A CHILD’S HISTORY
OF THE WORLD

By V. M. HILLYER

A CHILD’S GEOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD
A CHILD’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD
CHILD TRAINING
THE DARK SECRET

With EDWARD G. HUEY

A CHILD’S HISTORY OF ART

A CHILD’S HISTORY
OF THE WORLD

BY

V. M. HILLYER

HEAD MASTER OF CALVERT SCHOOL
AUTHOR OF “CHILD TRAINING,” “KINDERGARTEN
AT HOME,” ETC.

With Many Illustrations by
CARLE MICHEL BOOG
AND
M. S. WRIGHT

D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY
Incorporated

New York London

1934

Copyright, 1924, by
The Century Co.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission of the publisher.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This page is not for you, boys and girls.
It is for that old man or woman—twenty,
thirty, or forty years old, who may peek
into this book; and is what they would
call the

PREFACE

To give the child some idea of what has gone on in the world before he arrived;

To take him out of his little self-centered, shut-in life, which looms so large because it is so close to his eyes;

To extend his horizon, broaden his view, and open up the vista down the ages past;

To acquaint him with some of the big events and great names and fix these in time and space as a basis for detailed study in the future;

To give him a chronological file with main guides, into which he can fit in its proper place all his further historical study—

Is the purpose of this first Survey of the World’s History.

This part is not for you, either. It is for
your father, mother, or teacher, and is
what they would call the

INTRODUCTION

In common with all children of my age, I was brought up on American History and given no other history but American, year in and year out, year after year for eight or more years.

So far as I knew 1492 was the beginning of the world. Any events or characters before that time, reference to which I encountered by any chance, were put down in my mind in the same category with fairy-tales. Christ and His times, of which I heard only in Sunday-school, were to me mere fiction without reality. They were not mentioned in any history that I knew and therefore, so I thought, must belong not to a realm in time and space, but to a spiritual realm.

To give an American child only American History is as provincial as to teach a Texas child only Texas History. Patriotism is usually given as the reason for such history teaching. It only promotes a narrow-mindedness and an absurd conceit, based on utter ignorance of any other peoples and any other times—an intolerant egotism without foundation in fact. Since the World War it has become increasingly more and more important that American children should have a knowledge of other countries and other peoples in order that their attitude may be intelligent and unprejudiced.

As young as nine years of age, a child is eagerly inquisitive as to what has taken place in the ages past and readily grasps a concept of World History. Therefore, for many years Calvert School nine-year-old pupils have been taught World History in spite of academic and parental skepticism and antagonism. But I have watched the gradual drift toward adoption of this plan of history teaching, and with it an ever-increasing demand for a text-book of general history for young children. I have found, however, that all existing text-books have to be largely abridged and also supplemented by a running explanation and comment, to make them intelligible to the young child.

The recent momentous studies into the native intelligence of children show us what the average child at different ages can understand and what he cannot understand—what dates, figures of speech, vocabulary, generalities, and abstractions he can comprehend and what he cannot comprehend—and in the future all text-books will have to be written with constant regard for these intelligence norms. Otherwise, such texts are very likely to be “over the child’s head.” They will be trying to teach him some things at least that, in the nature of the case, are beyond him.

In spite of the fact that the writer has been in constant contact with the child mind for a great many years, he has found that whatever was written in his study had to be revised and rewritten each time after the lesson had been tried out in the class-room. Even though the first writing was in what he considered the simplest language, he has found that each and every word and expression has had to be subjected again and again to this class-room test to determine what meaning is conveyed. The slightest inverted phraseology or possibility of double meaning has oftentimes been misconstrued or found confusing. For instance, the statement that “Rome was on the Tiber River” has quite commonly been taken to mean that the city was literally built on top of the river, and the child has had some sort of fantastic vision of houses built on piles in the river. A child of nine is still very young—he may still believe in Santa Claus—younger in ideas, in vocabulary and in understanding than most adults appreciate—even though they be parents or teachers—and new information can hardly be put too simply.

So the topics selected have not always been the most important—but the most important that can be understood and appreciated by a child. Most political, sociological, economic, or religious generalities are beyond a child’s comprehension, no matter how simply told. After all, this History is only a preliminary story.

Excellent biographies and stories from general history have been written. But biographies from history do not give an historic outline. They do not give any outline at all for future filling in; and, indeed, unless they themselves are fitted into such a general historical scheme, they are nothing more than so many disconnected tales floating about in the child’s mind with no associations of time or space.

The treatment of the subject in this book is, therefore, chronological—telling the story of what has happened century by century and epoch by epoch, not by nations. The story of one nation is interrupted to take up that of another as different plots in a novel are brought forward simultaneously. This is in line with the purpose, which is to give the pupil a continuous view or panorama of the ages, rather than Greek History from start to finish, then, retracing the steps of time, Roman History, and so on. The object is to sketch the whole picture in outline, leaving the details to be gradually filled in by later study, as the artist sketches the general scheme of his picture before filling in the details. Such a scheme is as necessary to orderly classification of historical knowledge as is a filing system in any office that can function properly or even at all.

The Staircase of Time is to give a visual idea of the extent of time and the progressive steps in the History of the World. Each “flight” represents a thousand years, and each “step” a hundred—a century. If you have a spare wall, either in the play-room, attic, or barn such a Staircase of Time on a large scale may be drawn upon it from floor to reaching height and made a feature if elaborated with pictures or drawings of people and events. If the wall faces the child’s bed so much the better, for when lying awake in the morning or at any other time, instead of imagining fantastic designs on the wall-paper, he may picture the crowded events on the Staircase of Time. At any rate, the child should constantly refer either to such a Staircase of Time or to the Time Table as each event is studied, until he has a mental image of the Ages past.

At first a child does not appreciate time values represented by numbers or the relative position of dates on a time line and will wildly say twenty-five hundred B. C. or twenty-five thousand B. C. or twenty-five million B. C. indiscriminately. Only by constantly referring dates to position on the Staircase of Time or the Time Table can a child come to visualize dates. You may be amused, but do not be amazed, if a child gives 776 thousand years A.D. as the date for the First Olympiad, or says that Italy is located in Athens, or that Abraham was a hero of the Trojan War.

If you have ever been introduced to a roomful of strangers at one time, you know how futile it is to attempt even to remember their names to say nothing of connecting names and faces. It is necessary to hear something interesting about each one before you can begin to recall names and faces. Likewise an introduction to World History, the characters and places in which are utterly unknown strangers to the child, must be something more than a mere name introduction, and there must be very few introductions given at a time or both names and faces will be instantly forgotten. It is also necessary to repeat new names constantly in order that the pupil may gradually become familiarized with them, for so many strange people and places are bewildering.

In order to serve the purpose of a basal outline, which in the future is to be filled in, it is necessary that the Time Table be made a permanent possession of the pupil. This Time Table, therefore, should be studied like the multiplication tables until it is known one hundred per cent and for “keeps,” and until the topic connected with each date can be elaborated as much as desired. The aim should be to have the pupil able to start with Primitive Man and give a summary of World History to the present time, with dates and chief events without prompting, questioning, hesitation, or mistake. Does this seem too much to expect? It is not as difficult as it may sound, if suggestions given in the text for connecting the various events into a sequence and for passing names and events in a condensed review are followed. Hundreds of Calvert children each year are successfully required to do this very thing.

The attitude, however, usually assumed by teachers, that “even if the pupil forgets it all, there will be left a valuable impression,” is too often an apology for superficial teaching and superficial learning. History may be made just as much a “mental discipline” as some other studies, but only if difficulties of dates and other abstractions are squarely met and overcome by hard study and learned to be remembered, not merely to be forgotten after the recitation. The story part the child will easily remember, but it is the “who and when and where and why” that are important, and this part is the serious study. Instead of, “A man, once upon a time,” he should say, “King John in 1215 at Runnymede because—”

This book, therefore, is not a supplementary reader but a basal history study. Just enough narrative is told to give the skeleton flesh and blood and make it living. The idea is not how much but how little can be told; to cut down one thousand pages to less than half of that number without leaving only dry bones.

No matter how the subject is presented it is necessary that the child do his part and put his own brain to work; and for this purpose he should be required to retell each story after he has read it and should be repeatedly questioned on names and dates as well as stories, to make sure he is retaining and assimilating what he hears.

I recall how once upon a time a young chap, just out of college, taught his first class in history. With all the enthusiasm of a full-back who has just kicked a goal from field, he talked, he sang; he drew maps on the blackboard, on the floor, on the field; he drew pictures, he vaulted desks, and even stood on his head to illustrate points. His pupils attended spellbound, with their eyes wide open, their ears wide open, and their mouths wide open. They missed nothing. They drank in his flow of words with thirst unquenched; but, like Baron Munchausen, he had failed to look at the other end of the drinking horse that had been cut in half. At the end of a month his kindly principal suggested a test, and he gave it with perfect confidence.

There were only three questions:

(1) Tell all you can about Columbus.
(2) “ “ “ “ “ Jamestown.
(3) “ “ “ “ “ Plymouth.

And here are the three answers of one of the most interested pupils:

(1) He was a grate man.
(2) “ “ “ “ “
(3) “ “ “ “ “ to.

Here is the

STAIRCASE OF TIME

It starts far, far, below the bottom of the pages and rises up, Up, UP to where we are NOW—each step a hundred years, each flight of steps a thousand. It will keep on up until it reaches high heaven. From where we are NOW let us look down the flights below us and listen to the Story of what has happened in the long years gone by.

TIME TABLE

with

DATES AND OTHER FOOD
FOR THOUGHT

Don’t devour these dates all at once, or they’ll make you sick, and you’ll never want to see one again.

Take them piecemeal, only one or two at a time after each story, and be sure to digest them thoroughly.

A CHILD’S HISTORY
OF THE WORLD

BEGINS HERE

How Things Started

Once upon a time there was a boy—

Just like me.

He had to stay in bed in the morning until seven o’clock until his father and mother were ready to get up;

So did I.

As he was always awake long before this time, he used to lie there and think about all sorts of curious things;

So did I.

One thing he used to wonder was this:

What would the world be like if there were—

No fathers and mothers,

No uncles and aunts,

No cousins or other children to play with,

No people at all, except himself in the whole world!

Perhaps you have wondered the same thing;

So did I.

At last he used to get so lonely, just from thinking how dreadful such a world would be, that he could stand it no longer and would run to his mother’s room and jump into bed by her side just to get this terrible thought out of his mind;

So did I—for I was the boy.

Well, there was a time long, long, long ago when there were no men or women or children, NO PEOPLE of any kind in the whole world. Of course there were no houses, for there was no one to build them or to live in them, no towns or cities—nothing that people make. There were just wild animals—bears and wolves, birds and butterflies, frogs and snakes, turtles and fish. Can you think of such a world as that?

Then,

long, long, long

before that, there was a time when there were NO PEOPLE and NO ANIMALS of any sort in the whole world; there were just growing plants, trees and bushes, grass and flowers. Can you think of such a world as that?

Then,

long, long, long,
long, long, long

before that, there was a time when there were NO PEOPLE, NO ANIMALS, NO PLANTS, in the whole world; there was just bare rock and water everywhere. Can you think of such a world as that?

Then,

long, long, long
long, long, long—you might
keep on saying—
“long, long, long,” all day, and
to-morrow, and all
next week, and next
month, and next
year, and it would
not be long enough—

before this, there was a time when there was NO WORLD AT ALL!

There were only the Stars

Nothing else!

Now, real Stars are not things with points like those in the corner of a flag or the gold ones you put on a Christmas tree. The real stars in the sky have no points. They are huge burning coals of fire—coals of fire. Each star, however, is so huge that there is nothing in the world now anywhere nearly as big. One little bit, one little scrap of a star is bigger than our whole world—than our whole world.

One of these stars is our Sun—yes, our Sun. The other stars would look the same as the Sun if we could get as close to them. But at that time, so long, long ago, our Sun was not just a big, round, white, hot ball as we see it in the sky to-day. It was then more like the fireworks you may have seen on the Fourth of July. It was whirling and sputtering and throwing off sparks.

One of these sparks which the Sun threw far off got cool just as a spark from the crackling log in the fireplace gets cool, and this cooled-off spark was—

What do you suppose?
See if you can guess—
It was our World!—yes, the World
on which we now live.

At first, however, our World or Earth was nothing but a ball of rock. This ball of rock was wrapped around with steam, like a heavy fog.

Then the steam turned to rain and it rained on the World,

a a a
n n n
d d d

i i i
t t t

r r r
a a a
i i i
n n n
e e e
d d d

until it had filled up the hollows and made enormously big puddles. These puddles were the oceans. The dry places were bare rock.

Then, after this, came the first living things—tiny plants that you could only have seen under a microscope. At first they grew only in the water, then along the water’s edge, then out on the rock.

Then dirt or soil, as people call it, formed all over the rock and made the rock into land, and the plants grew larger and spread farther over the land.

Then, after this, came the first tiny animals in the water. They were wee Mites like drops of jelly.

Then, after this, came things like Insects, some that live in the water, some on the water, some on the land, and some in the air.

Then, after this, came Fish, that live only in the water.

Then, after this, came Frogs, that live in the water and on the land, too.

Then, after this, came Snakes and huge lizards bigger than alligators, more like dragons; and they grew so big that at last they could not move and died because they could not get enough food to eat.

Then, after this, came Birds that lay eggs and those Animals like foxes and elephants and cows that nurse their babies when they are born.

Then, after this, came Monkeys.

Then, last of all, came—what do you suppose? Yes—People—men, women, and children.

Here are the steps; see if you can take them:

What do you suppose will be next?

Umfa-Umfa and Itchy-Scratchy

How do you suppose I know about all these things that took place so long ago?

I don’t.

I’m only guessing about them.

But there are different kinds of guesses. If I hold out my two closed hands and ask you to guess which one has the penny in it, that is one kind of a guess. Your guess might be right or it might be wrong. It would be just luck.

But there is another kind of a guess. When there is snow on the ground and I see tracks of a boot in the snow, I guess that a man must have passed by, for boots don’t usually walk without some one in them. That kind of a guess is not just luck but common sense.

And so we can guess about a great many things that have taken place long ago, even though there was no one there at the time to see them or tell about them.

Men have dug down deep under the ground in different parts of the world and have found there—what do you suppose?

I don’t believe you would ever guess.

They have found the heads of arrows and spears and hatchets.

The peculiar thing about these arrows and spears and hatchets is that they are not made of iron or steel, as you might expect, but of stone.

Now, we are sure that only men could have made and used such things, for birds and fish or other animals do not use hatchets or spears. We are also sure that these men must have lived long, long years ago before iron and steel were known, because it must have taken long, long years for these things to have become covered up so deep by dust and dirt. We have also found the bones of the people themselves, who must have died thousands upon thousands of years ago, long before any one began to write down history. So we know that the people who were living on the earth then were working and playing, eating and fighting—doing many of the same things we are to-day—especially the fighting.

This time in the pre-history of the world, when people used such things made of stone, is therefore called The Stone Age.

These First Stone Age People we call Primitive, which simply means First as a Primer means First Reader. Primitive People were wild animals. Unlike other wild animals, however, they walked on their hind legs.

These First People had hair growing, not just on their heads, but all over their bodies, like some shaggy dogs. They had no houses of any sort in which to live. They simply lay down on the ground when night came. Later, when the earth became cold, they found caves in the rocks or in the hillsides where they could get away from the cold and storms and other wild animals. So men, women, and children of this time were called Cave People.

They spent their days hunting some animals and running and hiding from others. They caught animals by trapping them in a pit covered over with bushes, or they killed them with a club or a rock if they had a chance, or with stone-headed arrows or hatchets. They even drew pictures of these animals on the walls of their caves, scratching the picture with a pointed stone, and some of these pictures we can still see to-day.

They lived on berries and nuts and grass-seeds. They robbed the nests of birds for the eggs, which they ate raw, for they had no fire to cook with. They were blood-thirsty; they liked to drink the warm blood of animals they killed, as you would a glass of milk.

They talked to each other by some sort of grunts—

“Umfa, umfa, glug, glug.”

They made clothes of skins of animals they killed, for there was no such thing as cloth. And yet, although they were real men, they lived so much like wild animals that we call such people savages.

Primitive Men were not pleasant people. They were fearful and cruel creatures, who beat and killed and robbed whenever they had a chance.

A cave man got his wife by stealing a girl away from her own cave home, knocking her senseless, and dragging her off by her hair, if necessary. The men were fighters but not brave. They would kill other animals and other men if the others were weaker or if they could sneak upon them and catch them off their guard, but if others were stronger they would run and hide.

Their only rule of life was hurt and kill what you can, and run from what you can’t. This is what we call the first law of nature—every man for himself. They knew if they didn’t kill they would be killed, for there were no laws nor police to protect them.

These primitive cave people are our ancestors, and we get from them many of their wild ways. In spite of our religion and manners and education, there are many men still living who act in the same way when they get a chance.

Jails are made for such men.

Suppose you had been a boy or a girl in the Stone Age, with a name like Itchy-Scratchy. I wonder how you would have liked the life.

When you woke up in the morning, you would not have bathed or even washed your hands and face or brushed your teeth or combed your hair.

You ate with your fingers, for there were no knives or forks or spoons or cups or saucers, only one bowl—which your mother had made out of mud and dried in the sun to hold water to drink—no dishes to wash and put away, no chairs, no tables, no table manners.

There were no books, no paper, no pencils.

There was no Saturday or Sunday, January or July. Except that one day was warm and sunny or another cold and rainy, they were all alike. There was no school to go to. Every day was a holiday.

There was nothing to do all day long but make mud pies or pick berries or play tag with your brothers and sisters.

I wonder how you would like that kind of life!

“Fine!” do you think?—“a great life—just like camping out?”

But I have only told you part of the story.

The cave would have been cold and damp and dark, with only the bare ground or a pile of leaves for a bed. There would probably have been bats and big spiders sharing the cave with you.

You might have had on the skin of some animal your father had killed but as this only covered part of your body and as there was no fire, you would have felt cold in winter, and when it got very cold you might have frozen to death.

For breakfast you might have had some dried berries or grass-seed or a piece of raw meat, for dinner the same thing, for supper still the same thing.

You would never have had any bread or milk or griddle-cakes with syrup, or oatmeal with sugar on it, or apple pie or ice-cream.

There was nothing to do all day long but watch out for wild animals—bears and tigers; for there was no door with lock and key, and a tiger, if he found you out, could go wherever you went and “get you” even in your cave.

And then some day your father, who had left the cave in the morning to go hunting, would not return, and you would know he had been torn to pieces by some wild beast, and you would wonder how long before your turn would come next.

Do you think you would like to have lived then?

Fire! Fire!! Fire!!!

The first things are usually the most interesting—the first baby, the first tooth, the first step, the first word, the first spanking. This book will be chiefly the story of first things; those that came second or third or fourth or fifth you can read about and study later.

Primitive People did not at first know what fire was. They had no matches nor any way of making a light or a fire. They had no light at night. They had no fire to warm themselves by. They had no fire with which to cook their food. Somewhere and sometime, we do not know exactly when or how, they found out how to make and use fire.

If you rub your hands together rapidly, they become warm. Try it. If you rub them together still more rapidly, they become hot. If you rub two sticks together rapidly, they become warm. If you rub two sticks together very, very, very rapidly, they become hot and at last, if you keep it up long enough and fast enough, are set on fire. The Indians and boy scouts do this and make a fire by twisting one stick against another.

This was one of the first inventions, and this invention was as remarkable for them at that time as the invention of electric light in our own times.

People of the Stone Age had hair and beards that were never cut, because they had nothing to cut them with, even had they wanted them short, which they probably didn’t.

Their finger-nails grew like claws until they broke off.

They had no clothes made of cloth, for they had no cloth and nothing with which to cut and sew cloth if they had.

They had no saws to cut boards, no hammer or nails to fasten them together to make houses or furniture.

They had no forks nor spoons; no pots nor pans; no buckets nor shovels; no needles nor pins.

The People of the Stone Age had never seen or heard of such a thing as iron or steel or tin or brass or anything made of these metals. For thousands and thousands of years Primitive People got along without any of the things that are made of metal.

Then one day a Stone Age Man found out something by accident; a “discovery” we call it.

He was making a fire; and a fire, which is to us such a common, every-day thing, was still to him very wonderful. Round his fire he placed some rock to make a sort of camp-fire stove. Now, it happened that this particular rock was not ordinary rock but what we now call “ore,” for it had copper in it. The heat of the fire melted some of the copper out of the rock, and it ran out on the ground.

What were those bright, shining drops?

He examined them.

How pretty they were!

He heated some more of the same rock and got some more copper.

Thus was the first metal discovered.

At first people used the copper for beads and ornaments, it was so bright and shiny. But they soon found out that copper could be pounded into sharp blades and points, which were much better than the stone knives and arrow-heads they had used before.

But notice that it was not iron they discovered first, it was copper.

We think people next discovered tin in somewhat the same way. Then, after that, they found out that tin when mixed with copper made a still harder and better metal than either alone. This metal, made of tin and copper together, we now call bronze; and for two or three thousand years people made their tools and weapons out of bronze. And so we call the time when men used bronze tools, and bronze weapons for hunting and fighting, the Bronze Age.

At last some man discovered iron, and he soon saw that iron was better for most useful things than either copper or bronze. The Iron Age started with the discovery of iron, and we are still in the Iron Age.

As people who lived in the Bronze and Iron Ages were able, after the discovery of metal, to do many things they could not possibly have done before with only stone, and as they lived much more as we do now, we call people of the Bronze and Iron Ages “civilized.”

You may have heard in your mythology or fairy tales of a Golden Age also, but by this is meant something quite different. The Golden Age means a time when everything was beautiful and lovely and everybody wise and good. There have been times in the World’s History which have been called the Golden Age for this reason.

But I am afraid there never has been really a golden age—only in fairy-tales.

From an Airplane

People of the Bronze and Iron Ages thought the world was flat, and they knew only a little bit of the world, the small part where they lived; and they thought that if you went too far the world came to an end where you would

TU
M
B
L
E

O
F
F

The far-away land which nobody knew they called the Ultima Thule. This is a nice name to say—Ultima Thule, Ultima Thule—far-away Ultima Thule.

If we should go up in an airplane and look down on the world at the place where the first civilized people once lived, we should see two rivers, a sea and a gulf, and from so high up in the air they would look something like this:

Now, you probably have never even heard of these rivers and seas, and yet they have been known longer than any other places in the world. One of these lines is the Tigris River, and the other is the Euphrates. They run along getting closer and closer together until at last they join each other and flow into what is called the Persian Gulf.

