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/ˈhɛkətuːm/ · noun
(Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, historical) A great public sacrifice to the gods, originally of a hundred oxen; also, a great number of animals reserved for such a sacrifice..
O be propitious, powerfull God of Arts, / I sheathe my weapons, and doe breake my darts, / Be then appeas'd, I'le offer to thy shrine, / An Heccatombe, of many spotted kine.
[B]oth the muſes and the graces are his hard Miſtriſſes, though he daily Invocate them, though he ſacrifize Hecatombs, they ſtil look a ſquint, […]
But haſte, conſult vve quick ſome prophet here / […] that vve may learn / By vvhat crime vve have thus incenſed Apollo, / VVhat broken vovv, vvhat hecatomb unpaid / He charges on us, and if ſoothed vvith ſteam / Of lambs and goats unblemiſh'd, he may yet / Be vvon to ſpare us, and avert the plague.
[I]n th' olden time / Some sacrifices ask'd a single victim, / Great expiations had a hecatomb.
[I]t is conceivable that if we were ancients some of us might be offering grateful hecatombs by mistake, and proving our honesty in a ruinously expensive manner.
For the god they speedily stationed the sacred hecatomb all in good order surrounding the well-built altar.
The tutelary deity of the Aztecs was the god of war. The great object of their military expeditions was, to gather hecatombs of captives for his altars. The soldier, who fell in battle, was transported at once to the region of ineffable bliss in the bright mansions of the Sun.
O hecatombe! O catastrophe! / From Mydas pompe to Irus beggery!
Use hecatomb when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Hecatomb means (Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, historical) A great public sacrifice to the gods, originally of a hundred oxen; also, a great number of animals reserved for such a sacrifice..
Common synonyms include abundance, battalion, arseload, assload.
The opposite depends on the specific sense.
O be propitious, powerfull God of Arts, / I sheathe my weapons, and doe breake my darts, / Be then appeas'd, I'le offer to thy shrine, / An Heccatombe, of many spotted kine.
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