"Minos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... King Minos of Crete had promised Neptune (Poseidon), god of the sea, to offer to him whatever animal should first come up out of the water, for he declared he had no animal that was worthy for so high a sacrifice. Therefore the ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... and Procris I saw, and fair Ariadne, the daughter of wizard Minos, whom Theseus on a time was bearing from Crete to the hill of sacred Athens, yet had he no joy of her; for Artemis slew her ere that in sea-girt Dia, by reason ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... tresses are like wires of beaten gold, Gold bright and sheen; Like Nisus' golden hair that Scylla poll'd, Scyll o'erseen Through Minos' love. ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... the careless hero flees, beating the wave with his and casting to the gales of the open sea his idle promises,—there, standing among the shingle of the beach, the daughter of Minos follows him, alas! with her beautiful sad eyes: she stares, astonied, like to a Bacchante changed into a statue. She looks forth, and her heart floats upon the great waves of her grief. She lets slip from her head her fine-spun coif, she tears away the thin veils which cover her ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... her charms, one of the two who seemed like kings rose from his seat and spoke. He, Minos, who sat in judgment with Rhadamanthus, now begged the latter to stand up and announce what must be done in order to affect the resuscitation and restoration of the damsel Altisidora. As soon as he had ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the East, and where in retirement once dwelt Cicero. No writer has known where to date the beginnings of civilization in Greece, but with Mycenae, Tiryns, and the Minoan palace of Crete laid bare, antiquarians have pointed the way to dates far older than anything before recorded. The palace of Minos is ancient enough to make the Homeric age seem modern. With the Dorian invasion of Greece about 1000 B.C., begins that Greek civilization of which we have so much authentic knowledge. Dorian influence was confined largely to Sparta, but it spread to many Greek colonies ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... ancient customs, and to entice and withdraw the citizens to opinions contrary to the laws. Ridiculing the school of Isocrates, he would add, that his scholars grew old men before they had done learning with him, as if they were to use their art and plead causes in the court of Minos in the next world. And to frighten his son from anything that was Greek, in a more vehement tone than became one of his age, he pronounced, as it were, with the voice of an oracle, that the Romans would certainly be destroyed when they began once to be infected ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... upon the corset may not be out of place here. We know that its use is of no small antiquity. We have lately come to learn that civilization stepped across to Europe from Asia, using Crete as a stepping-stone; and in frescoes found in the palace of Minos, at Knossos, by Dr. Arthur Evans, we find that the corset was employed to distort the female figure nearly four thousand years ago, as it is to-day. There must be some clue deep in human nature to the persistence of a custom which is in itself so absurd. Those who have studied ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... upas-tree, deadly Unwisdom overshadowing all things; and there is done what lies in human skill to stifle all Wisdom everywhere in the birth, to smite our poor world barren of Wisdom,—and make your utmost Collective Wisdom, were it collected and elected by Rhadamanthus, AEacus and Minos, not to speak of drunken Tenpound Franchisers with their ballot-boxes, an inadequate Collective! The Wisdom is not now there: how will you 'collect' it? As well wash Thames mud, by improved methods, to find more ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... you of this? "This, too, is mere folly," say you, "and is an untrue story; for long before this, Minos, of more ancient date, subjected the Aegaean seas with his fleet, and by seasonable correction, punished {piratical} attacks." What then can I possibly do for you, my Cato of a Reader, if neither Fables[17] nor Tragic Stories suit your taste? Do not be too severe upon {all} ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... sat up on the catafalque, and as she did so the clarions sounded, accompanied by the flutes, and the voices of all present exclaiming, "Long life to Altisidora! long life to Altisidora!" The duke and duchess and the kings Minos and Rhadamanthus stood up, and all, together with Don Quixote and Sancho, advanced to receive her and take her down from the catafalque; and she, making as though she were recovering from a swoon, bowed her head to the duke and duchess and to the kings, and looking sideways at Don ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Voelundarhaus, and Voelund and Daedalus both effect their escape from a maze by a cleverly devised pair of wings, which enable them to fly in safety over land and sea and escape from the tyranny of their respective masters, Nidud and Minos. Voelund resembles Vulcan, also, in that he is a clever smith and makes use of his talents to work out his revenge. Vulcan, lamed by a fall from Olympus, and neglected by Juno, whom he had tried to befriend, sends her a golden throne, which is provided with ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... of the altar is the Judgment of Minos, and the driving of the lost souls to Hell under the