"Gladiatorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the limner's art; the Numidians with skins of ebony and keen black eyes that shone like dusky rubies; they were agile at the chase, could capture a lion or trap the wild beasts that are so useful in gladiatorial games. There were Greeks here, pale of face and gentle of manner who could strike the chords of a lyre and sing to its accompaniment, and there were swarthy Spaniards who fashioned breast-plates of steel and fine chain mail to resist the assassin's dagger: there were Gauls ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... for the exhibition of public spectacles were very numerous. The first theatre was erected by Pompey the Great; but the Circus Maximus, where gladiatorial combats were displayed, was erected by Tarquinus Priscus; this enormous building was frequently enlarged, and in the age of Pliny could accommodate two hundred thousand spectators. A still more remarkable edifice was the amphitheatre erected ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... the gate, whither the citizens flocked to see gladiatorial displays or contests between wild beasts. With the exception of one at Dorchester, it is the largest in Britain. It is made of lofty banks of earth, which surround the arena, and must have been an imposing structure in the days of its glory, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... in this volume of sketches. They are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they present, though some of them are still delightful enough. "The Killing of Julius Caesar Localized" is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque report of a gladiatorial combat in The Innocents Abroad. The Answers to Correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period. The Jumping Frog itself was not originally of this harvest. It has a history of its own, as we shall ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... man and the boy made ready for the game as for a gladiatorial display. Their frowning seriousness proved that they had comprehended the true British idea of sport. Musa came round the net to Audrey's side, but Audrey said ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... inch of ground is disputed. Once in a long interval when the ball gets dangerously near a goal, someone on the imperiled side kicks it half the length of the field, and the scrimmages are renewed. But it is rarely kicked at all except at such junctures. Foot-ball! I say to myself that it is a gladiatorial combat with an occasional punt thrown in by way of identification. But every one around me is declaring that the play of both sides is magnificent, that the team work is perfection, and the head qualities ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... inmates of the camps, the garrison of Fortress Monroe, the crews of the ships at anchor under its guns, all gazed with eager eyes over the open waters of the bay, their interest in the coming contest as intense as Roman audience ever displayed for the life and death struggle in the gladiatorial arena. Before them lay a mightier amphitheatre than that of the Coliseum, and before them was to be fought more notable struggle for life and death than ever took place within the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... not merely on the senate's resolutions but also on the speeches and votes of the senators. Cicero, when proconsul, received through his friend, M. Caelius, the reports of a certain Chrestus, but seems not to have been particularly well satisfied with the latter's accounts of gladiatorial sports, law-court proceedings, and the various pieces of city gossip. As in this case, such correspondence never extended beyond a rude relation of facts that required supplementing through letters from party friends of the absent person. These ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Honorius went to Rome, and celebrated their triumph over the Goths, with (for the last time in history) gladiatorial sports. Three years past, and then Stilicho was duly rewarded for having saved Rome, in the approved method for every great barbarian who was fool enough to help the treacherous ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... their mimic naval combats and regattas here in the desert, for they are always at heart a seafaring people. Beyond the pool there is a Circus, with four rows of stone seats and an oval arena, for wild-beast shows and gladiatorial combats. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... majesty of all ruins; there is nothing like it. All the associations of the place, too, give it the most impressive character. When you enter within this stupendous circle of ruinous walls and arches, and grand terraces of masonry, rising one above another, you stand upon the arena of the old gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrdom; and as you lift your eyes to the vast amphitheater, you meet, in imagination, the eyes of a hundred thousand Romans, assembled to witness these bloody spectacles. What a multitude and mighty array of ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... "virtually forbidden" to marry, to beget children, and to hold private property! Nay, it is forbidden to live, since murder can only be perpetrated on living subjects. You add that "in the same way the gladiatorial shows of old, and other barbarous customs, were not specifically forbidden in the New Testament, and yet Christianity was the sole means of their suppression." This is very true. But these shows and barbarous customs thus suppressed were not authorised by God. They were not ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except towards their pets. How little the old Romans knew of it is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... slicing of his nose in two pieces, the cracking of his crown in sundry places, and the scoring of his body as though it had been a Loin of Pork for the Bakehouse, he was taken into his service, and became a principal figure in all the grand gladiatorial encounters, at wages of forty shillings a week and his meat. As for Mr. Figg himself, who was as good at backsword as at broadsword, at quarter-staff as at foil, and at fisticuffs as any one of them,—to say nothing of his Cornish wrestling,—I saw him once, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... produced by the heroic, or rather saintly, death of Telemachus. No