Brewer's: Narses

(2 syl.). A Roman general against the Goths; the terror of children. (473-568.) (See Bogie.)

“The name of Narses was the formidable sound with which the Assyrian mothers were accustomed to terrify their infants.” —Gibbon: Decline and Fall, etc., viii. 219.

Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894
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