"Saturnalia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "strange" things, which were not likely to meet the approbation of his family, Walter was silent. Not a word about that Saturnalia, or the omission of grace at a "warm meal"! Nor did he mention the liberties that were allowed the children, or the freedom with which they joined in the conversation. Perhaps it was a superfluous precaution. That bearskin would have ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... noon. Ligarius was returning from the Campus Martius. He strolled through one of the streets which led to the Forum, settling his gown, and calculating the odds on the gladiators who were to fence at the approaching Saturnalia. While thus occupied, he overtook Flaminius, who, with a heavy step and a melancholy face, was sauntering in the same direction. The light-hearted young man plucked him ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... uproarious Virginia reels and old-country dances. The police, including the reserves, stood in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the governor was too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great. It was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was license; it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-rover along with all these other chesty sea-rovers among the paper houses ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... friends, who speedily overtook him. When the party turned the corner of Front Street and were safely out of sight of Judge Straight's office, the capitalist entered the grocery store and invested his unearned increment in gingerbread. When the ensuing saturnalia was over, Billy finished the game of marbles which the judge had interrupted, and then set out to execute his commission. He had nearly reached his objective point when he met upon the street a young white lady, whom he did not know, and for whom, the path being narrow at that point, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... to face the captain, who, however, had sat his horse without moving. "I am no Jew. I am as good a Christian as his Holiness, who but just now sat at yon jalousie, feasting his eyes on these heathen saturnalia." ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Christmas. Some kept Christmas in January, others in April, others in May. It was a pre-Christian force which drove them all into agreement upon the twenty-fifth of December. Just as they wisely took the Christmas tree from the Roman Saturnalia, so they took the date of their festival from the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness, when the night begins to decrease and the day to increase, when ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... little boys and had ample leisure of mind to take note of any outrageous noise above, and for want of occupation was itching to get at old friends like Howieson. There are times, however, when even a savage forgets himself, and one spring day the saturnalia in Moossy's room reached an historical height. It had been discovered that any dislike which Moossy may have had to a puppy in his desk, and a frog in his top-cloak pocket, was nothing to the horror with which he regarded mice. As ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... social barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It's no use to put it on religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and we know what they think of Christianity as a belief. No, we've got to go further back, to the Pagan Saturnalia— Well, I renounce the whole affair, here and now. I'm going to spend the rest of the night bundling these things up, and to-morrow I'm going to spend the day in a taxi, going round and giving them back to the fools that ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... Fabulae Atellanae, the only original and national form of the Roman drama, in respect of plan, were not perhaps more perfect than the so-called Commedia dell' Arte, in which, the parts being fixed and invariable, the dialogue is extemporised by masked actors. In the ancient Saturnalia we have probably the germ of the present carnival, which is entirely an Italian invention. The Opera and the Ballet were also the invention of the Italians: two species of theatrical amusement, in which the dramatic interest is entirely ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... might; equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,—the final expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... the very saturnalia of common-sense.... These works are invaluable to fathers; by keeping always one volume in advance of his oldest son, a man can stand before the household, an encyclopaedia of every ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... unconsidered trifles of anecdote,—tasting some long-interred bon-mot and relishing some disentombed scandal,—pausing over the symphonic prose of Milton, only to run, the next moment, to the Silenian ribaldry of Tom Brown the younger,—and so keeping up a Saturnalia, in which goat-footed sylvans mix with the maidens of Diana, and the party-colored jester shakes his truncheon in the face of Plato. Only in this wild and promiscuous license can we taste the genuine joys ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... poetic, even to abbey churches; yea, dug up the very bones of ancient monarchs from the consecrated vaults where they had reposed for centuries, and scattered them to the winds; and then amid the mad saturnalia of sacrilege, barbarity, and blasphemy to proclaim the reign of "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," with Marat for their leader, and