You might make these two rivers in the ground of your yard or garden or draw them on the floor if your mother will let you. Just for fun you might name your drinking-cup “Tigris” and your glass “Euphrates.” Then you might call your mouth, into which they both empty, the “Persian Gulf,” for you will hear a great many new names by and by, and as grown-up people give names to their houses and boats, to their horses and dogs, why shouldn’t you give names to things that belong to you? For instance, you might call your chair, your bed, your table, your comb and brush, even your hat and shoes, after these strange names.

Then, if we flew in our airplane to the west, we should see a country called Egypt, another river, the Nile, and a sea now named the Mediterranean. Mediterranean simply means “between the land,” for this sea is surrounded by land. It is, indeed, almost like a big lake. It is supposed that long, long ago in the Stone Age, there was no water at all where this sea now is, only a dry valley, and that people once lived there.

Along the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates were the only civilized nations living in the Bronze Age. The rest of the World people knew nothing about. There may have been Cave Men living in other parts of the World, but it is only of the people in these two places that we have any written history until after the Iron Age began.

All of the people who lived in the country of the Tigris and Euphrates were white. We don’t know how nor when nor where colored people first lived, though it is interesting to guess. There were, we think, just three different white families and from these three families all the white people in the world are descended. Yes, your family came from here, ’way, ’way, ’way, ’way, back. So you will want to know the names of these three families and which one was your own. They were:

The Indo-Europeans, often called Aryans,
The Semites, and
The Hamites.

Most of us belong to the Aryan family, some are Semites, but very few in this part of the World are Hamites.

If your name is Henry or Charles or William, you are probably an Aryan.

If it is Moses or Solomon, you are probably a Semite.

If it is Shufu or Rameses, you are probably a Hamite.

The Aryans came from higher up on the map than the other two families, we think. They were the first people to tame wild horses and to use them for riding and drawing carts. They also had tamed cows which they used for milk, and sheep for their wool.

Real History Begins or ’Way ’Way Back
to the Time of the Gipsies

You can remember the big things that have happened in your own lifetime.

And you have of course heard your father tell about things that happened in his own life—how he fought the Germans in the Great War, perhaps.

And if your grandfather is still living, he can tell you still other stories of things that took place when he was a boy before even your father was born.

Perhaps your
great,
great,
grandfather

may have been living when Washington was President, and his

great,
great,
great,
great,
grandfather

may have been living when there were only wild Indians in this country.

Although these ancestors, as they are called, are dead long since, the story of what did happen in all their lifetimes ’way, ’way back has been written down in books and this story is history—“his story” one boy named it.

Christ was living in the Year 1—no, not the first year of the world, of course.

Do you know how many years ago that was?

You can tell if you know what year this is now.

If Christ were living to-day, how old would He be?

Nineteen hundred and more years may seem a long time. But perhaps you have seen or heard of a man or a woman who was a hundred years old. Have you?

Well, in nineteen hundred years only nineteen men each a hundred years old might have lived one after the other—nineteen men one after the other since the time of Christ—and that doesn’t seem so long after all!

Everything that happened before Christ was born is called B.C., which you can guess are the initials of Before Christ, so B.C. stands for Before Christ. So much is easy.

Everything that has happened in the world since the time of Christ is called A.D. This is not so easy for though A. might stand for After, we know D. is not the initial of Christ. As a matter of fact, A. D. are the initials of two Latin words, “Anno Domini.” Anno means “in the year,” Domini “of the Lord”; so that Anno Domini is “in the year, of the Lord,” which in ordinary, every-day language means of course “since the time of Christ.”

The things I have told you that I have had to guess at we call Before-History, or Pre-History—which means the same thing. But the things that have happened in the lifetime of people, who have written them down—the stories I don’t have to guess at—we call History.

The first history that we feel fairly sure is really true begins with the Hamite family. The Hamites, you remember, were one of the three families of the white race I have already told you about who lived by the Tigris and Euphrates. We think that they moved away from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and went down to Egypt long before history began.

Of course they didn’t pack all their furniture on a big wagon and move to Egypt, as you might move from the house where you now live to another. They lived in tents then and not in houses at all, and they only moved along a day’s journey at a time as campers or Gipsies might do. In fact, Gipsy is short for Egyptian. When they got tired of one place or had eaten up everything there was near-by, they rolled up their tents, packed them on camels, and moved a little farther along to a new place. And so camping here for a while, then gradually moving farther along to the next good place and camping there, they at last got as far off as the land we now call Egypt. When they finally reached Egypt they found it such a fine country in which to live that there they stayed for good and were called Egyptians.

Why do you suppose they found Egypt such a fine country in which to live? It was chiefly on account of a habit of the river Nile—a bad habit you might at first think it—a habit of flooding the country once every year.

It rains so hard in the spring that the water fills up the river Nile, overflows its banks, and spreads far out over the land, but not very deep. It is as if you had left a water-spigot turned on and the water running, or had begun to water your garden with a hose, and then you had gone off and forgotten it.

But the people know when the overflow is coming and they are glad for it to come, so they put banks around some of it so that it is stored up for watering the land during the rest of the year when there is no rain. After most of the water has dried up, it has left a layer of rich, dark, moist earth over the whole country. In this earth it is easy to grow dates, wheat, and other things which are good for food.

If it were not for this yearly overflow of the Nile, the country of Egypt would be a sandy desert in which no plant or living thing would grow—for all plants as well as animals must have water and will die without it. Egypt, without water, would be like the great Sahara Desert, which is not far away. It is the Nile, therefore, that makes the land so rich and Egypt such an easy and cheap country to live in, for food grows with little or no labor and costs almost nothing. Besides this, the climate is so warm that people need little clothing and do not have to buy coal or make fires to heat their houses. So it was to this country that the Hamites at last came, finally settled down, and were thereafter called Egyptians.

The first Egyptian king whose name we know was Menes, but we do not know much about him. We believe he built some kind of waterworks so that the people might better use the water of the Nile, and he probably lived about 3400 B. C. He may have lived either earlier or later, but as this is an easy date to remember, we shall take it for a starting-point. You might remember it by supposing it is a telephone number of a person you wanted to call up:

Menes, First Egyptian king . . 3400 B.C.

The Puzzle-Writers

People of the Stone Age had learned how to talk to each other, but they could not write, for there was no such thing as an alphabet or written words, and so they could not send notes or messages to one another or write stories. The Egyptians were the first people to think of a way to write what they wanted to say.

The Egyptians did not write with letters like ours, however, but with signs that looked like little pictures, a lion, a spear, a bird, a whip. This picture-writing was called hieroglyphics—see if you can say “Hi-e-ro-glyph-ics.” Perhaps you have seen, in the puzzle sections of a newspaper, stories written in pictures for you to guess the meaning. Well, hieroglyphics were something like that.

Here is the name of an Egyptian queen, whom you will hear about later—written in hieroglyphics; her name you would never guess from this funny writing. It is “Cleopatra.”

A king’s or queen’s name always had a line drawn around it, like the one you see around the above name in order to mark it more prominently and give it more importance. It was something like the square or circle your mother may put around her initials or monogram on her letter-paper.

But there was no paper in those days and so the Egyptians wrote on the leaves of a plant called papyrus that grew in the water. It is from this name “papyrus” that we get the name “paper.” Can you see that “paper” and “papyrus” look and sound something alike? The Egyptians’ books were written by hand, of course, but they had no pencils nor pens nor ink to write with. For a pen they used a reed, split at the end, and for ink a mixture of water and soot.

Their books were not made of separate pages like our books, but from a long sheet of papyrus-leaves pasted together. This was rolled up to form what was called a scroll, something like a roll of wall-paper, and was read as it was unrolled.

Stories of their kings and battles and great events in their history they used to write on the walls of their buildings and monuments. This writing they carved into the stone, so that it would last much longer than that on the papyrus-leaves.

All the old Egyptians, who wrote in hieroglyphics and knew how to read this writing, had died long since, and for a great many years no one knew what such writing meant. But a little over a hundred years ago a man found out by accident how to read and understand hieroglyphics once again. This is the way he happened to do so.

The Nile separates into different streams before it flows into the Mediterranean Sea. These separate streams are called mouths and one of these mouths has been given the name “Rosetta.”

One day a man was digging nearby this Rosetta Mouth when he dug up a stone something like a tombstone with several kinds of writing on it. The top writing was in pictures which we now call hieroglyphics, and no one understood what it meant. Below this was written what was supposed to be the same story in the Greek language, and a great many people do understand Greek. All one had to do, therefore, to find out the meaning of the hieroglyphics, was to compare the two writings. It was like reading secret writing when we know what the letters stand for. You may have tried to solve a puzzle in the back of your magazine, and this was just such an interesting puzzle, only there was no one to tell the answer in the next number.

The puzzle was not so easy as it sounds, however, for it took a man almost twenty years to solve it. That is a long time for any one to spend in trying to solve a puzzle, isn’t it? But after this “key” to the puzzle was found, men were able to read all of the hieroglyphics in Egypt and so to find out what happened in that country long before Christ was born.

This stone is called the Rosetta Stone, from the Rosetta Mouth of the Nile where it was found. It is now in the great British Museum in London and is very famous, because from it we were able to learn so much history which we otherwise would not have known.

Egypt was ruled over by a king who was called a Pharaoh. When he died his son became the Pharaoh and so on. All the other people were divided into classes, and the children in each class usually became just what their fathers had been. It was very unusual for an Egyptian to start at the bottom and work up to the top, as a poor boy in this country may do, though once in a great while this happened even in Egypt, as we shall see by and by.

The highest class of people were called priests. They were not like priests or ministers of the church nowadays, however, for there was no church at that time. The priests made the religion and rules, which every one had to obey as everybody does the laws of our land.

But the priests were not only priests; they were doctors and lawyers and engineers, as well. They were the best-educated class, and they were the only people who knew how to read and write, for it was very difficult, as you might suppose, to learn how to read and write hieroglyphics.

The next highest class to the priests were the soldiers, and below these were the lower classes—farmers, shepherds, shopkeepers, merchants, mechanics, and last of all the swineherds.

The Egyptians did not worship one God as we do. They believed in hundreds of gods and goddesses, and they had a special god for every sort of thing, who ruled over and had charge of that thing—a god of the farm, a god of the home, and so on. Some of their gods were good and some were bad, but the Egyptians prayed to them all.

Osiris was the chief god, and Isis was his wife. Osiris was the god of farming and judge of the dead. Their son Horus had the head of a hawk.

Many of their gods had bodies of men with heads of animals. Animals they thought sacred. The dog and the cat were sacred animals. The ibis, which was a bird like a stork, was another. Then there was the beetle, which was called a scarab. If any one killed a sacred animal he was put to death, for the Egyptians thought it much worse to kill a sacred and holy creature than to kill even a human being.

The Tomb-Builders

The Egyptians believed that when they died, their souls stayed near by their bodies. So when a person died they put in the tomb with him all sorts of things that he had used in daily life—things to eat and drink, furniture and dishes, toys and games. They thought the soul would return to its own body at the day of judgment. They wanted their bodies to be kept from decaying until judgment day, in order that the soul might then have a body to return to. So they pickled the bodies of the dead by soaking them in a kind of melted tar and wrapping them round and round and round with a cloth like a bandage. A dead body pickled in this way is called a mummy, and after thousands of years the mummies of the Egyptian kings may still be seen. Most of them are not, however, in the tombs where they were at first placed. They have been moved away and put in museums, and we may see them there now. Although they are yellow and dried up, they still look like

At first only kings or important people of the highest classes were made mummies, but after a while all the classes, except perhaps the lowest, were treated in the same way. Sacred animals from beetles to cows were also made into mummies.

When an Egyptian died his friends heaped up a few stones over his body just to cover it up decently and keep it from being stolen or destroyed by those wild animals that fed on dead bodies. But a king or a rich man wanted a bigger pile of stones over his body than just ordinary people had. So to make sure that his pile would be big enough, a king built it for himself before he died. Each king tried to make his pile larger than any one else’s until at last the pile of stones became so big it was a hill of rocks and called a pyramid. The pyramids therefore were tombs of the kings who built them while they were alive to be monuments to themselves when they were dead. In fact a king was much more interested in building a home for his dead body than he was in a home for his live body. So, instead of palaces, kings built pyramids. There are many of these pyramids built along the bank of the Nile, and most of them were built, we think, just after 3000 B.C.

When a building is being put up nowadays, men use derricks and cranes and engines to haul and raise heavy stones and beams. But the Egyptians had no such machinery, and though they used huge stones to build the pyramids, they had to drag these stones for many miles and raise them into place simply by pushing and pulling them. The three biggest of all the pyramids are near the city of Cairo. The largest one of them, which is called the Great Pyramid, was built by a king named Cheops. To remember when he lived, simply think of this as another telephone number:

Cheops ..............2900 B.C.

It is said that one hundred thousand men worked twenty years to build his pyramid. It is one of the largest buildings in the world, and some of the blocks of stone themselves are as big as a small house. I have been to the top of it, and it is like climbing a steep mountain with rocky sides. I have also been far inside to the cave-like room in the center where Cheop’s mummy was placed. There is nothing in there now, however, except bats that fly about in the darkness, for the mummy has disappeared—been stolen, perhaps.

Near the Pyramid of Cheops is the Sphinx. It is a huge statue of a lion with a man’s head. It is as big as a church, and though it is so big, it has been carved out of one single rock. The rock, however, was already there and so did not have to be carried. The Sphinx is a statue of the god of the morning, and the head is that of one of the Egyptian Pharaohs who built a pyramid near that of Cheops. The desert sand has covered the paws and most of the body. Though the sand has been dug away from time to time, the wind quickly covers the body with sand again.

The Egyptians carved other large statues of men and women out of rock. These figures are usually many times bigger than life-size, and sit or stand stiffly erect with both feet flat on the ground and hands close to the body in the position some children take when they “sit” for their photograph.

They built huge houses for their gods. These were called temples and took the place of our churches. These temples had gigantic—that’s the way it is spelled, though it means “giant-ic”—columns and pillars. Ordinary people standing beside them look like dwarfs. Here is one of these temples, and you can see how different it is from our churches:

They decorated their temples and pyramids, and the cases in which the mummies were put, with drawings and paintings. The pictures they made, however, looked something like those a young child might draw. For example, when they wanted to make a picture of water, they simply made a zigzag line to represent waves; when they tried to draw a row of men back of a row in front, they put those in the back on top of those in front. To show that a man was a king, they made him several times larger than the other men in the picture. When they painted a picture they used any color they thought was pretty, usually blue or yellow or brown. Whether the person or thing was really that color or not made no difference.

A Rich Land Where There Was No
Money

You have read in fairy-tales of a land where cakes and candy and sugar-plums grow on trees, where everything you want to eat or to play with can be had just by picking it. Well, long, long ago people used to think there had been really such a country, and where do you suppose they said it was? Somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—those rivers with the strange names I asked you to learn—and they called this spot the Garden of Eden. We do not know exactly where it was, for there is no such place now quite as wonderful as the Garden of Eden was supposed to be.

Egypt was a land of one river, the Nile. The land of the Two Rivers had several names.

Let us suppose we are flying over the country in an airplane and looking down at the land between these two rivers. It is called Mesopotamia, which is two Greek words simply meaning “Between the Rivers.”

See the land over there by the upper Tigris. It is called Assyria.

See the land near where the rivers join each other. That is called Babylonia.

See the land near where they empty. That is called Chaldea.

And see over there is Mount Ararat, where it is supposed Noah’s Ark rested after the flood.

Here are a lot of new names. A young friend of mine had a train of toy cars. He had noticed that the Pullman cars on which he had ridden had names, and so he gave his toy cars names also. He called them:

Assyria Mesopotamia
Babylonia Ararat
Chaldea Euphrates

Babylonia was a very rich country, for the two rivers brought down and dropped great quantities of earth just as the Nile did in Egypt, and this made very rich soil. Wheat, from which we make bread, is called the staff of life. It is the most valuable of all foods which grow. It is supposed that wheat first grew in Babylonia. Dates in that part of the world are almost as important a food as wheat. Dates, too, grow there very plentifully. Now, you may think dates are something to be eaten almost like candy but in Babylonia dates took the place of oatmeal. In the rivers there were quantities of good fish, and as fishing was just fun, you see that the people who lived in Babylonia—the Babylonians, as they were called—had plenty of good food without having to do much work for it. No one had any money in those days; people had cows and sheep and goats, and a man was rich who had much of these “goods.” But if a man wanted to buy or sell, he had to buy or sell by trading something he had for something he wanted.

Somewhere in Babylonia the people built a great tower called the Tower of Babel, which you have probably heard about. It was more like a mountain than a tower. They built other towers, too. Some say the Tower of Babel and towers like it were built so that the people might have a high place to which they could climb in case of another flood. But others give a different reason. They say that the people who built these towers came to Babylonia from farther north where there were mountains. In this northern land they had always placed their altars on the top of a mountain, to be close to heaven. So when they moved to a flat country like Mesopotamia and Babylonia, where there were no mountains, they built mountains in order to have a high place for the altar on top. To reach the top of these mountains or towers, they made, instead of a staircase on the inside, a slanting roadway that wound around the outside in somewhat the way a road winds around a mountain.

There was hardly any stone either in or near Babylonia as there was in Egypt, and so the Babylonians built their buildings of bricks, which were made of mud formed into blocks and dried in the sun. In the course of time, bricks of this sort crumble and turn back into dust again just as mud pies that you might make would do. This is the reason why all that is left of the Tower of Babel and the other buildings that were put up so long ago are now simply hills of clay into which the brick has turned.

The Egyptians wrote on papyrus or carved their history in stone, but the Babylonians had neither papyrus nor stone. All they had were bricks. So they wrote on bricks before they were dried, while they were still soft clay. This writing was made by punching marks into the clay with the end of a stick. It was called cuneiform, which means wedge-shaped, for it looked like little groups of wedge-shaped marks, like chicken-tracks, made in the mud. I have seen boys’ writing that looked more like cuneiform than it did like English.

The Babylonians as they watched their flocks by night and by day watched also the sun and the moon and the stars moving across the sky. So they came to know a great deal about these heavenly bodies.

Did you ever see the moon in the daytime?

Oh, yes, you can.

Well, every once in a great while the moon as it moves across the sky gets in front of the sun and shuts out its light—just as, if you should put a white plate in front of an electric light, the electric light would be darkened. It may be ten o’clock in the morning and broad daylight when suddenly the sun is covered up by the moon as by a white plate and it becomes night and the stars shine out and chickens, thinking it is night, go to roost. But in a few moments the moon passes by and the sun shines out once again. This is called an eclipse of the sun.

Now you probably have never seen an eclipse of the sun, but some day you may. At that time, and even to-day when ignorant people see an eclipse of the sun, they think that something dreadful is going to happen—the end of the world, perhaps, just because they have never seen such a strange sight before and do not know that it is a thing that happens regularly and that no harm comes from it.

Well, nearly twenty-three hundred years before Christ, 2300 B. C., the Babylonians told beforehand just when there was going to be an eclipse of the sun. They had watched the moon moving across the sky and they had figured out how long it would be before it would catch up with the sun and cross directly over it. So you see how much the old Babylonians knew about such things. Men who study the stars and other heavenly bodies are called astronomers, and the Babylonians, therefore, were famous astronomers.

The Egyptians worshiped animals; but it was quite natural that the Babylonians should worship these wonderful heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, and stars, and they did.

The first king of Babylonia whom we know much about—and that much is very little—was Sargon I, who may have lived about the same time that the pyramids were built in Egypt.

About 2100 B. C. Babylonia had a king known far and wide for the laws he made. His name was Hammurabi, and we still have the laws he made though we no longer obey them; for they were carved into a stone in cuneiform, and we have the stone. Sargon and Hammurabi are strange names like no one’s name you ever heard before, yet they are real names of real kings who ruled over real people.

The Wandering Jews

“You are” spells “Ur.” It is one of the shortest names I know. It is the name of a little place in that part of Babylonia called Chaldea. In this place—about nineteen hundred years B.C.—there lived a man named Abraham. Abraham had a very large family and though he had no money he was rich. He had large herds of sheep and goats, and these were the chief riches in those days. Now, Abraham believed in one God, as we do, while his neighbors, the Babylonians, worshiped idols and the heavenly bodies, such as the sun, moon, and stars, as I have just said. Abraham did not like his neighbors for this reason; and his neighbors didn’t like him, either, for they thought his ideas were peculiar or even crazy. So, about nineteen hundred years before Christ, Abraham took his large family, his flocks, and his herds and moved to a land called Canaan, far away on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

Abraham lived to be a very old man, and he had a large family. One of his grandsons named Jacob, who was also known by the name of Israel, had a son Joseph. You probably remember the Bible story of Jacob’s favorite son Joseph with the coat of many colors. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him, as boys and even dogs are apt to be jealous of any one who is liked better than they are. So they put Joseph into a well and then sold him as a slave to some Egyptians who were passing by. Then they told their father Jacob that Joseph had been killed by wild animals. The Egyptians took Joseph to far-off Egypt—far away from Canaan.

But although Joseph was a slave in Egypt, and although, as I told you, it was very difficult for any one to work his way up out of his class to a higher class, he was so bright that at last he became one of the rulers in Egypt.

Now, at that time when he was ruler there came a famine in Canaan and there was no food. In Egypt, however, there was plenty of food stored up. So Joseph’s wicked brothers went down to Egypt to beg the rulers for bread. They probably thought by that time their brother was dead. They did not know that he had become such a great man and that he was now the ruler of whom they were begging food. You can imagine how surprised they were and how ashamed they must have felt when they found out that the great ruler was their own brother, whom they had planned to kill and then had sold as a slave.

Joseph might have let his brothers starve to death or put them in prison, or sent them back to Canaan without anything, if he had wanted to revenge himself on them. But instead of doing any of these things, he gave them not only all the food they wanted and more to take back home, but made them rich presents besides. Then he told them to go back and get the rest of his family and return with them to Egypt, and he promised to give them a piece of land called Goshen where there would be no famines and they might live happily. So they did as they were told, and Israel and his sons and all their families came down and settled in Goshen about 1700 B.C. They were called Israelites, which means of course the children of Israel, and they believed they were God’s chosen people. These are the people we now call the Jews.

