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Gladiatorial

adjective
1.
Of or relating to or resembling gladiators or their combat.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Gladiatorial" Quotes from Famous Books



... dangerously near a goal, someone on the imperiled side kicks it half the length of the field, and the scrimmages are renewed. But it is rarely kicked at all except at such junctures. Foot-ball! I say to myself that it is a gladiatorial combat with an occasional punt thrown in by way of identification. But every one around me is declaring that the play of both sides is magnificent, that the team work is perfection, and the head qualities displayed unique ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant

... I am sick of the whole thing. I would reintroduce prize-fighting and bear-baiting and gladiatorial shows to brace the nation up a bit. We'll get jammed full of rotten vices like those beastly ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn

... Mexico, when, fortune having deserted a warrior, he fell into the hands of his enemies, a victim doomed to sacrifice, a chance was, under certain conditions, given him for his life. He was tied by one foot, naked, to the gladiatorial stone, armed with a wooden sword, and six warriors were, one after another, entered against him. If extraordinarily skilful, strong, and brave, he might hold his own and save his life; at least he might destroy ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson

... wished to erase his name from the law, entering another one instead. Although this plan was not carried out, it was still made clear to all that they received not even benefits gladly from inferior men. About this same time Faustus, son of Sulla, gave a gladiatorial combat in memory of his father and entertained the people brilliantly, furnishing them with baths ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... amusement of the sovereign multitude. These were naturally in great part brave men captured in war, who had not forgotten that they had once faced the Romans in the field. A number of these desperadoes broke out of one of the Capuan gladiatorial schools (681), and sought refuge on Mount Vesuvius. At their head were two Celts, who were designated by their slave-names Crixus and Oenomaus, and the Thracian Spartacus. The latter, perhaps a scion of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... elements in their advance;—thirdly, that this polished condition of society, which should naturally with the evils of a luxurious repose have counted upon its pacific benefits, had yet, by means of its circus and its gladiatorial contests, applied a constant irritation, and a system of provocations to the appetites for blood, such as in all other nations are connected with the rudest stages of society, and with the most barbarous modes of warfare, nor even in such circumstances without many palliatives wanting ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... they came. To his thinking, the Christians had not only the power, but the right to kill Chilo. True, pity was not entirely a stranger to that world to which the young patrician belonged. The Athenians raised an altar to pity, and opposed for a long time the introduction of gladiatorial combats into Athens. In Rome itself the conquered received pardon sometimes, as, for instance, Calicratus, king of the Britons, who, taken prisoner in the time of Claudius, and provided for by him bountifully, dwelt in the city in freedom. But vengeance for a personal ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... a noble reply by Captain de Camp, of the Hon. East India Company's service, from Madras, and much applause from the diners, they ascend, to join the ladies; forming, round the drawing-room-fire, a vast amphitheatre, in the centre of which, gladiatorial children contend for nuts and oranges—Captain de Camp filling the post of honour,—making himself at home in Mr. Brown's easy chair and slippers. Mr. Wellesley drags in the yule-log, much to the detriment of the Brussels, and the ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner

... evident delight of the artist in plant and animal forms and his neglect of the human figure—all these are Celtic. When we turn to the rarer scenes in which man is specially prominent—a hunt, or a gladiatorial show, or Hesione fettered naked to a rock and Hercules saving her from the monster[4]—the vigour fails (Fig. 17). The artist could not or would not cope with the human form. His nude figures, Hesione and Hercules, and his clothed gladiators are not fantastic but grotesque. ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield

... significant of these were to abolish the inhuman treatment of criminals, who were considered not so well as the beasts of the field. Organized Christianity secured human treatment of prisoners while they were in confinement, and the abolition of punishment by crucifixion. Gladiatorial shows were suppressed, and laws permitting the freer manumission of slaves were passed. The exposure of children, common to both Greeks and Romans, was finally forbidden by law. The laws of marriage were modified so that the sanctity of the home was secured; and, finally, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... Antony, at one of his breakfasts with Cleopatra, had eight wild boars roasted whole; and though the Romans do not appear to have been addicted to hunting, wild-boar fights formed part of their gladiatorial shows in the amphitheatre. In France, Germany, and Britain, from the earliest time, the boar-hunt formed one of the most exciting of sports; but it was only in this country that the sport was conducted without dogs,—a ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... permeate his being. He had done well and was justly entitled to a moment of self laudation. Mr. Stokes—Bettina's father—would no longer be against him, for who could not say he was not capable of competing in the world-arena with full-grown, gladiatorial intellects? He had even successfully crossed blades with Mr. Stokes's own best brand of Damascene gray matter. And he had won the fray, for the everlasting good and happiness of all parties concerned. In anticipation he already felt himself thrilling proudly beneath the crown ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... the slowly changing social conscience which, as each generation passes, appreciates more fully warfare's inconsistency with justice and antagonism to right. This same cause found civilized society taking keen delight in the heathen barbarity of a gladiatorial combat, and has transformed and lifted it up to where it is horrified at a bull-baiting or a prize fight. It found human beings with absolute power of life and death over other human beings and has evolved the view ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take heed that ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... panegyric. From all corners of the earth strangers flock to see the wonders of the mighty metropolis, more crowded than London, more magnificent than Paris, more luxurious than New York. Fetes, shows, processions, gladiatorial combats, chariot races, form the amusement of the vast populace. A majestic centralized power controls all kingdoms, and races, and peoples. The highest state of prosperity is reached that the ancient world knew, and all bow down to Caesar and behold ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... the side, and was easily the best man in it, but among the lesser lights there was a great display of energy, much of it misplaced. The worst offender was Bray. To watch him play was to witness a gladiatorial display of frightfulness. His fists flew about like a flail, his legs were everywhere. On the whole he did more damage to his own side than to his opponents. And the amount of energy he wasted every game in hacking the bodies of any who got in his ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... stands outside the gate, whither the citizens flocked to see gladiatorial displays or contests between wild beasts. With the exception of one at Dorchester, it is the largest in Britain. It is made of lofty banks of earth, which surround the arena, and must have been an imposing structure in the days of its glory, with its tiers of seats rising ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... sent against the barbarians, to reduce under the authority and dominion of the Romans such of them as had not yet been subdued. Scipio returned to Carthage, to pay his vows to the gods, and to exhibit a gladiatorial show, which he had prepared on account of the death of his father and uncle. This exhibition of gladiators was not formed from that description of men which the lanistae are accustomed to procure, such ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... "choose-up-and-spell-down." I don't know if you ever played it. It was a survival, pure and simple, from the Old Red School-house. There was where it really lived. There was where it flourished as a gladiatorial spectacle. The crack spellers of District Number 34 would challenge the crack spellers of the Sinking Spring School. The whole countryside came to the school-house in wagons at early candle-lighting time, and watched them fight it out. The interest grew as the contest ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood

... editor had found himself handicapped by a lack of the mysterious enrichment that a tour through college gives the least absorbent mind. He was determined to provide it for his boy, though Joel felt that every moment's delay in leaping into the commercial arena was so much delay in arriving at gladiatorial eminence. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... demagogical arts which the earlier Romans would have despised. They provided games, at great expense, for the entertainment of the populace. In the room of the invigorating and of the intellectual contests, which had been in vogue among the Greeks, the Romans acquired an increasing relish for bloody gladiatorial fights of men with wild beasts, and of men against one another. Slaves multiplied to an enormous extent: "as cheap as a Sardinian" was a proverb. The race of plain farmers dwindled away. The trade in slaves became a flourishing branch of business. Field-hands toiled in ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... any arena came from its use to denote the paling of a palisade, or any stake or post. Palus, in a fight, always appeared to stand still: metaphorically he might be said to seem as immobile as the post upon which beginners in the gladiatorial art practice their first attempts at strokes, cuts, thrusts and lunges. So little did he impress beholders as mobile, so emphatically did he impress them as stationary, that he might almost as well have been an upright stake, planted ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... It was a scene of bustle and life, as if the whole vicinity had poured forth its inhabitants to a village wake, or rural feast. But the earnest desire to look on blood and death, is not peculiar to those dark ages; though in the gladiatorial exercise of single combat and general tourney, they were habituated to the bloody spectacle of brave men falling by each other's hands. Even in our own days, when morals are better understood, an execution, a bruising match, a riot, or a meeting of radical ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... and neglect alike of themselves and of others. The schools moreover, apart from their faulty methods and ideals of instruction, encourage other faults. The boys' interests lie not in their work, but in the theatres, the gladiatorial games, the races in the circus—those ancient equivalents of twentieth-century athleticism. Their minds are utterly absorbed by these pursuits, and there is little room left for nobler studies. 'How few boys will talk of anything else at home? ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... may hold their mimic naval combats and regattas here in the desert, for they are always at heart a seafaring people. Beyond the pool there is a Circus, with four rows of stone seats and an oval arena, for wild-beast shows and gladiatorial combats. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... though man may kill the lower animals for his own convenience, he is bound not to inflict needless suffering on them. The torture of an animal, for no adequate purpose, is absolutely indefensible. Cock-fights, bull-fights, and the like seem to me to admit of no more justification than the gladiatorial shows. Are field-sports, then, in the same category? The answer, I think, depends on three considerations: (1) would the animal be killed any way, either for food, or as a beast of prey; (2) what is the amount of suffering inflicted on it, in addition to that which would be inflicted by killing ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler

... goal to strive toward, had long been corrupting the upper classes. Now, a terrible plague swept the world from end to end, so that laborers became scarce, lands went untenanted, taxes unpaid. The drain of supporting Rome's boundless extravagance, in buildings, feasts, and gladiatorial displays, began to tell upon the provinces at last. Newer and ever harsher methods had to be employed to wring money from exhausted lands. Driven by their sufferings to cling to religion as a support, men thought of it more seriously; and a cry went up that earth was being ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... inventive gifts were taxed more than ever. Every day brought a festival, every night magnificent banquets. One spectacle, excursion, or hunting party followed another. In the theatres, the Odeum, the Hippodrome, no more brilliant performances, races, naval battles, gladiatorial struggles, and combats between beasts had been given, even before Actium. Dion himself had formerly attended the entertainments of those who belonged to the court circle, the society of "Inimitable Livers." It had been revived again, but Antony called them the "Comrades of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Fortress Monroe, the crews of the ships at anchor under its guns, all gazed with eager eyes over the open waters of the bay, their interest in the coming contest as intense as Roman audience ever displayed for the life and death struggle in the gladiatorial arena. Before them lay a mightier amphitheatre than that of the Coliseum, and before them was to be fought more notable struggle for life and death than ever took place within ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... quitted the sombre gallery and made their way into the open air. After they had gone about twenty yards the guides came to an abrupt halt and one of them pointed to the centre of the vast gladiatorial arena. ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg

... exhausted provincials. Every young man of active ambition or noble birth, whose resources had been impoverished by debauchery and extravagance, had but to borrow fresh sums in order to give magnificent gladiatorial shows, and then, if he could once obtain an aedileship, and mount to the higher offices of the State, he would in time become the procurator or proconsul of a province, which he might pillage almost ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... disposed to question the effect produced by the heroic, or rather saintly, death of Telemachus. No prohibitory law of Honorius is to be found in the Theodosian Code, only the old and imperfect edict of Constantine. But Muller has produced no evidence or allusion to gladiatorial shows after this period. The combats with wild beasts certainly lasted till the fall of the Western empire; but the gladiatorial combats ceased either by common consent, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... property; at least they "can arise from no other sources." Then, according to your argument, it is "virtually forbidden" to marry, to beget children, and to hold private property! Nay, it is forbidden to live, since murder can only be perpetrated on living subjects. You add that "in the same way the gladiatorial shows of old, and other barbarous customs, were not specifically forbidden in the New Testament, and yet Christianity was the sole means of their suppression." This is very true. But these shows and barbarous customs thus suppressed ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... these unfortunate victims; the one after his triumph, and the other on the pretext of a rebellion.[672] No war, says Lipsius,[673] was ever so destructive to the human race as these sports. In spite of the laws of Constantine and Constans, gladiatorial shows survived the old established religion more than seventy years; but they owed their final extinction to the courage of a Christian. In the year 404, on the kalends of January, they were exhibiting the shows in the Flavian ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... should be a theatre for any show, with heights around it insignificant, but offering a vantage ground whence could be watched the struggle in the midst. There was a sacred centre—an island and a mount—and, within the lines, so great a concourse of gladiatorial souls as befits the greatest of spectacles. I say, I do not know how far such visions are permitted, nor how far the right reason of the Church condemns them; but the dream returned to me very powerfully, recalling my boyhood, when the traveller ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc

... character does not appeal except in moments of contention. There never yet has been a time when the theatre could compete successfully against the amphitheatre. Plautus and Terence complained that the Roman public preferred a gladiatorial combat to their plays; a bear-baiting or a cock-fight used to empty Shakespeare's theatre on the Bankside; and there is not a matinee in town to-day that can hold its own against a foot-ball game. Forty thousand ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... met Cavenaugh in the entrance hall, serenely going forth to or returning from gladiatorial combats with joy, or when he saw him rolling smoothly up to the door in his car in the morning after a restful night in one of the remarkable new roadhouses he was always finding. Eastman had seen a good ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... it acquired fresh glory; it remains the most interesting city in the world; is filled with the sublime ruins and monuments of its pagan greatness and the priceless art-treasures of its mediaeval period; of ruined buildings the most imposing are the Colosseum (a vast amphitheatre for gladiatorial shows) and the Baths of Caracalla (accommodated 1600 bathers); the great aqueducts of its Pre-Christian period still supply the city with water from the Apennines and the Alban Hills; the Aurelian Wall ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... fall at his feet, and displayed a figure in which the grace of an Antinous met with the columnar strength of a Grecian Hercules,— presenting, in its tout ensemble, the majestic proportions of a Jupiter. He stood—a breathing statue of gladiatorial beauty, towering above all who were near him, and eclipsing the noblest specimens of the human form which the martial assembly presented. A buzz of admiration arose, which in the following moment was ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... Lares, a marble Venus, and a golden casket by no means small, which held, so they told us, the first shavings of Trimalchio's beard. I asked the hall-porter what pictures were in the middle hall. "The Iliad and the Odyssey," he replied, "and the gladiatorial games given under Laenas." There was no time in which to ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... answered gently; "the arena must yet be sanded!" This she said having reference to the covering up of the bloodstains at the gladiatorial shows with fine sand. "Well," she went on, "waste not thine anger on a thing so vile. I have thrown my throw and I have lost. Vae victis!—ah! Vae victis! Wilt thou not lend me the dagger in thy robe, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... table, cards, and dice have got cantered over; the fourth presenting us with two French knights, armed cap—pie, engaged in a tourney; while in the fifth and last a couple of German lansquenets essay their gladiatorial skill with their long and dangerous weapons. Several years back a tablet was discovered in one of the cellars of the house, inscribed "Ci-gist vnrable religieux mastre Pierre Dercl, docteur en thologie, jadis prieur de cans. Priez Dieu pour luy. 1486," which would almost indicate that the ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... fair curly hair and delicate hands skilled in the limner's art; the Numidians with skins of ebony and keen black eyes that shone like dusky rubies; they were agile at the chase, could capture a lion or trap the wild beasts that are so useful in gladiatorial games. There were Greeks here, pale of face and gentle of manner who could strike the chords of a lyre and sing to its accompaniment, and there were swarthy Spaniards who fashioned breast-plates of steel and fine chain mail to resist the assassin's dagger: there were Gauls with long lithe limbs and ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... appreciation of certain incidents in Roman history, like the turmoils in the time of the Gracchi, and the scene in the forum when Mark Antony played on the heartstrings of the populace. Everything is grist that comes to our mill. Even a football game is a modern rendition of a gladiatorial combat. Don't ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... long, thick donkey persuaders, sticks that are anything but small and willowy; it is an amusing spectacle, and seated on the commanding knoll nibbling "drum-sticks" and wish-bones, I can almost fancy myself a Roman of old, eating peanuts and watching a gladiatorial contest in the amphitheatre. The similitude, however, is not at all striking, for thick as are their quarter-staffs the Persian ryots don't punish each other very severely. Whenever one of them works himself up to a fighting-pitch, he ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except towards their pets. How little the old Romans knew of it is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... when saying "good-by," they put up the thumb with the fingers closed. In Yuen-nan and eastern Tibet we noted the same custom among the aboriginal tribesmen. I wonder if it is merely a coincidence that in the gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome "thumbs up" meant mercy ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... the Roman gladiatorial shows, and to the philosophic detachment by which Marcus Aurelius was able to see and yet not to see them; and the whole book was the spiritual story of a young Roman's soul, a priestlike artistic temperament, born in the haunted twilight between the setting sun of pagan religion ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... by the Duke of Weimar. I have passed a luxurious afternoon, having been in bed from dinner till tea, reading Rammohun Roy's book, and framing dialogues aloud on every argument beneath the sun. Really, I have not had my mind so exercised for months; and I have felt a gladiatorial disposition lately, and don't enjoy mere light conversation. The love of knowledge is prodigiously kindled within my soul of late; I study much and reflect more, and feel an aching wish for some person with whom I might talk fully ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... surrounded with walls, but an irregular space bounded by the Tiber on the west, and the Palatine Hill and the Circus Maximus on the east. The Cloaca Maxima ran beneath it, and it was rich in temples and monuments. On it the first gladiatorial exhibition occurred, B.C. 264, and there too, other burials of living persons had been made, in spite of the long-ago abolishment of such rites by Numa.] and the public excitement somewhat allayed in that horrible way. A large army was immediately raised, and sent to meet ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... cuts through the subject on so new a plane that the accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect where there are no catch-words ready made for the defender; after you have been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is an assailant who does not scruple to hit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... another festival, and another circus. In the year 550 of the city, there were five festivals. The candidates for the consulship spent large sums on these games, the splendor of which became the standard by which the electoral body measured the fitness of candidates. A gladiatorial show cost seven hundred and twenty thousand sesterces, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... from the body, was a theological idea that grew out of the reaction against pagan animalism. The development of the body among the Greeks and Romans was followed by those brutal exhibitions of physical prowess in the gladiatorial contests where the physical only was cultivated and honored. With the dawn of Christianity a reaction set in against this whole idea of developing the body. They thought no good could come from its supreme development, because ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... dust; turn the house out of window. Adj. discordant; disagreeing &c. v.; out of tune, ajar, on bad terms, dissentient &c. 489; unreconciled, unpacified; contentious &c. 720. quarrelsome, unpacific[obs3]; gladiatorial, controversial, polemic, disputatious; factious; litigious, litigant; pettifogging. at odds, at loggerheads, at daggers drawn, at variance, at issue, at cross purposes, at sixes and sevens, at feud, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... majesty of all ruins; there is nothing like it. All the associations of the place, too, give it the most impressive character. When you enter within this stupendous circle of ruinous walls and arches, and grand terraces of masonry, rising one above another, you stand upon the arena of the old gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrdom; and as you lift your eyes to the vast amphitheater, you meet, in imagination, the eyes of a hundred thousand Romans, assembled to witness these bloody spectacles. What a multitude and mighty array of human beings; and how little do ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... he says, "to loiter in the baths of Agrippa and to hear from the idlers there the gossip of the hour. The gladiatorial struggles in the Circus Maximus and the comedies in the theaters have lost for me their relish. For the civic rewards which Tiberius gives his favored ones I have no wish. Senatorships and proconsulships ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford

... of the populations of England and America at the present day. Were it not for the tremendous power of modern law, there is not the slightest doubt that the mass of Londoners or New Yorkers would flock to-day to see a gladiatorial show, or to watch a pack of lions tearing, limb from limb, a dozen unarmed convicts. Not the "cultured" classes—some of them would be ashamed, and some would really feel a moral incapacity for witnessing so much pain—but the masses ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford

... language. They refused to be romanized in any other respect. Even the Roman amusements tended to disgust them, and it is to the credit of his superior refinement that the average Greek was repelled by those brutal exhibitions of gladiatorial bloodshed and slaughter over which the coarser ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... merely, but for the world at large, which regards her with tense anxiety. Let America beware. Even a just war may give rise to all possible iniquities. Vestiges of ancient fierceness linger within us; the human animal licks its chops as it watches the gladiatorial combats. We veil these cannibal appetites under highsounding names, speaking of Right and of Liberty. The last hope of our day lies in youth. Let youth claim for the future the individual's prerogative to judge good and evil for himself, to be the ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... just government of the provinces; the complete reform of the system of collecting taxes; the abolition of the cruelty of the criminal laws and the mitigation of sentences unnecessarily severe; the regulation of gladiatorial exhibitions; the diminution of the absolute power possessed by fathers over their children and of masters over their slaves; the admission of women to equal rights to succession to property from their children; the rigid suppression of spies and informers; and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... practice of this art been found consistent with noble rank or honourable estate. Christianity might be expected to spare some sympathy for a calling that offers prizes to abandonment and self-immolation, but her eye is fixed on a more distant mark than the pleasure of the populace, and, as in gladiatorial Rome of old, her best efforts have been used to stop the games. Society, on the other hand, preoccupied with the art of life, has no warmer gift than patronage for those whose skill and energy exhaust themselves on the mimicry of life. The reward of social ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... me with wonder, enchained me with interest, and thrilled me with horror. The tremendous force with which she expresses the very worst passions in their strongest essence forms an exhibition as exciting as the bull fights of Spain, and the gladiatorial combats of old Rome, and (it seemed to me) not one whit more moral than these poisoned stimulants to popular ferocity. It is scarcely human nature that she shows you; it is something wilder and worse; the feelings ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... the tavern. He despises serious friends, and, boy as he is, spends his tender years in revelling with the most abandoned youths among harlots and wine-cups. He rules your house, orders your slaves, directs your banquets. He is a frequent visitor to the gladiatorial school and there—as a boy of position should!—he learns from the keeper of the school the names of the gladiators, the fights they have fought, the wounds they have received. He never speaks any language save Punic, and though he may occasionally use a Greek word picked up from his mother, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... national sports. England has its football, Scotland its golf, Canada its lacrosse, the United States its baseball. The enthusiasm and excitement that hold whole cities in thrall as a national league season draws to its close, is a more striking phenomenon than Roman gladiatorial shows or Spanish bull-fights. Persons who seldom if ever attend a game, who do not know one player from another, wax eloquent over the merits of a team that represents their own city, while individuals who attain to the title of "fans" handle familiarly the details of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... trite saying that men who can not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a kingdom. During his reign, gladiatorial contests were relieved of their savage brutality, work was given to many, education became popular, and people said, "The Age of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... Good lack-a-day, {now's} the sticking-point, if I don't look out for myself. They are making toward me with a gladiatorial air. ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... performances took place. And wonderful performances they were. There were sometimes great fights between lions, tigers, bulls, and bears; sometimes wild beasts were slain by men, and sometimes men were slain by wild beasts. There were gladiatorial combats, executions of criminals, and many other kinds of cruel and barbarous amusements. When the Colosseum was inaugurated, five thousand wild beasts were put to death, and afterwards, at the celebration of a great victory, eleven thousand animals ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... was to report to him not merely on the senate's resolutions but also on the speeches and votes of the senators. Cicero, when proconsul, received through his friend, M. Caelius, the reports of a certain Chrestus, but seems not to have been particularly well satisfied with the latter's accounts of gladiatorial sports, law-court proceedings, and the various pieces of city gossip. As in this case, such correspondence never extended beyond a rude relation of facts that required supplementing through letters from party friends of the absent person. These friends, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... producing their literary excellence. The subjects selected were not always good, and must occasionally have produced in Cicero's own mind a repetition of the reprimand which he once expressed as to the gladiatorial shows and law-court adjournments; but Caelius does communicate much of the political news from Rome. In one letter, written in October of this year, he declares what the Senate has decreed as to the recall ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... speak of the COLISEUM. I will assume that most of my readers know that this was an immense amphitheater, constructed in the days of Rome's imperial greatness, used for gladiatorial combats of men with ferocious beasts and with each other, and calculated to afford a view of the spectacle to about one hundred thousand persons at once. The circuit of the building is over sixteen hundred ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... to have got into such a predicament while having a good time at a gladiatorial show! As you know, I went to Macedonia on business; it took me ten months; I was on my way home with a very neat sum of money, and had nearly reached Larissa, which I included in my route in order to see the show I mentioned, when I was attacked ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will look upon, and be with you in; but they will not be with you, if you sit on the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth, whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial war. You also, you tender and delicate women, for whom, and by whose command, all true battle has been, and must ever be; you would perhaps shrink now, though you need not, from the thought of sitting as queens above set lists where the jousting game might be mortal. How much more, then, ought ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... pictures, such as representations of the ancient divinities, lares, penates, and genii; pictures of tavern scenes, of mechanics at their work; rope-dancers and representations of various games, gladiatorial contests, genre scenes from the lives of children, youths, and women, festival ceremonies, actors, poets, and stage scenes, and last, but not least, many caricatures, of which I here give you an example ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement

... neither does Dionysius of Halicarnassus, though Dionysius was very fond of entering into details of Roman antiquities. Tacitus gives one origin to this priesthood, the author of the Annals another; Tacitus, describing the gladiatorial shows by which the birthday of Vitellius was celebrated in the year 15, says, that the Emperor Tiberius consecrated those priests to the Julian House, in imitation of their first institutor, Romulus, who consecrated them to King Tatius: (facem Augustales subdidere: ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... to gladiatorial spectacles. This slaughter happened near the canal of Drusus, where the Roman guard on the Rhine could be spectators of the battle. The account of it came to Rome in the first ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... the boy made ready for the game as for a gladiatorial display. Their frowning seriousness proved that they had comprehended the true British idea of sport. Musa came round the net to Audrey's side, but Audrey ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... and the frontier I have pushed forward." He turned away from her and stood for a moment at the window in a flood of yellow radiance. The clarity of his eyes and luster of his dark hair and the hue of his cheeks were all declarations of gladiatorial perfection of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... and Romans amused themselves with witnessing the gladiatorial contests of their male slaves; but it was left for civilized America to introduce woman into the "ring" and make her show her paces on the race-course. An ungraceful figure she cuts, and a repulsive ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... again eyed the messenger, and this time fully realizing the gladiatorial development of that dark stranger's physical form, he grew many shades paler, and involuntarily ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... with this festival extended through three successive days. They consisted of sacrifices and other religious rites, dramatic spectacles, athletic games, and military and gladiatorial shows. In the course of these diversions there was celebrated on one of the days what was called the Trojan game, in which young boys of leading and distinguished families appeared on horseback in a circus or ring, where ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott

... carnal and selfish delight. The morning brought the chases, and evening the banquet, the theatre, or the ball; while at intervals grand polytechnic exhibitions delighted the populace, being given, probably, in the vain hope that they would satisfy the rising discontent, much as the gladiatorial shows satisfied, while they still further brutalized, the degraded populace of ancient Rome, making possible the toleration of such colossal iniquity as marked the decline of the Empire. Such, then, was the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... mere physical torture, in gladiatorial combats, or in the bloody precincts of plaza de toros, as grossly demoralizing as the loathsome minutiae of heinous crimes upon which legal orators dilate; and which Argus reporters, with magnifying lenses at every eye, reproduce for countless ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... than alarums and excursions of no great seriousness, I think of modifying the gladiatorial arena and approximating it to natural conditions. The soil is very imperfectly represented by my work-table; and the Spider has not her fortress, her burrow, which plays a part of some importance both in attack and in defence. A short length of reed is planted perpendicularly ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... place for the exhibition of gladiatorial shows, combats of wild beasts, and naval engagements. Its shape was that of an ellipse, surrounded by seats for the spectators. The word Amphitheatre was first applied to a wooden building erected by Caesar. Augustus built one of ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell

... conversations, actions, are all affected by the "optique du theatre" they are composed in a certain "key" which seeks to give a harmonious impression, but which conveys frankly semblance and not reality. The craving for "real" effects upon the stage is anti-aesthetic, like those gladiatorial shows where persons were actually killed. I once saw an unskilful fencer, acting the part of Romeo, really wound Tybalt: the effect was lifelike, beyond question, but it ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... and what it involves, in this department which the master spirits of ancient as well as of modern time selected as their peculiar sphere; what the talents are that may contend with the greatest intellects of the age in that greatest of all our gladiatorial arenas, the Supreme Court of the United States, and what various and rare excellencies must unite in forming a man who may stand forth and share in such generous battle, and, still more, shall come off victorious from such a field. And ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... Opera is generally such a depiction of sex-passion, of lust and murder, that it would not be permitted on the stage. A few years from now people will be horrified to remember that the preceding generation reveled in such blood scenes—just as we now speak with horror of the gladiatorial contests ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... any unwelcome eccentricity in the movements of the beasts, and confined them to their appointed prey. Around the parapet which was raised above the arena, and from which the seats gradually rose, were gladiatorial inscriptions, and paintings wrought in fresco, typical of the entertainments for which the place was designed. Throughout the whole building wound invisible pipes, from which, as the day advanced, cooling and fragrant ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... England this martial spirit was more violent than in Greece, because, when war actually came, the Greeks were themselves exposed to all its horrors and sufferings, but in England the bloodthirsty mind could enjoy the conflict in a suburban train with a half-penny paper. As in bull-fights or gladiatorial shows, the spectators watched the expensive but entertaining scene of blood and death from a safe and comfortable distance. They gave the cash and let the credit go; they thoroughly appreciated the rumble of a distant ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... frown. If I but touch his hand, the giant trembles. He would be a Hercules in my service, and yet I've got him just there"; and she depressed her little thumb with the confidence of a Roman empress desiring to show favor to some gladiatorial slave. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... he bartered his immortal time in a thirty-years' gladiatorial fight that in the end millions of Germans might feel the tingle of blood-brotherhood. How he faced the long, heart-breaking battle, therein we find the true measure of our great Bismarck! Thus his work, as an individual, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... be killed. Yet in the capital where the zeal of the bulls, and I suppose, of the bull-fighters, is such, it is said that there is a subtle decay in the fashionable, if not popular, esteem of the only sport which remembers in the modern world the gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome. It is said, but I do not know whether it is true, that the young English queen who has gladly renounced her nation and religion for the people who seem so to love her, cannot endure ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... and theatron, a place for spectators), a building in which the seats for spectators surround the scene of the performance. The word was doubtless coined by the Greeks of Campania, since it was here that the gladiatorial shows for which the amphitheatre was primarily used were first organized as public spectacles. The earliest building of the kind still extant is that at Pompeii, built after 80 B.C. It is called spectacula in a contemporary inscription. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... contrast to the plain and worn garment of the man who waited under the high arch of the Beautiful Gate with arms folded across his breast. An intense stillness fell over the gathering—such a hush as marked the circus arena in Rome when gladiatorial combatants came together in the death-struggle. As Annas, the All-Powerful head of God's elect priesthood, neared the end of the open path cut through the throng, the Galilean lifted his eyes from the surrounding scene and entered into some high place of communion. ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock

... pro-German pause and meditate upon a future United States where native individualism was less and less reluctantly heading for the iron jaws of the Prussianized American machine; and, furthermore, upon the weird spectacle of the real gladiatorial contest—German sentimentality wrestling in a death grapple with American downright ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... she could feel the breath sharp in her lungs. "I would rather.... He would make a good spectacle in the gladiatorial contests. He would look well with a sword through ...
— Step IV • Rosel George Brown

... Mr. Calverley. "You informed me—which was your duty as a friend—of this curmudgeon's boast that he would have me horsewhipped if I dared venture into England. You will readily conceive that any gentleman of self-respect cannot permit such farcical utterances to be delivered without appending a gladiatorial epilogue. Well! what are ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... but having been honourably vanquished by him, even to the slicing of his nose in two pieces, the cracking of his crown in sundry places, and the scoring of his body as though it had been a Loin of Pork for the Bakehouse, he was taken into his service, and became a principal figure in all the grand gladiatorial encounters, at wages of forty shillings a week and his meat. As for Mr. Figg himself, who was as good at backsword as at broadsword, at quarter-staff as at foil, and at fisticuffs as any one of them,—to ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... American people long since tried and found wanting as a safe or wise counsellor; the same of whom the Roman Catholic Church one day assumed the responsibility, and found the task more onerous than had been expected. He retains his arrogance, his gladiatorial skill, his habit of sweeping assertion; but perhaps his virulence is softened, save where some unhappy "humanitarian" is under dissection. Enough remains of the habit, however, to make his worst pages the raciest, and to render it a sharp self-satire ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... Nimes, and a "Corrida de Meurte"—borrowing the phrase from the Spanish—at Arles, each to take place in the great Roman arenas, which had not seen bloodshed for centuries; not since the days when the Romans matched men against each other in gladiatorial combat, and turned ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... themselves by the quivering of her nostrils. And oh, what a speech she made! Such torrents of furious hatred in the cause of universal love! Comrade Mary quoted a Socialist writer who had said that just as gladiatorial combats had continued until Christian monks were willing to throw themselves into the arena, so war would continue until Socialists were willing to throw themselves beneath the hoofs of the cavalry. And in this Quaker spinster you ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... Magnus—and indeed we have been mutually united by frequent pleasant intercourse to such an extent, that our friends the boon companions of the conspiracy, the young chin-tufts, speak of him in ordinary conversation as Gnaeus Cicero. Accordingly, both in the circus and at the gladiatorial games, I received a remarkable ovation without a single cat-call. There is at present a lively anticipation of the elections, in which, contrary to everybody's wishes, our friend Magnus is pushing the claims of Aulus's son;[104] and in that matter his weapons are neither his prestige ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... to Peter (Matt. xvi. 13). Many Greek inscriptions have been found here, some referring to the shrine. Agrippa II. changed the name to Neronias, but this name endured but a short while. Titus here exhibited gladiatorial shows to celebrate the capture of Jerusalem. The Crusaders took the city in 1130, and lost it to the Moslems in 1165. Banias is a poor village inhabited by about 350 Moslems; all round it are gardens of fruit-trees. It is well watered and fertile. There ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... foes seen and unseen, Perry was engaged in gladiatorial combat with a savings ledger. In the space of a week he had developed a singularly profane vocabulary. Probably the contiguity of Watson had something to do with it. He was under the special tutelage of Watson, and the handling he received was anything but ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... comfort. These baths were generally very extensive, and fitted up with every possible convenience;—the passages and apartments were paved with marbles of every hue, and the tesselated floors were adorned with representations of gladiatorial engagements, hunting, racing, and a variety of subjects from the mythology. In the Thermae at Rome, ingenuity and magnificence seem exhausted; and the elegance of the architecture, and the vast range of rooms and porticos, create in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various

... major-generals, and secondary diplomatists, when their date is past, awake no more emotion than last year's advertisements, or obsolete directories; whereas those who, in a stormy age, have swept the harps of passion, of genial wit, or of the wrestling and gladiatorial reason, become more interesting to men when they can no longer be seen as bodily agents, than even in the middle chorus of that intellectual music over which, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... OF THE GLADIATORS.—While Pompey was subduing the Marian faction in Spain, a new danger broke out in the midst of Italy. Gladiatorial combats had become, at this time, the favorite sport of the amphitheatre. At Capua was a sort of training-school, from which skilled fighters were hired out for public or private entertainments. In this seminary was a Thracian slave, known by the name of Spartacus, who incited his companions to ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... said the girl, vehemently. "They go there and sit and have a good time at the expense of the Province, and show off a little with a passage-at-arms now and then that suggests more of a gladiatorial arena than that of a body of ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... attacks of Mr. Gladstone, who was rallying his own followers, both in the House and in the country, for their successful onslaught upon the Government. It was a unique and most valuable experience to watch these two great men in their gladiatorial combats across the table of the House: Gladstone wielding the mighty broadsword of his powerful eloquence, and seeming as if at every moment he would annihilate his antagonist; Disraeli, with marvellous ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.



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