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Augustan   Listen
adjective
Augustan  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to Augustus Caesar or to his times.
2.
Of or pertaining to the town of Augsburg.
Augustan age of any national literature, the period of its highest state of purity and refinement; so called because the reign of Augustus Caesar was the golden age of Roman literature. Thus the reign of Louis XIV. (b. 1638) has been called the Augustan age of French literature, and that of Queen Anne (b. 1664) the Augustan age of English literature.
Augustan confession (Eccl. Hist.), or confession of Augsburg, drawn up at Augusta Vindelicorum, or Augsburg, by Luther and Melanchthon, in 1530, contains the principles of the Protestants, and their reasons for separating from the Roman Catholic church.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Augustan" Quotes from Famous Books



... probably under interdict during the reigns of the Augustan dynasty; men did not dare to copy it, or to have it known that they possessed it; and when it might have safely reappeared, the republic had faded even from regretful memory, and there was no desire to perpetuate a work devoted to its service and honor. Thus the world had lost the ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis

... kneeling and holding one hand of the dying man between his own, was Angelo Poliziano, the Catullus of the fifteenth century, a classic of the lighter sort, who in his Latin verses might have been mistaken for a poet of the Augustan age. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... In songs that will not die How in Augustan days of old Your love did glorify His life and all his being seemed Thrilled by that rare incense Till, grudging him the dreams he dreamed, The ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field

... matter, and bear with me though I be somewhat busy, for I mean it for the best. I have many times heard of men of good judgement and friends to this cause, that as the emperor's majesty, being in disposition of the Augustan confession, hath been forced in these great wars of the Turk to temporise in respect of Christendom; so your highness, being of his mind inwardly, hath also upon good policy forborne to discover yourself until you ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... in absolute poverty, their situation was certainly not above mediocrity—not even that gilded mediocrity of which Horace speaks, with a country house at Tibur and Montmorency, and which results from a pension of thirty thousand sestercia from the Augustan treasury, or a government annuity of six thousand francs—but that poor and miserable mediocrity which only provides from day to day, and which is only prevented from becoming ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... and feel his right to do so without any authority, and yet write better Latin than when he borrowed every separate expression. In the same way our architects would have to be taught to write the accepted style. We must first determine what buildings are to be considered Augustan in their authority; their modes of construction and laws of proportion are to be studied with the most penetrating care; then the different forms and uses of their decorations are to be classed and catalogued, as a German grammarian ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... Invaluable for their light upon men and things fourteen hundred years ago, these Variae of Cassiodorus; and for their own sake, as literary productions, most characteristic, most entertaining. Not quite easy to read, for the Latin is by no means Augustan, but after labour well spent, a delightful revelation of the man and the age. Great is the variety of subjects dealt with or touched upon; from the diplomatic relations between Ravenna and Constantinople, or the alliances ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... of this chant and of kindred fragments of the Salian songs, which were regarded even by the philologues of the Augustan age as the oldest documents of their mother-tongue, is related to the Latin of the Twelve Tables somewhat as the language of the Nibelungen is related to the language of Luther; and we may perhaps compare these venerable litanies, as respects both ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... formular to flatter Kings and Queens; so much so, that even in our church-service we have "our most religious King," used indiscriminately, whoever is King. Nay, they even flatter themselves;—"we have been graciously pleased to grant." No modern flattery, however, is so gross as that of the Augustan age, where the Emperour was deified. "Praesens Divus habebitur Augustus[685]." And as to meanness, (rising into warmth,) how is it mean in a player,—a showman,—a fellow who exhibits himself for a shilling, to flatter his Queen[686]? The attempt, indeed, was dangerous; for if ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... To The Augustan Reprint Society William Andrews Clark Memorial Library 2205 West Adams Boulevard ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe

... art is propagated in proportion to the rewards conferred upon it; a position from which a stranger would naturally infer, that literature was now blessed with patronage far transcending the candour or munificence of the Augustan age, that the road to greatness was open to none but authors, and that by writing alone riches and honour were to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... of the city of Rome at the beginning of the Augustan age was not less than half a million of people, and probably exceeded this number. There was no middle class, a comparatively small number of gentry, a very numerous plebs or populace, and many slaves. The Emperor Augustus boasted that after the war with Sextus Pompeius he handed ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... had not been noticed in print before that, though it is of considerable interest in a number of respects. I am indebted to Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd., London, for permission to reproduce the pamphlet herewith in the Augustan Reprints. ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.