After Joseph, who was of course an Israelite himself, died, the kings or Pharaohs of Egypt did not like these foreign people who belonged to the Semite family, and treated them very badly, as other peoples have always treated the Jews badly ever since. Though the Jews and their sons and sons’ sons lived in Egypt for about four hundred years, they were always hated by the Egyptians.

Now about four hundred years from the time the Jews first came into Egypt—400 from 1700 is 1300 B.C.—there was a ruler of Egypt called Rameses the Great.

Rameses so hated the Jews that finally he gave orders to have every Jewish boy baby killed. In this way he thought to get rid of these people. One little Jewish boy named Moses, however, was saved, and when he grew up he became the greatest leader of his people. Moses wanted to get the Jews out of this unfriendly country where the people worshiped false gods. And so at last he led all his people out of Egypt across the Red Sea. This was called the Exodus, and it took place about 1300 B.C.

After the Jews had left Egypt they first stopped at the foot of a mountain called Mount Sinai, while Moses went up to the top where he could be by himself and learn what God wanted him and the Jews to do. Moses spent forty days praying on top of the mountain. When he came down from the mountain-top, he brought with him the Ten Commandments, the same Ten Commandments you may have learned in Sunday-school. But Moses had been gone so long that when he came back again to his people he found them worshiping a golden calf as the Egyptians had done. They had lived in Egypt until they had come to think it was all right to worship idols.

Moses was very angry. It was high time, he thought, that they should get rid of the bad influence of their old Egyptian neighbors. And at last he succeeded in making them worship God again and gave them the Ten Commandments for their rule of life. So Moses is called a lawgiver and the founder of the Jewish religion. Then Moses died, and the Jews wandered from place to place for a great many years before they finally settled in Canaan.

The Jews had no kings. They were ruled by men called judges, but the judges lived very simply, just like every one else and not like kings in palaces with servants and fine robes and rich jewels. But the Jews wanted a real king as their enemies had and other nations who were their neighbors. Strange they wanted a king which so many countries have tried to get rid of—we should think they would have preferred a President as we have.

So at last a judge who was named Samuel said they should have a king, and Saul was chosen. Then Samuel poured olive-oil over Saul’s head. This may seem a queer thing to do, but it took the place of putting a crown on his head and was a sign that he was to be king. Samuel, therefore, was the last one of their judges, and Saul was their first king.

All other nations at that time believed as the Egyptians and Chaldeans did, in fairy-tale gods or idols. But the Jews alone believed in one God. They had a Holy Book which had been written by their prophets. This book is the Old Testament part of the Christian Bible.

So this is the story of the Wandering Jews who gave us the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments, and here is the way they wandered:

From Ur to Canaan—1900 B.C.

From Canaan to Egypt—1700 B.C.

From Egypt back to Canaan—1300 B.C.

Fairy-Tale Gods

There was once a man named Hellen—strange-sounding name for a man, isn’t it? He was not a Semite and not a Hamite. He was an Aryan. He had a great many children and children’s children, and they called themselves Hellenes. They lived in a little scrap of a country that juts out into the Mediterranean Sea, and they called their land Hellas. I once upset a bottle of ink on my desk, and the ink ran out into a wriggly spot that looked exactly as Hellas does on the map. Though Hellas is hardly any bigger than one of our States, its history is more famous than that of any other country of its size in the world. We call Hellas “Greece” and the people who lived there “Greeks.”

About the same time the Jews were leaving Egypt, about the time when people were beginning to use iron instead of bronze, that is, about 1300 B.C., we first begin to hear of Hellas and the Hellenes, of Greece and the Greeks.

The Greeks believed in many gods, not in one God as we do and as the Jews did, and their gods were more like people in fairy-tales than like divine beings. Many beautiful statues have been made of their different gods, and poems and stories have been written about them.

There were twelve—just a dozen—chief gods. They were supposed to live on Mount Olympus, which was the highest mountain in Greece. These gods were not always good, but often quarreled and cheated and did even worse things. The gods lived on a kind of food that was much more delicious than what we eat. It was called nectar and ambrosia, and the Greeks thought it made those who ate it immortal; that is, so that they would never die.

Let me introduce you to the family of the gods. I know you will be pleased to meet them. Most of them have two names.

There are many other less important gods and goddesses as well as some gods that are half human, such as the three Fates and three Graces and the nine Muses.

Some of the planets in the sky which look like stars are still called by the names of these Greek gods. Jupiter is the name of the largest planet. Mars is the name of one that is reddish—the color of blood. Venus is the name of one that is very beautiful. There is also a Mercury and a Neptune.

It is hard for us to understand how the Greeks could have prayed to such gods as these, but they did. Their prayers, however, were not like ours. Instead of kneeling and closing their eyes as we do, they stood up and stretched their arms straight out before them. They did not pray to be forgiven for their sins and to be made better. They prayed for victory over their enemies or to be protected from harm.

When they prayed they often made the god an offering of animals, fruit, honey, or wine in order to please him so that he would grant their prayer. The wine they poured out on the ground, thinking the god would like to have them do this. The animals they killed and then burned by building a fire under them on an altar. This was called a sacrifice. Their idea seemed to be that even though the gods could not eat the meat of the animals nor drink the wine themselves, they liked to have something given up for them. And so even to-day we say a person makes a sacrifice when he gives up something for another.

When the Greeks were sacrificing they usually looked for some sign from the god to see whether he was pleased or not with the sacrifice and whether he would answer their prayer and do what they asked him or not. A flock of birds flying overhead, a flash of lightning, or any unusual happening they thought was a sign which meant something. Such signs were called “omens.” Some omens were good and showed that the god would do what he was asked, and some omens were bad and showed he would not. Omens were very much like some of the signs that people believe in even to-day when they say it is a good sign or good luck if you see the new moon over the right shoulder or a bad sign or bad luck if you spill the salt.

Not so very far from Athens is a mountain called Mount Parnassus. On the side of Mount Parnassus was a town called Delphi. In the town of Delphi there was a crack in the ground, from which gas came forth, somewhat as it does from cracks in a volcano. This gas was supposed to be the breath of the god Apollo, and there was a woman priest called a priestess who sat on a three-legged stool or tripod over the crack so as to breathe the gas. She would become delirious, as some people do when they are sick with fever and we say they are “out of their heads,” and when people asked her questions she would mutter strange things and a priest would tell what she meant. This place was called the Delphic Oracle, and people would go long distances to ask the oracle questions, for they thought Apollo was answering them.

The Greeks went to the oracle whenever they wanted to know what to do or what was going to happen, and they firmly believed in what the oracle told them. Usually, however, the answers of the oracle were like a riddle, so that they could be understood in more than one way. For instance, a king who was about to go to war with another king asked the oracle who would win. The oracle replied, “A great kingdom will fall.” What do you suppose the oracle meant? Such an answer, which you can understand in two or three ways, is still called “oracular.”

A Fairy-Tale War

The history of countries usually begins—and also ends—with war. The first great happening in the history of Greece was a war. It was called the Trojan War and was supposed to have taken place about twelve hundred years before Christ, or not long after the beginning of the Iron Age. But we are not only not sure of the date; we are not even sure that there ever was such a war, for a great deal of it, we know, is simply fairy-tale. This is the way the tale goes.

Once there was a wedding feast of the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus, when suddenly a goddess who had not been invited threw a golden apple on the table. On the apple was written these words:

To the Fairest.

The goddess who had thrown the apple was the goddess of quarreling; and true to her name she did start a quarrel, for each of the goddesses, like vain human beings, thought she was the fairest and should have the apple. At last they called in a shepherd boy named Paris to decide which was the fairest.

Each goddess offered Paris a present if he would choose her. Juno, the queen of the gods, offered to make him a king; Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, offered to make him wise; but Venus, the goddess of beauty, offered to give him the most beautiful girl in the world for his wife.

Now, Paris was not really a shepherd boy but the son of Priam, the king of Troy, which was a city on the sea-shore opposite Greece. Paris when a baby had been left on a mountain to die, but had been found by a shepherd and brought up by him as his own child.

Paris didn’t care about being wise; he didn’t care about being king; what he did want was to have the most beautiful girl in the world for his wife, and so he gave the apple to Venus.

Now the most beautiful girl in the world was named Helen, and she was already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. But in spite of that fact Venus told Paris to go to Sparta in Greece, where he would find Helen, and then run away with her. So Paris went to Sparta to visit King Menelaus and was royally entertained by him. And then Paris, although he had been treated so kindly and been trusted, one night stole Helen away and carried her off across the sea to Troy. Though this was in the Iron Age, it was the way a Cave Man of the Stone Age might have acted.

Menelaus and the Greeks were naturally very angry and immediately prepared for war and sailed off for Troy to get Helen back. Now, in ancient times all cities had walls built around them to protect them from the enemy. As there were no cannons nor guns nor deadly weapons such as are used in war nowadays, it was very hard to get into a walled city or capture it. Troy was protected in this way with walls; and though the Greeks tried for ten years to capture it, at the end of the ten years Troy was still unconquered.

So at last the Greeks decided to try a trick to get into the city. They built a huge horse of wood, and inside this wooden horse they put soldiers. They placed the horse in front of the city walls and then sailed away as if at last they were giving up the war. The Trojans were told by a spy that the horse was a gift of the gods and that they ought to take it into the city. A Trojan priest named La-oc-o-on, however, told his people not to have anything to do with the horse, for he suspected a trick. But people seldom take advice when told not to do what they want to do.

Just then some huge snakes came out of the sea and attacked Laocoon and his two sons and, twining round them, strangled them to death. The Trojans thought this was a sign from the gods, or an omen as they would have said, that they should not believe Laocoon; so they determined to take the horse into the city against his advice. The horse was so big, however, that it would not go through the gates, and in order to get it inside of the walls they had to tear down part of the wall itself. When night fell, the Greek soldiers came out of the horse and opened the gates of the city. The other Greeks, who had been waiting just out of sight, returned and entered through the gates and the hole the Trojans had made in the wall. Troy was easily conquered then, and the city was burned to the ground, and Helen’s husband carried her back to Greece. For reason of this horse trick, we still have a saying, “Beware of the Greeks bearing gifts,” which is as much as to say, “Look out for an enemy who makes you a present.”

The story of the Trojan War was told in two long poems. Some people think they are the finest poems that were ever written. One of these poems is called the “Iliad,” from the name of the city of Troy, which was also known as Ilium. The “Iliad” describes the Trojan War itself. The other poem is called the “Odyssey” and describes the adventures of one of the Greek heroes on his way home after the war was over. This Greek hero’s name was Odysseus, which gives the name Odyssey to the book, but he was also called Ulysses. These poems, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” were composed by a blind Greek poet named Homer, who is supposed to have lived about two hundred years after the war; that is about 1000 B.C.

Homer was a bard; that is, a singing poet who went about from place to place and sang his poems to the people. Usually a bard played on the lyre as he sang, and the people gave him something to eat or a place to sleep to pay him for his songs. Nowadays, instead of a Homer singing the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” we have the organ-grinder and street piano playing their tunes in front of our houses.

Homer never wrote down his poems, for he was blind; but the people were very fond of hearing his songs, and they learned them by heart, and mothers taught them to their children after Homer had died. At last, many years later, another man wrote the poems down in Greek, and you may some day read them in Greek, if you study that language, or at least in an English translation.

Although the Greeks thought so much of Homer, he could hardly make a living, and he almost had to beg his daily bread. After his death however, the people of nine different cities each proudly said that Homer was born in their city. And so some one has made this rime:

Some people now doubt that there ever was a poet named Homer. Others think that instead of only one man there must have been several men, perhaps nine, who composed these poems, and this might explain how he could be born in nine different cities.

The Kings of the Jews

While the blind beggar Homer was singing his wonderful songs through the streets of Greece, a great king of the Jews was singing other wonderful songs in Canaan. This king was named David, and he wasn’t born a king. He was only a shepherd boy in King Saul’s army. This is the way he happened to become king.

At first, as you remember, the Jews had no kings; but they had asked for kings, and at last they were given one by the name of Saul.

David had killed the giant Goliath. We all love this Bible story because we are always glad when the skilful little chap beats the great, big, bragging bully.

Well, King Saul had a daughter, and she fell in love with this brave and athletic young David the Giant-Killer, and at last they were married.

So after Saul died David became king, and he was the greatest king the Jews ever had. Although Saul had been king he had lived in a tent, not in a palace, and he didn’t even have a capital city.

So David conquered a city in Canaan called Jerusalem and made this city the capital of the Jews.

But David was not only a brave warrior and a great king; he wrote beautiful songs as well.

The blind beggar Homer sang of his fairy-tale gods. The great King David sang of his one God.

These songs are the Psalms, which you hear read and sung in church.

Nowadays even a popular song is popular for only a few months, but the songs which David wrote almost three thousand years ago are still popular to-day! The Twenty-third Psalm, which starts, “The Lord is my shepherd,” is one of the most beautiful and a good one to learn by heart. David likens himself to a sheep and his Lord to a good shepherd who tenderly looks out for the comfort and safety of his sheep.

David’s son was named Solomon, and when David died Solomon became king.

If a good fairy had asked you what you would rather have than anything in the world, I wonder what you would have chosen. When Solomon became king, God is said to have appeared to him in a dream and asked him what he would rather have than anything else in the world. Instead of saying he wanted to be made rich or powerful, Solomon asked to be made wise, and God said He would make him the wisest man that ever lived. Here is a story that shows how wise he was.

Once upon a time two women came to Solomon with a baby, and each woman said the baby was her own child. Solomon called for a sword and said, “Cut the baby in two, and give each a half.” One of the women cried out to give the baby to the other rather than do this, and Solomon then knew who was the real mother and ordered the baby to be given to her.

Solomon built a magnificent temple made of cedar-wood from the famous forest of Lebanon, and of marble and gold and studded with jewels. Then he built himself a wonderful palace, which was so gorgeous and splendid that people came from all over the world to see it. The Bible tells us just how large this temple and palace were, not in feet but in cubits. A cubit was the distance from a man’s elbow to the end of his middle finger, which is about one foot and a half.

The queen of Sheba, among others, came a long distance across Arabia to hear the wise sayings of Solomon and see his palace and the temple he had built.

Although the palace and temple were considered extraordinarily magnificent at that time, you must remember that this was a thousand years before Christ.

Solomon’s temple and palace have disappeared long since, and there is left of them neither stick nor stone. But his wise sayings are preserved in every language and read by every people in every part of the world. There are thousands of buildings now in the world that would make his palace, if still standing, look like a child’s toy-house. But no one has ever been able to say any better the things he said. Do you think you could? Suppose you try. Here are some of them. They are called proverbs.

What’s that mean?

What’s that mean?

What’s that mean?

Solomon was the last great king the Jews ever had. After he died the Jewish nation gradually broke up and went to pieces, and the great Jewish people are to-day without a king, without a capital, and without a country of their own, but are found in every other country of the world.

The People Who Made Our A B C’s

Long before people knew how to write, there lived a carpenter named Cadmus. One day he was at work on a house when he wanted a tool that he had left at home. Picking up a chip of wood, he wrote something on it and, handing it to his slave, told him to go to his home and give the chip to his wife, saying that it would tell her what he wanted. The slave, wondering, did as he was told. Cadmus’s wife looked at the chip, and without a word handed the tool to the amazed slave, who thought the chip in some mysterious way had spoken the message. When he returned to Cadmus with the tool, he begged for the remarkable chip, and when it was given him, hung it around his neck for a charm.

This is the story the Greeks told of the man they say invented the alphabet. We believe, however, that Cadmus was a mythical person, for the Greeks liked to make up such stories, and we think no one man made the alphabet. But Cadmus was a Phenician and we do know that the Phenician people invented the alphabet. You probably call it your A B C’s, but the Greeks had much harder names for the letters. They called A “alpha,” B “beta,” and so on. So the Greek boy spoke of learning his “alpha beta,” and that is why we call it the “alphabet.”

You may never have heard of Phenicia or the Phenician people. Yet, if there had been no such country as Phenicia, you might now be learning at school to read and write in hieroglyphics or in cuneiform.

Up to this time, you know, people had very clumsy ways of writing. The Egyptians had to draw pictures, and the Babylonians made writing like chicken-tracks. The alphabet that the Phenicians invented had twenty-two letters, and from it we get the alphabet we use to-day.

Of course, we do not use just the same alphabet now that the Phenicians did, but some of the letters are almost, if not quite, like those we now have after three thousand years. For instance the

The Phenicians lived next door to the Jews; in fact they belonged to the same family—the Semites. Their country was just north of the kingdom of the Jews; that is, above it on the map and lying along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Phenicians had a great king named Hiram who lived at the same time as Solomon. In fact, Hiram was a friend of Solomon and sent him some of his best workmen to help build a temple at Jerusalem. And yet Hiram himself and the Phenicians did not believe in the Jewish God.

The Phenicians worshiped idols, terrible monsters named Baal and Moloch, which they called gods of the sun. They also believed in a goddess of the moon named Astarte and made sacrifices of live children to her idol, Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum; this is a real story and not a fairy-tale. Just suppose you had been a child then!

The Jews, as we have learned, were very religious, but their neighbors, the Phenicians, though Semites and therefore relatives, were business people and thought of nothing but money, money, money—all the time. And they were not particular how they earned it, whether honestly or not. Nowadays, dealers know that they must be honest if they are to be very successful, but the Phenicians were usually tricky in their trading with people. They always drove a good bargain and sometimes even cheated when they had a chance.

The Phenicians made many things to sell, and then they went far and near to sell them.

They knew how to make beautiful cloth and glassware and objects in gold and silver and ivory.

They knew the secret of making a wonderful purple dye from the body of a little shell-fish that lived in the water near the city of Tyre. This dye was known as Tyrian purple from the name of that city, and it was so beautiful that kings’ robes were colored with it.

Tyre and Sidon were the two chief cities of Phenicia, and once upon a time they were two of the busiest cities in the world.

In order to find people to sell to, the Phenicians traveled in boats all over the Mediterranean Sea and even went outside this sea into the Great Ocean. This opening is now called the Strait of Gibraltar but was then known as the Pillars of Hercules. They went as far as the British Isles. Other people in those days had not dared to go so far in boats; they thought they would come to the edge of the ocean and tumble off. But the Phenicians had no such fear, and so they were the greatest sailors as well as the greatest traders of their times. Their ships were built from the cedar-trees that grew on the slopes of their hills, which were called Lebanon.

Wherever the Phenicians found good harbors for their boats, they started little towns where they traded with the natives, who at that time were almost savage. With ignorant savages they found they could drive a good bargain. For a few glass beads or a piece of purple dyed cloth worth very little they could get in return gold and silver and other things worth a great deal. On the African coast, one of these towns they started was called Carthage. Of Carthage we shall hear more by and by, for it grew to be so wealthy and important that—but wait until I come to that story.

Hard as Nails

Our story goes back again to Greece, the land of Homer and the fairy-tale gods and to Sparta, where Helen once lived.

About nine hundred years before Christ was born, there lived in Sparta a man named Lycurgus. That is a hard name, and when you hear about this man you may think he was hard, too. Lycurgus wanted his city to be the greatest in the world.

But first he had to find out what it was that made a city and a people great.

So he started off and traveled for years and years visiting all the chief countries of the world to see if he could learn what it was that made them great. And this is what he learned.

Wherever the people thought chiefly of fun and pleasure, of amusing themselves and having a good time—he found they were not much good, not much account—not great.

Wherever the people thought chiefly of hard work and did what they ought, whether it was pleasant or not, he found they were usually good for something—some account—great.

So Lycurgus came back to his home Sparta and set to work to make a set of rules which he thought would make his people greater than all other people in the world. These rules were called a Code of Laws, and I think you’ll agree they were very hard, and they made the Spartans hard, too—as “hard as nails.” We shall see whether they made the Spartans really great, also.

To begin with, babies, as soon as they were born, were examined to see that they were strong and perfect. Whenever one was found that did not seem to be so, he was put out on the mountain-side and left to die. Lycurgus wanted no weaklings in Sparta.

When boys were seven years old, they were taken from their mothers and put in a school, which was more like a soldiers’ camp than a school, and they never lived anywhere else until they were sixty years old.

In this school they were not taught the things you are, but only the things that trained them to be good soldiers.

There were no such things as school-books then.

There were no spelling-books.

There were no arithmetics.

There were no geographies. No one knew enough about the world to write a geography.

There were no histories. No one knew much about things that had happened in the world before that time, and of course none of the history since then that you now study had taken place.

At certain times, the Spartan boy was whipped, not because he had done anything wrong, but just to teach him to suffer pain without whimpering. He would have been disgraced forever if he had cried, no matter how badly he was hurt.

He was exercised and drilled and worked until he was ready to drop. But still he was obliged to keep on, no matter how tired or hungry or sleepy or aching he might be, and he must never show by any sign how he felt.

He was made to eat the worst kind of food, to go hungry and thirsty for long periods of time, to go out in the bitter cold with little or no clothing, just to get used to such hardships and able to bear all sorts of discomforts. This kind of training, this kind of hardening, is therefore called “Spartan discipline.” How do you think you would have liked it?

The Spartans’ food, clothing, and lodging were all furnished them, though it was very poor food and poor clothing and poor lodging. They were not allowed good things to eat, soft beds to lie on, or fine clothing to wear. Such things were called luxuries, and luxuries, Lycurgus thought, would make people soft and weak, and he wanted his people hard and strong.

The Spartans were even taught to speak in a short and blunt manner; they were taught not to waste words; they must say what they had to say in as few words as possible. This manner of speaking we call “Laconic” from the name Laconia, the state in which Sparta was located.

Once a king wrote to the Spartans a threatening letter, saying that they had better do what he told them to, for if he came and took their country, he would destroy their city and make them slaves.

The Spartans sent a messenger back with their answer, and when the letter was opened, it contained only one word:

“IF!”

Even to-day, we call such an answer, short but to the point, a Laconic answer.

Did all this hard training and hard work make the Spartans the greatest people in the world?

Lycurgus did make the Spartans the strongest and best fighters in the world—but—

The Spartans conquered all the peoples around about them, though there were ten times as many—but—

They made these people their slaves, who did all their farming and other work—but—

We shall see later whether Lycurgus’s idea was right.

North of Sparta was another great city of Greece called Athens. There were, of course, many other towns in Greece, but Sparta and Athens were the most important. In Athens the people lived and thought quite differently from those in Sparta.

The Athenians were just as fond of everything beautiful as the Spartans were of discipline and of everything military.

