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Parthenon   /pˈɑrθənˌɑn/   Listen
Parthenon

noun
1.
The main temple of the goddess Athena; built on the acropolis in Athens more than 400 years B.C.; example of Doric architecture.






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"Parthenon" Quotes from Famous Books



... who walk about followed by a crowd of youths eager to drink in their words. Here is the Acropolis, with its snow-white temples and propylaeum, fair and chaste as though they had been built in heaven and gently lowered to this Attic mound by the hands of angels. There in the Parthenon are the sculptures of Phidias, and yonder in the temple of the Dioscuri, the paintings of Polygnotus,—ideal beauty bodied forth to lure the souls of men to unseen and eternal worlds. If they turn to ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... religion of Pleasure, in which all Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. First, bals masques in every saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And all these three worships issue in vast temple building. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom, and built you the Parthenon—the Virgin's temple. The Mediaeval worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples also—but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and built you Versailles and the Vatican. Now, lastly, will you tell me what we worship, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... unbroken amidst all conflicts. The wise old Greeks chose for the protectress of Athens the goddess of Wisdom, and whilst they consecrated to her the olive branch, which is the symbol of peace, they set her image on the Parthenon, helmed and spear-bearing, to defend the peace, which she brought to earth. So this heavenly Virgin, whom the Apostle personifies here, is the 'winged sentry, all skilful in the wars,' who enters into our hearts and fights for us to keep us in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... could not refrain from looking back, as we passed rapidly to the shore, and we continued to direct our eyes towards the spot, where we had caught the last glimpse of the Theseum and the ruins of the Parthenon through the vistas in the woods, for many minutes after the city and the Acropolis had been totally ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... in behalf of the Canongate are not the slightest. The Castle may excel us in extent of prospect and sublimity of site; the Calton had always the superiority of its unrivalled panorama, and has of late added that of its towers, and triumphal arches, and the pillars of its Parthenon. The High Street, we acknowledge, had the distinguished honour of being defended by fortifications, of which we can show no vestiges. We will not descend to notice the claims of more upstart districts, called ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... Jennie, too, would enjoy it. Vesta could be left at home with Gerhardt and a maid, and he and Jennie would travel around a bit, seeing what Europe had to show. He wanted to visit Venice and Baden-Baden, and the great watering-places that had been recommended to him. Cairo and Luxor and the Parthenon had always appealed to his imagination. After he had had his outing he could come back and seriously gather up the threads ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... spared," the world could still see enough to render possible a just impression of her old and chaste magnificence. It is painful to reflect within how comparatively short a period the chief injuries have been inflicted on such buildings as the Parthenon, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, and to remember how recent is the greater part of the rubbish by which these edifices have been choked up, mutilated, and concealed. Probably until within a very few centuries, time had been, simply ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... objects chimnies, is too much even of a high taste; one might as well live in a fever. Mr. Aristabulus Bragg, who is a wag in his way, informs me that there is one town in the interior that has actually a market-house on the plan of the Parthenon!" ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper

... African departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... capital, and supported the entablature. The horizontal lines of the architrave and cornice were more marked than the vertical lines of the columns. The portico with its row of columns supported the pediment. The Parthenon is the most perfect example of the Doric order, and shattered as it is by time and man it is still one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. It was built in the time of Pericles, from about 460 to 435 B.C., ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... inner ear may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms—his marbles are ever musical; not "frozen music" as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but silent swooning music. This gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply significant of modern aspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas. Dante inspired this monstrous and ennobled masterpiece, but Baudelaire filled many of its chinks and crannies with writhing ignoble shapes; shapes of dusky ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... polished communities of Greece, and she drew into a focus all the Grecian intellect; she obtained from her dependants the wealth to administer the arts, which universal traffic and intercourse taught her to appreciate; and thus the Odeon, and the Parthenon, and the Propylaea arose! During the same administration, the fortifications were completed, and a third wall, parallel [289] and near to that uniting Piraeus with Athens, consummated the works of Themistocles and Cimon, and preserved the communication between ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of millions of men as the most vast monument of the ages. Its very defects are destined to be as lasting as its beauties, and its mighty faults are more imposing than the small perfections of the Greeks. Between it and the Parthenon, as between the Roman empire and the Athenian commonwealth, one may choose, but one dares not make comparison. The genius of the Greeks absorbed the world's beauty into itself, distilled its perfection, and gave humanity ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... rather than the ordinary reader. They are the materials of history, not history itself. They bear the same relation to the works of Livy or Gibbon which the rude blocks in the quarry do to the temples of St Peter's or the Parthenon. Ordinary readers are not aware of this when they take up a volume of despatches; they expect to be as much fascinated by it as they are by the correspondence of Madame de Sevigne, Cowper, Gibbon, or Arnold. They will soon find their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various

... produced by a man directing his own muscles—were produced in the Rome of Nero as perfectly as they could be produced to-day. To this fact our museums bear ample and minute witness; while the Colosseum and the Parthenon are quite enough to show that the masons of the ancient world were at least the equals of our own. If no advance, then, in the quality of manual labour as such has taken place in the course of two thousand years, it is idle to contend that its powers have increased in the course ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... une lampe une flamme fidele, Au fond du Parthenon le marbre inhabite Garde de Phidias la memoire eternelle, Et la jeune Venus, fille de Praxitele, Sourit encor, debout dans sa divinite, Aux siecles impuissants qu'a ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... spell of the Violet Crown. Illusions as to the eternal summer with which poets have blessed the Isles of Greece vanished as they found deep snow in the streets, icicles on the Acropolis, and snow-balling in the Parthenon. He had a reception only a shade less cordial than if he were Demosthenes come back. He dined with King Otho, and went to a Te Deum in honour of the Queen's birthday. Finlay, the learned man who had more of the true spirit of history than most historians then alive, took him ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... Gate, where the Linden commences, forms the entrance to the city from the Thiergarten, and is a sort of triumphal arch, erected in 1789. It is seventy feet in height, and two hundred in width, being modelled after the entrance in the gateway of the temple of the Parthenon at Athens. It affords five ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou

... lack of passion, of vivid interest, of significance in a word, in Greek sculpture of the Periclean epoch. The conception of absolute beauty having been discovered to be an abstraction, the tradition of the purely ideal has gone with it. The caryatids of the Erechtheum, the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze, the reliefs of the Nike Apteros balustrade are admired certainly; but they are hardly sympathetically admired; there is a tendency to relegate them to the limbo of subjects for aesthetic lectures. And yet no one can have carefully examined the ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... in the service of the State, described in these eloquent words, reflects itself in the highest productions of Greek art and literature, and is the source of that 'political' spirit which every one can detect, alike in the poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, as the inspiring cause of the noblest efforts of imitation. It prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in such plays as the Persae and Eumeuides ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... The Parthenon, standing on the summit of Athens, built of white marble, was surrounded by columns 34 feet high. It was 230 feet long, 102 feet wide, and 68 high, and was perhaps the most perfect building ever raised by man. Every ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... nests of a wood-pigeon and a bottle-tit, as between the hut of a North American savage and a Grecian temple. But although the savage, in the course of ages, may attain as much civilization as would lead him to the construction of a new Parthenon, the wood-pigeon will continue only to make a platform of sticks to the end of time. It is evident, from a contemplation of all nature, that the faculties of quadrupeds, birds, insects, and all the inferior animals, are stationary: those of man only are progressive. It is this ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various