superintendence of the two Archangels, who stand in the sky with drawn swords, sorrowfully watching the fulfilment of divine justice. Signorelli here has followed very closely the text of the ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... their fathers.' As Chan is the ancient Ponapean word both for sun and king, the name means, without doubt, 'place of the sun king.' It is a memory of a dynastic name of the race that ruled the Pacific continent, now vanished—just as the rulers of ancient Crete took the name of Minos and the rulers of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... Treffinger's classical subjects, the conception was wholly medieval. This Phaedra, just turning from her husband and maidens to greet her husband's son, giving him her first fearsome glance from under her half-lifted veil, was no daughter of Minos. The daughter of heathenesse and the early church she was; doomed to torturing visions and scourgings, and the wrangling of soul with flesh. The venerable Theseus might have been victorious Charlemagne, and Phaedra's maidens ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Mogul buildings of the same period, in a large inclosure laid out as a beautiful garden, with fountains, lakes, statuary, tamarind-trees, oranges, lemons, among the most fragrant flowers. It was a glorious day on which we drove out to Secundra, the air was musical with the merry notes of the minos, in their dusky red plumage, the little chirping bee-eaters, hoopoes, and blue-jays. Some little girls freely plucked the abundant rose-buds, pinks, lemon verbenas, and geraniums, bringing them to us for pennies, instigated by the gardeners, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... corroborated by the fact that in a vast number of early cults the gods are represented by human figures with animal heads. The Egyptian religion was full of such divinities—the jackal-headed Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in Greece, Athena with an owl's head, or Herakles masked in the hide and jaws of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that, following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Perseus. And in that we say that he made whole the lame, the paralytic, and those born blind, we seem to say what is very similar to the deeds said to have been done by AEsculapius" (Ibid, ch. xxi.). "Plato, in like manner, used to say that Rhadamanthus and Minos would punish the wicked who came before them; and we say that the same thing will be done, but at the hand of Christ" (Ibid, ch. viii.) In ch. liv. Justin argues that the devils invented all these gods in order that when Christ came his story should ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... Miss Henrietta Minos Rhadamanthus Darwin that I plead guilty to the justice of both criticisms, and throw myself on the mercy of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... were words of the letter which the elders had sent—"come home quickly, or Athens will be lost. A great king from beyond the sea, Minos of Crete, is on the way with ships and a host of fighting men; and he declares that he will carry sword and fire within our walls, and will slay our young men and make our children his slaves. Come ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... enormities. This one God too we also regard as our judge, who will in the end sit upon our conduct throughout the whole of our lives, and punish or reward according to what we shall have been, just as the souls of men, according to your belief, receive their sentence at the bar of Minos and Rhadamanthus. And other similar truths are wrapt up with and make a part of this great primary one. Wherefore it is most evident, that nothing can be more false and absurd than to think and speak of us as atheists and for that reason a nuisance ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... former that which subsists in soul. After these follows the Theaetetus, in which science considered as subsisting in soul is investigated; science itself, according to its first subsistence, having been previously celebrated by Socrates in one part of the Phaedrus. The Politicus and Minos, which follow next, may be considered as ramifications from the Laws; and, in short, all the following dialogues either consider more particularly the dogmas which are systematically comprehended in those already enumerated, or naturally flow from them as their original source. As it ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... other.[23] There are no other identifications that seem at all certain in the strict province of religion, although in myth the form of Manus, who is the Hindu Noah, has been associated with Teutonic Mannus, and Greek Minos, noted in Thucydides for his sea-faring. He is to Yama (later regarded as his brother) as is ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... that Daedalus, adventuring forth On rapid wings, from Minos' realms in flight, Trusted the sky, and to the frosty North Swam his strange way, till on the tower-girt height Of Chalcis gently he essayed to light. Here, touching first the wished-for land again, To thee, great Phoebus, and thy guardian might, He vowed, and bade as offerings ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... in the universal convictions of mankind, and the "common traditions" of all ages.[484] No one refers more frequently than Socrates to the grand old mythologic stories which express this faith; to Minos, and Rhadamanthus, and AEacus, and Triptolemus, who are "real judges," and who, in "the Place of Departed Spirits, administer justice."