The Athenians loved athletic games of all sorts just as the Spartans did, but they also loved music and poetry and beautiful statues, paintings, vases, buildings, and such things that are known as the “arts.”

The Athenians believed in training the mind as well as the body. The Spartans believed the training of the body was the all-important thing. Which do you like better, the Athenians’ idea or the Spartans’ idea?

Once at a big game a very old man was looking for a seat on the Athenians’ side. There was no seat empty, and no Athenian offered to give him one. Whereupon the Spartans called to the old man and gave him the best seat on their side. The Athenians cheered the Spartans to show how fine they thought this act. At this the Spartans said:

“The Athenians know what is right but they don’t do it.”

The Crown of Leaves

Greek boys and young men and even girls loved all sorts of outdoor sports.

They didn’t play football or baseball or basketball, but they ran and jumped and wrestled and boxed and threw the discus—a thing like a big, heavy dinner-plate of iron.

From time to time matches were held in different parts of Greece to see who was the best in these sports.

The Big Meet, however, took place only once every four years at a place called Olympia in southern Greece; and these Olympic games, as they were called, were the most important affairs held in Greece, for all the winners from different parts of the country were here matched against each other to see who should be the champion of all Greece.

The time when the games were held was a great national holiday, for the games were in honor of the head god Jupiter, or Zeus as the Greeks called him. People came from all over the known world to see the games much as they do now when a World’s Fair is held or a big football game.

Only Greeks could enter this contest, and only those who had never committed a crime or broken any laws—as a boy nowadays must have a clean record in order to be allowed to play on his college or school team.

If there happened to be a war going on at the time, and there usually was, so important was this holiday that a truce was declared, and everybody went off to the games. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with the games, and even war was not as important. “Business before pleasure!” When the games were finished, they started fighting again!

The Greek boys and young men would train for four years getting ready for this big event, and then nine months before the great day they would go to Olympia to get in training at an open-air gymnasium near the field.

The games lasted five days and began and ended with a parade and prayers and sacrifices to the Greek gods, beautiful statues to whom were placed all about the field, for this was not only sport, but a religious service in honor of Jupiter and the other gods.

There were all sorts of matches—in running, jumping, wrestling, boxing, chariot-racing, and throwing the discus.

Any one who cheated would have been put out and never again allowed to take part. The Greek believed in what we call being a good sport. He didn’t brag if he won. He didn’t make excuses if he lost; he didn’t cry out that the decision was unfair.

The athlete who won one or more of these games was the hero of all Greece, and in particular of the town from which he came. The winner received no money prize but was crowned with a wreath made of laurel leaves. This he valued much more than an athlete nowadays does the silver cup or gold medal he may win. Besides receiving the laurel wreath, the winner had songs written to him by poets, and often statues were made of him by sculptors.

There were not only athletic matches but contests between poets and musicians to see who could write the best poetry or compose and play the sweetest music on a kind of small harp called the lyre. The winners of these contests did not receive a laurel wreath, but they were carried in triumph on the shoulders of the throng, as you may have seen the captain of a winning team picked up and raised aloft by his fellow-players after he has won.

Now, in Greek History the first event which we can be absolutely sure is true is the record of the winner of a foot-race in these Olympic Games 776 years before Christ was born. And from this event the Greeks began to count their history dates, as we do now from the birth of Christ. It was their Year 1.

The four years’ time between the Olympic Games was called an Olympiad. Up to this time, they had no calendar that gave the year or date, so 776 is the date of the first Olympiad. Greek History before that time may have been partly true, but we know much of it was mythical. Beginning with 776, however, Greek history is pretty much all true.

After a long while they stopped having the games, but a few years ago it was thought it would be a good thing to start them again. So, for the first time since before Christ, new Olympic Games were again held in 1896 A.D., not in Olympia, however, but in Athens. The games used to be held only in Greece. Now they are held each time in a different country. Only Greeks used to be allowed to take part. Now, however, athletes from almost all the countries of the world are invited to compete. War used to be stopped when the time for the games arrived. Now the games are stopped when war is on.

From what we have learned of the Spartans’ training, we might guess that they used to win most of the athletic prizes, and they did.

Do the Spartans still continue to win most of the prizes in the New Olympic Games?

No. Not even the Greeks now carry off the chief prizes.

A Bad Beginning

Have you ever heard of the Seven-League Boots, the boots in which one could take many miles at a single step?

Well, there is a still bigger boot; it is over five hundred miles long, and it is in the Mediterranean Sea.

No, it’s not a real boot, but it would look like one if you were miles high in an airplane and looking down upon it.

It is called Italy.

Something very important happened in Italy, not long after the First Olympiad in Greece. It was so important that it was called the Year 1, and for a thousand years people counted from it as the Greeks did from the First Olympiad, and as we do now from the birth of Christ. This thing that happened was not the birth of a man, however. It was the birth of a city, and this city was called Rome.

The history of Rome starts with stories that we know are fairy-tales or myths in the same way that the history of Greece does. Homer told about the wanderings of the Greek, Odysseus. A great many years later a poet named Vergil told about the wanderings of a Trojan named Æneas.

Æneas fled from Troy when that city was burning down and started off to find a new home. Finally after several years he came to Italy and the mouth of a river called the Tiber. There Æneas met the daughter of the man who was ruling over that country, a girl by the name of Lavinia, and married her, and they lived happily ever after. So the children of Æneas and Lavinia ruled over the land, and they had children, and their children had children, and their children had children, until at last boy twins were born. These twins were named Romulus and Remus. Here endeth the first part of the story and the trouble begins, for they did not live happily ever after.

At the time the twins were born, a man had stolen the kingdom, and he feared that these two boys might grow up and take his stolen kingdom away from him. So he put the twins in a basket and set them afloat on the river Tiber, hoping that they might be carried out to sea or upset and be drowned. This, he thought, was nearly all right, so long as he didn’t kill them with his own hands. But the basket drifted ashore instead of going out to sea or upsetting, and a mother wolf found the twins and nursed them as if they were her own babies. And a woodpecker also helped and fed them berries. At last a shepherd found them and brought them up as if they were his own sons until they grew up and became men. This sounds a good deal like the story of Paris who was left out to die and was found and brought up by a shepherd also.

Each of the twins then wished to build a city. But they could not agree which one was to do it, and in quarreling over the matter, Romulus killed his own twin brother Remus. Romulus then built the city by the Tiber River, on the spot where he and his brother had been saved and nursed by the mother wolf. Here there were seven hills. This was in 753 B.C., and he named the city Roma after his own name, and the people who lived there were called Romans. So that is why, ever afterward, the Roman kings always said they were descended from the Trojan hero, Æneas, the great-great-great-grandfather of Romulus.

Don’t you believe this story? Neither do I. But it is such an old, old story every one is supposed to have heard it even though it is only a legend.

In order to get people for the city which he had started, it is said that Romulus invited all the thieves and bad men who had escaped from jail to come and live in Rome, promising them that they would be safe there.

Then as none of the men had wives, and there were no women in his new city, Romulus thought up a scheme to get the men wives. He invited some people called Sabines, who lived near-by, both men and women, to come to Rome to a big party.

They accepted, and a great feast was spread. In the middle of the feast, when every one was eating and drinking, a signal was given, and each of the Romans seized a Sabine woman for his wife and ran off with her.

The Sabine husbands immediately prepared themselves for war against the Romans, who had stolen their wives. When the battle had begun between the two armies, the Sabine women ran out in the midst of the fighting between their new and old husbands and begged them both to stop. They said they had come to love their new husbands and would not return to their old homes.

What do you think of that?

It sounds like a pretty bad beginning for a new city, doesn’t it? and you may well wonder how Rome turned out—a city that started with Romulus killing his brother and that was settled by escaped prisoners who stole the wives of their neighbors. We must remember, however, that then they were nearer the time when Primitive Men lived whose only rule of life was: kill or be killed, steal or be stolen; and whose usual way of getting wives was to knock them in the head and drag them off to their caves while they were senseless. Besides, they believed in the same gods as the Greeks, and we have heard how their gods did all sorts of wicked things themselves. This, too, was long before Christ was born, and at that time they did not know anything about the Christian religion or what we call right and wrong.

You see I have tried to think of some good excuses for the actions of these first Romans.

Kings with Corkscrew Curls

After Rome’s bad start she had one king after another, and some of these kings were pretty good and some were pretty bad.

But the most important city in the world at this time was far away from Rome on the Tigris River. This city was called Nineveh, and here lived the kings of the country called Assyria, which I told you about some time ago.

As usual, the chief thing we hear about Assyria and the Assyrians is that they were fighting with their neighbors. This, however, was not the fault of their neighbors.

The Assyrian kings who lived in Nineveh wanted more land and power, and so they fought their neighbors in order to take their land away from them. These kings had long corkscrew curls, and you may think that only girls wear long curls and that a man with curls would be “girl-like.” But these kings were not at all that kind. They were such terrible fighters that they were feared far and near. They treated their prisoners terribly; they skinned them alive, cut off their ears, pulled out their tongues, bored sticks into their eyes, then bragged about it. They made the people whom they conquered pay them huge sums of money and promise to fight with them whenever they went to war.

And so Assyria became so strong and powerful that she at last owned everything of importance in the world, the land between the rivers called Mesopotamia, and the land to the east, north, and south, and Phenicia, and Egypt, and pretty nearly everything except Greece and Italy.

This big, big country of Assyria was ruled by the kings at Nineveh, who lived in great magnificence. They built wonderful palaces for themselves, and on each side of the way that led to the palace they placed rows of huge statues of bulls and lions with wings and men’s heads as a rich man nowadays might plant a row of trees along the driveway that leads up to his home. These winged animals are what are called cherubs in the Bible.

Perhaps you have heard a particularly sweet and pretty little baby called a cherub. Isn’t it strange that these hideous Assyrian monsters should be called cherubs also?

When the Assyrian kings were not fighting men they were fighting wild animals, for they were very fond of hunting with bow and arrow, and they had pictures and statues made of themselves on horseback or in chariots fighting lions. Often they would capture the animals they hunted alive and put them in cages so that the people could come and see them. This was something like a “zoo” such as we have nowadays.

The rulers of Assyria had very strange names. Sennacherib was one of the most famous. Sennacherib lived about 700 B.C. Once upon a time Sennacherib was fighting Jerusalem. His whole army was camped one night when as they lay asleep something happened, for when the morning came, none woke up; all were dead, both men and horses. An English poet named Byron has written a poem called “The Destruction of Sennacherib” describing this event. Perhaps they were poisoned; what do you think?

Assur-bani-pal was another king who ruled later—about 650 B.C. He was a great fighter too, but he was also very fond of books and reading; so Assur-bani-pal started the first public library. The books in that first public library were, however, very peculiar. Of course they were not printed books, and they were not even made of paper. They were made of mud with the words pressed into the clay before it dried. This writing was cuneiform, which I have already told you about. The books were not arranged in bookcases, either, but were placed in piles on the floor. They were, however, kept in careful order and numbered so that a person who wanted to see a book in the library could call for it by its number.

Assyria reached the height of her power during the reign of Sennacherib and Assur-bani-pal, and everything in Nineveh was so lovely for the Ninevites that the time when Assur-bani-pal reigned was called the Golden Age.

But although everything in Nineveh was so lovely for the Ninevites, everywhere else the Assyrians were hated and feared, for their armies brought death and destruction wherever they went.

So it came to pass that not long after Assur-bani-pal died, two of the neighbors of Nineveh could stand it no longer. These two neighbors were the king of Babylon, who lived south, and a people called the Medes, who lived to the east and belonged to the Aryan family. So the king of Babylon and the Medes got together and attacked Nineveh, and together they wiped that city off the face of the earth. This was in 612 B.C.—Six-One-Two—and the power of Nineveh and Assyria was killed dead. This, therefore is called the Fall of Nineveh, the end of Nineveh. We might put up a tombstone:

A City of Wonders and Wickedness

The king of Babylon had beaten Nineveh. But he didn’t stop with that. He wanted his Babylon to be as great as Nineveh had been. So he went on conquering other lands to the left and right until Babylon, in its turn, became the leader and ruler of other countries. Was Babylon, also, in its turn, to fall, as Nineveh had fallen?

When at last the king of Babylon died, he left his vast empire to his son. Now, the king’s son was not called John or James or Charles or anything simple like that. It was—Nebuchadnezzar, and I wonder if his father called him by all that long name or shortened it to a nickname like “Neb,” for instance, or “Chad,” or perhaps “Nezzar.” This is the way Nebuchadnezzar wrote his name, for he used cuneiform writing. How would you like to write your name in such a queer way?

Nebuchadnezzar set to work and made the city of Babylon the largest, the most magnificent and the most wonderful city of that time and perhaps of any time. The city was in the shape of a square and covered more ground than the two largest cities in the world to-day—New York and London—put together. He surrounded it with a wall fifty times as high as a man—fifty times—whew!—and so broad that a chariot could be driven along on the top, and in this wall he made one hundred huge brass gates. The Euphrates River flowed under the wall, across the city, and out under the wall on the other side.

Nebuchadnezzar could not find any one in Babylon who was beautiful enough to be his queen. The Babylonian girls must have felt pretty bad—or mad—about that. So he went to Media, the country that had helped his father conquer Nineveh. There he found a lovely princess, and so he married her and brought her home to Babylon.

Now, Media was a land of hills and mountains, whilst Babylon was on level ground and without even a hill in sight. Nebuchadnezzar’s queen found Babylonia so flat and uninteresting that she became homesick, and she longed for her own country with its wild mountain scenery. So, just to please her and keep her contented Nebuchadnezzar set to work and built a hill for her, but the queer thing was he built it on top of the roof of his palace! On the sides of this hill he made beautiful gardens, and these gardens he planted not only with flowers but also with trees, so that his queen might sit in the shade and enjoy herself. These were called Hanging Gardens. The Hanging Gardens and the tremendous walls were known far and wide as one of the Seven Wonders of the world.

Would you like to know what the other Wonders were?

Well, the pyramids in Egypt were one; the magnificent statue of Jupiter at Olympia, where the Olympic Games were held, was another—so those with the Hanging Gardens make three.

Nebuchadnezzar believed in idols like those terrible monsters the Phenicians worshiped. The Jews away off in Jerusalem believed in one God. Nebuchadnezzar wanted the Jews to worship his gods, but they would not. He also wanted them to pay him taxes, and they would not. So he sent his armies to Jerusalem, destroyed that city, burnt the beautiful Temple that Solomon had built, and brought the Jews and all their belongings to Babylon. There in Babylon Nebuchadnezzar kept the Jews prisoners, and there in Babylon the Jews remained prisoners for fifty years.

Babylon had become not only the most magnificent city in the world; it had become also the most wicked. The people of Babylon gave themselves up to the wildest pleasures. Their only thought seemed to be, “Let’s eat, drink, and be merry”; they thought nothing of the morrow; the more wicked the pleasure the more they liked it.

But although Nebuchadnezzar seemed able to do and able to have everything in the world he wanted, he finally went crazy. He thought he was a bull, and he used to get down on his hands and knees and eat grass, imagining he was a beast of the field.

And Babylon, in spite of its tremendous walls and brass gates, was doomed. Babylon was to be conquered. It didn’t seem possible. How could it be conquered, and who was to do the conquering? You would probably never guess.

A Surprise Party

When I was a boy I was always told, and you have probably been told the same thing:

“You can have no dessert until you have eaten your dinner.”

No matter whether I was hungry or not, “No dinner, no dessert.” This was a rule which my father said was “like the laws of the Medes and Persians.”

I didn’t know then who the Medes and Persians were, but I know now that they were two Aryan families living next to Babylon—you remember Nebuchadnezzar had married a Median girl—and that they were governed by laws which were fixed so hard and fast and were so unchangeable that we still speak of any such thing that does not change as like “the laws of the Medes and Persians.”

The Medes and the Persians had a religion which was neither like that of the Jews nor like the idol worship of the Babylonians. It had been started by a Persian named Zoroaster, who was a wise man like Solomon. He may even have lived about the same time as Solomon, but probably a good deal later.

Zoroaster went about among the people, teaching them wise sayings and hymns. These wise sayings have been gathered into a book, which is now the Persian Bible.

Zoroaster taught that there were two great spirits in the world, the Good Spirit and the Bad Spirit.

The Good Spirit, he said, was Light, and the Bad Spirit, Darkness. The Good or Light he called Mazda; where have you heard that word, I wonder. So the Persians kept a fire, in which they thought was the Good Spirit, constantly burning on their altars, and they had men watch over this flame to see that it never went out. These men who watched the flame were called Magi, and they were supposed to be able to do all sorts of wonderful things, so that we call such wonderful things “magic,” and the people who are able to do them we call “magicians.”

At the time of this story which I’m telling you, the ruler of the Medes and the Persians was a great king named Cyrus.

But before I go on with this story I must tell you about a little country not far from Troy. This little country was called Lydia. Perhaps you may know a girl named Lydia. I do. Lydia was ruled over by a king named Crœsus who was the richest man in the world. When we want to describe a man as very wealthy, we still say he is “as rich as Crœsus.”

Crœsus owned nearly all the gold-mines, of which there were a great many in that country, and besides this he collected money in the form of taxes from all the cities near him.

Before the time of Crœsus people did not have money such as we have now. When they wished to buy anything, they simply traded something they had for something they wanted—so many eggs for a pound of meat or so much wine for a pair of sandals. To buy anything expensive, such as a horse, they paid with a lump of gold or silver, which was weighed in the scales to see just how heavy it was. It is hard for us to think how people could get along without cents and nickels, dimes, quarters and dollars—with no money at all—and yet they did.

Crœsus, in order to make things simpler, cut up his gold into small bits. Now, it was not easy for every one to weigh each piece each time it was traded, for he might not have any scales handy. So Crœsus had each piece weighed and stamped with its weight and with his name or initials to show that he guaranteed the weight. These pieces of gold and silver were only lumps with Crœsus’ seal pressed into them, but they were the first real money even though they were not round and beautifully engraved like our coins.

Now, Cyrus, the great Persian king, thought he would like to own this rich country of Lydia with all its gold-mines, so he set out to conquer it.

When Cyrus was on the way Crœsus sent in a hurry to the oracle in Greece to ask what was going to happen and who was going to win. You will remember what I said about the oracle at Delphi and how people used to ask the oracle questions—to have their fortunes told, as nowadays some people ask the ouija board.

The oracle replied to Crœsus’ question:

“A great kingdom shall fall.”

Crœsus was delighted, for he thought the oracle meant that Cyrus’ kingdom would fall. The oracle was right, but not in the way Crœsus had thought.

A great kingdom did fall, but it was his own kingdom of Lydia and not Cyrus’ that fell.

But Cyrus was still not satisfied with the capture of Lydia, and so at last he attacked Babylon.

Now, the people in Babylon who thought of nothing but pleasure were busy feasting and drinking and having a good time. Why should they worry about Cyrus? Their city had walls that were so high and thick and was protected by such strong gates of brass that it seemed as if no one could possibly have captured it.

But you remember that the Euphrates River ran beneath the walls and crossed right through the city. Well, one night when the young prince of Babylon named Belshazzar was having a gay party and enjoying himself, feeling quite certain that no one could enter the city, Cyrus made a dam and turned the waters of the river to one side. Then Cyrus’ army marched into the city through the dry river-bed and captured the surprised Babylonians without even a fight. It is supposed that some of the Babylonian priests helped him to do this and even opened the gates, for Babylon had become so wicked that they thought it time for it to be destroyed.

Old Lycurgus would have said: “I told you so. People who think of nothing but pleasure never come to a good end.”

This surprise party was in 538—5 and 3 are 8.

Two years later Cyrus let the Jews, who had been carried away fifty years before from Jerusalem, return to the home of their fathers, thus ending the Babylonian Captivity.

To-day the only thing left of this great city of Babylon, which was once bigger than New York and London together—Babylon the Wicked, Babylon the Magnificent, Babylon with all its great walls and brass gates and Hanging Gardens—is only a mound of earth. A few miles away is a ruined tower. This tower, we think, may once have been the Tower of Babel.

The Other Side of the World

There used to be a “missionary box” in my Sunday-school, and into this box we dropped our pennies to send a missionary to the heathen.

The heathen, we were told, were people who lived on the other side of the world and worshiped idols.

There was the heathen “Chinee,” the heathen “Japanee,” and the heathen Indian.

These heathen Indians were not our American Indians. They lived in a country called India on the other side of the world. India looks on the map like the little thing that hangs down in the back of your mouth when the doctor says: “Stick out your tongue. Say ’Ah.’” Our Indians are red, but the Indians from India are white. The white Indians belong to the Aryan family, the same family that Cyrus belonged to.

Two thousand years before the time of Cyrus, an Aryan family had moved away from the other Aryan families in Persia until they had come to this country we now call India.

In the course of time there came to be four chief classes of people in India, four chief classes of society—high society, low society, and two classes of society in between. These classes were called castes, and no one in one caste would have anything to do with one in another caste. A boy or girl in one caste would never play with a boy or girl in another caste. A man from one caste would never marry a woman in another. No one from one caste would eat with one in another caste, even though he were starving. Men in different castes were even afraid of touching each other in passing on the street. It was almost as if they were afraid of catching some horrible disease.

The highest caste of all were the Fighters and Rulers. The Rulers were the Fighters, and the Fighters were the Rulers, for they had to be fighters in order to keep their rule.

In the next caste were the Priests; and, as in the case of the Egyptian priests, these men were not what we think of as priests nowadays. They were what we should call professional men—doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.

Next came the farmers and tradespeople—the butcher, the baker, and candlestick maker.

Fourth and last were the common laborers. These were the men who knew nothing and could do nothing but dig or chop wood or carry water.

Below these four castes were still other people so low and mean that they were called outcastes or Pariahs. We now call any person who has done something so disgraceful that no one, not even the lowest, will have anything to do with him a “pariah.”

The people in India believed in a god whom they called Brahma, and so we call their religion Brahmanism. The Brahmanists believed that when a person died his soul was born again in the body of another person or perhaps of an animal. If he had been good while alive they thought his soul went into the body of a higher caste man when he died—as if he were promoted from one grade to the next. If, however, he had led a bad life they thought his soul went into the body of a lower caste man or even of an animal.

When a man died, his body was not buried, it was burned. If he were a married man, his wife was obliged to throw herself alive upon the burning flames. She was not allowed to live after her husband was dead. If the wife died, that was another matter; the man simply got another wife. In the Brahman temples were hideous idols, which the people worshiped as gods. These idols had several heads apiece or many arms, or many legs, or they had tusks sticking out of their mouths—or they had horns coming out of their heads.

About the year 500 B.C. there was born a prince in India by the name of Gautama. Gautama saw so much suffering and trouble in the world that he felt it was not right that he himself, just because he by chance had been born rich, should be happy while others were miserable and unhappy. So he gave up the life to which he had been born and brought up, a life of ease and luxury with all its good things, and spent his entire time trying to make things better for his people.

Gautama taught the people to be good; he taught them to be honest; and he taught them to help the poor and unfortunate. After a while people began to call him Buddha, and he was so holy and pure that at last they thought he must be god himself, and so they worshiped him as god.

These people who believed in Buddha were called Buddhists, and many, many Brahmanists left their hideous idols and became Buddhists. You see there was no such thing as a Christian religion as yet, for this was still five hundred years before Christ was born, and Buddhism seemed so much better than Brahmanism that we do not wonder that great numbers of people became Buddhists.

Buddhists thought their religion was so good that they wanted everyone to become Buddhists; so they sent missionaries across country and sea to the island of Japan just as we send Christian missionaries now, and this new religion spread far and wide.

Perhaps you have never met nor seen nor even heard of a Buddhist, and yet to-day there are many more Buddhists on the other side of the world than there are Christians!

About the same time that Gautama was starting Buddhism in India, a man in China, a teacher by the name of Confucius, was teaching the people of China what they ought to do and what they ought not to do. His teachings filled several books and formed what came to be a religion for the Chinese.

Confucius taught his people to obey their parents and teachers and to honor their ancestors. This sounds something like one of the Ten Commandments: “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

Confucius also taught the golden rule, the same golden rule you are taught to-day, only instead of saying, “Do unto others as you would be done by,” he said, “Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you.”

In China there are still as many people who follow the teachings of Confucius as there are Christians in all the rest of the world. So here are two religions each as large or larger than the Christian religion.

China was highly civilized, even at this time, 500 B.C., and many inventions were known and used in that country long before the rest of the world ever heard of them. Yet we know little of China’s history until a great deal later.

Rich Man, Poor Man

Whenever I pass a group of street boys playing ball, I almost always hear some one shout, “That’s no fair!”

There always seem to be some players who think the others are not playing fair. Sides are always quarreling.

They need an umpire.

When Athens was young there were two sides among the people—the rich and the poor, the aristocrats and the common people—and they were always quarreling. Each side was trying to get more power, and each side said the other wasn’t playing fair.

They needed an umpire.

Athens had had kings, but the kings took the side of the rich, and so at last the Athenians had kicked out the last king, and after that they would have no more kings.

About the year 600 B.C. things became so very bad that a man named Draco was chosen to make a set of rules for the Athenians to obey. These rules he made were called the Code of Draco.

Draco’s Code made terrible punishments for any one who broke the rules. If a man stole anything, even as small a thing as a loaf of bread, he was not just fined or sent to jail; he was put to death! And no matter how small the wrong a man had done, he was put to death for it. Draco explained the reason for such a severe law by saying that a thief deserved to be put to death and should be. A man who killed another deserved more than to be put to death, but unfortunately there was no worse punishment to give him.

You can understand how much trouble the laws of Draco caused. They were so hard that a little later another man was called upon to make a new set of laws. This man was named Solon, and his laws were very just and good. We now call senators and other people who make our laws “Solons” after this man Solon who lived so long ago, even though their laws are not always just and good.

Still the people were not satisfied with Solon’s laws. The upper classes thought the laws gave too much to the lower classes, and the lower classes thought they gave too much to the upper. Both classes, however, obeyed the laws for a while, although both classes complained against them.

But about 560 B.C. a man named Pisistratus stepped in and took charge of things himself. He was not elected nor chosen by the people. He simply made himself ruler, and he was so powerful that no one could stop him. It was as if a boy made himself captain or umpire without being chosen by those on the teams.

There were others from time to time in Greece who did the same thing, and they were called tyrants. So Pisistratus was a tyrant. Nowadays only a ruler who is cruel and unjust is called a tyrant. Pisistratus, however, settled the difficulties of both sides, and, though a tyrant in the Greek sense, he was neither cruel nor unjust. In fact, Pisistratus ruled according to the laws of Solon, and he did a great deal to improve Athens and the life of the people. Among other things he did, he had Homer’s poems written down, so that people could read them, for before this time people knew them only from hearing them recited. So the people put up with Pisistratus and also with his son for a while. But finally the Athenians got tired of the son’s rule and drove all the Pisistratus family out of Athens in 510 B.C.

The next man to try and settle the quarrels of the two sides was named Clisthenes. It is hard, sometimes, to learn the name of a stranger to whom we have just been introduced unless we hear his name repeated several times. So I will say over his name so that you can get used to hearing it:

Clisthenes;
Clisthenes;
Clisthenes.

Your father may be poor or he may be rich.

If he is poor he has one vote when there is an election.

If he is rich he has one vote but only one vote and no more.

If he breaks the laws, whether he is rich or whether he is poor, he must go to jail.

It was not always so; it is not always so even now. But long ago it was much worse.

Clisthenes gave every one a vote—rich and poor alike—and ruled wisely and well.

Clisthenes started something called ostracism. If for any reason the people wanted to get rid of a man, all they had to do was to scratch his name on any piece of a broken pot or jar they might find and drop it in a voting-box on a certain day. If there were enough such votes, the man would have to leave the city and stay away for ten years. This was called ostracism, and a man so treated was said to be ostracized, from the Greek name for such a broken piece of pottery, on which the name was written. Even to-day we use this same word to speak of a person whom no one will have anything to do with, whom no one wants around, saying he has been ostracized.

Have you ever been sent away from the table to the kitchen or to your room for being naughty?

Then you, too, have been ostracized.

Rome Kicks Out Her Kings

In 509 B.C. something happened in Rome.

There were two classes of people in Rome, just as there were in Athens; the wealthy people who were called patricians and the poor people who were called plebeians. We use the same words now and call people who are rich and aristocratic “patricians,” and the people who are poor and uneducated “plebeians.” The patricians were allowed to vote, but the plebeians were not allowed to vote.

At last, however, the plebeians had been given the right to vote. But in 509 Rome had a king named Tarquin. He didn’t think the plebeians should be allowed to vote, and so he said they should not. The plebeians would not stand this, and so they got together and drove Tarquin out of the city, as the Athenians had driven out their king. This was in 509, and Tarquin was the last king Rome ever had.

After King Tarquin had been driven out, the Romans started what is called a republic, something like our own country, but they were afraid to have only one man as president for fear he might make himself king, and they had had enough of kings.

So the Romans elected two men each year to be rulers over them, and these two men they called consuls. Each consul had a body-guard of twelve men—just a dozen. These men were given the name “lictors,” and each lictor carried an ax tied up in a bundle of sticks. This bundle of sticks with the ax-head sticking out in the middle or at the end was known as “fasces” and signified that the consuls had power to punish by whipping with the sticks or by chopping off one’s head with the ax.

Perhaps you have seen fasces used as ornaments or as a decoration around monuments or on buildings like a court-house, city hall, or capitol. Why do you suppose they are used in this way?

One of the first two consuls was named Brutus the Elder, and he had two sons. The king, Tarquin, who had been driven out of the city, plotted to get back to Rome and become king once more. He was able to persuade some Romans to help him. Among those whom he persuaded were, strange to say, the two sons of Brutus—the new consul of Rome.

Brutus found out this plot and learned that his own children had helped Tarquin. So Brutus had his sons tried. They were found guilty, and in spite of the fact that they were his own children, he had the lictors put both of them to death as well as the other traitors to Rome.

Tarquin did not succeed in getting back the rule of Rome in this way, and so the next year he tried again. This time he got together an army of his neighbors, the Etruscans, and with this army he attacked Rome.

Now, there was a wooden bridge across the Tiber River, which separated the Etruscans from the city of Rome. In order to keep the Etruscans from crossing into the city, a Roman named Horatius, who had already lost one eye in fighting for Rome, gave orders to have this bridge broken down.

While the bridge was being chopped down, Horatius with two of his friends stood on the far side of the bridge and fought back the whole Etruscan army. When the bridge was cracking under the blows of the Roman soldiers, Horatius ordered his two friends to run quickly to the other side before the bridge fell.

Then Horatius, all by himself, kept the enemy back until at last the bridge crashed into the river. Horatius then jumped into the water with all his armor on and swam toward the Roman shore. Though arrows the Etruscans shot were falling all around him, and though his armor weighed him down, he reached the other side safely. Even the Etruscans were thrilled at his bravery, and, enemies though they were, they cheered him loudly.

There is a very famous poem called “Horatius at the Bridge,” which describes this brave deed, and most boys like to learn at least a part of it.

A few years after Horatius, there lived another Roman named Cincinnatus. He was only a simple farmer with a little farm on the bank of the Tiber, but he was very wise and good, and the people of Rome honored and trusted him.

One day when an enemy was about to attack the city—for in those days there always seemed to be enemies everywhere ready to attack Rome on any excuse—the people had to have a leader and a general. They thought of Cincinnatus and went and asked him to be dictator.

Now, a dictator was the name they gave to a man who in case of sudden danger was called upon to command the army and in fact all the people for the time being while there was danger. Cincinnatus left his plow, went with the people to the city, got together an army, went out and defeated the enemy, and returned to Rome, all in twenty-four hours!

The people were so much pleased with the quick and decided way in which Cincinnatus had saved Rome that they wanted him to keep right on being their general in time of peace. Even though they hated kings so much, they would have made him king if he would have accepted.

But Cincinnatus did not want any such thing. His duty done, he wanted to return to his wife and humble home and his little farm. So in spite of what many would have thought a wonderful chance, he did go back to his plow, choosing to be just a simple farmer instead of being king.

The city of Cincinnati in Ohio is named after a society which was founded in honor of this old Roman, who lived nearly five hundred years before Christ.

Greece vs. Persia

Do you know what those two little letters “vs.” mean between Greece and Persia in the name of this story?

Perhaps you have seen them used on football tickets when there was to be a match between two teams, as, for example, Harvard vs. Yale.

They stand for “versus,” which means “against.”

Well, there was to be a great match between Greece and Persia, but it wasn’t a game; it was a fight for life and death, a fight between little Greece and great big Persia.

Cyrus, the great Persian king, had conquered Babylon and other countries, as well, and he had kept on conquering until Persia ruled most of the world, all except Greece and Italy.

About the Year 500 B.C. the new ruler of this vast Persian Empire was a man named Darius. Darius looked at the map, as you might do, and saw that he owned and ruled over a large part of it. What a pity, thought he, that there should be a little country like Greece that did not belong to him!

So Darius said to himself, “I must have this piece of land called Greece to complete my empire.” Besides, the Greeks had given him some trouble. They had helped some of his subjects to rebel against him. Darius said, “I must punish these Greeks for what they have done and then just add their country to mine.”

So he called his son-in-law and told him to go over to Greece and conquer it.

His son-in-law did as he was told and started out with a fleet and an army to do the punishing. But before his fleet could reach Greece it was destroyed by a storm, and he had to go back home without having done anything.

Darius was very angry at this, mad with his son-in-law and mad with the gods who he thought had wrecked his ships, and he made up his mind that he himself would go and do the punishing and conquering the next time.

First, however, he sent his messengers to all the Greek cities and ordered each of them to send him some earth and some water as a sign that they would give him their land and become his subjects peaceably without a fight.

Many Greek cities were so frightened by the threat of Darius and by his mighty power that they gave in at once and sent earth and water as they were told to do.

But little Athens and little Sparta both hotly refused to do so, in spite of the fact that they were only two small cities against the vast empire of Darius.

Athens took Darius’ messenger and threw him into a well, saying, “There is earth and water for you; help yourself”; and Sparta did likewise. Then these two cities joined their forces and called on all their neighbors to join with them to fight for their native land against Darius and Persia.

So Darius made ready to conquer Athens and then Sparta.

In order to reach Athens his army had to be carried across the sea in boats. Of course, in those days there were no steamboats. Steamboats were invented thousands of years later. The only way to make a boat go was with sails or with oars. To make a large boat move with oars, it was necessary to have a great many rowers—three rows one above the other on each side of the boat.

Such a boat was called a trireme, which means three rows of oars. It took about 600 of these boats to carry Darius’ army over to Greece. Each of these 600 boats carried, besides the rowers or crew, about 200 soldiers. So you can see for yourself how many soldiers Darius had in this army, if there were 600 ship-loads of them and 200 soldiers on each ship. Yes, that is an example in multiplication—120,000 soldiers—that’s right.

So the Persians sailed across the sea; and this time there was no storm, and they reached the shore of Greece safely. They landed on a spot called the plain of Marathon, which was only about twenty-six miles away from Athens. You will see presently why I have told you just the number of miles—twenty-six.

When the Athenians heard that the Persians were coming, they wanted to get Sparta in a hurry to help, as she had promised to do.

Now, there were no telegraphs or telephones or railroads, of course, in those days. There was no way in which they could send a message to Sparta except to have it carried by hand.

So they called on a famous runner named Pheidippides to carry the message. Pheidippides started out and ran the whole way from Athens to Sparta, about one hundred and fifty miles, to carry the message. He ran night and day, hardly stopping at all to rest or to eat, and on the second day he was in Sparta.

The Spartans, however, sent back word that they couldn’t start just then; the moon wasn’t full, and it was bad luck to start when the moon wasn’t full, as nowadays some superstitious people think it bad luck to start on a trip on Friday. They said they would come after a while, when the moon was full.

But the Athenians couldn’t wait for the moon. They knew the Persians would be in Athens before then, and they didn’t want them to get as far as that.

So all the fighting men in Athens left their city and went forth to meet the Persians on the plain of Marathon—twenty-six miles away.

The Athenians were led by a man named Miltiades, and there were only ten thousand soldiers of them. Besides these, there were one thousand more from a little near-by town, which was friendly with Athens and wished to stand by her—eleven thousand in all. If you figure it out, you will see that there were perhaps ten times as many Persians as there were Greeks, ten Persian soldiers to one Greek soldier.

The Greeks, however, were trained athletes, as we know, and their whole manner of life made them physically fit. The Persians were no match for them. And so, in spite of the small number of Greeks, the large number of Persians were beaten, and beaten badly. Of course the Greeks were far better soldiers than the Persians, for all their training made them so, but more than all this, they were fighting for themselves to save their homes and their families.

Perhaps you have heard the fable of the hound who was chasing a hare. The hare escaped. The hound was made fun of for not catching the little hare. To which the hound replied, “I was only running for my supper; the hare was running for his life.”

The Persian soldiers were not fighting for their homes or families, which were away back across the sea; and it made little difference to them who won, anyway, for they were merely hirelings on slaves; they were fighting for a king because he ordered them to.

Naturally the Greeks were overjoyed at this victory.

Pheidippides, the famous runner, who was now at Marathon, started off at once to carry the joyful news back to Athens, twenty-six miles away. The whole distance he ran without stopping for breath. But he had not had time to rest up from his long run to Sparta, which he had taken only a few days before, and so fast did he run this long distance that as soon as he had reached Athens and gasped the news to the Athenians in the market-place he dropped down dead!

In honor of this famous run, they have nowadays, in the new Olympic Games, what is called a Marathon race, in which the athletes run this same distance.

This battle of Marathon took place in 490 B. C. and is one of the most famous battles in all history, for the great Persian army was beaten by one little city and its neighbor, and the Persians had to go back to their homes in disgrace.

A little handful of people, who governed themselves, had defeated a great king with a large army of only hired soldiers or slaves.

But this was not the last the Greeks were to see of the Persians.

Fighting Mad

Darius was now angrier than ever, and still more determined to whip those stubborn Greeks, who dared to defy him and his enormous power; and he began to get ready for one more attempt. This time, however, he made up his mind that he would get together such an army and navy that there would be no chance in the world against it, and he made a solemn oath to destroy the Greeks. So for several years he gathered troops and supplies, but something happened, and in spite of his oath he did not carry out his plan. Why? You guessed it. He died.

But Darius had a son named Xerxes—pronounced as if it began with a Z.

When I was a boy, there was an alphabet rime that began, “A is for Apple,” and went on down to, “X is for Xerxes, a great Persian king.” I learned the rime, though I did not know at that time anything either about Xerxes or Persia.

Xerxes was just as determined as his father had been that the Greeks must be beaten, so he went on getting ready.

But the Greeks also were just as determined that they must not be beaten, so they, too, went on getting ready, for they knew the Persians would sooner or later come back and try again.

At this time there were two chief men in Athens, and each was trying to be leader. One was named Themistocles—pronounced The-mis-to-klees—and the other Aristides—pronounced Air-is-tie-dees. Notice how many Greek names seem to end in “es.”

Themistocles urged the Athenians to get ready for what he knew was coming, the next war with Persia. Especially did he urge the Athenians to build a fleet of boats, for they had no boats and the Persians had a great many.

Aristides, on the other hand, didn’t believe in Themistocles’ scheme to build boats. He thought it a foolish expense and talked against it.

Aristides had always been so wise and fair that people called him Aristides the Just. Some of the people wanted to get rid of him, because they thought he was wrong and Themistocles was right. So they waited till the time came to vote to ostracize any one they wanted to get rid of. Do you remember who started this custom? Clisthenes—about 500 B.C.

When the day for voting came, a man who could not write and did not know Aristides by sight happened to ask his help in voting. Aristides inquired what name he should write, and the man replied, “Aristides.”

Aristides did not tell who he was, but merely said:

“Why do you want to get rid of this man? Has he done anything wrong?”

“Oh, no,” the voter replied. “He hasn’t done anything wrong”; but with a long sigh he said, “I’m so tired of hearing him always called ’The Just.’”

Aristides must have been surprised by this unreasonable answer, but nevertheless he wrote his own name for the voter, and when the votes were counted there were so many that he was ostracized.

Though it did not seem quite fair that Aristides should be ostracized, it was fortunate, as it turned out, that Themistocles had his way, and it was fortunate the Athenians went on preparing for war.

They built a fleet of triremes. Then they got all the cities and towns in Greece to agree to join forces in case of war. Sparta, on account of its fame as a city of soldiers, was made the leader of all the others in case war should come.

And then, just ten years after the battle of Marathon, in 480 B. C., the great Persian army was again ready to attack Greece. It had been, brought together from all parts of the vast Persian Empire and was far bigger than the former army with its 120,000 men, although that was a large army for those days.

This time the army is supposed to have consisted of over two million soldiers—two million; just think of that! The question then was how to get so many soldiers over to Greece. Such a multitude could not be carried across to Greece in boats, for even the largest triremes only held a few hundred men, and it would have taken—well, can you tell how many boats, to carry over two million? Probably many more triremes than there were in the whole world at that time. So Xerxes decided to have his army march to Greece, the long way but the only way round. So they started.

Now, there is a strip of water called a strait, something like a wide river, right across the path the Persian army had to take. This strait was then called the Hellespont. It is, of course, still there, but if you look on the map now you will find it is now called the Dardanelles. But there was no bridge across the Hellespont, for it was almost a mile wide, and they didn’t have bridges as long as that in those days. So Xerxes fastened boats together in a line that stretched from one shore to the other shore, and over these boats he built a floor to form a bridge so that his army could cross upon it.

Hardly had he finished building the bridge, however, when a storm arose and destroyed it. Xerxes, in anger at the waves, ordered that the water of the Hellespont be whipped as if it were a slave he were punishing. Then he built another bridge, and this time the water behaved itself, and his soldiers were able to cross over safely.

So vast was Xerxes’ army that it is said to have taken it seven days and seven nights marching continuously all the time in two long unbroken lines to get over to the opposite shore. Xerxes’ fleet followed the army as closely as they could along the shore, and at last they reached the top of Greece. Down through the north of Greece the army came, overrunning everything before it, and it seemed as though nothing on earth could stop such numbers of men.

One Against a Thousand

There is a little narrow passageway with the mountains on one side and the water on the other through which the Persians had to go to reach Athens. This pass is called Thermopylæ, and you might guess what Thermopylæ means if you notice that the first part is like Thermos bottle, which means “hot” bottle. As a matter of fact, Thermopylæ meant Hot Gateway, and was so named because this natural gateway to Greece had hot springs near-by.

The Greeks decided that it was best to stop the Persians at this gate—to go to meet them there first before they reached Athens. In such a place a few Greek soldiers could fight better against a much larger number.

It also seemed wise to send picked Greek troops to meet the Persians, the very best soldiers in Greece with the very bravest general to lead them.

So the Spartan king, who was named Leonidas—which in Greek means “like a lion”—was chosen to go to Thermopylæ, and with him seven thousand soldiers—seven thousand soldiers to block the way of two million Persians! Three hundred of these were Spartans, and a Spartan was taught that he must never surrender, never give up. A Spartan mother used to say to her son:

“Come back with your shield or on it.”

When Xerxes found his way blocked by this ridiculously small band of soldiers, he sent his messengers ordering them to surrender, to give themselves up.

And what do you suppose Leonidas replied?

It was what we should expect a Spartan to answer, brief and to the point; that is, “Laconic.” He said simply:

“Come and take us.”

As there was nothing left for Xerxes to do but fight, he started his army forward.

For two days the Persians fought the Greeks, but Leonidas still held the pass, and the Persians were unable to get through.

Then a Greek traitor and coward, who thought he might save his own life and be given a rich prize by Xerxes, told that king of a secret path over the mountains by which he and his army might slip through and get around Leonidas and his soldiers who blocked the way.

The next morning Leonidas learned that the Persians had found out this path and were already on the way to pen him in from behind. There was still a chance, however, for his men to escape, and Leonidas told all those who wanted to do so to leave. Those that remained knew that the fight was absolutely hopeless and that it meant certain death for all them. In spite of this, however, one thousand men, including all the three hundred Spartans stood by their leader, for, said they:

“We have been ordered to hold the pass, and a Spartan obeys orders, and never surrenders, no matter what happens.”

So there Leonidas and his thousand men fought to the bitter end until all except one of their number was killed.

The gateway to the city of Athens was now open, and things looked very black for the Greeks, for there was nothing to prevent the Persians from marching over the dead bodies of Leonidas and his men straight on to Athens.

The Athenians, wondering what was to happen to them, hurriedly went to the oracle at Delphi and asked what they should do.

The oracle replied that the city of Athens itself was doomed, that it would be destroyed, there was no hope for it, but that the Athenians themselves would be saved by wooden walls.

This answer, as was usually the case in whatever the oracle said, was a riddle, the meaning of which seemed hard to solve. Themistocles, however, said that he knew the answer. You remember that it was he who had been working so hard to have a fleet of ships built. Themistocles said that the oracle meant these ships when it spoke of the wooden walls.

So the Athenians, following the supposed advice of the oracle, left their city as Themistocles told them and went on board the ships, which were not far away, in a bay called Salamis.

The Persian army reached Athens and found it deserted. So they burned and destroyed the city as the oracle said. Then they marched on to the Bay of Salamis, where the Athenians were on board the ships. There, on a hill overlooking the bay, Xerxes had a throne built for himself so that he could sit, as if in a box at the theater looking at a play, and watch his own large fleet destroy the much smaller one of the Greeks with all the Athenians on board.

The Greek fleet was commanded, of course, by Themistocles. His ships were in this narrow bay or strait of water, somewhat in the same way that the soldiers of Leonidas had been in the narrow valley at Thermopylæ.

Themistocles, seeing that the Bay of Salamis looked somewhat like the Pass of Thermopylæ, had an idea. He made believe he was a traitor like the traitor at Thermopylæ and sent word to Xerxes that if the Persian fleet divided and one half stayed at one end of the strait and the other half closed off the other end of the strait, the Greeks would be penned in between and caught as in a trap.

Xerxes thought this a good idea, so he gave orders to have his ships do as Themistocles had suggested. But Xerxes, sitting smiling on his throne, had the surprise of his life. The result was just the opposite of what he had expected. With the Persian fleet separated in two parts, the Greeks in between could fight both halves of the divided fleet at the same time, and the space was so narrow that the Persians’ ships got in the way of each other and rammed and sank their own boats.

And so the Persian fleet was completely beaten, and the proud and boastful Xerxes, with most of his army and all the navy that was left, made a hasty retreat back to Persia the way they had come.

And this was the last time the Persians ever tried to conquer little Greece.

If Themistocles had not had his way and built such a strong fleet, what do you think would have become of Athens and Greece!

The Golden Age

When we were talking about the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, I told you that later we should also hear of a Golden Age.

Well, we have come to the Golden Age now. This doesn’t mean that people at this time used things made of gold, nor that they had a great deal of gold money. It means—well, let us see what sort of a time it was, and then you can tell what it means.

After the wars with Persia, Athens seemed to have been cheered up by her victory to do wonderful things, and the next fifty years after the Persians were driven out of Greece—that is, 480 to 430 B. C.—were the most wonderful years in the history of Greece and perhaps the most wonderful years in the history of the world.

Athens had been burned down by Xerxes. At the time it happened this seemed like a terrible misfortune. But it wasn’t. The people set to work and built a much finer and much more beautiful city than the old one had been.

Now, the chief person in Athens at this time was a man named Pericles. He was not a king nor a ruler, but he was so very wise and such a wonderful speaker and such a popular leader that he was able to make the Athenians do as he thought best. He was like the popular captain of a football team, who is a fine player himself and can make fine players of all the others on his team. Athens was his team, and he trained it so well that any one of the team would have been able to fill any position no matter how important it was. Some men became great artists. Some men became great writers. Some men became great philosophers. Do you know what philosophers are? They are wise men who know a great deal and love knowledge.

The artists built many beautiful buildings, theaters, and temples. They made wonderful statues of the Greek gods and goddesses and placed them on the buildings and about the city.

The philosophers taught the people how to be wise and good.

The writers composed fine poems and plays. The plays were not like those we have nowadays but were all about the doings of the gods and goddesses.

The theaters were not like those we have nowadays, either. They were always out of doors, usually on the side of a hill, where a “grand stand” could be built facing the stage. There was little or no scenery, and instead of an orchestra of musicians there was a chorus of singers to accompany the actors. The actors wore false faces or masks to show what their feelings were, a “comic” mask with a grinning face when they wanted to be funny and a “tragic” mask with a sorrowful face when they wanted to seem sad.

Perhaps you have seen pictures of these masks, for in the decorations of our own theaters these same comic and tragic masks are sometimes used.

Athens had been named after the goddess Athene, who was supposed to watch out for and look after the city. So the Athenians thought she should have a special temple. Accordingly, they built one to her on the top of a hill called the Acropolis. This temple they called in her honor the Parthenon, meaning the “maiden,” one of the names by which she was known.

The Parthenon is considered the most beautiful building in the world, though as you see by the picture, as it is to-day, it is now in ruins. In the center of this temple was a huge statue of Athene made of gold and ivory by a sculptor named Phidias. We are told that it was the most beautiful statue in the world as the Parthenon was the most beautiful building, but it has completely disappeared, and no one knows what became of it. One might guess, however, that the gold and ivory tempted thieves, who may have stolen it piece by piece.

Phidias made many other statues on the outside of the Parthenon, but most of these have been carried away and put in museums or have been lost or destroyed.

This statue of Athene and the other sculptures on the Parthenon made Phidias so famous that he was asked to make a statue of Jupiter to be placed at Olympia, where the Olympic Games were held. The statue of Jupiter was finer even than the one he had made of Athene and was so splendid that it was called one of the Seven Wonders of the World. You remember the pyramids of Egypt and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were two others of the Seven Wonders.

Phidias is probably the greatest sculptor that ever lived, but he did a thing which the Greeks considered a crime and would not forgive. We do not see anything so terribly wrong in what he did, but the Greeks’ idea of right and wrong was different from ours. This is what he did. On the shield of the statue of Athene that he had made, Phidias carved a picture of himself and also one of his friend Pericles. It was merely a part of the decoration of the shield, and hardly any one would have noticed it. But according to the Greek notion it was sacrilege to make a picture of a human being on a statue of a goddess. So when the Athenians found out what Phidias had done they threw him into prison, and there he died.

The Greeks used different kinds of columns on their buildings, and these columns are used in many public and in some private buildings to-day. I’ll tell you what each kind is like; then see how many you can find.

The Parthenon was built in a style called Doric.

The top of the column is called the capital, and the capital of the Doric column is shaped like a saucer with a square cover on top of it. There was no base or block at the bottom of the column. It rested directly on the floor. As the Doric column is so plain and strong-looking it is called the man’s style.

The second style is called Ionic.

The capital of the Ionic column has a base, and the capital has ornaments like curls underneath the square top, and the column has a base.

As this column is more slender and more ornamental than the Doric, it is called the woman’s style.

The third style is called Corinthian.

The capital of the Corinthian column is higher than either of the other two and still more ornamental. It is said that the architect who first made this column got his idea for its capital from seeing a basketful of toys that had been placed on a child’s grave as was the custom instead of flowers. The basket had been covered with a slab, and leaves of the thistle called the acanthus had grown up around the basket. It looked so pretty that the architect thought it would make a beautiful capital for a column, and so he copied it.

I asked some boys which one could find the most columns. The next day one boy said he had seen two Ionic columns, one on each side of the door of his house. The second had seen ten Doric columns on the savings-bank. But the third said he had seen 138 Corinthian columns.

“Where on earth did you see so many?” I asked.

“I counted the lamp-posts from my house to the school,” he said. “They were kind of Corinthian columns.”

One of the friends of Pericles was a man named Herodotus. He wrote in Greek the first history of the world. For this reason Herodotus is called the Father of History, and some day if you study Greek you may read what he wrote in his own language. Of course, at that time there was very little history to write. What has happened since hadn’t happened then, and before his time little was known of what had taken place. So Herodotus’s history was chiefly a story of the wars with Persia, which I have just told you about. After that he had to stop; there was nothing more to write about.

In those days every once in a while a terrible contagious disease, called a plague, would break out, and people would be taken sick and die by the thousands, for the doctors knew very little about the plague or how to cure it. Such a plague came upon Athens, and the Athenians died like poisoned flies. Pericles himself nursed the sick and did all he could for them, but finally he, too, was taken sick with the plague and died. So ended the Golden Age, which has been called in honor of its greatest man the Age of Pericles.

When Greek Meets Greek

The Golden Age, when Athens was so wonderful, lasted for only fifty years.

Why, do you suppose, did it stop at all?

It stopped chiefly because of a fight.

This time, however, the fight was not between Greece and some one outside, as in the Persian Wars. The fight was between two cities that had before this been more or less friendly—mostly less—between Sparta and Athens. It was a family quarrel between Greeks. And the fight was all because one of these cities—Sparta—was jealous of the other—Athens.

The Spartans, as you know, were fine soldiers. The Athenians were fine soldiers, too. But ever since Themistocles with the ships he had built had beaten the Persians at Salamis, Athens had also a fine fleet, and Sparta had no fleet. Furthermore, Athens had become the most beautiful and most cultured city in the whole world.

Sparta did not care much about Athens’s beautiful buildings and her education and culture and that sort of thing; that did not interest her. What did make her jealous was Athens’s fleet. Sparta was inland, not on nor near the sea-shore as Athens was; so she could not have a fleet at all. Sparta did not intend, however, to let Athens get ahead of her, and so on one excuse or another Sparta with all of her neighbors started a war against Athens with all of her neighbors.

Sparta was in a part of Greece which was called by the hard name, the Peloponnesus. But in those days the boys did not think this a hard name, for they were as familiar with it as you are with such a name as Massachusetts, for instance, which would seem just as hard to a Greek as Peloponnesus does to you. This war between Athens and Sparta was therefore called the Peloponnesian War from the fact that it was not only Sparta but all of the Peloponnesus that fought against Athens.

We think a war lasts entirely too long if it lasts four or five years, but the Peloponnesian War lasted twenty-seven years! There is a saying, “When Greek meets Greek then comes a tug of war!” which means to say, “When two equal fighters such as Athens and Sparta, both Greek, meet each other in battle, who knows how it will end?”

I am not going to tell you about all the battles that took place during these twenty-seven years, but at the end of this long and bloody war both cities were tired and worn out, and the glory of Athens was gone. Although Sparta was ahead, neither city ever amounted to much afterward. The Peloponnesian War ruined them both. That’s the way war does!

All during the Peloponnesian War there was a man at Athens by the name of Socrates who, many think, was one of the wisest and best men who ever lived. He was called a philosopher and went about the city teaching the people what was right and what they ought to do. But instead of actually telling the people what he thought was right, he asked them questions which made them see what was right. In this way, chiefly by asking questions, he led people to find out for themselves what he wanted them to know. This kind of teaching, simply by asking questions, has ever since been called Socratic.

Socrates had a snub nose and was bald and quite ugly, and yet he was very popular with the Athenians, which may seem strange, for the Athenians loved beautiful faces and beautiful figures and beautiful things, and Socrates was anything but beautiful. It must have been the beauty of Socrates’s character that made them forget his ugliness, as I know some boys and girls who think their teacher is perfectly beautiful just because she is so good and kind that they love her, although she is really not pretty at all.

Socrates had a wife named Xantippe. She had a bad temper and was the worst kind of a crosspatch. She thought Socrates was wasting his time, that he was a loafer, as he did no work that brought in any money. One day she scolded him so loudly that he left the house, whereupon she threw a bucket of water on him. Socrates, who never answered back, merely remarked to himself:

“After thunder, rain may be expected.”

Socrates didn’t believe in all the Greek gods, Jupiter, Venus, and the rest, but he was careful not to say so himself, for the Greeks were very particular that no one should say or do anything against their gods. Phidias, you remember, was thrown into prison for merely putting his picture on the shield of the goddess Athene, and one would have been put to death for teaching young men not to believe in the gods.

At last, however, Socrates, as he had feared he would be, was charged with not believing in the Greek gods and with teaching others not to believe in them. And so for this he was condemned to death. He was not hanged or put to death as prisoners are now, however. He was ordered to drink a cup of hemlock, which was a deadly poison. Socrates’s pupils, or disciples, as they were then called, tried to have him refuse to drink the cup, but he would not disobey the order; and so, when he was nearly seventy years old, he drank the cup of hemlock and died with all his disciples around him.

Although this was four hundred years before Christ was born, and before, therefore, there were any such things as Christians or a Christian religion, yet Socrates believed and taught two things that are just what Christians also believe.

One of these things he believed was that each of us has inside a conscience, which tells us what is right and what is wrong; we don’t have to read from a book or be told by another what is right or what is wrong.

Another thing he taught was that there is a life after death and that when we die our souls live on.

No wonder he was not afraid himself to die!

Wise Men and Otherwise

Have you ever been playing in your yard when a strange boy who had been watching from the other side of the fence asked to be let into the game, saying he would show you how to play? You didn’t want him around, and you didn’t want him in, but somehow or other he got in and was soon bossing everybody else.

Well, there was a man named Philip who lived north of Greece, and he had been watching Sparta and Athens—not playing but fighting—and he wanted “to get into the game.” Philip was king of a little country called Macedonia, but he thought he would like to be king of Greece, also, and it seemed to him a good time, when Sparta and Athens were “down and out” after the Peloponnesian War, to step in and make himself king of that country. Philip was a great fighter, but he didn’t want to fight Greece unless he had to. He wanted to be made king peaceably, and he wanted Greece to do it willingly. So he thought up a scheme to bring this about, and this was his scheme.

He knew, as you do, how the Greeks hated the Persians whom they had driven out of their country over a hundred years before. Although the Persian Wars had taken place so long ago, the Greeks had never forgotten the bravery of their forefathers and the tales of their victories over the Persians. These stories had been told them over and over by their fathers and grandfathers, and they loved to read and reread them in Herodotus’s history of the world.

So Philip said to the Greeks:

“Your ancestors drove the Persians out of Greece, to be sure, but the Persians went back to their country, and you didn’t go after them and punish them as you should have done. You didn’t try ’to get even’ with them. Why don’t you go over to Persia and conquer it now, and make the Persians pay for what they did to you?” Then he slyly added:

“Let me help you. I’ll lead you against them.”

No one seemed to see through Philip’s scheme—nobody except one man. This man was an Athenian named Demosthenes.

Demosthenes, when he was a boy, had decided that he would some day be a great speaker or orator, just as you might say you are going to be a doctor, or an aviator, or a lawyer when you grow up.

But Demosthenes had picked the one profession which by nature he was worst fitted for. In the first place, he had such a very soft, weak voice that one could hardly hear him. Besides this, he st-st-stammered very b-b-badly and could not re-cite even a sh-sh-short p-p-poem without hesit-t-tating and st-st-stumbling so that people laughed at him. It seemed absurd, therefore, that he should aim to be a great speaker.

But Demosthenes practised and practised and practised by himself. He went down on the sea-shore and put pebbles in his mouth to make it more difficult to speak clearly. Then he spoke to the roaring waves, making believe that he was addressing an angry crowd, who were trying to drown the sound of his voice, so that he would have to speak very loud indeed.

So at last, by keeping constantly at it, Demosthenes did become the greatest speaker that ever lived. He spoke so wonderfully that he could make his audience laugh or make them cry whenever he wanted to, and he could persuade them to do almost anything he wished.

Now, Demosthenes was the man who saw through Philip’s scheme for conquering Persia. He knew that Philip’s real aim was to become king of Greece. So he made twelve speeches against him. These speeches were known as Philippics, as they were against Philip. So famous were they that even to-day we call a speech that bitterly attacks any one a Philippic.

The Greeks who heard Demosthenes were red-hot against Philip while they listened to him. But as soon as they got away from the sound of Demosthenes’s words the same Greeks became lukewarm and did nothing to stop Philip.

So at last, in spite of everything that Demosthenes had said, Philip had his way and became king over all Greece.

Before, however, he could start out, as he had promised, to conquer Persia, he was killed by one of his own men, so that he was unable to carry out his plan.

But Philip had a son named Alexander. Alexander was only twenty years old, not old enough even to vote if he had lived in our country, but when his father died he became king of Macedonia and also of Greece.

When Alexander was a mere child, he saw some men trying without success to tame a young and very wild horse that shied and reared in the air so that no one was able to ride it. Alexander asked to be allowed to try to ride the animal. Alexander’s father made fun of his son for wanting to attempt what those older than he had been unable to do, but at last gave his consent.

Now, Alexander had noticed what the others, although much older, had not noticed. The horse seemed to be afraid of its own shadow, for young colts are easily frightened by anything black and moving, as some children are afraid of the dark.

So Alexander turned the horse around facing the sun, so that its shadow would be behind, out of sight. He then mounted the animal and, to the amazement of all, rode off without any further trouble.

His father was delighted at his son’s cleverness and gave him the horse as a reward. Alexander named the horse Bucephalus and became so fond of him that when the horse died Alexander built a monument to him and named several cities after him.

Now, Alexander was a wonderful boy, but he had such a wonderful teacher named Aristotle that some people think part, at least, of his greatness was due to the teacher.

Aristotle was probably the greatest teacher that ever lived. If there were more great teachers like Aristotle, it seems likely there would have been more great pupils like Alexander.

Aristotle wrote books about all sorts of things—books about the stars called astronomy, books about animals called zoölogy, and books on other subjects that you probably have never even heard of, such as psychology and politics.

For thousands of years these books that Aristotle wrote were the school-books that boys and girls studied, and for a thousand years they were the only school-books. Nowadays, a school-book is usually old-fashioned a few years after it is written and is then no longer used. So you see how remarkable it was that Aristotle’s school-books should have been used for so long a time.

Aristotle had been taught by a man named Plato, who was also a great teacher and philosopher. Plato had been a pupil of Socrates, so that Aristotle was a kind of “grand-pupil” of Socrates. You have heard of the Wise Men of the East. These were the three Wise Men of Greece.

Socrates,
Plato,
Aristotle.

Some day you may read what they wrote or said over two thousand years ago.

A Boy King

When you are twenty years old, what do you think you will be doing?

Will you be playing football on your college team?

Will you be working in a bank, or what?

When Alexander was twenty he was king of both Macedonia and Greece. But Macedonia and Greece were entirely too small for this wonderful young man. He wanted to own a much bigger country; in fact, he thought he would like to own the whole world; that was all—nothing more.

So Alexander went right ahead with his father’s plan to conquer Persia. The time had come to pay back Persia for that last invasion one hundred and fifty years before.

He got together an army and crossed the Hellespont into Asia and won battle after battle against the first Persian armies sent out to stop him.

He kept moving on, for Persia was a vast empire.

Soon he came to a town where in a temple there was kept a rope tied into a very far-famed and puzzling knot. It was called the Gordian Knot, and it was very famous because the oracle had said that whoever should undo this knot would conquer Persia. But no one had ever been able to untie it.

When Alexander heard the story, he went to the temple and took a look at the knot. He saw at once that it would be impossible to untie it, so, instead of even trying, as others had done, he drew his sword and with one stroke cut the knot in two.

So now when a person settles something difficult, not by fussing with it as one untangles a snarl, but at a single stroke, cutting through all difficulties, we say he “cuts the Gordian Knot.”

From that time on, Alexander conquered one city after another and never lost any battle of importance until he had conquered the whole of Persia.

Then he went into Egypt, which belonged to Persia, and conquered that country, too. To celebrate this victory, he founded a town near the mouth of the Nile and named it after himself, Alexandria. Then he started there a great library which later grew to be so big that there were said to be five hundred thousand books in it—that is, half a million—and was the largest library of ancient times. The books were not like those in the library of Assur-bani-pal nor the kind we have now, of course, because printing had not been invented. They were every one of them written by hand, and not on pages, but on long sheets which were rolled up on sticks to form a scroll.

In the harbor of Alexandria was a little island called Pharos, and on this island some years later was built a remarkable lighthouse named from the island, the Pharos, and its light could be seen for many miles. It was really a building more like a modern sky-scraper with a tower. It was over thirty stories high, which seemed most remarkable at that time when most buildings were only one or two stories high, and its light could be seen for many miles. So the Pharos of Alexandria was called one of the Seven Wonders of the World. You have already heard of three others, so this makes the fourth.

Alexandria grew in the course of time to be the largest and most important seaport of the ancient world. Now, however, the Pharos and the library and all the old buildings have long since disappeared.

But Alexander did not stay very long in any one place. He was restless. He wanted to keep on the move. He wanted to see new places and to conquer new people. He almost forgot his own little country of Macedonia and Greece. Instead of being homesick, however, as most any one would have been, he kept going farther and farther away from home all the time. We should call such a man an adventurer or an explorer, as well as a great general. And so he kept on conquering and didn’t stop conquering until he had reached far-off India.

There in India his army, which had stayed on with him all the way, became homesick and wanted to go back. They had been away from home for more than ten years and were so far off that they were afraid they would never get back.

Alexander was now only thirty years old, but he was called Alexander the Great, for he was ruler of the whole world—at least, all of it that was then known and inhabited by civilized people, except Italy, which was still only a collection of little, unimportant towns at that time. When Alexander found there were no more countries left for him to conquer, he was so disappointed that he wept!

And so at last, when there was nothing more to conquer, he agreed to do what his army begged him and started slowly back toward Greece.

He got as far as Babylon, the city once so large and so magnificent. There he celebrated with a feast, but while feasting and drinking he suddenly died. So he never reached Greece.

This was in 323 B.C. when he was but 33 years old. You can remember these figures easily, for they are all 3’s except the middle figure in the date, which is one less than 3.

Alexander the Great had conquered the largest country that has ever been under the rule of one man, and yet this was not the only reason we call him the “Great.”

He was not only a great ruler and a great general, but—this may surprise you—he was also a great teacher. Aristotle had taught him to be that.

Alexander taught the Greek language to the people whom he conquered so that they could read Greek books. He taught them about Greek sculpture and painting. He taught them the wise sayings of the Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato and his own teacher, Aristotle. He trained the people in athletics as the Greeks did for their Olympic Games. And so we can say that he taught far more people than any other teacher who has ever lived.

Alexander had married a beautiful Persian girl named Roxana, but their only child was a baby, not born until after his father’s death; so when the great king died there was no one to rule after him. He had told his generals before he died that the strongest one of them should be the next ruler; to fight it out among themselves, as we sometimes say, “May the best man win.”

So his generals did fight to see who should win, and finally four of them, who were victorious, decided to divide up this great empire and each have a share.

One of his generals was named Ptolemy I, and he took Egypt as his share and ruled well; but the others did not amount to much, and after a while their shares became unimportant and went to pieces. Like a red toy balloon which stretches and stretches as you blow it up, Alexander’s empire grew bigger and bigger until—all of a sudden—“pop”—nothing was left but the pieces.

Picking a Fight

“Every dog has his day.”

A tennis or golf champion wins over the one who was champion before him and then has a few years during which he is unbeaten. Sooner or later, however, some younger and better man beats him and in turn takes the championship.

It seems almost the same way with countries as with people. One country wins the championship from another, holds it for a few years, and then, when older, finally loses it to some new-comer.

We have seen that

Nineveh was champion for a while; then
Babylon had her turn; then
Persia, had her turn; then
Greece; and, lastly,
Macedonia.

You may wonder who was to be the next champion after Alexander’s empire went to pieces—who was to have the next turn.

When Alexander was conquering the world he went east toward the rising sun, and south. He paid little attention to the country to the west toward the setting sun. Rome, which we have not heard of for some time, was then only a small town with narrow streets and frame houses. It was not nearly important enough for Alexander to think much about. Rome herself was not thinking of anything then except keeping the neighboring towns from beating her.

It is usual to speak of a city as “her” or “she” as if a city were a girl, but Rome was more like a small boy whom all the other boys were “picking” on. In the course of time, however, Rome began to grow up and was not only able to take care of herself but could put up a very stiff fight. She was then no longer satisfied with just defending herself. So she fought and won battles with most of the other towns in Italy, until at last she found herself champion of the whole of the “boot.” Then she began to look around to see what other countries there were outside of Italy that she might conquer.

Perhaps you have noticed that Italy, the “boot,” seems about to kick a little island as if it were a football. This island is Sicily, and just opposite Sicily was a city called Carthage.

Carthage had been founded by the Phenicians many years before and had become a very rich and powerful city. As she was by the sea, she had built many ships and traded with all the other seaports along the Mediterranean, just as the old Phenician cities of Tyre and Sidon had done.

Carthage did not like to see Rome getting so strong and growing so big and becoming so powerful. In other words, Carthage was jealous of Rome.

Rome, on her side, was jealous of the wealth and trade of Carthage. So Rome anxiously looked around for some excuse to get into a fight with her.

Now, you know how easy it is to pick a quarrel and start a fight when you are “looking for trouble.” One boy sticks out his tongue, the other gives him a kick, and the fight is on.

Well, two countries are at times just like little boys; they start a fight with just as little excuse, and though they call the fight “war” it is nothing but a “scrap.” Only there are no fathers to come along and give them both a spanking and send them to bed without any supper.

So it didn’t take long for Rome and Carthage to find an excuse, and a war was started between them. The Romans called this fight a Punic War, for “Punic” was their name for Phenician, and the Carthaginians were Phenicians.

As Carthage was across the water, the Romans could not get to her except in boats. But Rome had no boats. She was not on the sea-shore, and she knew nothing about making boats, nor about sailing them, if she had had them.

The Carthaginians, on the other hand, had many, many boats, and, like all the Phenicians, were old and experienced sailors.

But Rome happened to find the wreck of a Carthaginian ship that had been cast ashore, and she at once set to work to make a copy of it. In a remarkably short time she had built one ship, then another and another, until she had a great many ships. Then, though she was new at the game, she attacked the Carthaginian fleet.

It would seem that the Carthaginians could easily have won, for the Romans knew so little about boats. But in sea battles, before this, the fighting had been done by running into the enemy and ramming and sinking their ships.

The Romans knew they were no match for the Carthaginians in this sort of fighting. So they thought up a way in which they could fight them as on land.

To do this they invented a kind of big hook which they called a “crow.” The idea was for a ship to run close alongside a Carthaginian ship and, instead of trying to sink her, to throw out this big hook or “crow,” catch hold of the other ship, and pull both boats dose together. The Roman soldiers would then scramble over the sides into the enemy’s boat and fight them the same way they would on land.

The scheme worked.

This new kind of fighting took the Carthaginians by surprise, and they were no match for the Romans at first.

But Rome did not have things all her own way by any means. The Carthaginians soon learned how to fight in this fashion, too. So Rome lost, as well as won, battles both on land and on sea. But at last she did win, and the Carthaginians were beaten. Thus ended the first Punic War.

The Boot Kicks and Stamps

But the Carthaginians were not beaten for good. They were only waiting for another chance to get even. As, however, they had been unsuccessful in attacking Italy from in front as they had been doing, they made up their minds to attack her from the back. Their scheme was to go the long way round through Spain and down into Italy from the north.

In order to do this, they had first of all to conquer Spain so that they could get through. They did this, however, rather easily, for the Carthaginians had a very great general named Hannibal. But then came the great difficulty, to get into Italy by this back way.

Across the top of the “boot,” at the north of Italy, there are the great mountains called the Alps. They are miles high and covered even in summer with ice and snow. There are crags and steep cliffs along which any one passing who made a single misstep would be dashed to death thousands of feet below.

It was the Alps, therefore, that formed a bigger and better wall than any city or country could possibly build. Of course the Romans thought it impossible for any army to climb over such a terribly high and dangerous wall.

Time and again there have been things that people call impossible to do, and then some one has come along and done them.

People said it was impossible to fly.

Then some one did it.

People said it was impossible to cross the Alps with an army.

Then Hannibal came along, and before the Romans knew what had happened he had done it. He had crossed the Alps with his army and was in at the back door!

The Romans were unable to keep him from marching on toward their city, winning battle after battle as he came along. They were unable to prevent him marching up and down Italy, conquering other towns in Italy and doing pretty much as he pleased. It seemed as if Rome were beaten and she were to lose all of Italy.

Now, in some games, if you can’t defend your own goal, it may be a good plan to try attacking your opponent’s goal.

Rome thought she would try this plan. While Hannibal was attacking her, she herself would attack Carthage while its general was away and there was no strong goal-keeper to defend that city.

So the Romans sent a young man named Scipio with an army to do this.

First, however, Scipio went to Spain to cut Hannibal off from the way he had come, and this country Scipio reconquered.

Then he went over to Africa to attack Carthage itself.

The Carthaginians, frightened at being attacked with their general and his army far off in Italy, sent as fast as they could for Hannibal to come home. When at last he arrived, it was too late. Scipio fought a famous battle at Zama near Carthage, and the Carthaginians were beaten, beaten a second time by the Romans. Thus ended the second Punic War in 202 B.C. This is another easy name and easy date—just like a telephone number:

Zama—two-O-two.

The Romans had won two wars against Carthage; you would think that they would now have been satisfied. But they weren’t. They thought they had not beaten Carthage badly enough. They were afraid she was not quite dead or that she might come to life. They thought there might be a little spark left that might start a fire if it weren’t trampled out.

Now, it is bad sport to pummel your opponent after he is beaten, and Carthage was beaten—beaten, black and blue—there was no hope of her “coming back.” And yet a few years later the Romans attacked her again for the third and last time.

Carthage was unable to defend herself, and the Romans viciously burned the city to the ground. It is said they even plowed over the land so that no trace of the city should remain, and sowed it with salt which prevented anything growing there. After that Carthage was never rebuilt, and now it is hard to tell even where the old city once was.

The New Champion of the World

You can well imagine how proud all the Romans now were that they were Romans, for Rome was the champion fighter of the world. If a man could toss his head and say, “I am a Roman citizen,” people were always ready to do something for him, afraid to do him any harm, afraid what might happen to them if they did. Rome was ruler not only of Italy but of Spain and Africa. Like other nations before her, once she had started conquering, she kept on conquering, until by 100 B.C. she in her turn was ruler of almost all the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea—all except Egypt.

The New Champion of the World, who was to be champion for a great many years, was very businesslike and practical.

The Greeks loved beautiful things, beautiful buildings, beautiful sculpture, beautiful poems. The Romans copied the Greeks and learned from them how to make many beautiful things, but the Romans were most interested in practical and useful things.

For example, now that Rome ruled the world, she had to be able to send messengers and armies easily and quickly in every direction to the end of her empire and back again. So it was necessary for her to have roads, for of course there were no railroads then. Now, an ordinary road made by simply clearing away the ground gets full of deep ruts and in rainy weather becomes so muddy that it can hardly be used at all.

So Rome set to work and built roads. These roads were like paved streets. Large rocks were placed at the bottom for a foundation, smaller stones placed on top, and large, flat paving-stones laid over all. Thousands of miles of such roads she built to all parts of her empire. One could go from almost anywhere all the way to Rome on paved roads. We still have an expression, “All roads lead to Rome.” So well were these roads made that many of them still exist to-day, two thousand years after they were built.

The Romans also showed their practical minds by making two very important city improvements. If you live in a city, you turn on a spigot and you get plenty of pure water whenever you want it. The people in cities at that time, however, usually had to get their water both for drinking and for washing from wells or springs near-by. These springs and wells often became dirty and made the people very sick. And so every once in a while because of such dirty water there were those terrible plagues, those terribly contagious diseases like the one I told you about in Athens when people died faster than they could be buried.

The Romans wanted pure water, and so they set to work to find lakes from which they could get pure water. As oftentimes these lakes were many miles away from the city, they then built big pipes to carry the water all the way to the city. Such a pipe was not made of iron or terra-cotta as nowadays, but of stone and concrete, and was called an “aqueduct,” which in Latin means “water-carrier.” If this aqueduct had to cross a river or a valley, they built a bridge to hold it up. Many of these Roman aqueducts are still standing and in use to-day.

Now, up to this time waste water, after it had been used, and also every other kind of dirt and refuse, was simply dumped into the street. This naturally made the city or town filthy and unhealthy and was another cause of plagues. But the Romans built great underground sewers to carry off this dirt and waste water and empty it into the river or into some other place where it would do no harm and cause no sickness. Nowadays, every large city has aqueducts and sewers as a matter of course, but the Romans were the first to build them on a large scale.

One of the most important things that Rome did was to make rules that every one had to obey; laws, we call them. Many of these laws were so fair and just that some of our own laws to-day are copied from them.

All the cities and towns of the Roman Empire had to pay money or taxes to Rome. So Rome became the richest city in the world. Millions of this money, which was brought to her, was spent in putting up beautiful buildings in the city, temples to the gods, splendid palaces for the rulers, public baths and huge open-air places called amphitheaters where the people could be amused.

The amphitheaters were something like our football and baseball fields or stadiums. They did not have football or baseball, however. They had chariot-races, and deadly fights between men, or between men and animals. Chariots were small carts with large wheels drawn by two or by four horses and driven by a man standing up. Perhaps you have seen chariot-races in the circus.

But the sport that the Romans enjoyed most of all was a Fight of Gladiators. Gladiators were very strong and powerful men who had been captured in battle by the Romans. They were made to fight with one another or with wild animals for the amusement of the crowd. These gladiatorial fights were very cruel, but the Romans enjoyed seeing blood shed. They liked to see one man kill another or a wild animal. It was so amusing. The movies would not have interested them half so much. Usually the gladiators fought until one or the other was killed, for the people were not, as a rule, satisfied until this was done.

Sometimes, however, if a gladiator, who had been knocked out, had shown himself particularly brave and a good fighter or a good sport, the people seated all around the amphitheater would turn their thumbs up as a sign that his life was to be spared by the other gladiator. So the winning gladiator, before killing his opponent whom he had down, would wait to see what the people wished. If they turned their thumbs down, it meant he was to finish the fight by killing his man.

But although Rome had become such a fine and beautiful and healthy city in which to live, the rich people were getting most of the money that came there from all over the empire. They were getting richer and richer all the time, while the poor people, who got nothing, were getting poorer and poorer all the time. The Romans brought the people whom they conquered in battle to Rome and made them work for them without pay. These were slaves and they did all the work. It is said that there were more than twice as many slaves as Romans—two slaves for every Roman citizen.

Now, Scipio, who had conquered Hannibal in the Punic War, had a daughter named Cornelia Graccha, and she had two sons. They were very fine boys, and Cornelia was naturally very proud of them.

One day a very rich Roman woman was visiting Cornelia and showing off all her rings and necklaces and other ornaments, of which she had a great many and was very proud.

When she had shown off all she had, she asked to see Cornelia’s jewels.

Cornelia called to her two boys, who were playing outside, and when they came in to their mother she put her arms around them and said:

“These are my jewels.”

But boys who are jewels when they are young do not always turn out to be jewels when they grow up. So you may wonder how Cornelia’s jewels tinned out.

When they grew up, the Gracchi, as they were called, saw such great extravagance among the rich and such great misery among the poor that they wanted to do something about it. They saw that the poor had hardly anything to eat and no place to live. This did not seem fair. So they tried to lower the price of food, so that the poor might be able to buy enough to eat. Then they tried to find some way to give the poor at least a small piece of land where they might raise a few vegetables. They were partly successful in bringing this about. But the rich people didn’t like giving up anything to the poor, and they killed one of the Gracchus brothers, and later they killed the other one, also. These were Cornelia’s jewels.

The Noblest Roman of Them All

Here’s a puzzle for you:

A man once found a very old piece of money that had on it the date “100 B. C.”

That couldn’t be so. Why not? See if you can tell without looking at the answer at the bottom of the page.[1]

In the year 100 B. C. was born in Rome a boy who was named Julius Cæsar.

If you had asked him when he was born, he would have said in the Year 653.

Why do you suppose?

Because Roman boys counted time from the founding of Rome in 753 B. C., and Cæsar was born 653 years after the city was founded. That makes it 100 years before Christ, doesn’t it?

Pirates seemed to be everywhere in the Mediterranean Sea at that time—Pirates. Now that Rome was ruler of the world, there were many ships carrying gold from different parts of the empire to Rome. So the pirates sailed up and down, lying in wait to capture and rob these ships laden with gold.

When Cæsar grew to be a young man, he was sent off to sea to fight these pirates, and he was captured by them. The pirates kept Cæsar a prisoner and sent to Rome saying they would not let him go unless Rome sent them a great deal of money. Cæsar knew that he would be killed if the money was not sent. He knew, too, that he might be killed, anyway. But he was not only not afraid but he told the pirates that if he lived to get back home he would return with a fleet and punish every one of them. When at last the money came they let him go, nevertheless. They thought Cæsar would not dare to do what he said. They thought he was just “talking big.” At any rate, they did not believe he would be able to catch them. Cæsar, however, kept his word, came back after them as he said he would do, and took them prisoners. Then he had them all put to death on the cross, which was the Roman way of punishing thieves.

The far-off places of the Roman Empire were always fighting against Rome trying to get rid of her rule, and had to be kept in order by a general with an army. As Cæsar had shown such bravery in fighting the pirates he was given an army and sent to fight two of these far-off places—Spain and a country north of Spain then known as Gaul, which is now France.

Cæsar conquered these countries, and then he wrote a history of his battles in Latin, which of course was his own language. Nowadays this book, called “Cæsar’s Commentaries,” is usually the first book which those who study Latin read.

In 55 B. C. Cæsar crossed over in ships to the island of Britain, which is now England, conquered it, and went back again next year in 54 B. C.

Cæsar was becoming famous for the way he conquered and ruled over the western part of the Roman Empire. Besides this, he was very popular with his soldiers.

Now there was in Rome at this time another general named Pompey. Pompey had been successfully fighting in the eastern part of the Roman Empire while Cæsar had been fighting in the west. Pompey had been a great friend of Cæsar, but when he saw how much land Cæsar had conquered and how popular he was with his soldiers, he became very jealous of him. Notice how many quarrels and wars are caused simply by jealousy. You have heard of at least two already.

So while Cæsar was away with his army Pompey went to the Roman Senate and persuaded the senators to order Cæsar to give up the command of his army and return to Rome.

When Cæsar received the order from the Senate to give up his command and return to Rome, he thought over the matter for some time. Then at last he made up his mind that he would return to Rome, but he would not give up his command. Instead, he decided that he and his army would take command of Rome itself.

Now, there was a little stream called the Rubicon which separated the part of the country over which Cæsar was given charge from that of Rome. The Roman law forbade any general to cross this stream with an army ready to fight—this was the line beyond which he must not pass, for the Romans were afraid that if a general with an army got too close to Rome he might make himself king.

When Cæsar decided not to obey the Senate, he crossed this stream—the Rubicon—with his army and marched on to Rome.

People now speak of any dividing line from danger as “the Rubicon” and say that a person “crosses the Rubicon” when he takes a step from which there is no turning back, when he starts something difficult or dangerous which he must finish.

When Pompey heard that Cæsar was coming he took to his heels and fled to Greece. In a few days Cæsar had made himself head not only of Rome but of all Italy. Cæsar then went after Pompey in Greece and in a battle with his army beat him badly.

Now that Pompey was out of the way, Cæsar was the chief ruler of the whole of the Roman Empire.

Egypt did not yet belong to Rome. So Cæsar next went there and conquered that country. Now, in Egypt there was ruling a beautiful queen named Cleopatra. Cleopatra was so charming that she seemed able to make every one fall in love with her. Cleopatra flirted with Cæsar and so fascinated him that he almost forgot everything else except making love to her. So although he had won Egypt he made Cleopatra queen over that country.

Just at this time some people in the far eastern part of the empire started a war to get rid of the rule of Rome. Cæsar left Egypt, traveled rapidly to the place where the enemy were, made quick work of conquering them, then sent back the news of his victory to Rome in the most laconic (do you remember what that means?) description ever given of a battle. There were only three words in the message. Although the messenger could have carried three thousand as easily as three words, Cæsar sent a message that would have been short even for a telegram. He wrote, “Veni, vidi, vici,” which means, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

When Cæsar at last got back to Rome, the people wanted to make him king, or said they did. Cæsar was already more than king, for he was head of the whole Roman Empire. But he wasn’t called king, for there had been no kings since 509 B. C., when Tarquin was driven out. The Romans had been afraid of kings and hated them, or were supposed to hate them.

A few of the people thought that Cæsar was getting too much power and believed it would be a terrible thing to make him a king. They, therefore, decided on a plot to prevent such a thing happening. One of these plotters was a man named Brutus who had been Cæsar’s very best friend.

One day when Cæsar was expected to visit the Roman Senate they lay in wait for him until he should appear—in the same way I have seen boys hide around the corner for some schoolmate, against whom they had a grudge, until he should come out of school.

Cæsar came along, and just as he was about to enter the Senate the plotters crowded around him, and one after another they stabbed him.

Cæsar, taken by surprise, tried to defend himself; but all he had was his stylus, which was a kind of pen he used for writing, and he could not do much with that, in spite of a famous saying, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

When at last Cæsar saw Brutus—his best friend—strike at him, his heart seemed broken and he gave up. Then, exclaiming in Latin, “Et tu, Brute!” which means, “And thou, O Brutus!” he fell down dead. This was in 44 B.C.

Antony, one of Cæsar’s true friends, made a speech over Cæsar’s dead body, and his words so stirred the crowd of people that gathered round that they would have torn the murderers to pieces if they could have caught them.

Shakspere has written a play called “Julius Cæsar,” and the month of July is named after him.

Now whom do you suppose Antony called “The Noblest Roman of Them All”?

“Julius Cæsar”?

No, you’re wrong. Brutus, the friend who stabbed Cæsar, was called, “The Noblest Roman of Them All.”

Why, do you suppose?

You’ll have to read Antony’s speech at the end of the play to find out.

Cæsar was pronounced in Latin “Kaiser”; and in later years the rulers of Germany were called this, and those of another country by the shortened form, “Czar.”

An Emperor Who Was Made a God

A man is famous who has a town or a street named after him.

Will you ever do anything great enough to have even an alley named after you?

But just suppose a month, one of the twelve months of the year, was given your name!

Millions upon millions of people would then write and speak your name forever!

But I’m going to tell you about a man who not only had a month named after him but who was made a god!

After Cæsar had been killed, three men ruled the Roman Empire. One of these three men was Antony, the friend of Cæsar, who made the famous speech over his dead body. The second was Cæsar’s adopted son, who was named Octavius. The name of the third you don’t need to know now, for Antony and Octavius soon got rid of him. Then no sooner had they forced him out than each of these two began to plot to get the share of the other.

Antony’s share, over which he ruled, was the eastern part of the empire. The capital of this part was Alexandria in Egypt, and so Antony went there to live.

In Egypt Antony fell in love with Cleopatra, as Cæsar before him had done, and he finally married her.

Octavius, in the west, which was his share, then made war on Antony and Cleopatra together, and in the end beat them both. Antony felt so bad at being beaten by Octavius that he committed suicide.

His widow, Cleopatra, thereupon, flirted with Octavius as she had with Julius Cæsar and Antony, hoping to make him also fall in love with her and so win him in that way.

But it was no use. Octavius was a different kind of man from both Julius Cæsar and Antony. He was cold-blooded and businesslike. He had no heart for love-making. He would not let a woman charm him or turn him aside from his plan, which was to be the greatest man in the world!

Cleopatra saw that it was no use trying her tricks on him. Then she heard that she was going to be taken back to Rome and paraded through the streets, as was done with any other prisoners taken in battle. She could not stand such a shame as that, and so she made up her mind she would not be taken back to Rome.

Now, in Egypt there is a kind of snake called an asp, which is deadly poisonous. Taking one of these asps in her hand, she uncovered her breast and let it bite her, and so she died.

Octavius was now ruler over all the countries that belonged to Rome, and when he returned home to that city, the people hailed him “Emperor.” He then gave up the name Octavius and had himself called “Augustus Cæsar,” which is like saying, “His Majesty, Cæsar.” This was in 27 B.C. Rome had got rid of her kings in 509. From now on she had emperors, who were more than kings, for they ruled over many countries.

Octavius, now with his name changed to Augustus Cæsar, was only thirty-six years old when he became sole master of the Roman world. Rome was the great capital of this vast empire. The city of Rome had probably as many people as New York City proper now has, and the Roman Empire had perhaps as many people as the United States has at present.

Augustus set to work to make Rome a beautiful city. He tore down a great many of the old buildings made of brick and put up in their place a remarkable number of new and handsome buildings of marble. And so Augustus always bragged that he found Rome brick and left it marble.

One of the finest buildings in Rome, the Pantheon, was built. Pantheon means the temple of all the gods. Do not mix this with the Parthenon in Athens, for the two buildings are quite different, and though the names look something alike and sound something alike, they mean quite different things; Parthenon is from the goddess Athene Parthenos; Pantheon is from the two words “Pan theon,” which means “all gods.”

The Pantheon has a dome built of concrete. This dome is shaped like a bowl turned upside down, and in the top of the dome is a round opening called an eye. Though this eye is uncovered, the height is so great above the floor that it is said that rain coming through the eye does not wet the floor beneath but evaporates before reaching it.

So magnificent did the city become with all these wonderful buildings, and so permanently did it seem to be built, that it was known as The Eternal City and is still so spoken of.

There was a public square in Rome called the Forum. Here markets were held and the people came together for all sorts of things. Around the Forum were erected temples to the gods, court-houses, and other public buildings. These court-houses were something like the temples that the Greeks built, only the columns were put on the inside of the building instead of on the outside.

Triumphal arches also were erected to celebrate great victories. When a conquering hero returned from the war, he and his army passed through this arch in a triumphal parade.

There had been in Rome a great amphitheater that is supposed to have held more people than any structure that has ever been built—two hundred thousand, it is said, or more than all the people who live in some good-sized cities. This was called the Circus Maximus. It was at last torn down to make room for other buildings.

Another amphitheater was the Colosseum, but this was not built until some time after Augustus had died. It held about the same number as the largest stadium in this country does to-day. Here were held those fights between men, called gladiators, and wild animals that I have already told you about. It is still standing, and, though it is in ruins, you can sit in the same seats where the old Roman emperors did, see the dens where the wild animals were kept, the doors where they were let into the arena, and even bloody marks that are said to be the stains made by the slain men and beasts.

So many famous writers lived at the time of Augustus that this has been called the Augustan Age. Two of the best known Latin poets, whom every school-boy now reads after he has finished “Cæsar’s Commentaries,” lived at this time. These poets were Vergil and Horace. Vergil wrote the “Æneid,” which told of the wanderings of Æneas, the Trojan, who settled in Italy, and was the great-great-great-grandfather of Romulus and Remus. Horace wrote many short poems called Odes. They were love-songs of shepherds and shepherdesses and songs of the farm and country life. People liked his songs, and many still name their sons after him.

When Augustus Cæsar died, he was made a god, because he had done so much for Rome; temples were built in which he was worshiped, and the month of August was named after him.

“Thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and
the Glory”

Augustus Cæsar had been Ruler of the World.

He had found Rome brick and left it marble.

He had had a month named after him, and

He had been made a god!

Surely no one could ever be greater than he! Yet a greater than he was living at the very same time—a greater ruler of a greater kingdom with greater power and greater glory, although Augustus himself knew nothing about Him and lived and died without ever having heard of Him. This Man was born in the eastern part of Augustus’s empire in a tiny little village called Bethlehem, and His name was Jesus Christ.

For many, many years after Christ was born no one except His family and friends knew or cared anything about His birth or paid the slightest attention to it.

Christ was a Jew, the son of a carpenter. As a boy and young man He led a very simple and quiet life working in His father’s shop. He did not begin to preach until He was more than thirty years old. Then He went about teaching the people what we learn to-day as the Christian religion.

He taught that there was one God over all.

He taught brotherly love, that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself.

He taught the golden rule; that is, “do unto others as you would be done by.”

He taught that there was a life after death for which this short life on earth was only a preparation; that therefore you should “lay up your treasures in heaven” by doing good works here.

The poorer Jews listened to Christ and believed what He taught them. But they thought He was going to set them free from the rule of the Romans, which they hated. The Jewish priests, however, were afraid of what Christ taught. He was teaching some things that were just the opposite of what they themselves taught. So they plotted to have Him put to death.

Now, the Jews could not put Christ to death without the permission of the Roman ruler of that part of the empire where Christ lived. This ruler was named Pilate. So they went to Pilate and told him that Christ was trying to make himself king. Christ of course meant and always said that He was a heavenly ruler and not an earthly king. The Jews knew that Pilate would not care at all what religion Christ taught. There were all sorts of religions in the Roman Empire—those that believed in mythological gods and those that believed in idols and those that believed in the sun, moon, and so on—one more new religion made little difference to the Romans, and Christ would not be put to death simply for teaching another. But the Jews knew if they could make Pilate believe that Christ was trying to make himself a king, that was a thing He could be crucified for. Pilate did not believe much in what the Jews said against Christ. It was a small matter to him, one way or the other, however. But he wanted to please the Jews, so he told them to go ahead and put Christ to death if they wanted to. So He was crucified.

Christ had chosen twelve men to teach what He told them. These twelve men were called apostles. After Christ was crucified these apostles went through the land teaching the people what Christ had taught them. Those who believed in and followed His teachings were called disciples of Christ or Christians. The apostles were teachers; the disciples were pupils.

The Romans thought these disciples of Christ were trying to start a new world empire, and that they were against Rome and the emperor and should be arrested and put in prison. So the Christians usually held their meetings in secret places, sometimes even underground, so that they would not be found and arrested.

But after a while the leaders of the Christians became bolder. They came out of their secret places and taught and preached openly, although they knew they would sooner or later be thrown into prison and perhaps killed. Indeed, so strongly did they believe in the teachings of Christ that they seemed even glad to die for His sake, as He had died on the cross for them.

In the first hundred years after Christ, there were a great many Christians put to death because they were thought traitors. Christians who died for Christ’s sake were called martyrs. The first martyr was named Stephen. He was stoned to death about 33 A.D.

One of the men who helped in putting Stephen to death was a man named Saul. Saul was a Roman citizen and, like other Roman citizens, was proud of that fact. He thought the Christians were enemies of his country, and he did everything he could to have the Christians punished. Then, all of a sudden, Saul had a change of heart and came to believe in the religion of the very people whom he had been fighting. Whatever Saul did or whatever he believed he did or believed with his whole soul. Though he had never seen Christ, he became one of the chief Christians and then was made an apostle and was called by his Roman name, Paul.

Paul preached the new religion far and wide just as earnestly as he had fought against it at first. Then he, too, was condemned to death. Paul, however, was, as I have said, a Roman citizen, and a Roman citizen could not be put to death by the ordinary judges who were not Roman citizens nor in the ordinary way by crucifying. So Paul appealed to the emperor. Nevertheless, he was put in prison in Rome and afterward beheaded. And so he is called St. Paul.

Peter was another of the chief apostles. Christ had said to him, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”[2] Peter, too, was thrown into prison, and was sentenced to be crucified. But he asked to be crucified with his head downward. He thought it too great an honor to die in just the same way as his Lord. On this spot in Rome where Peter was put to death was built long afterward the largest church in the world, the Cathedral of St. Peter.

As everything before Christ’s birth is called B.C. and everything since His birth is called A.D., you would naturally suppose that 0 would be the date of His birth.

But it was not until some five hundred years later that people began to date from Christ’s birth. And then, when they did begin to date from this event, they made a mistake. It was found out that Christ was really born four years before He was supposed to have been born—that is, in 4 B.C.—but when the mistake was found out, it was then too late to change.

Blood and Thunder

I once had a big Newfoundland dog, and he was one of the best friends a boy ever had. I don’t know who it was that named him; he was named before I got him; but whoever it was must either have been ignorant of history or a bad chooser of names. He was called Nero, and even a dog would have hated such a name, had he known whose it once was.

Every good story usually has a villain to make it interesting. Nero is the prize villain of history. He was a Roman emperor who lived not long after Christ, and he is considered the most terribly cruel and wicked ruler that ever lived.

He killed his mother.

He killed his wife.

He killed his teacher, who was named Seneca. He was not a bad teacher, either.

We think that Nero ordered both St. Peter and St. Paul put to death, for they were executed at this same time.

Nero seemed to take great pleasure in making others suffer. He loved to see men torn to pieces by wild beasts; it amused him greatly. I have seen boys who liked to throw stones at dogs just to hear them yelp, or tear the wings off of butterflies. Such boys must have some Nero in them; don’t you think?

If a man was a Christian, that gave Nero an excuse to torture him horribly. Nero had some of the Christians wrapped in tar and pitch, then placed around the garden of his palace and set fire to, as if they were torches. It is even said that Nero set Rome on fire just for the fun of seeing the city burn. Then he sat in a tower and, while he watched the blaze spreading, played on a harp. The saying is that “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”; but there were no fiddles at that time, and so we know it must have been a harp. The fire burned day and night for a whole week and destroyed more than half of the city. Then Nero laid the blame on the Christians, who, he said, started the fire. Did you ever blame another for something you had done?

Some think Nero really was crazy, and we hope he was, for it is hard to think any human being who was not crazy could act as he did.

Nero built himself an immense palace and overlaid it extravagantly with gold and mother-of-pearl. It was known as Nero’s House of Gold. At its front door he put up a colossal statue of himself in bronze fifty feet high. Both the House of Gold and the statue were later destroyed, but the Colosseum, which was built a few years afterward, was named Colosseum from this “coloss-al” statue of Nero that was once there.

Nero was very conceited. He thought he could write poetry and sing beautifully. Although he did both very badly, he liked to show off, and no one dared to laugh at him. Had any one been so bold as to make fun of him or even to smile, he would have had that person put to death instantly.

Even the Roman people who were not Christians feared and hated Nero. So they voted to have him put out of the way. But before they had a chance to do anything, Nero heard what they were planning, and in order to save himself the disgrace of being put to death by his own people he decided to kill himself. He was such a coward, however, that he couldn’t quite bring himself to plunge the sword into his heart. But as he hesitated, holding the sword to his breast and whimpering, his slave, impatient to finish the job, shoved the blade in. Thus was Rome rid of its worst ruler.

So much for the first part of this “blood and thunder” story. Here is the second part:

The Jews in Jerusalem didn’t like to have Rome rule over them. They never had. But they were afraid to do much about it. But in the Year 70 A.D. they rebelled; that is, they said they would no longer obey Rome or pay her money. The emperor sent his son, who was named Titus, with an army to put an end to the rebellion, to punish them as if they were disobedient children.

The Jews crowded into their city of Jerusalem to make a last stand against the Romans. But Titus destroyed that city completely and the Jews in it, a million of them, it is supposed. Then he robbed the great temple of all its valuable ornaments and brought them back to Rome.

To celebrate this victory over Jerusalem an arch was built in the Forum at Rome, and through this arch Titus and his army marched in triumph. On this arch was carved a procession, showing Titus leaving the city of Jerusalem with these ornaments. Chief among these ornaments was a golden seven-branched candlestick he had taken from the temple. To-day we see many copies in brass of this famous seven-branched candlestick. Perhaps you may have one in your home on the mantelpiece.

The city was rebuilt later, but most of the Jews who were left have ever since been living in all the other countries of the earth.

Titus became emperor, but in spite of the way in which he had massacred so many Jews, he was not such a bad emperor as you might suppose. He thought he was doing right in killing these men because they had rebelled against Rome. But Titus had a rule of life, much like that the Boy Scouts now have. This rule was, “Do at least one good turn a day.”

The third part of this story is the “thunder.”

In Italy there is a volcano named Vesuvius. You remember that “volcano” came from the name “Vulcan,” the blacksmith god, and people imagined that his forge in the heart of a volcano made the smoke and flame and ashes. From time to time this volcano, Vesuvius, thunders and quakes and spouts forth fire and throws up stones and gas and boils over with red-hot melted rock called lava. It is the hot inside of the earth exploding. Yet people build houses and towns near-by and live even on the sides of the volcano. Every once in a while their homes are destroyed when the volcano quakes or pours forth fire. Yet the same people go right back and build again in the same place!

There was at the time of Titus a little town named Pompeii near the base of Vesuvius. Wealthy Romans used to go there to spend the summer. Suddenly, one day in the year 79 A.D., just after Titus had become emperor, Vesuvius began to spout forth fire. The people living in Pompeii rushed for their lives, but they hadn’t time to get away. They were smothered with the gases from the volcano before they hardly had time to move and, falling down dead, were buried deep in a boiling rain of fire and ashes, just where they happened to be when the eruption, as it was called, took place.

The people and their houses lay buried beneath the ashes for nearly two thousand years, and in the course of time every one had forgotten there ever had been such a place. People came back as they had before and built houses over the spot where every one had forgotten there once was a city. Then one day a man was digging a well over the spot where Pompeii had once been. He dug up a man’s hand—no, not a real hand, but the hand of a statue. He told others, and they set to work and dug and dug to see what else they could find until the whole town was dug out. And now one can go to Pompeii and see it very much as it was in 79 A.D., before it had ever been destroyed.

There are houses of the Romans who went there to spend their vacations. There are shops and temples and palaces and public baths and the theater and the market place or forum. The streets were paved with blocks of lava, once melted stone. They still show ruts which were worn into them by the wheels of the chariots that the Romans used to drive. Stepping-stones were placed at some crossings, so that in case of heavy rains, when the streets were full of water, one could cross on them from curb to curb. These stepping-stones are still there. The floors of the houses were made of bits of colored stone to form pictures. They are still there. In the vestibule of one house, there is in the floor a mosaic picture of a dog. Under it are the Latin words, “Cave canem.” What does that mean? Can you guess? It means, “Look out for the dog!” That was a Roman’s idea of a joke two thousand years ago!

The bones of the people who were caught and buried alive in the ashes were also found. There were also found bronze ornaments worn by the women, vases that decorated the home, lamps which they used to light the houses, pots and pans and dishes. Beds and chairs were found just as they had been buried. Still more remarkable, cakes were found on the table, a loaf of bread half eaten, meat ready to be cooked, a kettle on the fire with the ashes still underneath it—beans and peas and one egg unbroken—probably the oldest egg in the world!

A Good Emperor and a Bad Son

Have you ever said, “I don’t care,” when you really did care?

I have. Every one has.

Perhaps you have been naughty and have been told you could have no dessert or must go to bed early, and you tossed your head and said, “I don’t care.”

Well, once upon a time there was a society or club formed of grown-up people who said they weren’t ever going to care what happened to them; whether it was good or whether it was bad would make no difference. I should call them the “Don’t Care Club,” but they called themselves “Stoics,” and they thought the way to be good was “not to care.”

If a Stoic’s house burned down, he would say to himself and try to make himself believe, “I don’t care; it doesn’t matter.”

If some one gave him a million dollars, he would say, “I don’t care; it doesn’t matter.”

If he was told by the doctor he was going to die next week, he would say, “I don’t care; it doesn’t matter.”

This Society of Stoics was started by a Greek philosopher named Zeno.

Zeno lived in Athens later than those philosophers, Socrates and Plato, whom you have already heard about. Zeno said that the only way to be good and the only way to be happy was not to care for pleasure and not to mind pain or suffering but calmly to put up with everything, no matter how unpleasant or disagreeable it was, and the Stoics believed him. Even to-day people who bear troubles and pain and hardships without a murmur are called stoics.

One of the chief members of the society was a Roman emperor.

Rome’s worst emperor, Nero, had been dead a hundred years when there came to the throne this new emperor, who was just as good as Nero was bad. This emperor was named Marcus Aurelius. Although he was so very good and pious, he was not a Christian. Indeed, Marcus Aurelius treated the Christians terribly, as they had been treated terribly by the previous emperors, for he thought them traitors to the empire.

At this time most of the Romans had very little religion of any sort. They were not Christians, but neither did they put much faith in their own gods, Jupiter and Juno and the rest. They honored them because they were brought up to honor them and because they thought if they didn’t honor them they might have bad luck, so they took no chances. But instead of believing in such gods, people usually believed in the teachings of some wise man or philosopher and obeyed more or less the rules he made. Zeno was one of these philosophers, and the Stoics were the members of this society.

Although Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, he would rather have been a Stoic philosopher or a priest. Although he had to be a soldier and a general, he would rather have been a writer. When he was off, fighting with his army, he carried his writing-materials with him, and he would go to his tent at night and write out his thoughts. These thoughts he called his “Meditations.” Here is one of the things he wrote:

That was written long years ago, yet your father might have told you the same thing this morning.

People read this book of Marcus Aurelius to-day, either in the Greek in which it was written or translated into English.

A great many of Marcus Aurelius’ sayings seem almost as if they might have been in the Bible. Indeed, some people keep his book by their bedside as if it were a Bible.

One of his rules was, “Forgive your enemies,” and he seemed almost glad to have enemies so that he might have a chance to forgive them. Indeed, he took such a special delight in forgiving his enemies that he even went out of his way to do so. Though Marcus Aurelius was not a Christian, nevertheless he was more Christian in the way he acted than some of the later emperors who were supposed to be Christians.

But like many people who are very good themselves, Marcus Aurelius was unable to bring up his son to be so. His son was named Commodus, and Commodus was just as bad as his father was good. He may have been bored when a child by too many of his father’s instructions, for when he grew up and was able to choose for himself and do as he pleased, instead of following Zeno and joining the Stoics, he joined the society of another philosopher called Epicurus.

Epicurus had lived about the same time as Zeno. But he had taught what at first seems almost the opposite of what Zeno taught. Epicurus said that the chief end and aim of man and the only good in the world was pleasure; but, said he, the pleasure must be of the right kind. Nowadays people who are very fond of eating nice things, whose whole thought in life is the pleasure of eating, are called “epicures.”

Commodus’s one thought was pleasure, and the worst kind of pleasure at that. A friend of mine thought Marcus Aurelius was such a fine man that he named his son after him, “Marcus Aurelius Jones,” but when the son grew up he was not at all like his namesake. The name “Commodus” would have suited him much better, for instead of being good and pious, he thought of nothing but pleasure and he was so bad that he ended in jail.

Commodus thought nothing of giving his people a good government; he only thought of giving himself a good time. He was an athlete and had beautiful muscles and a handsome figure, of which he was so proud that he had a statue made of himself. The statue showed him as the strong and muscular god Hercules. Commodus made the people worship him as if he were this god. Just to show off his muscles and his muscular ability, he himself took part in prize-fights—quite bad taste for an emperor. He poisoned or killed any one who found fault with or criticized him. He led a wild and dissipated life, but at last he met the end he deserved. He was strangled to death by a wrestler.

Lycurgus would have said again:

“I told you so.”

I — H — — S — — — — V — — — — —

The name of this story I’m going to put at the end, for you wouldn’t know what it means, anyway, until you have heard the story, and so it’s no use looking ahead.

All through the years since Christ was crucified, those who said they believed in Christ had been terribly treated—“persecuted,” we call it—because they were Christians. They had been flogged; they had been stoned; they had been torn with iron hooks; they had been roasted and burned to death. Yet, strange as it may seem, in spite of this terrible treatment, more and more people were becoming Christians every day. They believed so strongly in life after death, and they believed that they would be so much happier after death if they died for Christ’s sake, that they seemed even glad to suffer and to be killed. But at last the emperor himself put a stop to all these persecutions. This is how it happened.

About the year 300 A.D. Rome had an emperor by the name of Constantine. Constantine was not a Christian. His gods were the old Roman gods. He probably did not put much faith in them, however.

Well, once upon a time Constantine was fighting with an enemy when he dreamed one night that he saw in the sky a flaming cross. Beneath this cross were written the Latin words, “In hoc signo vinces.” In English this is, “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” Constantine thought this meant that if he carried the Christian cross into battle he would conquer. He thought it would at least be worth while to give the Christian God a trial. So he had his soldiers carry the cross, and he did win the battle. Then immediately he became a Christian himself and asked every one in the Roman Empire to become a Christian also. From that time on, all the Roman emperors who came after Constantine, all except one, were Christians.

To celebrate Constantine’s victory the Roman Senate built a triumphal arch in the Forum of Rome and called it the Arch of Constantine. If has three openings; the Arch of Titus has only one.

Constantine’s mother was named Helena. She was one of the very first to become a Christian and be baptized. Then she gave up her life to Christian works and built churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. It is said that she went to Palestine and found the actual cross on which Christ had been crucified three hundred years before and sent part of it to Rome. When she died she was made a saint, and so she is now called St. Helena.

Constantine built a church over the spot where St. Peter was supposed to have been crucified. Many years later, this church was torn down so that a much larger and grander church to St. Peter might be built there.

But Constantine did not care for Rome. He preferred to live in another city in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. This city was called Byzantium. So he moved from Rome to Byzantium and made that city his capital. Byzantium was called New Rome, and then the name was changed to Constantine’s city. In Greek, the word for “city” is “polis.” We see the word used in Annapolis and Indianapolis. So Constantine’s City became Constantinepolis, and then shortened to Constantinople.

Hardly had the Roman Empire become Christian before a quarrel arose between those Christians who believed one thing and those who believed another. The chief thing they quarreled about was whether Christ was equal to God the Father or not equal to Him. Constantine called the two disagreeing sides together at a place called Nicæa to settle the question. There the leaders of each side argued the matter hotly. Finally, it was decided that the Christian Church should believe that God the Son and God the Father were equal. Then they agreed to put what they believed in words. This was called a creed, which means “believe,” and because it was made at Nicæa it was known as the Nicene Creed, which many Christians still say every Sunday.

Before the time of Constantine, there were no weekly holidays. Sunday was no different from any other day. People worked or did just the same things on Sunday as they did on other days. Constantine thought Christians should have one day a week for the worship of God—a “holy day,” or holiday, as we call it—so he made Sunday the Christian day of rest, a “holy day” such as Saturday was for the Jews.

But although Constantine was head of the Roman Empire, there was another man whom all Christians throughout the world looked to as their spiritual head. This man was the Bishop of Rome. In Latin he was called “papa,” which means the same thing in Latin that it does in English, “father.” So the bishop of Rome was called “papa,” and this became “pope.” St Peter was supposed to have been the first Bishop of Rome. For many centuries the pope was the spiritual ruler of all Christians everywhere, no matter in what country they lived.

As now you know what the name of this story means I’m putting it here:

In Hoc Signo Vinces

Our Tough Ancestors

But Rome with the Roman Empire had had her day. She had risen as high as she could. It was her turn to fall. She had become as large as she ever was to be. It was her turn to be conquered. But you cannot guess what people were to do the conquering and to be next in power.

When I was a boy there was a gang of toughs who lived down by the gas-house and railroad tracks. They were ragged, unwashed, unschooled, but terrible fighters. Their leader was known to us as Mug Mike, and the very mention of him and his gang struck terror to our souls. Every now and then they paid our neighborhood a visit. Once we had offered fight, but with such terrible results that ever after at word of their approach the alarm would be sounded and we would hide indoors.

For ages there had been such a gang of half-civilized toughs living on the northern borders of the Roman Empire. Every now and then they tried to cross over the border into the Roman lands, and the Romans had to be constantly fighting them to keep them back where they belonged. Julius Cæsar had fought with them. So had Marcus Aurelius and so had Constantine. These wild and warlike people were called Teutons and—you may be shocked to hear it, but—they are the ancestors of most of us!

They had light hair and blue eyes; that is, they were what we call blonds. The Greeks and Romans and other people who lived around the Mediterranean Sea had black hair and dark eyes. They were what we call brunettes. If you have light or brown hair, you are probably a Teuton. If you have black hair, you are probably not.

The Teutons were white people, and they were Aryans, but they were uneducated toughs and could neither read nor write.