... met woman's world for the world's good. I'd fain have seen the tall, fair, Saxon surrounded by devoted Eastern subjects! All I did see was some of the preparations—red cloth being laid in acres up to a stately Parthenon—but from various accounts I have heard from ladies who were present, this must have been one of the most extraordinary and gorgeous functions the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... Agora was the most considerable. The theatre, called the Odeon, was erected in Athens for musical and poetical contests. The Acropolis, with its temples, was rebuilt, and the splendid Propylaea, of Doric architecture, formed a magnificent approach to them. The temple of Athenae—the famous Parthenon—was built of white marble, and adorned with sculptures in the pediments and frieze by the greatest artists of antiquity, while Phidias constructed the statue of the goddess of ivory and gold. No Doric temple ever equaled the severe proportions and chaste beauty of the Parthenon, and its ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... Metopes of the Parthenon; Eastern Frieze; Northern Frieze; Western Frieze; Southern Frieze; Eastern Pediment; Western Pediment; Temple of the Erectheum; Temple ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... I saw for the first time the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the sculptured bas-reliefs and canopy of the marvellous shrine. The marble, worn and mellowed by the subtle hand of time, took on an unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in some remote way of the honey-colored columns of the Parthenon, but more mystic, more complex, a color not born of the sun's inveterate kiss, but made up of cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs' tombs, and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of Siena, or ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... of God some men have! What can an Eskimo, whose highest conception of summer is a stunted bush, know of tropical orchards, of luscious peach, pear and plum? If the student has seen only the broken fragments of Phidias, what can he know of the Parthenon as it once stood in the zenith of its perfection, in the splendor of its beauty? But if man's reason can cull out all the lustrous facts of nature and history, and if his imagination has strength ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... the white figures throwing purple shadows on the sun-baked palaestra; 'bands of nude youths and maidens'—you remember Gautier's words—'moving across a background of deep blue as on the frieze of the Parthenon.' I began to read Greek eagerly for love of it all, and the more I read the more ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... of Athens, rose the magnificent Temple of Athena, called the Parthenon, built under the direction of Phidias, the most celebrated sculptor of that time, who adorned it with many of his works, and especially with the huge statue of Athena in ivory, forty-seven feet in height. The Acropolis was also enriched with another figure of Athena in bronze—also ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... volume. The poet used the name once before; but he then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in their dignity and force. One indeed among Mr. Tennyson's merits is, that he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial effort, but undulates with his matter, and flies high or low as it requires. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... striking authority; and he loved the watchmen and their drowsy drawl of "past umph a' clock;" he loved the charity schools and admired beyond all the sculpture of Phidias, or the marble miracles of the Parthenon, the two full-length statues about three feet each in length and two feet six inches each in breadth, representing a charity boy and a charity girl, standing over the door of the parish school; he loved the city companies, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various

... chair, deep, high-backed, wondrously self-assertive over against the creaky cane seat which before had dominated the room. Against the wall was a high bookcase, where Hilliard's volumes, previously piled on the floor, stood in loose array; and above the mantelpiece hung a framed engraving of the Parthenon. ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing

... to the nature of the tools, the selection of material, the particular sort of native endowment which are given to him. Some such men reveal their understanding of the soul and the world in the detached serenity, the too well-defined harmonies of a Parthenon; others in the dim and intricate richness, the confused and tortured aspiration of the long-limbed saints and grotesque devils of a Gothic cathedral. Others incarnate it in gleaming bronze; or spread ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... nobody endeavours to verify, every one ends by repeating what he learnt at school, till there come to be names and things which nobody would venture to meddle with. For a modern reader the perusal of Homer results incontestably in immense boredom; but who would venture to say so? The Parthenon, in its present state, is a wretched ruin, utterly destitute of interest, but it is endowed with such prestige that it does not appear to us as it really is, but with all its accompaniment of historic memories. The special characteristic of prestige ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... essay that Dawson has been "down on." What a curious notion about Glacial climate, and Basques and Finns! Are the Basques mountaineers—I hope so. I am sorry I have not seen the "Athenaeum," but I now take in the "Parthenon." By the way, I have just read with much interest Max Muller (356/7. Probably his "Lectures on the Science of Language," 1861-64.); the last part, about first origin of language, seems ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... most imposing we ever remember to have witnessed. The great door of the church was hung with black curtains, with the initials of the deceased, "F. C.," emblazoned in silver. On our entry we found the vast area of the modern Parthenon entirely crowded. Nave, aisles, galleries, &c., were alive with human beings who had come to see the last of Frederick Chopin. Many, perhaps, had never heard of him before....In the space that separates the nave from the choir, a lofty mausoleum had been erected, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... the question of the exact degree of severity and abstraction necessary in the forms of living things architecturally employed; my own feeling on the subject is, though I dare not lay it down as a principle, (with the Parthenon pediment standing against me like the shield of Ajax,) that no perfect representation of animal form is right in architectural decoration. For my own part, I had much rather see the metopes in the Elgin room of the British Museum, and the Parthenon without them, than have them together, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... the relic hunter who opened the door to the looter. The spirit which sends the tourist tapping about the ruins of the Parthenon, awoke in San Francisco. Idle and curious men swarmed into the city, poking about in the ruins in the hope of finding something worth carrying away as a souvenir of the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... wrote in 1856, "I went out at about twelve and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... together the skillful architecture which unites national sovereignty with State rights, individual security, and public prosperity? No, if these columns fall, they will be raised not again. Like the Coliseum and the Parthenon, they will be destined to a mournful, a melancholy immortality. Bitterer tears, however, will flow over them than were ever shed over the monuments of Roman or Grecian art; for they will be the remnants of a more ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various