Danton for their orator, and Robespierre for their high-priest; and, finally, to consummate the infamous ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... holiday honors with the high-born daughters of successful swindlers, but will be kindly permitted by the lordly Halliwell to stand on the curb and see beauts who are only by the grace of boodle, roll by like triumphant Sylla on Fortune's bike. During the Saturnalia in ancient Rome the master acknowledged the brotherhood of man by ministering to his slave; but Kansas City, thanks to the omnipotent Halliwell, has cut the working class off from mankind—the hewers ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and the soldiers enter the coffee-houses, the convents, and the inns, and demand to be served with wine and eatables as much as they want, and then, heated by drink, they burn the excise offices, force open several prisons, and set free all the smugglers and deserters. To put an end to this saturnalia a grand banquet in the open air is suggested, in which the National Guard is to fraternize with the whole garrison; but the banquet turns into a drinking-bout, entire companies remaining under the tables dead drunk; other companies carry away with them four hogsheads of wine, and the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... health of a great many people makes an annual visit to some mineral spring an absolute necessity; but, my dear people, take your Bible along with you, and take an hour for secret prayer every day, though you be surrounded by guffaw and saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they denounce you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand off from those institutions which propose to imitate on this side the water the iniquities of Baden-Baden. Let your moral and your immortal health keep ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... put to death can only be likened to that of the lover in Heinrich von Kleist's poetically sublime, but morally atrocious, tragedy, Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The Duke killed Marie because doing so gave him the most damnable pleasure,—her the most ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... them was even worse. Reflecting upon them now, with unstrung nerves, made them seem a hundred-fold more terrible than when they were the spontaneous offspring of hot blood. With the reflection came the thoguhts that this was but a prelude—an introduction—to an infinitely horrible saturnalia of violence and blood, through which he was to be hurried until released by his own destruction. This became a nightmare that threatened to stagnate the blood in his veins. He gasped, turned his back to the wall with an effort that thrilled him with pain, and ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... he continued. "Corsets, stockings, lingerie. Shop windows remind me of neighbors' bathrooms before breakfast. There's something odiously impersonal about them. See, all the way down the street—silks, garments, ruffles, laces. A saturnalia of masks. It's the only art we've developed in America—over-dressing. Clothes are peculiarly American—a sort of underhanded female revenge against the degenerate puritanism of the nation. I've seen ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... are marching to the conquest of the sacred cabbage, the emblem of matrimonial fecundity, and this besotted drunkard is the only man who can put his hand upon the symbolical plant. Therein, doubtless, is a mystery anterior to Christianity, a mystery that reminds one of the festival of the Saturnalia or some ancient Bacchanalian revel. Perhaps this paien, who is at the same time the gardener par excellence, is nothing less than Priapus in person, the god of gardens and debauchery,—a divinity probably chaste and serious in his ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... celebrated in the "Demi" or boroughs of Attica, in honor of Bacchus, in the month Poseidon. This was the most ancient of the Festivals, and was held with the greatest merriment and freedom; the slaves then enjoyed the same amount of liberty as they did at the Saturnalia at Rome. The second Festival, which was called the Lensea, from lenus, a wine-press, was celebrated in the month Gamelion, with Scenic contests in Tragedy and Comedy. The third Dionysian Festival was the Anthesteria, or "Spring feast," being celebrated during three days in the month Anthesterion. ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... kind of judicial Saturnalia. You must know, that one of the requisites to be a macer, or officer in attendance upon our supreme court, is, that they shall be men ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the latter years of his reign, had permitted Scarron's widow to make religion fashionable, by cloaking France with the mask of hypocritical piety—a mask soon, however, to be torn aside by Philippe of Orleans in the wild saturnalia of the Regency. The Abbe de Bernis was also a constant visitor at the house of Madame d'Etioles; he was, in the parlance of the time, the Abbe de la Maison—it is true he had no other benefice—but little thought then, either the abbe of the house or the mistress of the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... as within, bore witness to the graciousness of the Emperor in the prolonged holiday he had granted the people. It was as if the Saturnalia had arrived. Industry, such as there ever is, was suspended; all were sitting idle, or thronging some game, or gathering in noisy groups about some mountebank. As we advanced farther, and came just beyond the great road leading to Tibur, we passed the school of