prohibitory law of Honorius is to be found in the Theodosian Code, only the old and imperfect edict of Constantine. But Muller has produced no evidence or allusion to gladiatorial shows after this period. The combats with wild beasts certainly lasted till the fall of the Western empire; but the gladiatorial combats ceased either by common consent, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... would not wear the pomps and tinsels, or swagger it in public to their taste. He was too reserved; he was not a good mixer: if you fell on your knees to him, he simply recoiled in disgust. He would not witness the gladiatorial games, with their sickening senseless bloodshed; nor the plays at the theatre, with their improprieties. In these things he was an anomaly in his age, and felt about them as would any humane gentleman today. So it was easy for his enemies to work up ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... me—which was your duty as a friend—of this curmudgeon's boast that he would have me horsewhipped if I dared venture into England. You will readily conceive that any gentleman of self-respect cannot permit such farcical utterances to be delivered without appending a gladiatorial epilogue. Well! what are the conditions of ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... said, and she could feel the breath sharp in her lungs. "I would rather.... He would make a good spectacle in the gladiatorial contests. He would look well with ...
— Step IV • Rosel George Brown
... me with wonder, enchained me with interest, and thrilled me with horror. The tremendous force with which she expresses the very worst passions in their strongest essence forms an exhibition as exciting as the bull fights of Spain, and the gladiatorial combats of old Rome, and (it seemed to me) not one whit more moral than these poisoned stimulants to popular ferocity. It is scarcely human nature that she shows you; it is something wilder and worse; the feelings and fury of a fiend. The great ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... citizens of London having satisfactorily convinced her MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTY that a change of ministry CANNOT be productive of a corresponding transformation of measures, and that the late POLITICO-GLADIATORIAL STRUGGLE for the guerdon of office could only have emanated from a highly commendatory desire on the part of the disinterested and patriotic belligerents TO SERVE THEMSELVES or their country, HIS ROYAL MISTRESS, ever solicitous to enchain the hearts of her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... the turmoils in the time of the Gracchi, and the scene in the forum when Mark Antony played on the heartstrings of the populace. Everything is grist that comes to our mill. Even a football game is a modern rendition of a gladiatorial ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... The increasing love of gladiatorial combats was another indication of the national character. These brutalizing sports are said to have taken their origin from the Etruscans, who were accustomed to kill slaves and captives at the funerals of their ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... This gladiatorial combat might have been going on till now, the Sunday-school superintendent concluded, if Winch hadn't subsided. The amount of the contributions hadn't been figured up yet, for Sister Soulsby kept the list; but there ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... nature itself is completely refashioned and men have no inordinate and dangerous desires. But while all codes of conduct are repressive at the moment of passion, they vary widely in the degree in which they satisfy or thwart man's deeper needs. Such institutions as the gladiatorial games of Rome, human sacrifice, or slavery, were fruitful of so much pain that they were bound in time to perish. In contrast with these cruel customs, the prohibitions of the Jewish law, the Ten Commandments, for example, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... century later, does not hesitate to use his imagination, telling us that Pompeii was buried under showers of ashes "while all the people were sitting in the theatre." This statement has been effectively made use of by Bulwer, in his "Last Days of Pompeii." In this he pictures for us a gladiatorial combat in the arena, with thousands of deeply interested spectators occupying the surrounding seats. The novelist works his story up to a thrilling climax in which the volcano plays ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... winding up a gambling dispute with a hand-to-hand combat, in the course of which table, cards, and dice have got cantered over; the fourth presenting us with two French knights, armed cap—pie, engaged in a tourney; while in the fifth and last a couple of German lansquenets essay their gladiatorial skill with their long and dangerous weapons. Several years back a tablet was discovered in one of the cellars of the house, inscribed "Ci-gist vnrable religieux mastre Pierre Dercl, docteur en thologie, jadis prieur de cans. Priez Dieu pour luy. 1486," which would almost indicate that the ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... Tertullian, in the second century, Christian preachers and writers had lifted up their voice in the name of humanity. Towards the end of the third century, the Emperors themselves had so far yielded to the voice of reason, as to forbid by edicts the gladiatorial fights. But the public opinion of the mob in most of the great cities had been too strong both for saints and for emperors. St. Augustine himself tells us of the horrible joy which he, in his youth, had seen come over the vast ring of flushed faces ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... through college gives the least absorbent mind. He was determined to provide it for his boy, though Joel felt that every moment's delay in leaping into the commercial arena was so much delay in arriving at gladiatorial eminence. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... given to his subjects by the Duke of Weimar. I have passed a luxurious afternoon, having been in bed from dinner till tea, reading Rammohun Roy's book, and framing dialogues aloud on every argument beneath the sun. Really, I have not had my mind so exercised for months; and I have felt a gladiatorial disposition lately, and don't enjoy mere light conversation. The love of knowledge is prodigiously kindled within my soul of late; I study much and reflect more, and feel an aching wish for some person with whom I might ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... same feeling of horror and loathing which is excited by a detail of the exploits of an Indian Thug, or those of a mad Malay running a-muck, creese in hand, through the streets of Pulo Penang. Your Waterloo, and battles of the Nile and Baltic,—what are they, in sober fact, but gladiatorial murder-games on a great scale,—human imitations of bull-fights, at which Satan sits as grand alguazil and master of ceremonies? It is only when a great thought incarnates itself in action, desperately striving to find utterance even in sabre-clash and gun-fire, or when Truth ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Capitoline Jupiter. His likeness to Aurelius, his father, was become, in consequence, more striking than ever; and he had one source of genuine interest in the great literary guest of the occasion, in that the latter was the fortunate possessor of a monopoly for the exhibition of wild beasts and gladiatorial shows in the province of Carthage, where ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... "golden hair" will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within. Nay, if obvious practical difficulties can be overcome, let those women who feel inclined to do so descend into the gladiatorial arena of life, not merely in the guise of retiariae, as heretofore, but as bold sicariae, breasting the open fray. Let them, if they so please, become merchants, barristers, politicians. Let them have a fair field, but let them understand, as the necessary ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... unconnected with the life of the nobles; it was merely the exhibition of mercenary gladiators, slaves devoted to slaughter, condemned criminals, who, alternately with wild beasts, were set to butcher one another to make a Roman holiday. When Christianity was introduced, gladiatorial shows were done away with, and their place taken, in Christian times, by the duel, which was a way of settling difficulties by ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... anchor all! The triple lines steam slowly on; Day breaks, and through the sweep of decks each man Stands coldly by his gun— As cold as it. But he shall warm— Warm with the solemn metal there, And all its ordered fury share, In attitude a gladiatorial form. ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... of the desire that the will of God—a will synonymous with goodness and truth—may be done on earth. But what relation to all this has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian in the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which Satan is the wild beast in the shape of a great red dragon, and two thirds of mankind the victims—the whole provided and got up by God for ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... would suit the emergency, unless I stated, with your august leave, that Cyril, and not you, celebrated the gladiatorial exhibition; which ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... he bartered his immortal time in a thirty-years' gladiatorial fight that in the end millions of Germans might feel the tingle of blood-brotherhood. How he faced the long, heart-breaking battle, therein we find the true measure of our great Bismarck! Thus his work, as ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... the seats, was the great amphitheatre where the performances took place. And wonderful performances they were. There were sometimes great fights between lions, tigers, bulls, and bears; sometimes wild beasts were slain by men, and sometimes men were slain by wild beasts. There were gladiatorial combats, executions of criminals, and many other kinds of cruel and barbarous amusements. When the Colosseum was inaugurated, five thousand wild beasts were put to death, and afterwards, at the celebration of a great victory, eleven thousand animals perished. Under the ground, ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... Dr. Buchanan never gives way. In all circumstances he is cool, calculating, unruffled; he measures the full meaning and effect of every sentence; he can be fierce and withering, and still maintain a calm and composed demeanour. The gladiatorial conflicts in which these two combatants took part were often a source of rare amusement even outside the pale of the Presbytery, and, inasmuch as they were both well fortified with weighty and telling arguments, the spectacle was not always unedifying. On the question of Union, as is well known, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... eyed the messenger, and this time fully realizing the gladiatorial development of that dark stranger's physical form, he grew many shades paler, and involuntarily retreated towards ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... [178] An allusion to gladiatorial spectacles. This slaughter happened near the canal of Drusus, where the Roman guard on the Rhine could be spectators of the battle. The account of it came to Rome in the first year ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... she answered gently; "the arena must yet be sanded!" This she said having reference to the covering up of the bloodstains at the gladiatorial shows with fine sand. "Well," she went on, "waste not thine anger on a thing so vile. I have thrown my throw and I have lost. Vae victis!—ah! Vae victis! Wilt thou not lend me the dagger in thy robe, that here and now I may end my shame? No? Then one word more, most royal Harmachis: if thou ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... constant exercise of arbitrary power at home, to the habit of looking upon the men who ministered to his luxurious ease as absolutely without claim upon his respect or his benevolence? or that the recklessness of human life which was shown in the growing popularity of bloody gladiatorial shows, and in the incredible cruelty of the victors in the Civil Wars, was the result of this unconscious cultivation, from childhood onwards, of the despotic temper?[374] Even the best men of the age, such as Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, show hardly ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... world; is filled with the sublime ruins and monuments of its pagan greatness and the priceless art-treasures of its mediaeval period; of ruined buildings the most imposing are the Colosseum (a vast amphitheatre for gladiatorial shows) and the Baths of Caracalla (accommodated 1600 bathers); the great aqueducts of its Pre-Christian period still supply the city with water from the Apennines and the Alban Hills; the Aurelian Wall (12 m.) still surrounds the city, enclosing the "seven hills," the Palatine, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... grave, the gods will look upon, and be with you in; but they will not be with you, if you sit on the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth, whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial war. You also, you tender and delicate women, for whom, and by whose command, all true battle has been, and must ever be; you would perhaps shrink now, though you need not, from the thought of sitting as queens above set lists where the jousting game might be mortal. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, the interfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse of immortal poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of the quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous delirium of gladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly working leaven of Christianity. Such a romance would not call the attention of society to the dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics, the vulgarity of small schoolmasters, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... large, which regards her with tense anxiety. Let America beware. Even a just war may give rise to all possible iniquities. Vestiges of ancient fierceness linger within us; the human animal licks its chops as it watches the gladiatorial combats. We veil these cannibal appetites under highsounding names, speaking of Right and of Liberty. The last hope of our day lies in youth. Let youth claim for the future the individual's prerogative to judge good and evil for himself, to be the ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... having deserted a warrior, he fell into the hands of his enemies, a victim doomed to sacrifice, a chance was, under certain conditions, given him for his life. He was tied by one foot, naked, to the gladiatorial stone, armed with a wooden sword, and six warriors were, one after another, entered against him. If extraordinarily skilful, strong, and brave, he might hold his own and save his life; at least he might ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... to confront the fierce attacks of Mr. Gladstone, who was rallying his own followers, both in the House and in the country, for their successful onslaught upon the Government. It was a unique and most valuable experience to watch these two great men in their gladiatorial combats across the table of the House: Gladstone wielding the mighty broadsword of his powerful eloquence, and seeming as if at every moment he would annihilate his antagonist; Disraeli, with marvellous skill and exquisite ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... entablatures of stone or marble, and construct walks above in the upper story. But in the cities of Italy the same method cannot be followed, for the reason that it is a custom handed down from our ancestors that gladiatorial shows should ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... make the American pro-German pause and meditate upon a future United States where native individualism was less and less reluctantly heading for the iron jaws of the Prussianized American machine; and, furthermore, upon the weird spectacle of the real gladiatorial contest—German sentimentality wrestling in a death grapple with American downright unpicturesque ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... battling against foes seen and unseen, Perry was engaged in gladiatorial combat with a savings ledger. In the space of a week he had developed a singularly profane vocabulary. Probably the contiguity of Watson had something to do with it. He was under the special tutelage of Watson, and the handling he received was anything but gentle. It surely did require patience to ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... Eighty years of work for humanity's sake; eighty years devoted to teaching men to love mankind; eighty years of earnest labor, consecrated by friendship, cemented with love and beautified by truth. In ancient times men sought glory and renown in gladiatorial combat, though the victor's laurel was wet with human blood. In modern times men seek the plaudits of the world by achievements for human good, and by striving to elevate and ennoble men. Looking back through nineteen ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... similarly-named city founded by his father on the sea-coast. Here Christ gave His charge to Peter (Matt. xvi. 13). Many Greek inscriptions have been found here, some referring to the shrine. Agrippa II. changed the name to Neronias, but this name endured but a short while. Titus here exhibited gladiatorial shows to celebrate the capture of Jerusalem. The Crusaders took the city in 1130, and lost it to the Moslems in 1165. Banias is a poor village inhabited by about 350 Moslems; all round it are gardens of fruit-trees. It is well watered and fertile. There are not many remains of the Roman city above ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... is past, awake no more emotion than last year's advertisements, or obsolete directories; whereas those who, in a stormy age, have swept the harps of passion, of genial wit, or of the wrestling and gladiatorial reason, become more interesting to men when they can no longer be seen as bodily agents, than even in the middle chorus of that intellectual music over which, living, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... perpetual panegyric. From all corners of the earth strangers flock to see the wonders of the mighty metropolis, more crowded than London, more magnificent than Paris, more luxurious than New York. Fetes, shows, processions, gladiatorial combats, chariot races, form the amusement of the vast populace. A majestic centralized power controls all kingdoms, and races, and peoples. The highest state of prosperity is reached that the ancient world knew, and all bow down to Caesar and behold in him the representative ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... I must insist that he get a permit from the mayor, relieving us from all responsibility, before we allow him to be torn limb from limb. Return to-morrow at two o'clock, and if this man's courage still keeps up, you will see before your shuddering eyes an encounter which will make the historical gladiatorial combats of ancient Rome pale into insignificance.' I could sling a few language myself, those days, and the mayor was a friend of mine—or I thought he was—so I figured we could catch the suckers for an admission and then call it off, because ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... OF THE GLADIATORS.