... Condestable and the Calle de la Triperia, several gentlemen who, gracefully enveloped in their cloaks, stood there like sentinels, watching the people as they passed by. If the weather was fine, those shining lights of the Urbs Augustan culture bent their steps, still enveloped in the indispensable cloak, toward the promenade called the Paseo de las Descalzas, which was formed by a double row of consumptive-looking elms and some withered bushes of broom. There the brilliant Pleiad watched the daughters of this fellow-townsman ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... figurehead and type character. Cynthia's Revels has the same defects, but is to some extent saved by its sharp raillery of euphuism. With The Poetaster Jonson began to rise again. I think myself that the personages and machinery of the Augustan Court would be much better away, and that the implied satire on contemporaries would be tedious if it could not, as it fortunately can, be altogether neglected. But in spite of these drawbacks, the piece is good. Of Sejanus and Jonson's later Roman play Catiline ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... however, stones of moderate size were preferred, and when blocks of unusual dimensions occur, they are in many cases marked with false joints, dividing them into apparently smaller blocks, lest they should dwarf the building by their large scale. The general use in the Augustan period of marble for a decorative lining or wainscot in interiors led in time to the objectionable practice of coating buildings of concrete with an apparel of sham marble masonry, by carving false joints ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... artificial, you mean. People think Horace's love of the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After the strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan court, the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to him. I know it is the fashion to say that a love of Nature belongs only to the Moderns, but I do not think so. Into Pindar, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... dared for the first time to be what they were, and to say what they felt, and to whom Faith, Love, and Honor were worthy subjects of poetry, though they lacked the sanction of the Periclean and Augustan ages. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... the Augustan age of our literature, closes with a jarring discord—the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, their second home, in which they had seen ministers, princes, professors, and poets rise from their ranks. The scene of literary activity changes: France, Italy, but chiefly the Slavonic East, are pushed ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... the originators of new astronomical methods, were succeeded by Ptolemy, the perfecter of their methods and the systematizer of their knowledge. Meanwhile, in the West, Rome never became a true culture-centre. The great genius of the Roman was political; the Augustan Age produced a few great historians and poets, but not a single great philosopher or creative devotee of science. Cicero, Lucian, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, give us at best a reflection of Greek philosophy. Pliny, the one world-famous ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... accept the tradition that Vergil's father was a potter and a man of very humble circumstances. That Vergil's father made pottery may be true; a father's occupation was apt to be recorded in Augustan biography—but it requires some knowledge of Roman society to comprehend what these words meant at the end of the Republic. In Donatus' day a "potter" was a day-laborer in loin-cloth and leather apron, earning about twenty cents for a long day of fourteen hours. Needless to say, Vergil's ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... makes the city of Ostend speak, after being three years besieged by the Spaniards, is reckoned one of the best pieces of verse since the Augustan age. Public fame gave it at first to Scaliger because he was considered as the greatest poet of that time. The celebrated Peyresc[40] hinted it to that learned man, who made answer, he was too old not to be the aversion of the Virgins of Helicon; and that the verses ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny

... Translated royal Anne, our island's boast, Victorious sov'reign, dread of Gallia's host; Whose arms by land and sea with fame were crown'd, Whose statesmen grave for wisdom were renown'd, Whose reign with science dignifies the page; Bright noon of genius—great Augustan age. Such was thy Queen, and such th' illustrious time That nurs'd thy muse, and tun'd thy soul to rhyme; Yet wast thou fated sorrow's shaft to bear, Augmenting still this catalogue of care; The gripe of penury thy bosom knew, A gloomy jail obscur'd bright freedom's view; So life's gay visions ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... was new in the time of Cowper. Let us compare a landscape painted by Pope in his Windsor forest, with the lines just quoted, and we shall see the difference between the art of Cowper, and that of the Augustan age. ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... own time, and an exact diary; all alike, though in three different degrees of nearness to the writer's own personal experience, laborious, formal, self-suppressing. This was for the instruction of the public; and part of it has, perhaps, found its way into the Augustan Histories. But it was for the especial guidance of his son Commodus that he had permitted himself to break out, here [46] and there, into reflections upon what was passing, into conversations with the reader. And ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... lives of the vulgar have been? In the very height of Roman civilization, Trajan caused ten thousand men to hew each other to pieces for the amusement of the Roman people; and noble ladies feasted their eyes on the spectacle. In the Augustan age, when the invincible armies of Rome gave law to half the world, fathers were in the habit of mutilating their sons rather than see them subjected to the slavery and terrible despotism of their ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... Rambouillet. The Salon Bleu has become historic. This "sanctuary of the Temple of Athene," as it was called in the stilted language of the day, has been illuminated for us by the rank, beauty, and talent of the Augustan age of France. We are more or less familiar with even the minute details of the spacious room, whose long windows, looking across the little garden towards the Tuileries, let in a flood of golden ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... Mermaid Tavern is immortalized as the house resorted to by Shakspeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and Beaumont; the Devil—which, Pennant informs us, stood on the site of Child's-place, Temple Bar—was the scene of many a merry meeting of the choice spirits in old days; at Will's Coffee-house, in the Augustan age of English literature, societies were held to which Steele, and Pope, and Addison belonged; Doctor Johnson, Hawkesworth, the elder Salter, and Sir John Hawkins, were members of a club formerly held at the King's-head, in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various

... given better assurance of good intentions and upright conduct than that of Mr. Ewing. He was a man of lofty character, of great eminence in his profession of the law, and with wide and varied experience in public life. He had held high rank as a Senator in the Augustan period of the Senate's learning and eloquence, and he had been one of the ablest members of the distinguished Cabinets organized by the only two Presidents elected by the Whig Party. He had reached the ripe ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... the classical period of portraits in engraving, as just before had closed the Augustan age of French literature. Louis XIV. decreed engraving a fine art, and established an academy for its cultivation. Pride and ostentation in the king and the great aristocracy created a demand which the genius of the age supplied. The heights that had been reached could not be maintained. There were ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner

... the drive up or down Fifth Avenue, the newer Fifth Avenue, which has risen in marble and Indiana limestone from the brownstone and brick of a former age, the Augustan Fifth Avenue which has replaced that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get the effect best from the top of one of the imperial motor-omnibuses which have replaced the consular two-horse stages; and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... library should follow the chronological order. Indeed, I should advise him to attack the nineteenth century before the eighteenth, for the reason that, unless his taste happens to be peculiarly "Augustan," he will obtain a more immediate satisfaction and profit from his acquisitions in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth. There is in eighteenth-century literature a considerable proportion of what I may term "unattractive ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT

... execution, of my historical work, of whose limits and extent I had yet a very inadequate notion. The Classics, as low as Tacitus, the younger Pliny, and Juvenal, were my old and familiar companions. I insensibly plunged into the ocean of the Augustan history; and in the descending series I investigated, with my pen almost always in my hand, the original records, both Greek and Latin, from Dion Cassius to Ammianus Marcellinus, from the reign of Trajan to the last age of the Western Caesars. The subsidiary rays of medals, and inscriptions of ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon



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