the celebrated ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... which city I had travelled in pursuit of the mystic, suddenly, and when least expected, he appeared before me. It was the time of the Carnival. It was in one of those half-frantic scenes of noise and revel, call it not gayety, which establish a heathen saturnalia in the midst of a Christian festival. Wearied with the dance, I had entered a room in which several revellers were seated, drinking, singing, shouting; and in their fantastic dresses and hideous masks, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... back to our theme! Back to despots and slaves![iu] Feasts furnished by Famine! rejoicings by Pain! True Freedom but welcomes, while Slavery still raves, When a week's Saturnalia hath ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Christianity flourished side by side for a considerable period; and we find various pagan practices allowed to continue, where they were innocent. Thus the bride-cake and the bridal-veil are of heathen origin; the mirth of the Saturnalia survives, in a modified form, in some of the rejoicings of Christmas; and the flowers, which had filled the pagan temples during the Floralia, were employed to adorn God's ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... (Books XIII and XIV, Xenia and Apophoreta, are two collections of inscriptions for presents at the Saturnalia); also a Liber Spectaculorum on the opening of the grand Flavian amphitheatre (the Coliseum) begun by Vespasian and ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... (that is, of communal and public) value over sex-acts, and to a great extent made them into matters either of Temple-ritual and the worship of the gods, or of communal and pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and other similar festivals. We have certainly no right to regard these celebrations—of either kind—as insincere. They were, at any rate in their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social and festal; and from either point ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... back?" said the martyr. The fact is, she was well aware that this was a case of quid pro quo; and that Gwen was entitled, by treaty, to a perfect Saturnalia of sweet-hearting till after Christmas, in exchange for the six months of penal servitude to follow. But she preferred to indicate that the terms of the treaty ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... among other eccentricities, determined upon having a feast once a year, in imitation of the Saturnalia in ancient Rome. In this project he engaged several persons of rank, and his plan was put in execution at the deanery house. When all the servants were seated, and every gentleman placed behind his ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... of Macrobius except that he was a Greek, and lived in the fifth century. His principal work was his "Saturnalia," and he selected for it this title and plan, because, as he tells us, men were in his day so much occupied with business, that it was only in the annual festival of misrule that they had any time for reflection or social intercourse. The "Saturnalia," occupied the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... wealth had intoxicated this people, lifting them from the level of the commonplace into a saturnalia of extravagance. Poverty, the only restraint many of them had ever felt, was gone. Money had made them lawless, whimsical, bizarre. It had developed all-conquering personalities, potent individualities. They were still playing with it, wondering ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of these saturnalia was at hand. The last glimpse we have of them was on the night of 1st February 1685—the last Sunday Charles was permitted to spend ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... propaganda of the clerics, nursed frightful hatred against the Jews, not only as "infidels," but also as intellectual aristocrats. The rage of the populace was the combustible material in the terrific explosions that occurred periodically, in the bloody saturnalia of the Pastouraux (1320), in the Black Death riots (1348), in the massacre of ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... it. The Barristers were crawling out of their dark corners, pale and thin, with hardly a breath in their bodies, as though just coming to life again. One of them when he saw the pettifoggers putting their heads together, and lamenting their sad lot, up comes he and says: "Did not I tell you the Saturnalia could not last ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... of this catastrophe she separated herself almost entirely from her blood-stained husband, and spent her life in the recesses of the harem, praying as a Christian both for the murderer and his victims. It is a relief, in the midst of this atrocious saturnalia to encounter this noble and gentle character, which like a desert oasis, affords a rest to eyes wearied with the contemplation of so much ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... if you must come at all, about the beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day, and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has five saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of these is Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime wind will be ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... manifestations of la vie, so unutterably dull and sordid, are of small concern to the cultured traveller. The intimate charm and spirit of Paris will be heard and felt by him not amid the whirlwind of these saturnalia largely maintained by the patronage of English-speaking visitors, but rather in the smaller voices that speak from the inmost Paris which we have essayed to describe. Nor can we bid more fitting adieu to Lutetia than by translating Goethe's words to Eckermann: "Think of the city ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... quarters, but when they saw how well the police did their dispersing work, and choked up with their clubs the protests of aggregated suffering, self-confidence came back, revelry was resumed, and the saturnalia of theft went ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Their tale so inflamed the sober portion of our crew, who had remained on board the schooner, that at one moment it looked very much as though they were about to throw off all the trammels of discipline and obedience, and proceed forthwith on board the Spaniard, to participate in the saturnalia still in progress there; and it was only by the production of a lavish allowance of rum, and a promise from the carpenter that they should all have their turn on board the doomed ship, that they could be restrained from heaving the cutter's cargo overboard—instead ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... Khalifa's storehouse. They ran against our horses, tripped over each other and fell in their crazy haste to fill sacks, skins, and nondescript vessels of all sorts—metal, wood and clay—with grain. Women staggered under burdens that would assure their households of food for months. It became a saturnalia and jubilee for the long, half-starved slaves, men and women. By-and-by looting became more general. The houses of Emirs who had run away or been killed were entered and plundered by the populace. Donkeys were caught and loaded with spoils of war, and driven off to huts ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... metal, short-circuiting connections, destroying life far ahead of the point of attack; and, drawn along by the relentlessly creeping composite tractor beam, there progressed around the circumference of the hexan city two veritable Saturnalia of destruction—uninterrupted, cataclysmic detonations of sound and sizzling, shrieking, multi-colored displays of pyrotechnic incandescence combining to form a ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... off all communication with its neighbours and Madrid. The sorriest hamlet was determined to stand on its own bottom. Federation had given place to cantonalism, marked by massacres, incendiarism, and every description of brutality, and bloody saturnalia were celebrated throughout the length and breadth ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... for evil or good, what conscience, and reason, and policy, and wisdom united can not do. Esther is justly a favorite with the Christian and Jewish world; but Vashti, the proud queen who, with true woman's dignity, refuses to grace with her presence the saturnalia of an intoxicated monarch, is also entitled to our esteem, although she paid the penalty of disobedience; and the foolish edict which the king promulgated, that all women should implicitly obey their husbands, seems to indicate that unconditional ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... of the Holi, the Saturnalia of India, terminates on the last day of Phalgun, or 16th of March.[16] On that day the Holi is burned; and on that day the ravages of the monster (for monster they will have it to be) are supposed to cease. Any field that has ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... entreat you, my dear sir, at no time to forget that you are a Christian and a Protestant gentleman. Be sober and rational, and, if there be any truth in religion at all, do not make a mockery of it, by converting the Lord's day into a monstrous Saturnalia. Here is your letter." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... then be begun, and the Class Struggle will then display on the field of politics all its beneficent influence. Beneficent, I say, because the class struggle must be understood not in the contemptible sense of a Saturnalia of fist-fights and outrages, of malevolence and personal violence, but must be worthily conceived as a great social drama. With all my heart I hope that this conflict may be settled, for the progress of civilization, without bloody ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... perpetrated upon the Jews by the mob were merely a crude copy of the atrocities perpetrated upon them by the Government, and that the outlawed condition of the Jews bred the lawlessness and violence of the mob, which was fully aware of the anti-Semitic sentiments of the official world. The bloody saturnalia of Nizhni-Novgorod had, however, the beneficent effect that the Government, fearing the spread of the conflagration outside the Pale and even outside Jewry, took energetic steps to prevent all further excesses. As a matter of fact, the Nizhni-Novgorod pogrom was the last in ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... was not angry at this speech, but spoke to all his friends about the magnanimous conduct of Fabricius, and intrusted the prisoners to him alone, on the condition that, if the senate refused to make peace, they should be allowed to embrace their friends, and spend the festival of the Saturnalia with them, and then be sent back to him. And they were sent back after the Saturnalia, for the senate decreed that any of them who remained behind ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... they went out, as it chanced, into the meadows that stretch up the hill behind Brackenhurst. Frida remembered it well afterwards. It was the day when an annual saturnalia of vulgar vice usurps and