[485] He believed that in that future state the pursuit of wisdom would ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the souls of Coptic lord and slave, before the pyramids rose on Egypt's plains; austere Minos meted even justice to citizen and helot, while the sculptured ideals of Attica slept in Pentelican quarries; Brahmin and Sudra, according to deeds done in the body— strictly according to deeds done in some body—awake beyond the grave ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of the poem. The third circle includes gluttons; the fourth misers and spendthrifts; each succeeding circle embracing what the poet deems a deeper shade of guilt, and inflicting appropriate punishment. The Christian and heathen systems of theology are here freely interwoven. We have Minos visiting the Stygian Lake, where heretics are burning; we meet Cerberus and the harpies, and we accompany the poet across several of the fabulous rivers of Erebus. A fearful scene appears in the deepest circle of the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... effeminate, and disorganized Italians required many modifications when directed against the great military power of Russia. Moreover, the combinations of Eylau and Friedland were inapplicable to the contest with the maddened guerrillas of Minos, animated by the combined passions of hatred, patriotism, ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... fear. Minos will not be so cruel. Your eloquence will triumph over all accusations. The Furies will skulk away like disappointed sycophants. Only address the judges of hell in the speech which you were prevented from speaking last assembly. "When I consider"—is ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... revel were the gift of Dionysos. All nature was alive with some touch of a divine presence. So, too, every spot of Hellas was made interesting by some legend of Hercules, of Theseus, of Prometheus, of the great Dioscuri, of Minos, or Daedalus, of Jason and the Argonauts. The Greeks extended their own bright life backward through history, and upward through heroes and ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the soul of all things! They have given to a man—to you!—omnipotence and omniscience! They have made that man the supreme, the only legislator, the alpha of the law, the omega of power! They have decreed that he is Minos, that he is Numa, that he is Solon, that he is Lycurgus! They have incarnated in him the people, the nation, the state, the law! and for ten years! What! I, a citizen, vote, not only for my own dispossession, my own forfeiture, my own abdication, but for the abdication of universal ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... which I think is from Virgilius the Sorcerer, says: 'When thou art once dead, and Minos' (which is a heathen judge) 'has doomed thee, neither cunning, nor speechcraft, nor good works will restore thee!' A terrible thing! It denies any mercy to a ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... throne, built of brick and mud covered with plaster and stucco, upon which the Pharaoh Amenhetep sat. This is the palace of him whom the Greeks called Memnon, who ruled Egypt when Israel was in bondage and when the dynasty of Minos reigned in Crete. Here by the side of his pleasure-lake the most powerful of Egyptian Pharaohs whiled away his time during the summer heats. Evidently the building was intended to be of the lightest construction, and never ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... nunc, Daedale, dixit, Materiam, qua sis ingeniosus, habes. Possidet en terras, et possidet aequara, Minos: Nec tellus nostrae, nec patet undo fugae. Restat iter coelo: tentabimus ire. Da veniam caepto, Jupiter alte, meo. OVID. Ar. Am. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... to come, as described by Dante, and comprising, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, will be exhibited in a room adjoining the Western Museum on the 4th of July, and days following. Admittance, twenty-five cents. In the centre is seen a grand colossal figure of Minos, the Judge of Hell. He is seated at the entrance of the INFERNAL REGIONS [enormous capitals]. His right hand is raised as in the act to pronounce sentence, his left holding a two-pronged sceptre. Above his head is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... arising hereupon an erroneous deviation) they are the better pleased when they bury with their departed friends such arms, implements, or clothes as were most familiar to them in their lifetime; as Minos did ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... remind you of the characteristically beautiful setting. The place is Crete, and the three interlocutors—Cleinias a Cretan, Megillus a Lacedaemonian, and an Athenian stranger—have joined company on a pilgrimage to the cave and shrine of Zeus, from whom Minos, first lawgiver of the island, had reputedly derived not only his parentage but much parental instruction. Now the day being hot, even scorching, and the road from Cnossus to the Sacred Cave a long one, our three pilgrims, who ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... take these two savages to your care. How far the barbarism of the Mohawk will excuse his horrid acts I leave Minos to judge. But what can be said for the other, for the Englishman? The custom of duelling? A bad excuse at the best! but here it cannot avail. The spirit that urged him to draw his sword against his friend is not that of honour; it is the spirit ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... one of the routes to Italy, and so they had plenty of visitors bringing news from regions far off: a Carthusian, who had been in Ireland and seen St. Patrick's cave; a party of Hungarian acrobats with dancing bears; a young Cretan, John Bondius, who had seen the labyrinth of Minos, but all walled up to prevent men from straying into it and being lost. A great impression he made, when he dined with the Abbot; he was so learned and polished, and spoke Latin so well for a Greek. ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... playing its music by a waterfall! The British lawyers are all got together, and my friend Lankin, on his arrival, has been carried off by his brother serjeants, and becomes once more a lawyer. "Well, brother Lankin," says old Sir Thomas Minos, with his venerable kind face, "you have got your rule, I see." And they fall into talk about their law matters, as they always do, wherever they are—at a club, in a ball-room, at a dinner-table, at the top of Chimborazo. Some of the young barristers appear as bucks with uncommon splendor, ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with his triple head; Charon, freighting his boat with the shades of the dead; the Fates, in their garments of ermine bordered with purple; the avenging Erinnys; Rhadamanthus, before whom every Asiatic must render his account; Aeacus, before whom every European; and Minos, the dread arbiter of the judgment-seat. There, too, are to be seen those great criminals whose history is a warning to us: the giants, with dragons' feet extended in the burning gulf for many a mile; Phlegyas, in perpetual terror of the stone suspended over him, which never falls; ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Adriadne's crown. According to Greek mythology, the crown of Adriadne was, for her beauty and her sufferings, put among the stars. She was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete; she gave Theseus the clue by means of which he escaped from the labyrinth and she was afterwards abandoned ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of accusing an innocent person. The love of Phedre is excusable on account of the fatality which hangs over her family and descends pitilessly upon her. In our times we should call that fatality atavism, for Phedre was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae. As to Theseus, his verdict, against which there could be no appeal, was an arbitrary and monstrous act, and was punished by the death of that beloved son of his, who was the sole and last hope of his life. We ought never to ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... winter sun, then Samson's long locks, through which alone his strength remains, are cut off by the treachery of his deceitful concubine Delilah (the languishing, according to the meaning of the name). The beaming Apollo was, moreover, called the "Unshaven;" and Minos cannot conquer the solar hero, Nisos, until the latter loses his golden hair. In Arabic "Shams-on" means the sun, and Samson had seven locks of hair, the number of the planetary bodies. In view of the foregoing facts it seems quite possible that the majority of depilatory ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... labours of Hercules is the history of Pasiphae and the Minotaur; and this brings us again within the sphere of magic. Pasiphae was the wife of Minos, king of Crete, who conceived an unnatural passion for a beautiful white bull, which Neptune had presented to the king. Having found the means of gratifying her passion, she became the mother of a monster, half-man and half-bull, called the Minotaur. Minos was desirous of hiding ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... of those fine countries, so often moistened with the blood of man. The ingenious fables of mythology likewise occurred to his mind, and imparted to his language something of a poetical, and, I may say, of an inspired character. The sight of the kingdom of Minos led him to reason on the laws best calculated for the government of nations; and the birthplace of Jupiter suggested to him the necessity of a religion for the mass of mankind. This animated conversation ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... their old records and laws as preserved by the priesthood. As Moses—the Hebrew law giver, is represented as having received the law from God on the holy mountains, so is Zoroaster, the Persian, Manu, the Hindoo, Minos, the Cretan, Lycurgus, the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the groves of Trivia and the roof of gold. Daedalus, as the story runs, when in flight from Minos' realm he dared to spread his fleet wings to the sky, glided on his unwonted way towards the icy northern star, and at length lit gently on the Chalcidian fastness. Here, on the first land he retrod, he dedicated his winged oarage to thee, O Phoebus, in the vast temple ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... darkness; so Mithrobarzanes led the way, and I followed holding on to him, until we reached a great meadow of asphodel, where the shades of the dead, with their thin voices, came flitting round us. Working gradually on, we reached the court of Minos; he was sitting on a high throne, with the Poenae, Avengers, and Erinyes standing at the sides. From another direction was being brought a long row of persons chained together; I heard that they were adulterers, procurers, publicans, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... was spent, and their food eaten; and they were worn out with hunger and thirst. But at last they saw a long steep island, and a blue peak high among the clouds; and they knew it for the peak of Ida, and the famous land of Crete. And they said, 'We will land in Crete, and see Minos the just king, and all his glory and his wealth; at least he will treat us hospitably, and let us fill our water-casks upon ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... differs in degree. The quantity of our inspiration depends upon the use we make of our faculties. He who has the most wisdom, goodness, religion, and truth is the most inspired. This inspiration reveals itself in various forms, modified by country, character, education, peculiarity. Minos and Moses were inspired to make laws; David, Pindar, Plato, John the Baptist, Gerson, Luther, Boehme, Fenelon, and Fox were all inspired men. The sacraments of the Church were never designed to be permanent. In illustration of them, Parker ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Minos, the great king, ruled over Crete. He left the guarding of the island to one of the race of bronze, to Talos, who had lived on after the rest of the bronze men had been destroyed. Thrice a day would Talos stride around the island; his brazen feet ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... best, and the day is at hand when its inequalities will be redressed, and king and peasant, pauper and millionaire, be huddled, poor shivering phantoms, in one undistinguishable crowd, across the melancholy Styx, to the judgment-hall of Minos. To this theme many of Horace's finest Odes are strung. Of these, not the least graceful is that ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... ear-wrought garland fell away. Only was Crete fruitful that plenteous year; Where Ceres went, each place was harvest there. Ida, the seat of groves, did sing[417] with corn, Which by the wild boar in the woods was shorn. 40 Law-giving Minos did such years desire, And wished the goddess long might feel love's fire. Ceres, what sports[418] to thee so grievous were, As in thy sacrifice we them forbear? Why am I sad, when Proserpine is found, And Juno-like with Dis reigns under ground? Festival days ask Venus, songs, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... heaven suffices both night and day, so that in the turning of its pole it disappears not; let him imagine the mouth of that horn[3] which begins at the point of the axle on which the primal wheel goes round,—to have made of themselves two signs in the heavens, like that which the daughter of Minos made, when she felt the frost of death,[4] and one to have its rays within the other, and both to revolve in such manner that one should go first and the other after; and he will have as it were the shadow of the true constellation, and of the double dance, which ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... in Trebizond, a quicksand which gave way beneath their tread. From adversity to adversity, from country to country, we were finally driven to seclusion in the Isle of Candia, part of the quondam Minos territory. Venice had allowed Candia to fall before Mahomet's bloody sword. Europe lost her bulwark, the Cross of the Saviour was thrown down, and the Candian Christians have been massacred or forced to flee. I have ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... throne, tremendous to behold, Stern Minos waves a mace of burnished gold; Around, ten thousand thousand spectres stand, Through the wide dome of Dis, a trembling band; Whilst, as they plead, the fatal lots he rolls, Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls. —Odyssey, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... and appointed overseers, sat at Bishopsgate, at the end of a room on the ground floor, in three armchairs covered with black leather, with three busts of Minos, AEacus, and Rhadamanthus, in the wall above their heads, a table before them, and at their feet a form for ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... for me, Minos, I have mastered Greek since I have been here; so that my adversary will not have even that advantage of me. Now I hold that the highest praise is due to those who have won their way to greatness from obscurity; who ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Although Minos was very wise, he had a subject named Daed'a-lus who was even wiser than he. This man not only invented the saw and the potter's wheel, but also taught the people how to ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... fr. xxxii: Orion.]—Hesiod says that he was the son of Euryale, the daughter of Minos, and of Poseidon, and that there was given him as a gift the power of walking upon the waves as though upon land. When he was come to Chios, he outraged Merope, the daughter of Oenopion, being drunken; but Oenopion when he learned of it was greatly vexed at the outrage and blinded him and ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... inexorable judges, Minos and Rhadamanthus; before whom neither L. Crassus nor M. Antonius can defend you; and where, since the cause lies before Grecian judges, you will not even be able to employ Demosthenes; but you must plead for yourself before a very great assembly. These ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... often I have shuddered upon the verge of petty larceny, and how repeatedly my slumbers have been disturbed with visions of the King's-Bench Prison and Clerkenwell Bridewell. You, gentlemen, sit in your easy chair, and with the majesty of a Minos or an Aeacus, summon the trembling culprits to your bar. But though you never knew what fear was, recollect, other men have snuffed a candle with ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... Daedalus, as tells the tale, fleeing from Minos' reign, Durst trust himself to heaven on wings swift hastening, and swim forth Along the road ne'er tried before unto the chilly north; So light at last o'er Chalcis' towers he hung amid the air, Then, come adown to ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... Minos of Crete, a wonderful Labyrinth of winding ways so cunningly tangled up and twisted around that, once inside, you could never find your way out again without a magic clue. But the king's favor veered with the wind, and one day he had his master architect imprisoned in ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... beaver's, or ermine's; but not therefore to confuse God with the Hudson's Bay Company, nor to hunt foxes for their brushes instead of their skins, or think the poor little black tails of a Siberian weasel on a judge's shoulders may constitute him therefore a Minos in matters of retributive justice, or an AEacus in distributive, who can at once determine how many millions a Railroad Company are to make the public pay for not granting them ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... thought within himself what men he should choose to be his priests at Pytho; and far away, as he stood on the high hill, he saw a ship sailing on the wine-faced sea, and the men who were in it were Cretans, sailing from the land of King Minos to barter their goods with the men of Pylos. So Phoebus leaped into the sea, and changed his form to the form of a dolphin, and hastened to meet the ship. None knew whence the great fish came which smote the side of their ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... deprived of its skin; and in this condition the character sings or, more properly speaking, whines nearly half an hour on the stage, to excite the compassion of three infernal or malignant spirits who, like acus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, sit in judgment on her future destiny. I have been informed that it is scarcely possible to conceive a more obscene, indelicate, and disgusting object, than this favourite exhibition, which, if intended "to hold the mirror up to nature," it is to nature ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... that Michelangelo meant to represent by this figure the Renascence of Italy, still struggling with darkness. The whole work brings the times before us. There is the Christian Heaven above, and the heathen Styx below. Charon ferries the souls across the dark stream; they are first judged by Minos, and Minos is a portrait of a cardinal who had ventured to judge the rest of the picture before it was finished. There is in the picture all the whirling confusion of ideas which made that age terrible and beautiful by turns, devout and unbelieving, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... should possess Helen in these regions; and the decree of Rhadamanthus was, that she should live with Menelaus, who had undergone so many difficulties and dangers for her; besides, that Theseus had other women, the Amazonian lady and the daughters of Minos. The third cause was a point of precedency between Alexander the son of Philip, and Hannibal the Carthaginian, which was given in favour of Alexander, who was placed on a throne next to the elder Cyrus, the Persian. Our cause came on the last. ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... satire of Fielding, and must have been written, I think, after a perusal of that author's Satirical Romance, "A Journey from this World to the Next,"—the first half of which contains as much genuine humor and fancy as are to be found in any other production of the kind. The interrogatories of Minos in that work suggested, I suspect, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... reported by ancient history, in which government has been established with deliberation and consent, the task of framing it has not been committed to an assembly of men, but has been performed by some individual citizen of preeminent wisdom and approved integrity. Minos, we learn, was the primitive founder of the government of Crete, as Zaleucus was of that of the Locrians. Theseus first, and after him Draco and Solon, instituted the government of Athens. Lycurgus was the lawgiver of Sparta. The foundation ...
— The Federalist Papers
... combines the judicial functions of Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, but is placable with an obolus; a severely virtuous censor, but so charitable withal that he tolerates the virtues of others and the vices of himself; who flings about him the splintering lightning and sturdy thunders of admonition ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, even the fabulous Minos himself, became as familiar in the tribune as in the theatre, and the public went crazy over them. The shades of the heroes of antiquity hovered over the revolutionary assemblies. Posterity alone has replaced them by the shades ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... credit the ancient historians, the Etrurians or Tyrrhenians, even before the reign of Minos, had been for a long time masters of the greatest part of the Mediterranean Sea, and had given their name to the Tyrrhenian Sea, upon which they were situate. Piracy, as well as commerce, was followed by them; and they became at last so expert, successful, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... breathing fire, To punish Minos sent by Neptune's ire, Roams wild in vengeance thro' his wide domains, And death & terror spreads o'er Crete's fair plains; But soon the bellowing beast alive he caught, And vainly ...
— The Twelve Labours of Hercules, Son of Jupiter & Alcmena • Anonymous
... Dedalus, my poore Boy Icarus, Thy Father Minos, that deni'de our course, The Sunne that sear'd the wings of my sweet Boy. Thy Brother Edward, and thy Selfe, the Sea Whose enuious Gulfe did swallow vp his life: Ah, kill me with thy Weapon, not with words, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... vizier, grand vizier, eparch[obs3]. officer, functionary, minister, official, red-tapist[obs3], bureaucrat; man in office, Jack in office; office bearer; person in authority &c. 745. statesman, strategist, legislator, lawgiver, politician, statist|!, statemonger[obs3]; Minos, Draco; arbiter &c. (judge) 967; boss [U.S.], political dictator. board &c. (council) 696. secretary, secretary of state; Reis Effendi; vicar &c. (deputy) 759; steward, factor; agent &c. 758; bailiff, middleman; foreman, clerk ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Orpheus, Minos and all the great men say—"Let us worship God, and let us be just," nobody laughs; but everyone hisses the man who claims that one cannot please God unless when one dies one is holding a cow's tail, and the man who wants one to have the end of one's prepuce cut off, and the man who ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... That soaring spirit; vain it was to pass The gates of heaven, and send thy soul in quest O'er air's wide realms; for thou hadst yet to die. Ay, dead is Pelops' father, heaven's own guest, And old Tithonus, rapt from earth to sky, And Minos, made the council-friend of Jove; And Panthus' son has yielded up his breath Once more, though down he pluck'd the shield, to prove His prowess under Troy, and bade grim death O'er skin and nerves alone ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... to be a law of human psychology that almost all historic personages, from Minos to Mazzini, from Judas to Charlotte Corday, from Xerxes to Napoleon, are imaginary personages; some transfigured into demigods, by admiration and success; the others debased by hate and failure. In reality, the former were often uglier, the latter more attractive than tradition has pictured ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... fleece, by the assistance of Medea. AEson restored to youth by her magic powers. Murder of Pelias by his daughters. Medea's flight to Corinth. Murder of her rival and infants. Marriage with AEgeus. Adventures of Theseus. War with Minos. Plague in AEgina. Change of ants ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... knowest, to whom death for her was sweet In Utica, where thou didst leave those weeds, That in the last great day will shine so bright. For us the' eternal edicts are unmov'd: He breathes, and I am free of Minos' power, Abiding in that circle where the eyes Of thy chaste Marcia beam, who still in look Prays thee, O hallow'd spirit! to own her shine. Then by her love we' implore thee, let us pass Through thy sev'n regions; for which ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... "You are sure they are not Minos and Rhadamanthus, sir? My obolus is ready; shall I put ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the use of the Courts of Justice and the gentlemen of the law; while the outer division was occupied by the stalls of stationers, toymen, and the like, as in a modern bazaar. From the old play of THE PLAIN DEALER, it seems such was formerly the case with Westminster Hall. Minos has now purified his courts in both cities from all traffic but his own.] Now, don't you read this to your worthy father, Alan—he loves me well enough, I know, of a Saturday night; but he thinks me but idle company for any other day of the week. And here, I suspect, lies ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... languis, je brule pour Thesee ... Il avait votre port, vos yeux, votre langage, Cette noble pudeur colorait son visage, Lorsque de notre Crete il traversa les flots, Digne sujet des voeux des filles de Minos. Que faisiez-vous alors? Pourquoi, sans Hippolyte, Des heros de la Grece assembla-t-il l'elite? Pourquoi, trop jeune encor, ne putes-vous alors Entrer dans le vaisseau qui le mit sur nos bords? Par vous aurait peri le monstre de la Crete, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... then; my friend, Impeach Delay and you will make an end. Thrust vile Delay in jail and let it rot For doing all the things that it should not. Put not good-natured judges under bond, But make Delay in damages respond. Minos, Aeacus, Rhadamanthus, rolled Into one pitiless, unsmiling scold— Unsparing censor, be your thongs uncurled To "lash the rascals naked through the world." The rascals? Nay, Rascality's the thing Above whose back your knotted scourges sing. Your satire, truly, like a razor keen, "Wounds ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... blue waters of the Mediterranean where Posidon had his home, lies an island called Crete, and long ago in the days when Hercules laboured, a King, whose name was Minos, ruled over this land. The island is long and narrow and has much sea coast, and because of this fact King Minos stood in intimate relations with the ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... under the control of the community (for there is no question upon any other) 'MAY SOON BE SATURATED.' Tell it not in Bow Street, whisper it not in Hatton Garden,—that there is a plan for preventing injustice by 'saturation.' With what peals of unearthly merriment would Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus be aroused upon their benches, if the 'light wings of saffron and of blue' should bear this theory into their grim domains! Why do not the owners of pocket-handkerchiefs try to 'saturate?' Why does not the cheated publican beg leave to check the gulosity of his defrauder ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Greek king renowned as an administrator of distributive justice, after death appointed one of the three judges in Hades. See MINOS and RHADAMANTHUS. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... had embraced each other, And talked of friendship, love and sympathy. My pupil sweet, said he, beware of Love: For thou wilt shortly be besieged by him, From the four winds of heaven, because thou art Daughter of Minos, and already married To expectation of a royal dower. But O beware! for, listen what I say, By strong presentments I have moved thy father Bating a fair and well intending nay, To leave thy love to thine unmuffled eye. This is rare scope, my girl, O use it rarely, Be slow and nice ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... he consented to join the Trojans; and, going without arms into Apollo's temple at Thymbra, he was there slain by Paris. Scylla: Love-stories are told of two maidens of this name; one the daughter of Nisus, King of Megara, who, falling in love with Minos when he besieged the city, slew her father by pulling out the golden hair which grew on the top of his head, and on which which his life and kingdom depended. Minos won the city, but rejected her love in horror. The other Scylla, from whom the rock ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... necessary condition, their undergoing a previous trial, which should decide whether the deceased merited to be admitted to the rank of the family in the black city. Such an idea accorded too well with all the others, not to be incorporated with them: the people soon adopted it; and hell had its Minos and its Rhadamanthus, with the wand, the bench, the ushers, and the urn, as in the earthly and civil state. It was then that God became a moral and political being, a lawgiver to men, and so much the more to be dreaded, as this supreme legislator, this final ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... particular sin he depicts Dante shows us the evil in various phases. First of all it is personified in repulsive demons, the guardians of the circles of Hell. At the very entrance, sits, symbolizing the evil conscience, the sinners' judge "Minos horrific and grins. The ill-born spirit comes before him, confesses all and that sin-discerner (Minos) sees what place in Hell is for it, and with his tail makes as many circles round himself as the degrees he will have it descend." ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... on the coast of Crete. This island was protected by a brazen sentinel, named Talos, wrought by Vulcan, and presented by him to King Minos to protect his realm. This living man of brass hurled great rocks at the vessel, and destruction would have overwhelmed the voyagers but for Medea. Talos, like all the invulnerable men of legend, had his one weak point. This her magic art enabled her to discover, ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... you, to have explored the celestial regions, and to have traversed the round world in your imagination, since thou wast to die. Thus also did the father of Pelops, the guest of the gods, die; and Tithonus likewise was translated to the skies, and Minos, though admitted to the secrets of Jupiter; and the Tartarean regions are possessed of the son of Panthous, once more sent down to the receptacle of the dead; notwithstanding, having retaken his shield from the temple, he gave evidence of the ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... in the political theory of the Greeks than the respect they habitually express for law. Early legislators were believed to have been specially inspired by the divine power—Lycurgus, for instance, by Apollo, and Minos by Zeus; and Plato regards it as a fundamental condition of the well-being of any state that this view should prevail among its citizens. Nor was this conception of the divine origin of law confined to legend and to ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... In MINOS (or the Definition of Law) he refuses to accept the decree of the state as a law, but postulates the decision of some Ideal wise man. This is a following out of the Sokratic analogy of the professions, to a purely ideal ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... Constitutionalists do not propose to produce an effective and serviceable instrument; that is the least of their worries. Herault Sechelles, the reporter of the bill, writes on the 7th of June, "to have procured for him at once the laws of Minos, of which he has urgent need;" very urgent need, as he must hand in the Constitution that week.[1106] Such circumstance is sufficiently characteristic of both the workmen and the work. All is mere show and pretense. Some of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a subject which when given a right survey presents no difficulty. Mankind has been taught that in the essence of things fiscal your question of currency is as intricate and involved as was the labyrinth of Minos. And then, to add ill-doing to ill-teaching, our own crazy-patch system of finance has been in every one of its patches cut and basted and stitched with an interest of politics or of private gain to guide the shears and needle of what money-tailor ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... owns the magic might— Peaceful where She sits beside, Smiles the swart King on his Bride; Hell feels the smile in sudden light— Love can sun the Realms of Night. Heavenly o'er the startled Hell, Holy, where the Accursed dwell, O Thracian, went thy silver song! Grim Minos, with unconscious tears, Melts into mercy as he hears— The serpents in Megara's hair, Kiss, as they wreathe enamour'd there; All harmless rests the madding thong;— From the torn breast the Vulture mute Flies, scared before the charmed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various |
