, and the policy of the chief lent a willing ear to the lessons ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stage in which Beth at length began to meditate on Spartan remedies. The situation was not to be endured. No word had come from Searle. The world might have swallowed him up. She was sick of him—sick of his ways of neglect. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... fair Oenone, Weeping ever, weeping low, On the holy mount of Ida, Where the pine and cypress grow. In the self-same hour Cassandra Shrieked her prophecy of woe, And into the Spartan dwelling Did ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... in church service—these auxiliaries influence them so strongly in their sense of the beautiful that they think, "Surely I love God. Why, of course I love God." But to love God involves something practical. It means something more than mere profession. It means rugged self-denial, Spartan heroism, perhaps the loss of an "arm" or the "plucking out of an eye." Base must have been the soul which was not attracted by One who "spake as never man spake"; low-minded the man who did not see in Him imperishable beauty and refinement of soul; but ah! discipleship means far more than that. ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... it's going to play hob with my book.—No time like the present. I'll go back with you to-day, Morty, and put my things together.—It 's been the best time of my life!" he sighed, already beginning to dramatize himself as the self-denying Spartan. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... humor. In the Mil. (411 ff.) Philocomasium needs only to change clothing to appear in the role of her own hypothetical twin sister, and in 874 ff. and 1216 ff. the meretrix plays matrona. Sagaristio and the daughter of the leno impersonate Persians (Per. 549 ff.), Collabiscus becomes a Spartan (Poen. 578 ff.), Simia as Harpax gets Ballio's money (Ps. 905 ff.), the sycophant is garbed as messenger (Trin. 843 ff.), Phronesium elaborately pretends to be a mother (Truc. 499 ff.). A swindle is almost invariably the object in ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... adopted what they considered to be the best teaching of each sect. The Eclectics were very similar to, if not identical with, the Episynthetics, founded by a pupil of Athenaeus, by name, Agathinus. He was a Spartan by birth. He is frequently quoted by Galen, but none ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... mother who kept no record of her daily effort to lead her children in the path of righteousness and noble service: "Mrs. Adams's influence on her children was strong, inspiring, vital. Something of the Spartan mother's spirit breathed in her. She taught her sons and daughter to be brave and patient, in spite of danger and privation. She made them feel no terror at the thought of death or hardships suffered for one's country. She read and talked to them of the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... eighth. He has evidently a sympathy with the soldier, as well as with the poet, and he is no mean master of the art, or at least of the theory, of war (compare Laws; Republic), though inclining rather to the Spartan than to the Athenian practice of it (Laws). Of a supreme or master science which was to be the 'coping-stone' of the rest, few traces appear in the Laws. He seems to have lost faith in it, or perhaps to have realized that the time ...
— Laws • Plato
... inconvenience, the idea of forsaking their homes and husbands was too ridiculous. The notion of living in tents on potted beef and adamantine biscuits was shuddered at. The whole project was voted a wild-cat scheme (and Mr. Rhodes agreed). After the spartan bravery they had displayed for two months, the ladies regarded this new and wanton strain on their loyalty as inhuman. Their protest was loud and dignified; and when the women are concerned in a public protest the men are—oh, so mere! And the men in khaki were ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... showing in this tone, "is the house of the Akitcita, our soldiers and policemen, the men between twenty and forty, the warriors of the first rank, who live here in common, and into whose house women and children may not enter. I have read in the books at your schools how the Spartan young men lived together as soldiers in a common house, eating rough food and doing the severest duty, and the whole world has long applauded. The Sioux, who never heard of the Spartans, have been doing the same far back into the shadowy time. We, too, are ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... who was styled the son of Neptune, founded the city 656 years before the Christian aera. His followers were drawn from Argos and Megara. Byzantium was afterwards rebuild and fortified by the Spartan general Pausanias. See Scaliger Animadvers. ad Euseb. p. 81. Ducange, Constantinopolis, l. i part i. cap 15, 16. With regard to the wars of the Byzantines against Philip, the Gauls, and the kings ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... "I believe you could! You are an angel, a Spartan, and a sport. Your nature is simply an extravagant profusion of the highest human attributes. And the worst of it is, you look it. You are too beautiful—in a superior, overtopping way. ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... bone. When I did not notice him he would plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that bud of a tail, and looking up, with his head a little to the one side. His master I occasionally saw; he used to call me "Maister John," but was laconic as any Spartan. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... see the various articles of furniture ticketed with their prices. A luxurious bed, with satin hangings and Indian carved posts, standing ostentatiously in a corner, kept up this resemblance, for in a curtained recess stood a worn camp bedstead, Rushbrook's real couch, Spartan in ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... successfully launched to notice the change; but it was noticed by others, and especially by Howard. Often he watched Stafford moving moodily about his father's crowded rooms, with the impassive face which men wear when they have some secret trouble or anxiety which they conceal as the Spartan boy concealed the fox which was gnawing at his vitals; or Howard came upon him in the corner of a half-darkened smoking-room, with an expired cigar in his lips, and his eyes fixed on a ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... pursue the same path with Metastasio, he naturally fell into the opposite extreme: I might not unaptly call him a Metastasio reversed. If the muse of the latter he a love-sick nymph, Alfieri's muse is an Amazon. He gave her a Spartan education; he aimed at being the Cato of the theatre; but he forgot that, though the tragic poet may himself he a stoic, tragic poetry itself, if it would move and agitate us, must never be stoical. His language is so barren of imagery, that his characters seem altogether devoid ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... I faint; and my limbs fail me.—O daughter, touch thy mother, stretch forth thy hand—give it me—leave me not childless—I am lost, my friends. Would that I might see the Spartan Helen, the sister of the twin sons of Jove, thus, for through her bright eyes that most vile woman destroyed the ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... hundred years. I will not weary you with futile minor divisions of time; here are three coins (Plate VII.) roughly, but decisively, characteristic of the three ages. The first is an early coin of Tarentum. The city was founded as you know, by the Spartan Phalanthus, late in the eighth century. I believe the head is meant for that of Apollo Archegetes, it may however be Taras, the son of Poseidon; it is no matter to us at present whom it is meant for, but the fact that we cannot know, is itself of the greatest ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... if my life were the sacrifice to it, my friends might think they did a popular act in putting my family at least beyond the reach of necessity, which I myself began to despair of doing. And though I disclaim all pretense to that Spartan or Roman patriotism which loved the public so well that it was always ready to become a voluntary sacrifice to the public good, I do solemnly declare I have that love ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... I think, rather hard on men to be sent straight from the comfort and warmth of a hospital or convalescent camp to a place as Spartan as this. Instead of having a bed to sleep on, the unfortunate "detail" found himself condemned to the floor boards of a bell tent, with a very meagre allowance of well-worn blankets. In cold weather ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... the old gray buccaneer, lighting a Spartan cigar. "We're penned up; whoever has us cornered may now come round and knock us on the head ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... excess, since the training of the children of that sex, hardly yielded to that of the male in laboriousness and fatigue. Be this confessed to be an extreme: but then it was in some measure compensated by its being universally allowed, that the Spartan women owed to it that beauty in which they excelled the rest of the Grecian women, who were themselves held, in that point, preferable to the rest of the world. Hellen was a Spartan. Yet the legislator of that people, did not so much as consider this advantage ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... mail of Masistius, who commanded the cavalry at Plataea, and a scimitar said to have belonged to Mardonius. Masistius we know was killed by the Athenian cavalry; but as Mardonius fought against the Lacedaemonians and was killed by a Spartan, they could not have got it at first hand; nor is it likely that the Lacedaemonians would have allowed the Athenians to carry off such a trophy. And about the olive they have nothing else to tell but that the goddess used it as ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... blest! My griefs are fled! Fled like a dream! Methinks I tread in air!— Surprising happiness! unlook'd for joy! Never let love despair! The prize is mine!— Be smooth, ye seas! and, ye propitious winds, Blow from Epirus to the Spartan coast! ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... further way to check expenditure. Athalie had dismissed their servant as soon as she had lost her position at Wahlbaum and Grossman's. Table expenses were reduced to Spartan limits, much to the disgust of them all. No clothes were bought, no luxuries, no trifles. They did their own marketing, their own cooking, their own housework and laundry. And had it not been that the apartment entailed no outlay for light, heat, and rent, they ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... prospect but that the citizens would have to defend themselves as best they could. Benjamin Clifford took command of the volunteers, and Captain William Anderson organized a small body of sharpshooters called the Spartan Band. As cannon were badly needed, the brethren got two hollow steamboat shafts, cut them in two, plugged up one end, and thus made some cannon. They had no cannon balls, but they used scraps of iron and ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... Shelley lived like a Spartan; a hunk of bread and a jug of water, dashed perhaps with milk, served him as a dinner. His income was spent on the poor, on struggling men of genius, and on necessitous friends. Now as the world goes, this is simply ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... mingled feelings, but most of all because it was the 'thing to do,' the then accepted form of human action. When once the predominant type was determined, the copying propensity of man did the rest. The tradition ascribing Spartan legislation to Lycurgus was literally untrue, but its spirit was quite true. In the origin of states strong and eager individuals got hold of small knots of men, and made for them a fashion which they were ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... and ask Pasqualino whether Saru told him anything before he died, and Pasqualino, concealing the pistol in his bosom as the Spartan boy ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... said Adrian, seeing how the communications of Hippias were received, "that when our Nemesis takes lodgings in the stomach, it's best to act the Spartan, smile hard, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Ralph and Evelyn found the new owner of Vandon, when they rode over together to call, a day or two after the school-feast. Poor Dare was sitting on the low ivy-covered wall of the topmost terrace, a prey to the deepest dejection. If he had lived in Spartan days, when it was possible to conceal gnawing foxes under wearing apparel, he would have made no use of the advantages of Grecian dress for such a purpose. Captivated by Evelyn's gentleness and sympathetic ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... controversy and part of Eric's persistent but fruitless campaign against the studiedly Spartan attitude ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... nearer to a perfect democracy than any other government which has yet been known in the world. Judging of them also by their fruits, they were of the highest order of republics. Sparta could scarcely be any other than a republic, when a Spartan matron could say to her son just marching to battle, "Return ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... a repetition of your father's platitudes—I've heard them often enough. I don't know much about the war, but all I've heard has set me against it. But never mind! And now, good-bye, my Spartan sweetheart." ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... not betray any open signs of anger against the Athenians at what they heard. The embassy, it seems, was prompted not by a desire to obstruct, but to guide the counsels of their government: besides, Spartan feeling was at that time very friendly towards Athens on account of the patriotism which she had displayed in the struggle with the Mede. Still the defeat of their wishes could not but cause them secret annoyance. The envoys of each state departed ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... the good. But this understanding made no difference to her woman's regard, unless it were to strengthen it to a sort of gentle worship such as woman is always ready to yield to strength. It required no effort upon her part to picture this man in the heroic mould of a Spartan warrior. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... fooled her husband as these women have so often fooled his soldiers; and that the rough-and-ready justice of the camp should be her reward. Had Othello any knowledge or experience in such matters to fall back on, he might anchor to that, and become definitely either the trusting husband or the Spartan judge. But as it is, he is whirled back and forth in a maelstrom of agonized doubt, until compass, bearings, and wisdom lost, he ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... is only a woman! And she is quite too much of a Hulot. Valerie has a horror of them all.—My son-in-law has never chosen to come to this house; why has he given himself such airs as a Mentor, a Spartan, a Puritan, a philanthropist? Besides, I have squared accounts with my daughter; she has had all her mother's fortune, and two hundred thousand francs to that. So I am free to act as I please.—I shall ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... in my description, let those who read my story remember that such courteous dignity, however natural, I am bound to believe, it is to them, was to me an utterly new excellence in human nature. All my mother's Spartan nobleness of manner seemed unexpectedly combined with all my little sister's ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... of Barker consisted of Stacy's lifting that young gentleman bodily from his bunk and standing him upright in the open doorway. But Barker was accustomed to this Spartan process, and after a moment's balancing with closed lids like an unwrapped mummy, he sat down in the doorway and began to dress. He at first demurred to their departure except all together—it was so unfraternal; but eventually he allowed himself to be persuaded out of it and into his clothes. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... prefaces her death. Those who remember her in her youth and beauty, before disease rather than time had altered the pale heroic face, and bowed the slight, stately figure, may well perceive some strange analogy between soul and body in the Spartan firmness which enabled her to pen that ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... of the Rebel army, and set up their triumphant standard at Atlanta—then exit Southern Confederacy. But their dead were so piled in their path at Ringgold Gap that they could not pass them. The Spartans gained a name at Thermopylae, in which Leonidas and the whole Spartan army were slain while defending the pass. Cleburne's division gained a name at Ringgold Gap, in which they not only slew the victorious army, but captured five thousand prisoners besides. That brilliant victory of Cleburne's made ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... the philosopher, who alleges for proof an Olympic quoit, on which was preserved the inscription of Lycurgus's name. But others who, with Eratosthenes and Apollodorus, compute the time by the succession of the Spartan kings, place him much earlier than the first Olympiad. Timaeus, however, supposes that, as there were two Lycurguses in Sparta at different times, the actions of both are ascribed to one, on account of his particular renown; and that the ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... in AEgypt Spartan Dame Two Harlequins Thomson's Sophonisba Roman Actor Three Hours after Marriage Alexis's Paradise Usurper Love in a Forest Lottery Sultaness Edwin Mad Lovers Wedding Bays's Opera Female Fop Female Parson Fall of Saguntum Henry V. Penelope Non-Juror Rival Modes Philotas Footman ...
— The Annual Catalogue (1737) - Or, A New and Compleat List of All The New Books, New - Editions of Books, Pamphlets, &c. • J. Worrall
... to be mannish—driven to that extremity by the super-femininity of Henrietta Bryne-Stivers; pretending to be frivolous, to shock rigid Mrs. Pemberton; pretending to be a blue-stocking with a passion for the solid and heavy in literature; pretending to be a Spartan who must rise at dawn and, after a plunge in ice-cold mountain water, climb, with only big Don, the Newfoundland, for company, up to the sluice-box; there to pretend she was an esthete to whom the sunrise, while she communed alone with nature, revealed things invisible ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... me in cold blood for Featherbrain. Since then I've been a blighted being—hiding, like the Spartan chap in the story, the fox that preys on my vitals, and going through life with the hollow mockery of a ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... may destroy their own political freedom.(481) The Achean league, which under the leadership of Aratos, the "enemy of tyrants," had come into existence, promising so much hope, beheld itself later, and mainly through fear of the contagious effects of Spartan socialism under Cleomenes, compelled to unite with the Macedonians, that is, to give themselves up entirely. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... prepare them for the right use of leisure in future years, and though burdened with little knowledge, possessed of an educated sense of beauty, and an ingrained love of what is noble and hatred of all that is the reverse. He would be more cultivated and human than the best type of young Spartan, more physically vigorous and reverential, though less intellectually developed, than the best type of young Athenian—a nascent soldier and servant of the state, not, like most young Athenians of ability, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... the third day the pass of Thermopyae was forced, thanks to the treachery of a Greek and the contemptible policy of the Spartan government which steadily refused the plea of Leonidas for reenforcements. With Thermopyae taken there was no further reason for the Greek fleet to try to hold the straits north of Euboea, and during ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... his body, Spartan-like, to all the fatigues and exposures of war. He indulged in no luxury of tents or carriages, and ate the flesh of horses and wild beasts, which he roasted himself, over the coals. In his campaigns the ground was his ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England he had a Spartan struggle for life. In summer-time he fared comparatively well, but in winter the ill-heated houses of the colonists gave to him a most chilling and benumbing welcome. Within the great open fireplace, when fairly scorched in the face by the glowing flames of the roaring wood fire, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Lycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sent the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness with his smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law and civility, it is to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were, minding nought but the feats of war. There needed no licensing of books among them, for they disliked all ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... a death struggle with coiling serpents; then the loud, clear, triumphant notes, 'Give me liberty,' electrified the assembly. It was not a prayer, but a stern demand, which would submit to no refusal or delay. The sound of his voice, as he spoke these memorable words, was like that of a Spartan paean on the field of Plataea; and, as each syllable of the word 'liberty' echoed through the building, his fetters were shivered; his arms were hurled apart; and the links of his chains were scattered to the winds. When he spoke the word 'liberty' with an emphasis never ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... post dabble into our letters? Whatever agreement you make with Murray, if satisfactory to you, must be so to me. There need be no scruple, because, though I used sometimes to buffoon to myself, loving a quibble as well as the barbarian himself (Shakspeare, to wit)—'that, like a Spartan, I would sell my life as dearly as possible'—it never was my intention to turn it to personal, pecuniary account, but to bequeath it to a friend—yourself—in the event of survivorship. I anticipated that period, because ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... and lightly for a woman of her size, but was inclined to snuggle up too close, to permit undistracted guidance to her partner. It was almost impossible to avoid collisions with other couples, unless one possessed a Spartan mind and an iron will. In spite of himself, Keith became increasingly aware of her breast pressing against his chest; her smooth arm against his shoulder; the occasional passing contact of her, scarcely veiled from the sense of touch by the thin flame-coloured silk; the perfume she affected; the ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... as if it were a peculiarly distasteful medicine in the solid—the girl tidied the room. It was the only really well-furnished room in the cottage; Nell's little chamber in the roof was as plain as Marguerite's in "Faust," and Dick's was Spartan in its Character; but a Wolfer—Mrs. Lorton was a distant, a very distant connection by a remote marriage of the noble family of that name—cannot live without a certain amount of luxury, and, as there was not enough to go round, Mrs. Lorton ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... in my Head; Latin I write, and Greek I— read."] We have also his own authority (in Tom Jones) for supposing that he occasionally, if not frequently, sacrificed "with true Spartan devotion" at the "birchen Altar," of which a representation is to be found in Mr. Maxwell Lyte's history of the College. And it may fairly be inferred that he took part in the different sports and pastimes of the day, such as Conquering Lobs, Steal baggage, Chuck, Starecaps, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... same time take to thy house another wife in addition to this one, to bear thee children." When they spoke to him after this manner, Anaxandrides consented, having two wives, a thing which was not by any means after the Spartan fashion. ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... that such a rite was worked at Quiyough-cohanock, Strachey adds that Sir George Percy (who was with Smith) "was at, and observed" a similar mystery at Kecoughtan. It is plain that the rite was not a sacrifice, but a Bora, or initiation, and the parallel of the Spartan flogging of boys, with the retreat of the boys and their instructors, is very close, and, of course, unnoted by classical scholars except Mr. Frazer. Strachey ends with the critical remark that we shall not know all the certainty ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... leaped with a lighter heart from the window, intending to slip through the hands of the gendarmes. Tall and well proportioned as an ancient gladiator, and muscular as a Spartan, he walked for a quarter of an hour without knowing where to direct his steps, actuated by the sole idea of getting away from the spot where if he lingered he knew that he would surely be taken. Having passed through the Rue Mont Blanc, guided by the instinct which leads thieves ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... develop the faculty of lying to a high point of efficiency, and no one who knows him will contend that he is inferior to the European in this respect. The natural education of the Natives include the art of lying as the education of Spartan boys included the practice of larceny. Lying, we know, develops the memory, for a good memory is essential to successful lying. Some of the ruses and stratagems thought out by Natives fleeing from the king's wrath or the witch doctor's ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... was the "saint's" study—a den with a soft Eastern carpet, a big writing-table, a high porcelain stove of chocolate and white, and silk-upholstered settees. From this den a door opened into the "holy" man's sleeping-room, an apartment of spartan plainness save for its big stove, a replica of ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... o'er days more blest? Must we but blush?—Our fathers bled. Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... Lexington summoned them to common counsels, by the side of Warren, a man who lived to serve his country at home and abroad, and to die in the second place in the government. There, too, is the inflexible, the upright, the Spartan character, Robert Treat Paine. He also lived to serve his country through the struggle, and then withdrew from her councils, only that he might give his labors and his life to his native state, in another relation. These names, fellow-citizens, ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... army has never been so nearly reached as by that of Sparta. The Spartan spent his life in the barrack and the mess-room; his amusements were the exercises of the parade ground. For many generations a Spartan force had never been defeated in a pitched battle. We have had, in modern times, some instances of ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... warriors and the courage of despair—fought side by side with the Indian braves in the effort to arrest Rutherford's progress and compass his defeat. More than forty frontiersmen fell beneath the deadly shots of this truly Spartan band before the final ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... lips, but her hands are steady, and the touch is exceedingly gentle as she binds up the ugly red mark which he has inflicted on himself with what she is disposed to term Spartan-like courage. ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... He groaned, and tears flowed down the face that had taken the place of his own. Yet his consciousness remained. What shall he do? Go home to seek the palace, or lie hid in the woods? The latter he was afraid, the former he was ashamed, to do. While he hesitated the dogs saw him. First Melampus, a Spartan dog, gave the signal with his bark, then Pamphagus, Dorceus, Lelaps, Theron, Nape, Tigris, and all the rest, rushed after him swifter than the wind. Over rocks and cliffs, through mountain gorges that seemed impracticable, he fled, and they followed. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... firing at random on the furious savages, who howled for their blood. The Iroquois fought like incarnate demons, and every stone they flung with unerring precision shattered a white man's skull. Like the Spartan three hundred, this brave French band determined not to be taken alive, so the living supplied the places of their fallen comrades until only five or six men remained. But the Indians at last effected ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... pitiless sun beat upon them unmercifully. Philip's lips were cracked, his tongue was swollen, and the burning dust almost choked him. He began to see less clearly, and visions of things he knew to be unreal came to him. With Spartan courage and indomitable will, he never faltered, but went on. Mirages came and went, and he could not know whether he saw true or not. Then here and there he thought he began to see tufts of curly mesquite grass, and in the distance surely there were cacti. He knew that if he could hold out a little ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... admire what Lycurgus the Spartan did? A young citizen had put out his eye, and been handed over to him by the people to be punished at his own discretion. Lycurgus abstained from all vengeance, but on the contrary instructed and made a good man of him. Producing him ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... can have. I have a family I love as much as any man in this court loves his family. But I can remember the blessing I received from an aged mother's lips as I left her the last time. She, speaking as the Spartan mother did, said—'Go, my boy, return either with your shield or upon it.' This reconciles me—this gives me heart. I submit to my doom; and I hope that God will forgive me my past sins. I hope also, that inasmuch as He has for seven hundred ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... Mr. Genuine Bacon-Fat, appointed by me in my last will I give and bequeath: thirty measures of acorns; and to my mother, Mrs. Old-Timer Sow, appointed by me in my last will, I give and bequeath: forty measures of Spartan wheat; and to my sister, Cry-Baby, appointed by me in my last will, whose wedding, alas! I cannot attend, I give and bequeath: thirty measures of barley; and of my nobler parts and property I give and bequeath, to the cobbler: my bristles; ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... on their arrival searching for an attic in some bleak tenement in a noisy street. Here they were to live almost entirely on the baskets of home produce sent through the carriers at intervals by their thrifty parents. It was and is a Spartan discipline, and it turns out men who have shown their grit and independence in all lands where the British flag ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... times her eyes turned to the broad entrance across the sidewalk. She had telephoned to her father earlier in the afternoon; and he had promised faithfully to be ready at four o'clock for a spin up the drive behind Spartan. At three minutes past four the pucker made its first appearance; and now, several minutes later, it was quite distressing. Never before had he kept her waiting like this. She was conscious of the fact that at least a hundred men had stared at her in the longest ten minutes she had ever known. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... out of the Spartan kind, So flew'd, so sanded; and their heads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew; Crook-knee'd and dew-lap'd like Thessalian bulls; Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells, Each under each. A cry more tuneable Was ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... afraid, but she had learned in the Spartan household of her ancestors, to be more afraid of fear than of anything else, so she pulled a blanket over her head and shouldered a musket, and, after the elder Letitia had unbarred and unbolted the door, they all stepped out into the night, armed ...
— The Green Door • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... comfortable, nowhere pressing tightly or unequally. The word enceinte, by which a pregnant woman is designated, meant, originally, without a cincture,—that is, unbound. The Roman matrons, so soon as they conceived, were obliged to remove their girdles. Lycurgus caused the enactment of the Spartan law, that pregnant women should wear large dresses, so as not to prejudice the free development of the precious charges of which nature had rendered them the momentary depositaries. Stays or corsets may be used, in a proper manner, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... "Jupiter, Minerva, and all the celestial and infernal deities!" The force of the cracker was now somewhat spent. "Ye boys of Britain, that bear not one mark of manhood about you! Would Leonidas have fastened a squib to the robe of the Spartan mother? Would Cimber have so unworthily used Portia, the wife of Brutus? Would Corbulo thus have interrupted the heroic fortitude of Arria, the ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... members of the old noble and gentle "army nobility"—were careful to shun this vice. These officers, whose families had often served the king as soldiers for four or five generations, held fast to a Spartan simplicity of life, and to the old Prussian independence of material comforts, and with them were all those who regarded their vocation as something loftier than an amusement. Otherwise, a most unsoldierlike luxury was spreading unhindered ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... this best and meekest woman bore With such serenity her husband's woes, Just as the Spartan ladies did of yore, Who saw their spouses killed, and nobly chose Never to say a word about them more— Calmly she heard each calumny that rose, And saw his agonies with such sublimity, That all ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... I DAS, the celebrated Spartan leader who, with three hundred men, perished in the effort to resist the Persian hosts, at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... house or as watchmen against fire and the depredations of cattle. The Coromantees of the Gold Coast stand salient in all accounts as hardy and stalwart of mind and body. Long calls them haughty, ferocious and stubborn; Edwards relates examples of their Spartan fortitude; and it was generally agreed that they were frequently instigators of slave conspiracies and insurrections. Yet their spirit of loyalty made them the most highly prized of servants by those who could call it forth. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... there[44], With mirror of gold, Decking her face so fair, Girl-like; and hear, and stare, And turn death-cold: Never, ah, never more The hearth of her home to see, Nor sand of the Spartan shore, Nor tombs where her fathers be, Nor Athena's bronzen Dwelling, Nor the towers of Pitane For her face was a dark desire Upon Greece, and shame like fire, And her dead are welling, welling, From red Simois ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... Kultur without belying itself. On the contrary, so highly developed a Kultur nation as the German Empire puts itself in a position where it is almost impossible to acquire any considerable degree of culture. Culture is the enemy of such a state—it must remain in the Spartan or Macedonian stage. Rome began to decline as soon as Hellenistic culture got the ascendency over the old Latin Kultur. Kultur, in short, galvanizes; culture liberates. A survey of modern Germany hardly warrants a desire ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... without gratefully acknowledging the respect we entertain for those who have defended our cause with more than Spartan courage. It is the opinion of your committee, that they are to be respected as our countrymen, our brethren, and our fellow citizens—not to say they are to be applauded as men, whose great acts are based upon the acclamation of their fellow men; but rather let us hold up ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... awake the Spartan fife, And call in solemn sounds to life, The youths, whose locks divinely spreading, Like vernal hyacinths in sullen hue, At once the breath of fear and virtue shedding, 5 Applauding Freedom loved of old to view? What new Alcaeus,[21] fancy-blest, Shall sing the sword, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... scouts to ascertain what the Greeks were doing in their camp, the report was that some of them were engaged in gymnastics and warlike exercises, while others were merely sitting and combing their long hair. If the hypothesis already suggested is correct, the Spartan youths so engaged were perhaps not merely adorning themselves for death, but, as they thought, obtaining their full strength for battle. "The custom of keeping the hair unshorn during a dangerous expedition appears to ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... not begin there. A like adventure chanced often at the parsonage, and, at nine years of age, I reigned king absolute over a nursery full of her Majesty's subjects who called me brother, and quailed before my nod like Helots before the crest of a Spartan. But, as I say, all that is neither here nor there in ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... suddenly uneasy, as if some intuition warned it of treachery, and tried valiantly to escape from his grasp, and never did Spartan boy with wolf concealed beneath his tunic suffer more tortures than Morrow with the wretched little ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... meant the breaking of a life-time's traditions. The departure was depressing and unsettling; the weather was—as it always is during January in Glebeshire—at its worst, and the Jampot, feeling it all very deeply, maintained a terrible Spartan composure, which was meant to show indifference and a sense of injustice. She had to the very last believed it incredible that she should really go. She had been in the old Orange Street house for eight years, and had intended ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... more responsive to such cries since the war. That might have been foreseen by any one at all familiar with the psychopathology of reform. A cigarette addict who, in a spartan moment, swears off smoking, is familiar enough with the inner gnaw that robs him of his sleep and roils his dinner for days and days. His body, long habituated to the tobacco, had dutifully taken on the business of manufacturing ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... were in harmony with the rooms and furniture, consisting only of the strict necessities, cooked with a Spartan disregard for such sybarite foibles as seasoning or dressing. I believe there was a substantial meal somewhere in the early morning hours, but I never succeeded in getting down in time to inspect it. By successful bribery, I induced one of ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... battling with her mother-love. She knew what this quest of the Cave of Gold might mean—hardships, dangers, even death for those she loved. But she was of pioneer stock, had often seen her dearest go forth to face the dangers of the unknown wilderness; and, at last, with something of Spartan-like fortitude, she ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... its final reveille,— This dawning morn must be the last Our fated band shall ever see. To life, but not to hope, farewell; Yon trumpet's clang and cannon's peal, And storming shout and clash of steel Is ours,—but not our country's knell. Welcome the Spartan's death! 'Tis no despairing strife— We fall, we die—but our expiring breath Is ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... to the wall, shut his eyes, and closed his mind with a Spartan effort. His breathing came heavily, regularly, like one who slept or one who is running. Over that sound he caught at length another light rustling, and then the faint creak as she crossed the crazy floor. He made his face ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... amidst the stars of midnight. A more bloody apparition never emerged from the sulphureous canopy of war. Having perfect contempt for all enervating pleasures, with an iron frame and the abstemious habits of a Spartan, he rushed through a career which has excited the wonder of the world. He joined the Austrian party; struck down Denmark at a blow; penetrated Russia in mid-winter, driving the Russian troops before him as dogs scatter ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... brushing the dust from his clothes. There was a rapidly developing lump over one eye, but his expression remained unchanged. Josephine approached him with happy gurgles. Her heart was filled with womanly sympathy, but her soul remained undaunted. She was of the Spartan stuff that sends sons to the war, and holds a reception for them if they return—from victory—on their shields. She cooed in conscious imitation of Fraulein's best manner. "Now, ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... with him about himself, and enthusiastic admirers of his genius commonly met with a rather cold reception. He repelled everything in the shape of a compliment. Dr. Edward Emerson says somewhere that his father was used to eat whatever was set before him with Spartan-like indifference. This mistake may have arisen from the good quality of Mrs. Emerson's housekeeping, and the excellent fare which she provided for her husband and his friends. Emerson wished to bear the hardships of life without complaining, but he ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... written, in his Classic and Historic Portraits, that the ancient Spartan paid as much attention to the rearing of men as the cattle dealers in modern England do to the breeding of cattle. They took charge of firmness and looseness of men's flesh; and regulated the degree of fatness to which it was lawful, in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... something about the Macaulay-flowers of literature?—There was a dead silence.—I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If I have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken helot. We have done ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... seldom used. People who said "Daddy dear," or "Jim dear," were under suspicion. "They fight like cats and dogs when no one else is around" was the universal comment on a family whose members were very free of their terms of affection. We were a Spartan lot. We did not believe in letting our wives and children know that they were an important part of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... or, to speak more accurately, a first step towards an offence? You must either accept this theory with all its consequences, or absolve illicit passion. French society hitherto has chosen the third and middle course of looking on and laughing when offences come, apparently upon the Spartan principle of condoning the theft and punishing clumsiness. And this system, it may be, is a very wise one. 'Tis a most appalling punishment to have all your neighbors pointing the finger of scorn at you, a punishment that a woman feels ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... teaching of the Dogmatists, Methodists, and Empirics, and adopted what they considered to be the best teaching of each sect. The Eclectics were very similar to, if not identical with, the Episynthetics, founded by a pupil of Athenaeus, by name, Agathinus. He was a Spartan by birth. He is frequently quoted by Galen, but none of his ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... veins. For history does not record, that any other of its long and shining line of heroes and martyrs, ever met death, anywhere on this globe, in a holier cause or a sublimer mood, than died this Spartan-like slave, more than three quarters ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... pleading love stretched the arm of stony-eyed duty, striking into the dust the crystal drops, withering the palms; and following her stern beckon, the thirsty pilgrim re-trod the sands of surrender, more intolerable than before, because the oasis was still in sight. Duty! Rugged incorruptible Spartan dame, whose inflexible mandate is ever: "With your ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... out of her troubles. The days lengthened, and so did the faces at home; so would the bills have done had she ever yielded to the importunities of her Mrs.-Nickleby-like mother or Mart's weakling of a wife; but Jenny was Spartan in self-denial; what she couldn't pay for on ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... Sparta. Some writers say that it was held solely in honour of Apollo; others, of Hyacinthus; but it is much more probable, that it was intended to be in honour of both Apollo and Hyacinthus. The festival lasted for three days, and began on the longest day of the Spartan month, Hecatombaeus. On the first and last day, sacrifices were offered to the dead, and the fate of Hyacinthus was lamented. Garlands were forbidden to be worn on those days, bread was not allowed to be eaten, and no songs were recited in praise of Apollo. On the second day, rejoicing ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... difficult to date even that of the central three hundred years. I will not weary you with futile minor divisions of time; here are three coins (Plate VII.) roughly, but decisively, characteristic of the three ages. The first is an early coin of Tarentum. The city was founded as you know, by the Spartan Phalanthus, late in the eighth century. I believe the head is meant for that of Apollo Archegetes, it may however be Taras, the son of Poseidon; it is no matter to us at present whom it is meant for, but the fact that we cannot know, is itself of the greatest import. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Great Ajax with Tydides next appear'd, And he that o'er the sea's broad bosom steer'd In search of shores unknown with daring prow, And ancient Nestor, with his looks of snow, Who thrice beheld the race of man decline, And hail'd as oft a new heroic line: Then Agamemnon, with the Spartan's shade, One by his spouse forsaken, one betray'd: And now another Spartan met my view, Who, cheerly, call'd his self-devoted crew To banquet with the ghostly train below, And with unfading laurels deck'd the brow; Though from a bounded stage a ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... conditions are, the magnitude of States, the division of labor, the suppression of slavery and the requirements of personal comforts and prosperity. Neither the Girondists nor the Montagnards, who aimed to revive Athenian and Spartan ways, comprehended the precisely opposite conditions on ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that I wore through the remaining hours of darkness upon the sodden hillside. Superlative Miss Gilchrist! Folded in the mantle of that Spartan dame; huddled upon a boulder, while the rain descended upon my bare head, and coursed down my nose, and filled my shoes, and insinuated a playful trickle down the ridge of my spine; I hugged the lacerating fox of self-reproach, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... name from out the temple where the dead Are honour'd by the nations—let it be, And light the laurels on a loftier head, And be the Spartan's epitaph on me: "Sparta had many a worthier son than he"; Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need; The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted—they have torn me—and I bleed: I should have known what fruit would spring ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... faint; and my limbs fail me.—O daughter, touch thy mother, stretch forth thy hand—give it me—leave me not childless—I am lost, my friends. Would that I might see the Spartan Helen, the sister of the twin sons of Jove, thus, for through her bright eyes that most vile woman ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... the Macaulay-flowers of literature?—There was a dead silence.—I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If I have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken helot. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... AGESILA'US, a Spartan king, victorious over the Persians in Asia and over the allied Thebans and Athenians at Coronea, but defeated by Epaminondas at Mantinea after a campaign in Egypt; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... should imagine himself another Leonidas, and us his Spartan band, and want us to die around him, and start another Thermopylae down her in the mountains, some place," suggested Kent Edwards, "you would cheerfully pass in your checks along with the rest, so as to make the thing ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Housewife bathing herself, is only a pretext for drawing; and Degas chose these extraordinary themes because the drawing of the ballet girl and the fat housewife is less known than that of the nymph and the Spartan youth. Painters will understand what I mean by the drawing being "less known",—that knowledge of form which sustains the artist like a crutch in his examination of the model, and which as it were dictates ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... so strange a quality, that he was ready, if jay or magpie did not cross him, to fight for Spartan or Persian. Plato, whom thou esteemest much, and knowest somewhat less, careth as little for portent and omen as doth Diogenes. What he would have done for a Persian I cannot say; certain I am that he would have no more fought for a Spartan than he would for his own father: ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... had not the daughter of Jove brushed it aside with her hand, as a mother doth a fly from her sleeping child. The bow does not appear to have been extensively used in later times in either the Greek or Roman armies. The ferocious Spartan preferred the close combat with manual weapons, the Athenian won his glory upon the sea, and it was with the pike that Alexander overcame the hosts of Persia. The Cretans, who were the most celebrated archers ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... others, though he had become a perfectly undisciplined man himself, he would limit me strictly to the time necessary for my journey, a time that I never ventured to exceed. In some respects the education that he was giving me, though of Spartan severity, was not ill calculated for the formation of a manly character. He quite understood the importance of applying the mind completely to the thing which occupied it for the moment. If he saw me taking several books together that had no connection with each other, he would say, "Take one ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... did not daunt the spirits of Leonidas and his men, and his wife, Gorgo, not a woman to be faint-hearted or hold him back. Long before, when she was a very little girl, a word of hers had saved her father from listening to a traitorous message from the King of Persia; and every Spartan lady was bred up to be able to say to those she best loved that they must come home from battle "with the shield or on it"—either carrying it victoriously or borne upon it as ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... possibly be applicable to many a colonial mother who kept no record of her daily effort to lead her children in the path of righteousness and noble service: "Mrs. Adams's influence on her children was strong, inspiring, vital. Something of the Spartan mother's spirit breathed in her. She taught her sons and daughter to be brave and patient, in spite of danger and privation. She made them feel no terror at the thought of death or hardships suffered for one's country. She read and talked to them of the world's history.... ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... think you're horrid and unsympathetic." She tapped him admonishingly on the arm, laughing lightly. But the gloom was still in her dark-gray eyes. "But, after all, you are right. We are in for it, just as you have been.... God grant there are women more Spartan than I." ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... seem minute in my description, let those who read my story remember that such courteous dignity, however natural, I am bound to believe, it is to them, was to me an utterly new excellence in human nature. All my mother's Spartan nobleness of manner seemed unexpectedly combined with all my little ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... turf they rest, Far from the gory field, Borne to a Spartan mother's breast On many a bloody shield; [6] The sunshine of their native sky Smiles sadly on them here, And kindred eyes and hearts watch by The ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... the soldier's uniform and the barrack mess table are civilization's last word—would like no doubt to start a regime of National Kitchens and "Spartan Broth." They would point out the advantages thereby gained, the economy in fuel and food, if such huge kitchens were established, where every one could come for their rations of ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Lacedaemonian manner. Timaeus writes, that the Syracusans sent even Gylippus home dishonorably, and with a reputation lost by the unsatiable covetousness he displayed when he commanded the army. And numerous historians tell us of the wicked and perfidious acts committed by Pharax the Spartan, and Callippus the Athenian, with the view of making themselves kings of Sicily. Yet what were these men, and what strength had they, to entertain such a thought? The first of them was a follower of Dionysius, when he was expelled from Syracuse, and the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... "Only she was the Spartan mother combined with it," continued Mrs. Duncombe. "When Bob was a little urchin, he once, in anticipation of his future tastes, committed the enormity of riding on a stick on Sunday; so she locked him up till he had learnt six verses of one of Watts's hymns about going to church being like a little ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... protector, the bard so bold; The bard, they say, that has dared to speak, To attack the strong, to defend the weak. His fame in foreign climes is heard, And a singular instance lately occurred. It occurred in the case of the Persian king, Sifting and cross-examining The Spartan envoys. He demanded Which of the rival States commanded The Grecian seas? He asked them next (Wishing to see them more perplexed) Which of the two contending powers Was chiefly abused by this bard of ours? For he said, "Such a bold, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... people, who much loved and esteemed him, was VATER FRITZ,—Father Fred,—a name of familiarity which had not bred contempt in that instance. He is a King every inch of him, though without the trappings of a King. Presents himself in a Spartan simplicity of vesture: no crown but an old military cocked-hat,—generally old, or trampled and kneaded into absolute SOFTNESS, if new;—no sceptre but one like Agamemnon's, a walking-stick cut from the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... constitution! But apart from physical inconvenience, the idea of forsaking their homes and husbands was too ridiculous. The notion of living in tents on potted beef and adamantine biscuits was shuddered at. The whole project was voted a wild-cat scheme (and Mr. Rhodes agreed). After the spartan bravery they had displayed for two months, the ladies regarded this new and wanton strain on their loyalty as inhuman. Their protest was loud and dignified; and when the women are concerned in a public protest the men are—oh, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... and fall as an artist came his simultaneous transformation from invited guest to parasite and hanger-on; he could not bring himself to quit dinners so excellently served for the Spartan broth of a two-franc ordinary. Alas! alas! a shudder ran through him at the mere thought of the great sacrifices which independence required him to make. He felt that he was capable of sinking ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... it approaches them, they simply cower and submit. Not only that, but it is beyond question that hyenas have the power to call dogs to them. . . . For five weeks I have been alone in this tent six nights in every week all night, with two children and the spartan soul of Nels the Great Dane dog; and I have seen and I have heard the process ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... asks Mrs. Hopkins, fashionable busybody, running in for an informal call on Mrs. O'Meara, who is warm-hearted and sensible, and who listens to the babblings of Mrs. Hopkins, with a patience and benignity worthy of a Spartan mother. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... assembled in the Government Buildings at Pretoria for the purpose of deciding upon a course of action in the grave crisis which confronted the Republic. It was the gravest assemblage that was ever gathered together in that city—a veritable concourse of Spartan mothers. There was little speech, for the hearts of all were heavy, and tears were more plentiful than words, but the result of the meeting was the ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... question Thucydides is the only source; and despite the inherent merits of a great writer, it can hardly be doubted that the tribute of almost unqualified praise that successive generations of scholars have paid to Thucydides must have been in some measure qualified if, for example, a Spartan account of the Peloponnesian War had been preserved to us. Professor Mahaffy has pointed out that many other events in Greek history are viewed by us in somewhat perverted perspective because the great writers of Greece were Athenians ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Soft-hearted Karl and Spartan Mother Louise; her rigid character, its good and its bad side; her extreme punctilio and her pistol-shooting, to steady ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... of the Spartan Palaestra is, Strip or depart; but you are like the giant Antaeus, and will not let me depart unless I try a ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... opinion make their way against better judgment, especially if there can be no doubt of the sincerity of the man of such a temper, and the rigid eye, the proud air, and the whole attitude of Reed spoke, and spoke truly, of a life of absolute purity, and of a fanaticism of Spartan endurance. ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... do thou give to her all that thou givest now and at the same time take to thy house another wife in addition to this one, to bear thee children." When they spoke to him after this manner, Anaxandrides consented, having two wives, a thing which was not by any means after the Spartan fashion. ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... judging exteriorly, you are wrong. There is recounted somewhere in the classics an altogether incredible story of a Spartan youth and a fox: the boy, with the animal hid beneath his cloak, preserved an unruffled demeanor despite the animal's tearing teeth, until he fell down and died. In the same way, young sir, no man can lose fifty-odd guineas from his pocket and remain unaffected ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... ivory lute Sonatas full of passion, And she bangs her hair (Which is passing fair) In the good old Spartan fashion. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... man. Our motto in the little drogher yonder is to keep her afloat with the least possible bother to ourselves. We never lie in swagger harbours to be looked at. There isn't a burgee or a brass button on board. Strict Spartan utility is very much the motto of the ship's company. Hence, for example, you find the decks brown and not white, and yet I can assure you that they are absolutely staunch. She scarcely leaks a tear anywhere; and although she's beamy and heavy-bowed and deep, ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... indirectly suggested may be considered by us under five or six heads: I, the characters; II, the plan; III, the style; IV, the imitations of other writings of Plato; V; the more general relation of the Laws to the Republic and the other dialogues; and VI, to the existing Athenian and Spartan states. ...