pollutes the open downs at Epsom. Bertram did not care to see it, he said—the rabble of a great town turned loose to desecrate the open face of nature—even regarded as a matter of popular custom; he had ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... couple when no more than the ghosts of them have come together in a projecting mind is an intoxication beyond fermented grapejuice or a witch's brewage; and under the guise of active wits they will lead us to the parental meditation of antics compared with which a Pagan Saturnalia were less impious in the sight of sanity. This is full-mouthed language; but on our studious way through any human career we are subject to fits of moral elevation; the theme inspires it, and the sage residing in every civilized ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inviolable bounds of property; to hail, on the return of spring, the genial powers of fecundity; to perpetuate the two memorable areas of Rome, the foundation of the city and that of the republic, and to restore, during the humane license of the Saturnalia, the primitive equality of mankind. Some idea may be conceived of the abhorrence of the Christians for such impious ceremonies, by the scrupulous delicacy which they displayed on a much less alarming occasion. On ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... that former moon-worship still colours our religion, it is not to be overlooked that, as our Christmas festivities are but a continuation of the Roman saturnalia, with their interchanges of visits and presents, so "the Church, celebrating in August the festival of the harvest moon, celebrates at the same time the feast of the Assumption and of the Sacred Heart ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... The sudden madness and saturnalia of love into which I had these few weeks been plunged tapped, it seemed, my subliminal consciousness, maybe ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... witless wealth a-lust for strange new pleasures turned from the long strain of conflict to indulgence in endless orgies of extravagance like nothing ever witnessed by a world long since surfeited with contemplation of weird excesses: daily that wild dance of death attained wilder stages of saturnalia, the bands blaring ever louder to drown the mutter of savage elemental forces ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... infinite stimulants to curiosity and desire, only to that annual perplexity which used to beset us in our childhood on thanksgiving day. Having been kept all the year within the limits which prudence assigns to well-regulated children, came at last the governor's proclamation, and a general saturnalia of dainties for the little ones. For one day the gates of license were thrown open, and we, plumped down into the midst of pie and pudding exceeding all conception but that of a Yankee housekeeper, were left to struggle our way out ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... came out like a dandelion in the sun! HE'S a whole saturnalia in himself, once he is roused. I shouldn't like to say whose waist his arm did not go round. Really, Ursula, he seems to reap the women like a harvest. There wasn't one that would have resisted him. It was too amazing! ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... has greatly declined in violence, as well it might, since the O.P. saturnalia of disturbance, which lasted some sixty-six nights at Covent Garden Theatre in 1809. Swords were no longer worn, but the rioters made free use of their fists, called in professional pugilists as their allies, and in addition to catcalls, armed themselves ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... fable which Julian composed under the name of the Caesars, is one of the most agreeable and instructive productions of ancient wit. During the freedom and equality of the days of the Saturnalia, Romulus prepared a feast for the deities of Olympus, who had adopted him as a worthy associate, and for the Roman princes, who had reigned over his martial people, and the vanquished nations of the earth. The immortals were placed in just order on ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... publication of the Spectaculorum Liber (i.e. later in 84 and 85)[643] he published two books, the thirteenth and fourteenth, composed of neat but trifling poems on the presents (Xenia and Apophoreta) which it was customary to give at the feast of the Saturnalia. From this point his output was continuous and steady, as the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the resolution. She threw her scruples into the waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went with her and her crowd to one of the most reckless dances in Greenwich Village, where men and women strove to outdo the saturnalia of Montmartre, vied with one another in exposure, and costumed themselves as closely according to the fig-leaf era as the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Roman Catholic countries the name given to a season of feasting and revelry immediately preceding Lent, akin to the Saturnalia ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... on, but they must be silenced for the moment. She hoped to avoid a conversation between the woman and Helen. She rang the bell for a servant, but no one answered it; Mr. Wilcox and the Warringtons were gone to bed, and the kitchen was abandoned to Saturnalia. Consequently she went over to the George herself. She did not enter the hotel, for discussion would have been perilous, and, saying that the letter was important, she gave it to the waitress. As she recrossed the square she saw Helen and Mr. Bast looking out ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... should be put to the principal; thus, by a subtle transposition of the words, converting the accessory into the principal, by making it appear to abound in quantity. Many similar sayings of great men and philosophers are recorded in the Saturnalia of Macrobius. When Cicero saw his son-in-law, Lentulus, a man of small stature, with a long sword by his side: "Who," says he, "has girded my son-in-law to that sword?" thus changing the accessary into the principal. The same person, on seeing the half- length portrait of his ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... waiting in the hall, beside him his case and hold-all—what belongings he had thrust into them anyhow. He was intending to see the couple into the cab and then go quietly away, for he was determined to avoid the loathsome saturnalia with which his colleagues were certain to signalize the debacle. When the two appeared, he started involuntarily. He had been prepared for violence, he had expected tears.... The vision of a blubbering idiot, that mowed and mumbled, its wig ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... espionnage. Beneath his blighting rule French women only sought to surpass each other in reckless extravagance, and Frenchmen lost the courage which had half redeemed their frivolity. Honest citizens there were, indeed, who protested against these Saturnalia of successful villany and rampant vice, but few listened to their warnings. They were jeered at by the vulgar, fined, imprisoned, or banished by Ministers and Magistrates. All that was good, noble, and generous in the nation withered in the uncongenial atmosphere. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the spirit land, 424-426; servants and dependants killed to attend their dead lords, 426; sacrifices of foreskins and fingers in honour of dead chiefs, 426 sq.; boys circumcised in order to save the lives of their fathers or fathers' brothers, 427; saturnalia attending such rites of circumcision, 427 sq.; the Nanga, or sacred enclosure of stones, dedicated to the worship of ancestors, 428 sq.; first-fruits of the yams offered to the ancestors in the Nanga, 429; initiation of young men in the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... greatest was her husband's ineptitude, as yet unrevealed, but to her well known. To win success for a second-rate man! that is to a woman—as to a king—the delight which tempts great actors when they act a bad play a hundred times over. It is the very drunkenness of egoism. It is in a way the Saturnalia of power. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... the second Punic war there were introduced, among people of quality, the already-mentioned banquetings on the anniversary of the entrance of the Mother of the Gods (after 550), and, among the lower orders, the similar Saturnalia (after 537), both under the influence of the powers henceforth closely allied—the foreign priest and the foreign cook. A very near approach was made to that ideal condition in which every idler should know ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the bustle of packing and preparation for departure, and a kind of saturnalia prevailed at Hyde Lodge—a saturnalia which terminated with the breaking-up ball: and who among the crowd of fair young dancers so bright as Charlotte Halliday, dressed in the schoolgirl's festal robes of cloud-like muslin, and with her ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... doubt"—I quote from memory—"in honest faith, believe me, than in half the" systems of philosophy, or words to that effect. The victor had a slave at his ear during his triumph; the slaves during the Roman Saturnalia, dressed in their masters' clothes, sat at meat with them, told them of their faults, and blacked their faces for them. They made their masters wait upon them. In the ages of faith, an ass dressed ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... original; in another sense composed of old materials; in both senses universal and cosmopolitan. The Roman element in Christmas is a remarkable instance of this acquisitive power of Christianity. The celebration of the festival takes place at the same time as that of the Pagan Saturnalia; and from the old customs of that holiday, Christmas absorbed much that was consistent with the spirit of the new religion. During the Saturnalia the world enjoyed, in thought at least, a perfect ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... splendid examples and great images of the dead, to be admired and imitated; there were such among the Romans, under the basest Emperors; such in England when the Long Parliament ruled; such in France during its Saturnalia of irreligion and murder, and some such have made the annals of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Seneca remarks (Epist. xi. 5) "that the Roman players hang down their heads, fix their eyes on the ground and keep them lowered, but are unable to blush in acting shame." According to Macrobius, who lived in the filth century ('Saturnalia,' B. vii. C. 11), "Natural philosophers assert that nature being moved by shame spreads the blood before herself as a veil, as we see any one blushing often puts his hands before his face." Shakspeare makes Marcus ('Titus Andronicus,' act ii, ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... gratitude, and lighted it from the match he gallantly held for her. And so they smoked. The Merle twin never smoked for two famous Puritan reasons—it was wrong for boys to smoke and it made him sick. He eyed the present saturnalia with strong disapproval. The admiration of the Wilbur twin—now forgetting