—While Pompey was subduing the Marian faction in Spain, a new danger broke out in the midst of Italy. Gladiatorial combats had become, at this time, the favorite sport of the amphitheatre. At Capua was a sort of training-school, from which skilled fighters were hired out for public or private entertainments. In this seminary was a Thracian ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... combatants. Strong palings at these passages prevented any unwelcome eccentricity in the movements of the beasts, and confined them to their appointed prey. Around the parapet which was raised above the arena, and from which the seats gradually rose, were gladiatorial inscriptions, and paintings wrought in fresco, typical of the entertainments for which the place was designed. Throughout the whole building wound invisible pipes, from which, as the day advanced, cooling and fragrant showers ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... graces, satyrs, and many others; devotional pictures, such as representations of the ancient divinities, lares, penates, and genii; pictures of tavern scenes, of mechanics at their work; rope-dancers and representations of various games, gladiatorial contests, genre scenes from the lives of children, youths, and women, festival ceremonies, actors, poets, and stage scenes, and last, but not least, many caricatures, of which I here give you an example ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... permeate his being. He had done well and was justly entitled to a moment of self laudation. Mr. Stokes—Bettina's father—would no longer be against him, for who could not say he was not capable of competing in the world-arena with full-grown, gladiatorial intellects? He had even successfully crossed blades with Mr. Stokes's own best brand of Damascene gray matter. And he had won the fray, for the everlasting good and happiness of all parties concerned. In anticipation he already felt himself ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... pitch, to a more quiet and yet more ardent quality, "Ye 'lowed oncet thet I shouldn't never tech ye withouten ye said I mout. I've done obeyed ye—but now." He slowly extended both arms and stood upright in gladiatorial strength and compelling erectness. "But now ye're a-comin' inter my arms—of yore own accord—because we was ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... I am sick of the whole thing. I would reintroduce prize-fighting and bear-baiting and gladiatorial shows to brace the nation up a bit. We'll get jammed full of rotten vices ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... with very bad success. They had not far to go, for the schooner's bulwarks were very low for a sea-going vessel, but here was the main defence, the nets fully ten feet high and very strong—a defence suggestive of the old gladiatorial fight between the Retiarius, or net and trident-bearer, and the Secutor, or sword and ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... endowments; the just government of the provinces; the complete reform of the system of collecting taxes; the abolition of the cruelty of the criminal laws and the mitigation of sentences unnecessarily severe; the regulation of gladiatorial exhibitions; the diminution of the absolute power possessed by fathers over their children and of masters over their slaves; the admission of women to equal rights to succession to property from their children; the rigid ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... his gladiatorial propensities he disappeared into the forest whence he came, and being a free man of mental independence equal to his nerve, he merely waited in his lonely cabin until Meshach Milburn sent him word to return. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... lower animals for his own convenience, he is bound not to inflict needless suffering on them. The torture of an animal, for no adequate purpose, is absolutely indefensible. Cock-fights, bull-fights, and the like seem to me to admit of no more justification than the gladiatorial shows. Are field-sports, then, in the same category? The answer, I think, depends on three considerations: (1) would the animal be killed any way, either for food, or as a beast of prey; (2) what is the amount ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... be set against anything that the ancients achieved. [Footnote: Methodus, cap. VII., pp. 359-61. Bodin also points out that there was an improvement, in some respects, in manners and morals since the early Roman Empire; for instance, in the abolition of gladiatorial ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Magnus—and indeed we have been mutually united by frequent pleasant intercourse to such an extent, that our friends the boon companions of the conspiracy, the young chin-tufts, speak of him in ordinary conversation as Gnaeus Cicero. Accordingly, both in the circus and at the gladiatorial games, I received a remarkable ovation without a single cat-call. There is at present a lively anticipation of the elections, in which, contrary to everybody's wishes, our friend Magnus is pushing ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... forward." He turned away from her and stood for a moment at the window in a flood of yellow radiance. The clarity of his eyes and luster of his dark hair and the hue of his cheeks were all declarations of gladiatorial perfection of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... moments in the summer time, in broad daylight, persons sitting with a book or dozing in the arena had, on lifting their eyes, beheld the slopes lined with a gazing legion of Hadrian's soldiery as if watching the gladiatorial combat; and had heard the roar of their excited voices, that the scene would remain but a moment, like a lightning flash, and ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... affirms (Sat. b. i. c. 12) that the gladiatorial shows sometimes cost Europe twenty or thirty thousand lives in a month; and that not only the men, but even the women of all ranks were passionately fond of these shows. See Bishop ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... those days there were elephant fights, when these animals, like gladiators at Rome, were trained to single combats, or duels, fur the pleasure of cruel masters; and such was their spirit that one or both were always sacrificed on such occasions. We afterwards saw, in India, the arenas where these gladiatorial contests took place, one of which was located in the fort at Agra. A well-known peculiarity of this animal is the fact that it is almost impossible to breed from them in a domestic condition, thus rendering it necessary to replenish the ranks from the jungle. ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... a frown. If I but touch his hand, the giant trembles. He would be a Hercules in my service, and yet I've got him just there"; and she depressed her little thumb with the confidence of a Roman empress desiring to show favor to some gladiatorial slave. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... real victims. And that is the state of the populations of England and America at the present day. Were it not for the tremendous power of modern law, there is not the slightest doubt that the mass of Londoners or New Yorkers would flock to-day to see a gladiatorial show, or to watch a pack of lions tearing, limb from limb, a dozen unarmed convicts. Not the "cultured" classes—some of them would be ashamed, and some would really feel a moral incapacity for witnessing so much pain—but the masses would go, and would pay handsomely ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Cataline, quoting the well-known expression of the gladiatorial strife; "he hath it!—but all the plagues of Erebus, light on it—my good stiletto lies near to him in the swart darkness, to testify against me; nor by great Hecate! is there one chance to ten of finding it. Well! ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... a Rome in miniature. It had its forum and senate- house, its temples, theaters, and baths, its circus for racing, and its amphitheater for gladiatorial combats. Most of the municipalities enjoyed an abundant supply of water, and some had good sewer systems. The larger towns had well-paved, though narrow, streets. Pompeii, a small place of scarcely thirty thousand inhabitants, still exists to give ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... it was more advantageous to work them so hard that they had no time or strength to plot revolts. This is the most cynical refusal to regard slaves as human beings which can be found in history. They were liable to be tortured in their owners' cases in court. They might be given over to the gladiatorial shows and set to fight each other, or wild beasts. Seventy-eight gladiators condemned to fight to the death revolted in 74 B.C. under Spartacus, who defeated five armies. Crassus was sent against him ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... the practice of this art been found consistent with noble rank or honourable estate. Christianity might be expected to spare some sympathy for a calling that offers prizes to abandonment and self-immolation, but her eye is fixed on a more distant mark than the pleasure of the populace, and, as in gladiatorial Rome of old, her best efforts have been used to stop the games. Society, on the other hand, preoccupied with the art of life, has no warmer gift than patronage for those whose skill and energy exhaust themselves on the mimicry of life. The reward of social consideration is refused, it is true, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... treatment of criminals, who were considered not so well as the beasts of the field. Organized Christianity secured human treatment of prisoners while they were in confinement, and the abolition of punishment by crucifixion. Gladiatorial shows were suppressed, and laws permitting the freer manumission of slaves were passed. The exposure of children, common to both Greeks and Romans, was finally forbidden by law. The laws of marriage were modified so that the sanctity of the home was secured; and, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... fortunes, and abandonment to the pleasures of sense. Any Roman governor could make a fortune in a year; and his fortune was spent in banquets and fetes and races and costly wines, and enormous retinues of slaves. The theatres, the chariot races, the gladiatorial shows, the circus, and the sports of the amphitheatre were then at their height. The central spring of society was money, since it purchased everything which Epicureanism valued. No dignitary was respected for his office,—only for the salary or gains which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... motion, he suffered to fall at his feet, and displayed a figure in which the grace of an Antinous met with the columnar strength of a Grecian Hercules,— presenting, in its tout ensemble, the majestic proportions of a Jupiter. He stood—a breathing statue of gladiatorial beauty, towering above all who were near him, and eclipsing the noblest specimens of the human form which the martial assembly presented. A buzz of admiration arose, which in the following moment was suspended by the dubious recollections investing his ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... to the total number of years he had lived. This consequently caused some to say that he had chosen the number purposely and not by mere chance. After the consecration of this edifice he arranged through Tiberius and Drusus for gladiatorial combats, permission having been granted them by the senate. Then he committed to Taurus the management of the City together with the rest of Italy,—for Agrippa had been despatched again to Syria and he no longer looked with equal favor ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... and shows connected with this festival extended through three successive days. They consisted of sacrifices and other religious rites, dramatic spectacles, athletic games, and military and gladiatorial shows. In the course of these diversions there was celebrated on one of the days what was called the Trojan game, in which young boys of leading and distinguished families appeared on horseback in a circus or ring, where they performed ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... which the earlier Romans would have despised. They provided games, at great expense, for the entertainment of the populace. In the room of the invigorating and of the intellectual contests, which had been in vogue among the Greeks, the Romans acquired an increasing relish for bloody gladiatorial fights of men with wild beasts, and of men against one another. Slaves multiplied to an enormous extent: "as cheap as a Sardinian" was a proverb. The race of plain farmers dwindled away. The trade in slaves became a flourishing branch of business. Field-hands toiled ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... in a posture of defence, else May-day would incontinently have bumped him out of a port-hole into the sea. I used to pity poor Rose-water from the bottom of my heart. But my pity was almost aroused into indignation at a sad sequel to one of these gladiatorial scenes. ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... Meurte"—borrowing the phrase from the Spanish—at Arles, each to take place in the great Roman arenas, which had not seen bloodshed for centuries; not since the days when the Romans matched men against each other in gladiatorial combat, and turned tigers loose ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... In the gladiatorial arena of the court-room, Mr. Palma was regarded as a large-brained, nimble-witted, marble-hearted man, of vast ambition and tireless energy in the acquisition of his aims; but his colleagues and clients ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... page Are better told than acted on the stage; The ear sustains what shocks the timid eye, And Horror thus subsides to Sympathy, 270 True Briton all beside, I here am French— Bloodshed 'tis surely better to retrench: The gladiatorial gore we teach to flow In tragic scenes disgusts though but in show; We hate the carnage while we see the trick, And find small sympathy in being sick. Not on the stage the regicide Macbeth Appals an audience with a Monarch's ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... taste, he read Mr Stevenson and Mr Meredith, Miss Braddon and Mr Henry James, Ouida and Mr Thomas Hardy; Mr Hall Caine and Mr Anstey; Mrs Oliphant and Miss Edna Lyall. Not everybody can peruse all of these very diverse authors with pleasure. He began his poem on the Roman gladiatorial combats; indeed his years, fourscore and one, left his intellectual eagerness as unimpaired as that of Goethe. "A crooked share," he said to the Princess Louise, "may make a straight furrow." "One afternoon he had a long waltz with M- in ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... theatron, a place for spectators), a building in which the seats for spectators surround the scene of the performance. The word was doubtless coined by the Greeks of Campania, since it was here that the gladiatorial shows for which the amphitheatre was primarily used were first organized as public spectacles. The earliest building of the kind still extant is that at Pompeii, built after 80 B.C. It is called spectacula ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the year 550 of the city, there were five festivals. The candidates for the consulship spent large sums on these games, the splendor of which became the standard by which the electoral body measured the fitness of candidates. A gladiatorial show cost seven hundred and twenty thousand sesterces, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... three—and the thing was over. She saw the Grays being crushed back and realized that the Browns had won, when a last detail of the lessening tumult fixed her attention with its gladiatorial simplicity. Here, indeed, it was a case of man to man with the weapons nature ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... and was easily the best man in it, but among the lesser lights there was a great display of energy, much of it misplaced. The worst offender was Bray. To watch him play was to witness a gladiatorial display of frightfulness. His fists flew about like a flail, his legs were everywhere. On the whole he did more damage to his own side than to his opponents. And the amount of energy he wasted every game in hacking the ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... but pertness, luxurious habits, and neglect alike of themselves and of others. The schools moreover, apart from their faulty methods and ideals of instruction, encourage other faults. The boys' interests lie not in their work, but in the theatres, the gladiatorial games, the races in the circus—those ancient equivalents of twentieth-century athleticism. Their minds are utterly absorbed by these pursuits, and there is little room left for nobler studies. 'How few boys will talk of anything else at home? What topic of conversation ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... when the picture was taken. The contrast of the vast Roman structure, with its massive arched masonry, and the scattered assembly, which seems almost lost in the spaces once filled by the crowd of spectators who thronged to the gladiatorial shows, is one of the most striking we have ever seen. At Quimperle is a house so like the curious old building lately removed from Dock Square in Boston, that it is commonly taken for it at the first view. The Roman tombs at Arles and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take heed that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been permitted to live. Laws ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... said Mr. Hume, sourly, "they contrived the whole thing as a gladiatorial spectacle for their amusement. I don't think I was ever so near death;" and he shook hands gravely. "If you had not fired when you did, he would ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... purpose to speak of the COLISEUM. I will assume that most of my readers know that this was an immense amphitheater, constructed in the days of Rome's imperial greatness, used for gladiatorial combats of men with ferocious beasts and with each other, and calculated to afford a view of the spectacle to about one hundred thousand persons at once. The circuit of the building is over sixteen hundred feet; ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... theatre. Not a sound, so it is said, is lost from the stage upon any part of the house. The lowest sob of a dying heroine, in her very last agony, is heard as plainly by the occupant of the back seat of the amphitheatre, as are the thundering denunciations of the tragic actor in the wildest of gladiatorial scenes. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... rings, were in strong contrast to the plain and worn garment of the man who waited under the high arch of the Beautiful Gate with arms folded across his breast. An intense stillness fell over the gathering—such a hush as marked the circus arena in Rome when gladiatorial combatants came together in the death-struggle. As Annas, the All-Powerful head of God's elect priesthood, neared the end of the open path cut through the throng, the Galilean lifted his eyes from the surrounding scene and entered ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... the Romans were worse. Think of that form of punishment which they inflicted carelessly every day even for minor crimes—crucifixion! The poor victim was nailed by the hands and feet to a pole and left to hang in agony till death mercifully ended it all. Think of the gladiatorial combats in the city of Rome and in other Roman cities, where every day for centuries slaves or condemned criminals fought each other with swords to the death, or fought with wild beasts while the gloating multitudes looked ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... speak their language, responded heartily. The gladiators were of many races. Besides the Gauls there were four or five Goths; some Iberians, lean swarthy men; Numidians, fleet of foot, lithe and active—these were used more often for contests with wild beasts than in the gladiatorial conflicts, for which they lacked strength and weight—Parthians and Scythians, together with a score of natives of Italy, Romans and others, who had taken to the profession of gladiator as they might have done ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... Now, a terrible plague swept the world from end to end, so that laborers became scarce, lands went untenanted, taxes unpaid. The drain of supporting Rome's boundless extravagance, in buildings, feasts, and gladiatorial displays, began to tell upon the provinces at last. Newer and ever harsher methods had to be employed to wring money from exhausted lands. Driven by their sufferings to cling to religion as a support, men thought of it more seriously; and a cry went up that earth was being punished for its ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... beginning of the first Punic War, or war with Carthage, a new form of entertainment was introduced into Rome. This was the gladiatorial show, the fights of armed men in the arena, the first of which was given in the year 264 B.C., at the funeral of D. Junius Brutus. These exhibitions were long confined to funeral occasions, money being frequently left for this purpose in wills, but they gradually extended to other occasions, and ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... quitted the sombre gallery and made their way into the open air. After they had gone about twenty yards the guides came to an abrupt halt and one of them pointed to the centre of the vast gladiatorial arena. ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... called "that savage child, the crowd," a character does not appeal except in moments of contention. There never yet has been a time when the theatre could compete successfully against the amphitheatre. Plautus and Terence complained that the Roman public preferred a gladiatorial combat to their plays; a bear-baiting or a cock-fight used to empty Shakespeare's theatre on the Bankside; and there is not a matinee in town to-day that can hold its own against a foot-ball game. Forty thousand people gather annually from all quarters of the East to see Yale and Harvard meet ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... coffers were replenished, from the drained resources of exhausted provincials. Every young man of active ambition or noble birth, whose resources had been impoverished by debauchery and extravagance, had but to borrow fresh sums in order to give magnificent gladiatorial shows, and then, if he could once obtain an aedileship, and mount to the higher offices of the State, he would in time become the procurator or proconsul of a province, which he might pillage almost at his will. Enter the house of a Felix or a Verres. ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... romantic fables of the poets. Marc Antony, at one of his breakfasts with Cleopatra, had eight wild boars roasted whole; and though the Romans do not appear to have been addicted to hunting, wild-boar fights formed part of their gladiatorial shows in the amphitheatre. In France, Germany, and Britain, from the earliest time, the boar-hunt formed one of the most exciting of sports; but it was only in this country that the sport was conducted without dogs,—a real hand-to-hand contest of man and beast; ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... has ordered some novel spectacle—some gladiatorial exhibition at the hippodrome—or perhaps the massacre of the Scythian prisoners—or the conflagration of his new palace—or the tearing down of a handsome temple—or, indeed, a bonfire of a few Jews. The uproar increases. Shouts of laughter ascend the skies. The air becomes dissonant ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a regular market surrounded with walls, but an irregular space bounded by the Tiber on the west, and the Palatine Hill and the Circus Maximus on the east. The Cloaca Maxima ran beneath it, and it was rich in temples and monuments. On it the first gladiatorial exhibition occurred, B.C. 264, and there too, other burials of living persons had been made, in spite of the long-ago abolishment of such rites by Numa.] and the public excitement somewhat allayed ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... across and three feet high: and Humboldt considers it to be the stone described by early Spanish writers, and called temalacatl (spindle-stone) from its circular shape, something like a distaff-head. Upon this the captive chiefs stood in the gladiatorial fights which took place within the space surrounding the great teocalli. Slightly armed, they stood upon this raised platform in the midst of the crowd of spectators; and six champions in succession, armed with better weapons, came up to fight with them. If the captive worsted his assailants in ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor |
