does not exceed 164 feet. It stands west of Puebla, faces the four cardinal points, was used as a mausoleum, and is usually called “The Pyramid of Cholula.”
Pyramos (in Latin, Pyramus), the lover of Thisbê had been torn to pieces by a lion, Pyramos stabs himself “under a mulberry tree” in his unutterable grief. Thisbê finds the dead body, and kills herself on the same spot. Ever since then the juice of mulberries has been blood-stained.—Greek Mythology.
(Shakespeare has introduced a burlesque or this pretty love story in his Midsummer Night’s Dream; but Ovid has told the tale beautifully.)
Pyreni, the Pyrenees.
the land surprise,
Which ’twixt the Penmenmaur and the Pyreni lies.
Drayton: Polyolbion, iv. (1612).
(Penmenmaur, a hill in Caernarvonshire.)
Pyrgo Polinices, an extravagant blusterer. (The word means “tower and town taker.”)—Plautus: Miles Gloriosus.
If the modern reader knows nothing of Pyrgo Polinicés and Thraso, Pistol and Paroll—es; if he is shut out from Nephelo-Coccygia, he may take refuge in Lilliput.—Macaulay.
“Thraso,” a bully in Terence (The Eunuch); “Pistol,” in the Merry Wives of Windsor and 2 Henry IV.; “Parollés,” in All’s Well that Ends Well; “Nephelo-Coccygia” or cloud cuckoo-town, in Aristophanés (The Birds); and “Lilliput,” in Swift (Gulliver’s Travels).
Pyrocles and his brother Cy’moclés , sons of Acratés (incontinence). The two brothers are about to strip sir Guyon, when prince Arthur comes up and slays both of them.—Spenser: Faërie Queene, ii. 8 (1590).
Pyrocles and Musidorus, heroes whose exploits are told by sir Philip Sidney in his Arcadia (1581).
Pyrrho, the founder of the sceptics or Pyrrhonian school of philosophy. He was a native of Elis, in Peloponne’sus, and died at the age of 90 (B.C. 285).
Like Pyrrho, on a sea of speculation.
Byron: Don Juan, ix. 18 (1824).
(“Pyrrhonism” means absolute and unlimited infidelity.)
Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher, who is said to have invented the lyre from hearing the sounds produced by a blacksmith hammering iron on his anvil. (See Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, p. 1022.)
Standing beside the blacksmith’s door,
And hearing the hammers, as he smote
The anvils with a different note …
… formed the seven-chorded lyre.
Longfellow: To a Child.
(Handel wrote an “air with variations” which he called The Harmonious Black-smith, said to have been suggested by the sounds proceeding from a smithy, where he heard the village blacksmiths swinging their heavy sledges “with measured beat and slow.”)
Pythias, a Syracusian soldier, noted for his friendship for Damon. When Damon was condemned to death by Dionysius the new-made king of Syracuse, Pythias obtained for him a respite of six hours,