his ignominy—was frankly worded. Plainly she was no ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Throughout civilized Europe a sort of carnival of empiricism prevailed. Quack was king. A spurious leaven of charlatanism was traceable in politics, in science, in religion—pervaded all things indeed. The world was mad to cheat or to be cheated. The mountebank enjoyed his saturnalia. Never had he exhibited his exploits before an audience so numerous and so sympathetic—so eager to be swindled, so liberal in rewarding the swindler. Gravely does Miss Hannah More address Mr. Horace Walpole, concerning what she terms the 'demoniacal ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... had been marooned here, but since the beginning of this saturnalia they had not been in evidence beyond the thresholds ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... and conventional dulness of term and its duties, they interchanged with us anecdote and jest, and mingled with the sparkling imaginations of youth the reminiscences of riper years—I am sure they will have no cause to regret their share in those not ungraceful saturnalia, even though they may remember that the hour at which we separated was not always what we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... work, they painted two very beautiful facades in the Campo Marzio; one with the stories of Ancus Martius, and the other with the Festivals of the Saturnalia, formerly celebrated in that place, with all the two-horse and four-horse chariots circling round the obelisks, which are held to be most beautiful, because they are so well executed both in design and in nobility of manner, that they reproduce most ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... the essence of such a mood. The rowdy young man is not content to paint his tutor's door green: he would like to paint the whole city scarlet. The word which to us best recalls such gigantesque idiocy is the word "mafficking." The slaves of that saturnalia were not only painting the town red; they thought that they were painting the map red—that they were painting the world red. But, indeed, this Imperial debauch has in it something worse than the mere larkiness ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... of the horse's skull. Has it not an obvious connection with the 'hobby-horse' of the middle ages, and such mock pageants as the one described in Scott's Abbot, vol. i. chap. 14.; the whole being a remnant of the Saturnalia of the ancients?"] ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... dissolute—of the land. But now the guests were thinned in numbers by death, by marriage, by worn out passions; and many a fierce spirit had been tamed by adversity, till the mirth had grown to be half moody, and the saturnalia gross rather in intention than ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... and novel superstitions, and found a people ready for their wares. An old American woman has told me she has seen a thousand whalemen at one time ashore off ships in the harbor make night and day a Saturnalia of Occidental pleasure, a hundred fights ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... beneath the Tudor's sway. And then a Northern Stuart wore their crown, Whose son, unmindful he was over men Truth-lovers, lied to them and lost his head; For Puritans held no respect for lies. Next flared Charles Satyr's saturnalia Of Lely Nymphs, who panting sang "More gold; We yield our beauties freely; gold, more gold." Hapless explosions, folly, frenzied plots; Till well coerced by Lowland William's craft. Then plans that led to nought, or worse, enforced By Marlborough's cannon thundering over-seas. Then through the ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... voice, to the vague majestic accords of a violoncello, from merry child's laughter to angry sobbing. And all this was repeated in every direction by mocking echo, as if hundreds of fabulous forest maidens, disturbed in their green abodes, answered the appeal of the wild musical Saturnalia. ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... except Pompey's children, intending to seize and keep them as pledges of his reconciliation with Pompey. For there was then a common report that Pompey was on his way homeward from his great expedition. The night appointed for the design was one of the Saturnalia; swords, flax, and sulphur they carried and hid in the house of Cethegus; and providing one hundred men, and dividing the city into as many parts, they had allotted to every one singly his proper place, so that in a moment, many kindling the fire, the city ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... went into his house, and found no one up but the maids, who were keeping that saturnalia among the household gods, which, I am given to understand, goes on in every well-regulated household before the lords of the creation rise from their downy beds. I have never seen this process myself, but I am informed, by the friend of my heart, who looked on it once for five minutes, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... is doing nothing of this kind do not yet say that he is free, but learn his opinions, whether they are subject to compulsion, or may produce hindrance, or to bad fortune, and if you find him such, call him a slave who has a holiday in the Saturnalia; say that his master is from home; he will return soon, and you will know what ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... of his winter quarters, however, was not unbroken. Oroeses, king of the Albanians dwelling beyond the Cyrnus, made an expedition against them just at the time of the Saturnalia. He was