— Laws • Plato
... fellow like I do, Miss Wilmot. A nasty Spartan. But if you'll put a shilling in the gas meter we'll get cakes and a quarter of tea. He doesn't need to have any if he doesn't want it, but he can't grudge us a corner of table and half a chair each. Miss ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... transgress'd, And snatch'd the infant from the parent's breast; But still for public good the boy was train'd, The mother suffer'd, but the matron gain'd: Here nature's outrage serves no cause to aid; The ill is felt, but not the Spartan made. Then too I own, it grieves me to behold Those ever virtuous, helpless now and old, By all for care and industry approved, For truth respected, and for temper loved; And who, by sickness and misfortune tried, Gave want its worth and poverty its pride: ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... as the saying is, she is commonly a fool: if proud, scornful, sequiturque superbia formam, or dishonest, rara est concordia formae, atque pudicitiae, "can she be fair and honest too?" [5732] Aristo, the son of Agasicles, married a Spartan lass, the fairest lady in all Greece next to Helen, but for her conditions the most abominable and beastly creature of the world. So that I would wish thee to respect, with [5733]Seneca, not her person but qualities. "Will you say that's a good blade ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Lacedemonians.—In the 12th chapter of the 1st Book of Maccabees the letter of Jonathan, the High Priest, to the Lacedemonians is given, in which he claims their amity. This is followed by a letter of Arcus, the Spartan king, in answer, and ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... to the money as hard as I could, because I would rather die than give up anything of theirs I had got hold of; and so I held out bravely for quite a while, not giving in when they struck me, or even when they bent my fingers back. In fact, I was like some Spartan who lets himself be whipped as a test of his endurance: but unfortunately it wasn't at Sparta that I was doing this thing, but at Athens, and with the toughest sort of an Athenian gambling crowd; and so at last, when actually fainting, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... counterbalanced the weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to Chamberi. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the iron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan virtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps learnt a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom he describes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled. Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... so like Rosalind to be distressed at the idea of losing a love she could not return, and to show a pathetic eagerness to make a wrong step right. Her own Spartan judgment could never overlook the sin of preferring money before love, but she realised that it was too late in the day to preach this doctrine, and cast about in her mind for more ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... in Boeotia, like the Athenians above, esteemed themselves of the serpent race. The Lacedaemonians likewise referred themselves to the same original. Their city is said of old to have swarmed with [509]serpents. The same is said of the city Amyclae in Italy, which was of Spartan original. They came hither in such abundance, that it was abandoned by the [510]inhabitants. Argos was infested in the same manner, till Apis came from Egypt, and settled in that city. He was a prophet, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... word for you." On turning round I beheld a man with a keen Hebrew eye, an Alleghany ridge nose, and a chin like the rounded half of a French roll. I was evidently alone with a 'cute man of dollars and cents. On my fronting him, he said, with Spartan brevity, "Who's to pay?" Conceive, O reader! my consternation at being called upon to explain who was to make compensation for the sweeping away—to a considerable extent, at all events—of what represented, in ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... objectless, unreasoning, without possibility of material gain accruing; but for all that, deeds which for their sheer daring will ring for ever in the ears of men; of which the bare memory is an inspiration; whereof the fame in their own day roused the emulous courage of every Spartan and of every Englishman, making them ready to face any odds, and chilling the blood of their foes. Vain deeds, when we count the cost and the tangible gain—but very far from vain when we take into ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... attempts conversation with us in broken English, and the others laugh and talk incessantly. My inkstand, pen, and small handwriting amuse them very much. Miss K., the typical American travelling lady, who is encountered everywhere from the Andes to the Pyramids, tireless, with an indomitable energy, Spartan endurance, and a genius for attaining everything, and myself, a limp, ragged, shoeless wretch, complete the group, and our heaps of saddles, blankets, spurs, and gear tell of real travelling, past and future. It is a ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Egad! I'd burn the last ham in the locker to overtake her!"—and he hurls the glowing stump after the "Senator," as the Spartan youth hurled their shields into the thick of the battle ere rushing to ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... me," said d'Artagnan, "with a thousand livres each—I do not speak as a Spartan, but ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Friedrich, it is certain such a day never fully came. The "age of bronze and lacquer," so as it then stood,—relieved truly by a backbone of real Spartan IRON (of right battle STEEL when needed): this was all the world he ever got to dream of. His ideal, compared to that of some, was but low; his existence a hard and barren, though a genuine one, and only worth much memory in the absence of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to Madame Berthe," he ruminated. "Evidently the Louison dares not face this stony-faced Swiss Medusa. The felites histoires of Francois will fill up my mental notebook." Major Hawke then sat down at ease in the cafe of the Hotel National to indite a dispatch of spartan brevity to "Madame Louison" at the Hotel Faucon, Lausanne. "The Cook's Agency tell me that the London draft will be paid to-morrow. Francois will deliver me the photographs, and relate his selected historical excerpts, and then I will ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... their fortune. Moreover, your brother's debts, whether his own, or those he has in common with the family, trouble her enormously. Nevertheless, I hope to return toward the end of August; but in no circumstance will I ever again separate myself from the person I love. Like the Spartan, I intend to return with my ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... always death, the African has had to develop the faculty of lying to a high point of efficiency, and no one who knows him will contend that he is inferior to the European in this respect. The natural education of the Natives include the art of lying as the education of Spartan boys included the practice of larceny. Lying, we know, develops the memory, for a good memory is essential to successful lying. Some of the ruses and stratagems thought out by Natives fleeing from the king's wrath or the witch doctor's doom, of which I have ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... of her own hypothetical twin sister, and in 874 ff. and 1216 ff. the meretrix plays matrona. Sagaristio and the daughter of the leno impersonate Persians (Per. 549 ff.), Collabiscus becomes a Spartan (Poen. 578 ff.), Simia as Harpax gets Ballio's money (Ps. 905 ff.), the sycophant is garbed as messenger (Trin. 843 ff.), Phronesium elaborately pretends to be a mother (Truc. 499 ff.). A swindle is almost invariably the object in view. But we have ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... philosopher or revealed by the Deity. Hence the salvation of a community must lie in preserving intact, so far as possible, the institutions imposed by the enlightened lawgiver, since change meant corruption and disaster. These a priori principles account for the admiration of the Spartan state entertained by many Greek philosophers, because it was supposed to have preserved unchanged for an unusually long period a system established ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... isn't a curmudgeon. But he's a very peculiar man. He's a Spartan, and he lacks imagination. It has simply never entered his head that I could need an allowance. And, if you come to that, I can't say that I positively do. I have a tiny patrimony—threepence a week, or so—enough for my humble necessities, though scarcely perhaps ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... body, Spartan-like, to all the fatigues and exposures of war. He indulged in no luxury of tents or carriages, and ate the flesh of horses and wild beasts, which he roasted himself, over the coals. In his campaigns the ground was his bed, the sky his curtain, his horse blanket his covering, and the ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... sat awkwardly beside the frightened girl, who, overcome by the strain of what she had been through, was crying silently. It was strange to see Aura crying; she had always been such a Spartan, so different from any other girl he had ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... 25th by Capt. Henry Marcotte, 17th Infantry, retired, regularly authorized correspondent of the Army and Navy Journal, who has been with me ever since, enduring all the vicissitudes of the season with Spartan fortitude, although equally destitute of cover as myself and 60 years of age. I desire to express here officially and fully, my sincere gratitude for the kindness which permitted him to accompany my command, and the great appreciation of the valuable advice and assistance ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... duty is before everything. All my life I have sacrificed everything—peace, interest, happiness—to my destiny." These phrases in no way consoled Josephine who knew very well that her husband, in spite of his assumption of Spartan ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... and still longer if a girl. At the beginning of the eighth year, and until the boy reached the age of eighteen, he lived in a public barrack, where he was given little except physical drill and instruction in the Spartan virtues. His food and clothing were scant and his bed hard. Each older man was a teacher. Running, leaping, boxing, wrestling, military music, military drill, ball-playing, the use of the spear, fighting, stealing, and laconic speech and demeanor constituted the course of study. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... always says when he jaws our form, "I regret to see in this form a serious deterioration"—I mean in uncles. They come down here and trot us round and say what a luxurious place it is compared with the stern old Spartan days. They know something, though. They ask us to have meals with them at an hotel. They take care not to face a luxurious house-dinner. And while we dine they tell yarns about the hardness of the old days and how it toughened a fellow. And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... Phyllis; she would willingly have endured the pain to be made of so much importance, and said to be better than a Spartan, which must doubtless be ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... believe that, but for one cruel memory, he might have learnt even to taste some humour in his situation. Thanks to Mr. Jope and Mr. Adams, who had taken a genuine fancy to him, he found life on board the Vesuvius cheerful if not comfortable. The fare was Spartan, indeed, but, for a short holiday, tolerable. The prospect of seeing some real fighting excited him pleasurably, for he was no coward. Here, before his eyes, lay the coast of France; the actual forts and guns with which his imagination had ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... perspicacity; and he used to lecture comparative strangers about their duties with incredible insolence. The clergyman's life was made a burden to him, and the doctor's as well. Though he was the most luxurious and comfort-loving old wretch, his great text was the value of Spartan discipline for everyone else. If any dish was not exactly to his mind, he would allow no one to taste it, send it away, and complain bitterly that even his simple wants could not be supplied. Even when he got ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... A Spartan general pointing to his army said: "There stand the walls of Sparta and every man's a brick." Can I not point to the homes of our country and say: "There stand the walls of this republic and every ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... listening. I could but see it, and so I am bound to record that I saw Dick irreverently punch the major. It was a punch which carried with it the significance of an exclamation. The major received it with the face of a Spartan, but with the ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... his heart. 'Dead!' she cried. She looked about her in terror, then, rising to her feet, she ran to others lying near. They were strangers. 'Thank God!' she cried—' thank God!' Aurora returned to Mike's side, and, kneeling there, gazed upon him with streaming eyes. Burton's face had assumed a Spartan dignity in death. 'Poor, poor boy!' she said, and with her fingers upon his eyelids she whispered a prayer for his soul. It was long since she had minded to pray for her own, but the dead are so helpless. They invite even ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... principle, and in heart. Nor has the deterioration of the gentleman been confined to England only—polite and ceremonious France has felt her change. The Revolution brought in coarse and uncivilised manners. The awkward and unsuccessful attempt at Spartan and Roman republican manners; the citizen succeeding to Monsieur; the blasphemous, incredulous, atheistical principles instilled into the then growing generation of all classes; the system of equality, subversive of courtliness, and the obliging attentions and suavities of society, poisoned ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... just time enough to appease his hunger and reach Grove Lane by the suitable hour. He went out to the little coffee-shop which was his resort in Spartan moods, ate with considerable appetite, and walked over Westminster Bridge to the Camberwell tram. To kill time on the journey ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... is the Ferry, so often pictured, or attempted to be, by pen and pencil. Either art has failed, and will fail, to do justice to that sublimely grand mountain scenery. Not quite three years ago, an iron old man, who perished with the heroism of a Spartan, or rather, to be just, the faith of a Christian; but little more than a year in advance of the dawn of the day of his hope, centred upon this spot the eyes of a continent. A crazy fanatic, was the ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... barricade of stones, and entrenched themselves within it, firing at random on the furious savages, who howled for their blood. The Iroquois fought like incarnate demons, and every stone they flung with unerring precision shattered a white man's skull. Like the Spartan three hundred, this brave French band determined not to be taken alive, so the living supplied the places of their fallen comrades until only five or six men remained. But the Indians at last effected an entrance within the barricade, and killed ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... recharter of the United States Bank was the leading question of Federal politics. Though Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, had recommended a recharter, the predominant sentiment of the Republican party was adverse to the measure. Van Buren shared in this hostility, and publicly lauded the "Spartan firmness" of George Clinton when as Vice-President he gave his casting vote in the United States Senate against the bank bill, February 20, 1811. In 1812 was elected to the senate of New York from the middle district ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... centuries earlier, and the decay of Greek music was dated from that period. But to make any artist, however eminent, responsible for the decadence of art, is to confuse cause with effect; and the note of ignominy affixed by Augustus to the Art of Love was as futile as the action of the Spartan ephor when he cut the strings away from the cithara of Timotheus. The actual achievement of Ovid was to perfect and popularise a poetical form of unusual scope and flexibility; to throw a vivid and lasting life into the world of Graeco-Roman mythology; and, ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... I supposed he would take equal objections to the Gentoo, or the Roman, or the Spartan code, as also to the Koran. He admitted ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... grosser qualities of trees and valleys. Were it liable to be seized by the discursive and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not have been so barren where the Athenian was so prolific. But beauty is felt, not intellectually apprehended or logically deduced. Its presence is acknowledged by a gush from the soul, by a joyous sentimental recognition, not by a discernment of the understanding. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Very, of Vefour, and of Careme? This latter would certainly have thrown himself, like Vatel, on his sword, as a Brutus of cookery and as the last gastronome. Indeed, had Robespierre only introduced Spartan cookery, the guillotine would have been quite superfluous, for then the last aristocrats would have died of terror, or emigrated as soon as possible. Poor Robespierre! you would introduce stern republicanism to Paris—to a city in which one hundred and fifty ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the result of wealth which has increased faster than the power of rightly using it, has attained such enormous proportions, and is threatening, in commercial communities especially, to drown all noble aspirations, and Spartan simplicity, and Christian self-devotion, in its muddy flood. Surely never was Gideon's test more wanted for the army of the Lord of hosts ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... personal favour to them, but because he thought that their art would be a glory at once to them and to himself. And, indeed, those artists used to make images of the person known to strangers: but if such had never existed, illustrious men would yet be no less illustrious. The Spartan Agesilaus, who would not allow a portrait of himself to be painted or a statue made, deserves to be quoted as an example quite as much as those who have taken trouble about such representations: for a single pamphlet of Xenophon's in praise of that ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... beneath the glory of Barsoom's two satellites. She was cold and hungry and altogether miserable, but her brave little spirit refused to admit that her plight was hopeless even though reason proclaimed the truth. Her reply to reason, sometime spoken aloud in sudden defiance, recalled the Spartan stubbornness of her sire in the face of certain annihilation: ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the top of the deck plumb down to the hock kyard, he's nothin' but Jackson. This yere attitood of my grandsire, an' him camped in the swarmin' midst of a Henry Clay country, is frootful of adventures an' calls for plenty nerve. But the old Spartan goes through. ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... in all the arts of the card-table: a true Spartan girl; and had even courage, occasionally, to wrangle off a detection. Late hours (turning night into day, and day into night) were the almost unavoidable consequences of her frequent play. Her parents pleased themselves that their Sally had a charming constitution: and, as long as she ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... successor—that is, if he hit the ball and worked hard enough to deserve it. The thought of the little boy whose mother gave him a nickle every time he took his castor oil manfully came to his mind as he sat and gazed out the window. When asked what he did with the nickles, the Spartan youth had replied: "Buy more castor oil with it." Joe wearily dragged one of his stock ledgers from the rack and ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... correspondent that always Turned Back against a month of uneasiness for you, but later I saw I could not do it much as I love you for the element of danger to me is non-existent; it is merely an exciting adventure and you will have to believe me and not worry but be a Spartan mother. I would not count being laughed at and the loss of my own self respect if I really thought there was great danger, but I do not. You will not lose me and if I go now I can sit still next ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... incredible fact, that no bona fide occupant of these realms was ever seen in any part of their domain in the hands of a nurse, enveloped in the long clothes worn by many of the infants of the surrounding nations. Like the Spartan youths, all these people undergo a long course of training, and exceed the age of one-and-twenty before they are deemed worthy of admission into the ranks of these singular hordes. They have no actual ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... through something of the same process as Modeste's first letter had forced upon him. Though sorrow is said to develop virtue, it only develops it in virtuous persons; that cleaning-out of the conscience takes place only in persons who are by nature clean. La Briere vowed to endure his sufferings in Spartan silence, to act worthily, and give way to no baseness; while Canalis, fascinated by the enormous "dot," was telling himself to take every means of captivating the heiress. Selfishness and devotion, the key-notes ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... soon after, the right of succession (as every one thought) rested in Lycurgus; and reign he did for a time, but declared that the kingdom belonged to the child of his sister-in-law the queen, and that he himself should exercise the regal jurisdiction only as his guardian; the Spartan name for which office is prodicus. Soon after, an overture was made to him by the queen, that she would herself in some way destroy the infant, upon condition that he would marry her when he came to the crown. Abhorring the woman's wickedness, he nevertheless did not reject her ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... schools. Dean Pellew tells us that numerous letters of this kind were written by this tutor to his pupil in after life, and adds with a ludicrous solemnity, "It will readily be imagined how efficacious they must have proved, in forming the character of the future statesman, and erecting Spartan and Roman virtues on the noble foundation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... and the privet pale Compared, and Tibur's whitest ivory fail; The Spartan swan, the Paphian doves deplore Their hue, and ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... DAS, the celebrated Spartan leader who, with three hundred men, perished in the effort to resist the Persian hosts, at the mountain pass ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... father, Mr. Genuine Bacon-Fat, appointed by me in my last will I give and bequeath: thirty measures of acorns; and to my mother, Mrs. Old-Timer Sow, appointed by me in my last will, I give and bequeath: forty measures of Spartan wheat; and to my sister, Cry-Baby, appointed by me in my last will, whose wedding, alas! I cannot attend, I give and bequeath: thirty measures of barley; and of my nobler parts and property I give and ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... believe that the Spartan Burr, whose life was one of incessant labor and whose kindliness toward every one was so well known, should have deserved a commentary like this. The charge of immorality is so easily made and so difficult of disproof that it has been flung promiscuously at all the great men of ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... know where to find in any play a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as this. This is indeed, according to Milton, to "describe high passions and high actions". The fortitude of the Spartan boy who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha with a holy violence against ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... myself in a moment in the midst of a "classic revival," whimsical beyond description. Aeneas hastened to deposit his aged father in a heap on the gravel and ran after the Sylvan Nymphs; Theseus gave the Minotaur a respite; Themistocles was bending over the dying Spartan, who was coming to life; Venus Pudica was waltzing about the diagonal basin with Antinous; Ascanius was playing marbles with the infant Hercules. In this unreal phantasmagoria it was a relief to me to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Only goodness and truth are capable of real communion, interpenetration, and so of organic life and growth. This is their strength, power, and hope. Hence all the efforts at associated action in antiquity, such as the College of Pythagoras, the ideal Republic of Plato, the Spartan Commonwealth, the communities of the Essenes, the monastic institutions of Asia and Europe; and hence, too, the modern attempts, in Protestantism, by Fourier, the Moravians, the Shakers, Saint-Simon, Robert ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... race of Pericles and Leonidas, but who were a branch of that great Teutonic folk whose monogamous domestic life was sound at the core, and whose fearless, labouring, and resolute women yet bore for the men they followed to the ends of the earth, what Spartan women once ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... the following year. The plants should be set eighteen inches apart each way in the fruiting- bed. When they blossom, note and mark all the pistillates as such. Those that grow feebly, and whose foliage scalds or burns in the sun, root out at once. The Spartan law of death to the feeble and deformed should be rigorously enforced in the fruit garden. The first year of fruiting will satisfy you that the majority of seedlings are to be thrown away. Those that give special promise should be lifted with a large ball ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... The short of it, at any rate. You speak like a Spartan. You come to the point at once. But why do you come to me? I have no control over the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... Chief had, indeed, been beaten on the Chemung river. And yet, in the hour of defeat, he had added lustre to his name. In the annals of the forest there are few incidents as glorious as this Spartan-like struggle on the frontiers of the Indian country. Points of similarity can be traced between this battle and another which was waged, in 1813, by the great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, at Moravian Town, on ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... spare me a repetition of your father's platitudes—I've heard them often enough. I don't know much about the war, but all I've heard has set me against it. But never mind! And now, good-bye, my Spartan sweetheart." ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... reprehend. The utmost coolness and subordination was manifested, both by the 21st and 23d regiments. To Major Wood I feel particularly indebted. This officer's merits are so well known, that approbation can scarcely add to his reputation. He has the merit, with the Spartan band, in connection with Captain Towson's artillery, of defeating a vaunting foe of six times his force. Major Brooke did every thing in his power: and it affords me pleasure at all times to call the attention of the general commanding to this ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... scholar not entertain for Chicago somewhat more than a friendly spirit, merely? The first settlers of Chicago were Frenchmen; and, likely as not, some of Mdlle. Prud'homme's ancestors were of the number of those Spartan voyageurs who first sailed down Chicago River, pitched their tents on the spot where Kirk's soap-factory now stands, and captured and brought into the refining influences of civilization Long John Wentworth, who at ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... Greeks, like Bacon among the moderns, was the first who conceived a method of knowledge." His great work is his "Republic," in which he pictures the ideal State and outlines his scheme of education, which is built on ideals of both Spartan and Athenian citizenship. From Sparta comes the thought of an education which shall be controlled by the State from birth; while Athens adds the aesthetical aspects ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... over, his course settled. He turned to Silvia with a genial smile. "Score one more victory for the Feminists," he said. "I wonder if there ever has been a time, anywhere on earth, where women were actually and aggressively noncombatants. The Spartan woman handing over her husband's shield is typical. Whenever and wherever there has been a cause worth fighting for, worth dying for—always and forever we can see the figure of the woman, shield on arm and javelin in hand, standing at the ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... sad, and I have not power over it." "Thou art my bit of a sun that warms me, while everywhere else frost falls on me." "Thy letter, dear Bettine, I have sipped as wine from the goblet of Lyus." "I am studying the distinguished Spartan women. If I cannot be heroic, and am always ill from hesitation and timidity, I will at least fill my soul with that heroism, and feed it with that vital power, in which I am so sadly deficient." "Thou seemest to ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... was a great play at the principal theater in Athens, the seats set apart for strangers were filled with Spartan boys; and other seats, not far distant, were filled with Athenian youth. The theater was crowded, when an old man, infirm, and leaning on a staff, entered. There was no seat for him. The Athenian youth called to the old man to come to them, and with great difficulty ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... mansion, and passing through several splendid apartments, at length reached a large and magnificent saloon. It was hung with tapestry, upon which were represented the figures of Sappho sweeping the lyre; of the Spartan mother bending over the body, and counting the wounds of her son; of Penelope in the midst of her maidens, carefully unravelling the funeral web of her husband; of Lucretia inflicting upon herself a glorious and voluntary death; and of Arria teaching her husband in what manner a Roman should ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... Athenian general Iphicrates was able to cut to pieces a "mora" (brigade) of Spartan hoplites, in 392 B.C., by skillful use of a force ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... their success. Greece prepared for a vigorous resistance; it rose to a man; and the women, sacrificing their costly ornaments, accoutred their sons for the war, and bade them conquer or die with the spirit of the Spartan mother. The talents and courage of Raymond were highly esteemed among the Greeks. Born at Athens, that city claimed him for her own, and by giving him the command of her peculiar division in the army, the commander-in-chief only possessed superior power. He was numbered ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... solitary apartment, and if I suffered somewhat of the torments of baffled hope and foiled ambition, the pang is not for the spectator. My lighter moments are for the world—my deeper for myself; and, like the Spartan boy, I would keep, even in the pangs of death, a mantle over the teeth and fangs which ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a poet's profit" consisted in the canvassing his friends and patrons, distributing tickets, and soliciting favour in all quarters. By his address in these matters, Southern's tragedy, "The Spartan Dame," produced him L500; indeed, he is said to have profited more by his writings for the stage than any of his contemporaries. Malone states that Addison was the first to abandon the undignified custom of appealing personally to the public for support. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the cotton-spinners is interesting as showing how fresh his sympathy still was with the sons of toil, and what respect he had for their position. He congratulated himself on the Spartan training he had got at the Blantyre mill, which had really been the foundation of all the work he had done. Poverty and hard work were often looked down on,—he did not know why,—for wickedness was the only thing that ought to be a reproach ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Thermopylae; Leonidas pour'd out the wine, And shouted ere he drain'd the cup, "Ho! comrades, let us gaily dine— This night with Pluto we shall sup"; And if they leant upon a reed, And if their reed was slight and slim, There's something good in Spartan creed— The ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... Steppes; perhaps for the same reason that the Spartans of old excelled all other nations in physical strength, but with this difference, that nature doles out to the weakly colts the same fate which the Spartan parents ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... they may destroy their own political freedom.(481) The Achean league, which under the leadership of Aratos, the "enemy of tyrants," had come into existence, promising so much hope, beheld itself later, and mainly through fear of the contagious effects of Spartan socialism under Cleomenes, compelled to unite with the Macedonians, that is, to give themselves up ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... leg sufficiently workable in the matter of climbing stairs, Dr. Farr's boarder had resigned the family couch in the sitting-room and had retired to his spartan chamber under the eaves. From its open window that night he watched the moon. Let nothing happen to the universe in the meantime, and there would be a full moon on Friday night. The professor hoped that nothing ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... those Amphipolitans who surrendered to him their city, and those Pydneans who gave him admittance. [Footnote: Amphipolis was a city at the head of the Strymonic gulf, in that part of Macedonia which approaches western Thrace. It had been built formerly by an Athenian colony, and was taken by the Spartan general Brasidas in the Peloponnesian war. Ever since Athens regained her character of an imperial state, she had desired to recover Amphipolis, which was important for its maritime position, its exportation of iron, and especially ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... distillery and the boiling house or as watchmen against fire and the depredations of cattle. The Coromantees of the Gold Coast stand salient in all accounts as hardy and stalwart of mind and body. Long calls them haughty, ferocious and stubborn; Edwards relates examples of their Spartan fortitude; and it was generally agreed that they were frequently instigators of slave conspiracies and insurrections. Yet their spirit of loyalty made them the most highly prized of servants by those who could call it forth. Of them Christopher Codrington, governor ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
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