... the Parthenon, As the best gem upon her zone, And Morning opes with haste her lids To gaze upon the Pyramids; O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, As on its friends, with kindred eye; For out of Thought's interior sphere Those wonders rose to upper air; And Nature gladly gave them place, Adopted them into her ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... reality and life, not limited and temporary conditions, but life universal and for all time. Without commentary these carry their message, appealing to the wisest and the humblest. Gather into a single room a fragment of the Parthenon frieze, Michelangelo's "Day and Night," Botticelli's "Spring," the sprites and children of Donatello and Delia Robbia, Velasquez's "Pope Innocent," Rembrandt's "Cloth-weavers," Frans Hals' "Musician," Millet's "Sower," Whistler's "Carlyle." There is here no thought of period or ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... appreciate fully its proud superiority to all the accidents of changing taste and modified culture. It is only the truest art that can bear that test. The fanes of Paestum will always be more beautiful even than the magical shore on which they stand. The Parthenon, fixed like a battered coronet on the brow of the Acropolis, will always be the loveliest sight that Greece can offer to those who come sailing in from the blue Aegean. It is scarcely possible to imagine a condition of thought or feeling in which these ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... the Education Office, was coming back from a Garden Suburb, where the conversation had turned upon Eugenics. Photographs of the most beautiful Greek statues had stood displayed along the overmantel; Walter Pater's praise of the Parthenon frieze had been read; and a discussion had arisen upon the comparative merits of masculine and feminine beauty, during which Mr. Clarkson maintained a modest silence. He did, however, support the contention ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... object in Athens is the Acropolis, or Citadel—a rock which rises abruptly from the plain, and is crowned with the Parthenon. This was a temple dedicated to the goddess Minerva, and was built of the hard white marble of Pentelicus. It suffered from the ravages of war between the Turks and Venetians, and also more recently in our own time. The remnant of the sculptures which decorated the pediments, with ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... and answered, "Yes, you will find us all tinctured with it, more or less." At last, to Mr. Smedley's great joy, he got my father alive off this roof, and on his way to Downing, the new college of which Leslie Foster talked so much, and said was to be like the Parthenon. Shockingly windy walk: thought my brains would have been blown out. Passed Peter House, and saw the rooms in which Gray lived, and the irons of his fire-escape at the window. Warned Mr. Smedley of the danger of my father being caught by a coachmaker's yard which we were ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... great natural forces in modern life, and having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts. One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon—a Parthenon not of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel—the crowd fireside—being more than ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... nourished in a particular fashion; and, when it had been shown in every street, in every square, and before every temple, in the midst of a procession continually chanting, it ascended to the Acropolis, brushed passed the Propylaeum, and entered the Parthenon. ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... medium through which Hawthorne looks at the spectacle of transatlantic life and its surroundings. He visits the British Museum, and encounters only disappointment at the mutilated sculptures of the Parthenon; but out of this confession, which is truth, slowly arises the higher truth of that airy yet profound response with which he greets the multiform mute company of marble or painted shapes that form the real population ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... see a lot of intellectual pismires, who have secured positions of trust because of their political pull in the Tenderloin, hurling their petty scorn at Victor Hugo. It were like Carlyle's "critic fly" complacently rubbing its hinder legs and giving its opinion of the Parthenon, like aesop's vindictive snail besliming the masterpiece of Phidias, like a Baylor professor lecturing on the poetry of Lord Byron. Every writer of eminence since the days of Moses has had to run the gauntlet of these slight people's impotent ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... said to be little besides rhythmical and logical arrangements of line. The same rhythmical principle is found in the designs of the classical frieze in all its varieties, culminating in the rhythmic movement of the great Pan-Athenaic procession in that master-frieze of the Parthenon, which, though full of infinite variety and delicate sculptured detail, is yet controlled by a strictly ornamental motive, and constructed upon the rhythmic recurrence ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane

... (and here his eyes rested very tenderly upon the thin white profile of his wife) her soul. "Still," I answered, "the ancients, who understood such matters, did manufacture some tolerable female statues: the Fates of the Parthenon, the Phidian Pallas, the ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... geometrical system of regulating the sizes of the different parts. The Greeks certainly employed such a system, though there are not sufficient data for us to judge exactly on what principle it was worked out. In regard to the Parthenon, and some other Greek buildings, Mr. Watkiss Lloyd has worked out a very probable theory, which will be found stated in a paper in the "Transactions of the Institute ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various

... the object of the superstitious veneration of the people, and that St. Patrick thought it his duty to destroy it? And the attitude of the people at the time of its destruction shows that it could not have borne for them the same sacred character as the statue of Minerva in the Parthenon did for the Greeks or that of Capitoline Jove for the Romans. Can we suppose that St. Paul or St. Peter would have dared to break either of these? And let us remark that the event we discuss occurred at the very beginning of St. Patrick's ministry, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... The Parthenon, which is esteemed the grandest of all monuments of Greek art, embodying as it does the highest achievement in sculpture and architecture, was built just after the middle of the fifth century, although the precise date at which it was begun and finished is uncertain. ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 08, August 1895 - Fragments of Greek Detail • Various

... account of its beauty; even as, in lesser degree, Rubens has always managed to make us feel towards his flaccid, veal-complexioned, fish-eyed women, something of what we feel towards the goddesses of the Parthenon; towards the white-robed, long-gloved ladies, with meditative face beneath their ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... form which an effect of material could not enhance, and this effect of material, underlying that of form, raises the latter to a higher power and gives the beauty of the object a certain poignancy, thoroughness, and infinity which it otherwise would have lacked. The Parthenon not in marble, the king's crown not of gold, and the stars not of fire, would be feeble and prosaic things. The greater hold which material beauty has upon the senses, stimulates us here, where the form is also sublime, and lifts and intensifies our emotions. We need ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... as we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,—so I thought. I don't think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of special ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... artificial beauty which are English, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and classical names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills, the Cliffs of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Derwent, and Winandermere, which are to him now instead of the Acropolis and Parthenon, of Baiae, and Athens with its sea-walls, and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... has been called classical, Greek, and so on, but is, in truth, a very modern reproduction of a classical type—a Venus by Mr. Gibson, rather than a Venus by Milo; a classic draped figure of a Wedgwood plaque more than an echo from the Parthenon.... The actress has evidently been well taught, and is both an apt and clever pupil; she speaks clearly, enunciates well, occasionally conceals the art she has so closely studied, and is at times both tender and graceful.... Her one great fault is insincerity, or, in other ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar

... recently been reopened for the restoration of some of the buildings in the Greek capital. The marble is dazzlingly white and fine-grained, but it sometimes contains little pieces of quartz or flint, which give some trouble to the workmen. The Parthenon, crowning like a perfect capital of human art the summit of Nature's rough workmanship in the Acropolis, was built of this marble; and the immortal sculpture of Pheidias on the metopes, the frieze of the cella, and the tympana of the pediments of the temple, known as the Elgin Marbles, were ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... authorized by Congress in April, 1816, because of the bad financial condition into which the government had fallen during the War of 1812. The building was designed by William Strickland, in his day the leading American architect, being modeled after the Parthenon of Athens. It was completed in 1824 and was put to ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins

... done. As he worked, a thousand pictures were flashing through his mind. He saw his beloved old home in lovely Athens. He felt his father's hand on his, teaching him to paint. He gazed again at the Parthenon, more beautiful than a dream. Then he saw himself playing on the fishing boat on that terrible holiday. He saw the pirate ship sail swiftly from behind a rocky point and pounce upon them. He saw himself and his friends dragged aboard. He felt the tight rope on his wrists as they bound ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall

... the world in intellectual pursuits, in art, in poetry, in philosophy. A large and vital part of European culture is rooted directly in the language and thought of Athens. The most beautiful edifice in the world was the Peace Palace of the Parthenon, erected by Pericles, to celebrate the end of Greece's suicidal wars. This endured 2,187 years, to be wrecked at last (1687) in Turkish hands by the Christian bombs of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... during the decadence of nations, when it has been hired by wealth as the minister of luxury. Exquisite art and degrading corruption were contemporary in Greece as well as in Rome. Phidias and Iktinos had scarcely completed the Parthenon, when the glory of Athens had departed; Phidias died in prison; and the Spartans set up in the city the memorials of their own triumph and of Athenian defeat. It was the same in ancient Rome, where art was at its greatest height when the people ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... surroundings, that you do not see a figure in violent action starting prominently out from the window as you stand in the church. But, after all, this is a thing of artistic sense and discretion, and no rules can be formulated. The Parthenon frieze is of figures in rapid movement. Yet what repose! And in stained-glass you must aim at repose. Remember,—it is an accessory to architecture; and who is there that does not want repose in architecture? Name me a great building which does ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall

... athletics than in philosophy. At all events, tradition credits him with the invention of "scientific" boxing. Was it he, perhaps, who taught the Greeks to strike a rising and swinging blow from the hip, as depicted in the famous metopes of the Parthenon? If so, the innovation of Pythagoras was as little heeded in this regard in a subsequent age as was his theory of the motion of the earth; for to strike a swinging blow from the hip, rather than from the shoulder, is a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... together. The day for irrelevant statues, as for wall pictures, is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always part of an architectural conception. And since churches are all museum stuff, since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our art—our factory-area our Parthenon, ECCO!' ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... represented in an archaistic and conventional character, this copy cannot be relied on as giving us much information as to the usual style of Alcamenes, who was almost certainly a progressive and original artist. It is safer to judge him by the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon, in which he must almost certainly have taken a share under the direction ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... in it "the capable eye" may discover the pose of the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles, of the Jupiter Olympius of Phidias, and the other lost wonders of ancient chisels, and, more directly, the tender severity of Doric capitals, and the secret grace of the shafts of the Parthenon. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... buildings here are the Capitol, Patent-office, and Post-office. Of these the Patent-office, which is modelled after the Parthenon, is the only one that has any pretensions to architecture. I fear the Anglo-Saxon of these later days, whether in the old country or here, is destined to leave no solid traces of architectural taste—vide National ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... o'clock two thousand students in blouses from the Parthenon were joined by an immense column of workmen from the faubourgs, and, having fraternized in the Place de la Concorde, advanced in perfect order in procession, led by National Guards, shouting the Marseillaise and the Hymn of the Girondins. Slowly and solemnly moved the vast mass up the Rue Royale ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg

... assisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the right line in cornice and wainscoting and door space, which is the hall mark left on architecture by genius or age. The builders of the Parthenon knew this, the builders of Vernons did not— ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... Greeks possess on the hill of gold—the symbol of beauty consecrated by insult! Let us give thanks to the layers of the stupid cannon, since from their German skill there results for them—shame; for us—a Parthenon! ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... theory. It is true that every visual element is understood as expression too. It is not true, however, that expression and impression are parallel and mutually corresponding beyond the elements. Suppose a concourse of columns covered by a roof,—the Parthenon. Those psychophysical changes induced by the sight now mutually check and modify each other. Can we say that there is a "meaning," like the energy of the column, corresponding to that complex? It is at least not energy ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... works of a great artist without feeling that not so much the private as the common wealth is by him indicated. I think the true soul—humble, rapt, conspiring with all, regards all souls as its lieutenants and proxies—itself in another place—and saith of the Parthenon, of the picture, of the poem,—It is also my work. I can never quarrel with your state of mind concerning original attempts in your own art. I admire it rather. And I am pained to think of the grievous resistance ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... recall, with their just conceptions of harmony, their noble and sustained flow of thought, and their freedom from the adventitious ornaments of an exaggerated rhetoric or a sentimental morality, the golden age of Greece. We seem to stand within the Parthenon, to gaze upon the Venus of Cnidus, to be jostled by the gay crowd at the Olympic games. It was indeed a golden age, when all that was beautiful in nature was reverently and assiduously nurtured, and all that was noble and natural in art was magnificently ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... the last eighteen months or so I've been idling—running about to theatres and museums and so forth. I began at Athens and finished up with London. I remember one day sitting on the steps of the Parthenon declaiming the Antigone—and a moment with some meaning in it seemed to have come ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer

... the oversight of all the works, and was surveyor-general, though upon the various portions other great masters and workmen were employed. For Callicrates and Ictinus built the Parthenon; the chapel at Eleusis, where the mysteries were celebrated, was begun by Coroebus, who erected the pillars that stand upon the floor or pavement, and joined them to the architraves; and after his death Metagenes of Xypete added the frieze and the upper line of columns; Xenocles ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... accepts,' Disraeli wrote to his friend Mrs. Willyams, 'I shall lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the house of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon and Lancashire to the Attic Plains.' 'The Greeks really want to make my friend Lord Stanley their king. This beats any novel; but he will not. Had I his youth I would not hesitate, even with the earldom of ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... the forming taste of the country revels in superlatives, and if we could only have the deepest artesian well in the world sunk by the side of the tallest column in all creation, the admiring, not overcritical patriot would be happier than ever was the Athenian when he looked up at the newly erected Parthenon. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... would not tell thee; for the world is mine and the fulness thereof,' is a grand word, but it does not give all the truth. When Paul stood on Mars Hill, and, within sight of the fair images of the Parthenon, shattered the intellectual basis of idolatry, by proclaiming a God 'not worshipped with men's hands as though He needed anything, seeing He giveth to all men all things,' that truth, mighty as it is, is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... highest part of this ground you will build your house: an airy situation is invaluable in warm weather; and then a view is so desirable. In the choice of a style of architecture some difficulty arises. You may either have a clap-board Parthenon, with Corinthian columns in front and Doric columns in the rear, painted white, to flash back the rays of the sun, or which is perhaps more fashionable, a Gothic cottage, with steep roof, rustic pillars, fantastic barge-boards, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... hopes of the hotel, because it is the place of all others which it is to our interest to make look well. People go to the post office all the same, be it a barn or a parthenon, but they will go, other things being equal, to the best hotel. Here comes in the American principle of Competition, the keynote of all our enterprise. Competition is to do for us what the hope of earthly immortality did for the builders of the Pyramids, what the desire to glorify God did ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... position of defending him from himself. "You would rather see no such thing. You shouldn't talk in that utterly trivial way. I like the Parthenon, of course, but I can't think of it now because my head. is too full of my escape from where I was ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... pulled down, its arches dislocated, its columns stretching over the earth; in these ruins you could still detect the solid proportions of a sort of Tuscan architecture; farther off, the remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here, the caked heights of an acropolis along with the fluid forms of a Parthenon; there, the remnants of a wharf, as if some bygone port had long ago harbored merchant vessels and triple-tiered war galleys on the shores of some lost ocean; still farther off, long rows of collapsing walls, deserted thoroughfares, a whole Pompeii buried ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... it out. Having passed the village of Casha, they at last entered upon the slope, and thence into the plain of Attica but the intervening heights and the trees kept the town concealed, till a turn of the path brought it full again before them; the Acropolis crowned with the ruins of the Parthenon—the Museum hill—and the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... his horse caused his death on the 26th of June. His principal work was the Travels and Archaeological Researches in Greece (in German and French, 1826-1830), of which only two volumes were published, dealing with the island of Ceos and the metopes of the Parthenon. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... Parthenon on Nob Hill, the acropolis of San Francisco, is the Fairmont Hotel commanding a view of the Bay and the Contra Costa hills. Its Venetian Room, its Terrace and its Ball Room are among the features of the Fairmont in keeping ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood

... the last fortnight; "Tangier" is distinctly visible; "Buda-Pest" may be readily inferred despite the overlapping labels of "Wien" and "Bale"; while away off to one corner a crumpled and lingering shred points back, though uncertainly, to the Parthenon and the Acropolis. And in the midst of this flowery field is planted a large M after the best style of the White ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... and his circle of architects and sculptors would be could they stand on the corner of Broadway and Twenty-eighth Street and see the miniature Parthenon that graces the roof of a pile innocent of other Greek ornament? They would also recognize their old friends, the ladies of the Erechtheum, doing duty on the Reveillon Building across the way, pretending ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... Frith, which forms the bay of Edinburgh, contracts into the river Forth. We swept by country seats, one of which was pointed out as the residence of the late Dugald Stewart, and another that of the Earl of Elgin, the plunderer of the Parthenon; and castles, towers, and churches, some of them in ruins ever since the time of John Knox, and hills half seen in the fog, until we came opposite to the Ochil mountains, whose grand rocky buttresses advanced from the haze almost to the river. Here, in the windings of the Forth, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... which the Greeks themselves are not in entire accord." A remarkable utterance. Politicians had gone to Siberia for less. Palmerston, too, had his way, and Otto, escorted by a warship, left his fatherland. On arriving in Athens, the joy-bells rang out and the columns of the Parthenon were flood-lit. But the choice was not to the popular taste; and it was not long before Otto was extinguished, as well as the lights. By the irony of fate, he returned to Munich on the very day that Ludwig had erected a Doric ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... in corridors golden. In all the wide farm-place the person most human. You spoke out so plainly with squealing and capering, With whinnying, snorting, contorting and prancing, As you dodged your pursuers, looking askance, With Greek-footed figures, and Parthenon paces, O broncho that would ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay

... indirectly; and we thus find such a correspondence between this index feature and the entire structure as renders this primary division a scientific though a very broad one. The contrast between the trabeated style and the arched style may be well understood by comparing the illustration of the Parthenon which forms our frontispiece, or that of the great temple of Zeus at Olympia (Fig. 4), with the exterior of the Colosseum at Rome (Fig. 5), introduced here for the ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... once the centre of art and learning, adorns our collection with Athens, the Acropolis and Parthenon, the latter almost completely and shamefully bereft of those famous marbles, chiseled by Phidias nearly ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp

... old capital of Picardy, on the Somme, with a cathedral begun in 1220, described as the "Parthenon of Gothic architecture," and by Ruskin as "Gothic, clear of Roman tradition and of Arabian taint, Gothic pure, authoritative, unsurpassable, and unaccusable"; possesses other buildings of interest; was the birthplace of Peter the Hermit, and is ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... living among them and seeing only them! men's hands are not delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly fashioned in the capitals; but in the flowery perfection of the Parthenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more delicate designing. So is the palm inwound with our art, and poetry, and religion, and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... his own ten years. He attributes an overwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance. He, and he alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more than mortal centuries. He sends armies fighting into the extremities of the past. He assigns the Parthenon to a hill of ages, and the temples of Upper Egypt to ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... the P.D.'s a great deal of amusement is a supposititious newspaper, wherein the members are interviewed on any and all occasions and many interesting things brought to light. In one of them, for instance, Ictinus confides to the reporter that he was born in the shadow of the Parthenon. This mixing up of one's peculiarities, habits, and nationality with those of the illustrious individual whose name he bears, is capable of being given many laughable twists and has been taken advantage of ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 10, October 1895. - French Farmhouses. • Various



Words linked to "Parthenon" :   temple, Athens, capital of Greece, Athinai, Greek capital



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