impelled partly by a wish to do a favor to Tigranes the younger, who was a friend of his, but mostly by the fear that the Romans would invade Albania, and he cherished the idea that if he should fall upon them in the winter, when they were not expecting hostilities and were not encamped ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... town is given up to harmless racket. Nowhere has the tradition of the Latin Saturnalia been fitted with less change into the Christian calendar. Men, women, and children of the proletariat—the unemancipated slaves of necessity—go out this night to cheat their misery with noisy frolic. The owner of a tambourine is the equal of a peer; the proprietor of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the entrance to the grounds gran'ther stopped me while he solemnly untied the knot in his empty sleeve. I don't know what kind of hairbrained vow he had tied up in it, but with the little ceremony disappeared every trace of restraint, and we plunged head over ears into the saturnalia of delights that was an ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Neoplatonic philosopher and Latin grammarian of the early part of the 5th century A.D. He is best known as the author of the "Saturnalia" and of a commentary upon Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis" in that author's "De republica". It is this latter work that is probably in the mind of Chretien, as well as of Gower, who refers to him in his "Mirour l'omme", and of Jean de Meun, the ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... cases of joy, dismissal from the house in quarrels, wishing joy on New Year's Day, king and queen on twelfth day (from the Saturnalia), holding up the hand in sign of assent, shaking hands, etc., are Roman customs, so were executions just out of the town, where also the executioner resided. In Anglo-Saxon times this officer was ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... every man's lips, while women and children, and those too aged to take part in the wild saturnalia of blood that was to follow, scattered ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... therefore they left them their swinging censers, their gold chalices, and their symbolic candles. Thus it is that Roman Catholicism became, and is still, merely a Christian form of Paganism which is made to pay successfully, just as the feasts and Saturnalia of ancient days were made to pay as spectacular and theatrical pastimes. I should not blame your Church if it declared itself to be an offshoot of Paganism at once,—Paganism, or any other form of faith, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... fasting. But after the winter solstice, when he saw that the days grew longer again, he spent eight days in rejoicing, and in the following year he celebrated both periods, the one before and the one after the solstice. This is why the heathen celebrate the calends and the saturnalia in honor of their gods, though Adam had consecrated those days ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... The Roman Saturnalia was a remembrance of the Atlantean colonization. It was a period of joy and festivity; master and slave met as equals; the distinctions of poverty and wealth were forgotten; no punishments for crime ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... European-American civilization, is considered with the superficial frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality. We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the world's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in life. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... robes—Waugh! God of the fallen Indians! how they would revel in the fierce fire-water, the glorious fire-water! Even the Squaws, useful at the skinning, would also drink, and reel, and become lower than the animals they had slain to bring about all this saturnalia. Why had his forefathers fought against the Palefaces? Was not all this civilized evil ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... three weeks or so you will receive instructions at Cairo to write up a series of local articles. Until then, my boy, complete rest and—don't worry; above all, don't worry. You and I have passed through a saturnalia of horror, and you, less inured to horrors than I, have gone down. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... bulk of the Orientals was still beyond the Himalayas and the Gobi, Europe indulged in a wild saturnalia to celebrate its own doom. All pretense of sexual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small illprinted newspapers carried advertisements promising the gratification of strange lusts. A new cult of Priapus sprang up and virgins were ceremoniously deflowered ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... who stand before this magnificent monument; it is found in Thorwaldsen's "Christ;" in Franklin Simmons's "Angel of the Resurrection,"—in such works as those that have a language for the soul, rather than in a "Saturnalia." ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... vigils. The agonales were celebrated in January; the carmentales, in January and February; the lupercales and matronales, in March; the megalesia in April; the floralia, in May; and the matralia in June. They had their saturnalia, robigalia, venalia, vertumnalia, fornacalia, palilia, and laralia, their latinae, their paganales, their sementinae, their compitales, and their imperativae; such as the novemdalia, instituted by the senate, on account of a supposed shower of stones. Besides, every private family had a number ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett |
