PREFACE
This book, like the first of the series the Book of the Ancient World, was used in its original manuscript form by one of my history classes. It carries on the story of the way in which man has been learning how to live from the time of the Coming of the Greeks to the loss of Greek independence in 146 B.C.
The spirit of a nation is expressed and its history is recorded in three ways: in its political history, in its literature and in its art. The aim of this book has been to use such parts of the political history of the Greeks, of their literature and of their art as seem to have been the outward and visible signs of the spirit that inspired them.
It would not have been possible to write this book in this way without the kind permission of translators and publishers to use copyright translations. I gladly take this opportunity to acknowledge my debt to Professor Gilbert Murray and the Oxford University Press for the translation of the Iphigenia in Tauris; to Mr. A. W. Pickard—Cambridge and the Oxford University Press for the translations from Demosthenes; to Mr. A. E. Zimmern and the Oxford University Press for passages from the Greek Commonwealth; and to the Trustees of the Jowett Fund and the Oxford University Press for translations from Plato and Thucydides; to Sir Arthur Evans for passages from an article in the Monthly Review; to Mr. G. S. Freeman for translations from the Schools of Hellas by the late Kenneth J. Freeman; to Mr. A. S. Way for a passage from the Persians; to Mr. A. W. Crawley for passages from the translation of the Odyssey by Butcher and Lang; to Mrs. Putnam for an extract from The Lady; to Miss Leslie White Hopkinson for her arrangement of one of the Elegiacs of Solon; to Messrs. Macmillan and Co. for translations from the Iliad by Lang, Leaf and Myers, from Pausanias by Sir J. G. Frazer, from Plato's Republic by Davies and Vaughan, from the Trial and Death of Socrates by F. G. Church, from Herodotus by G. C. Macaulay, from Xenophon by H. G. Dakyns, and for various translations in Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals (E. N. Gardiner), The City State of the Greeks and Romans (W. Warde Fowler) and Our Hellenic Heritage (H. R. James); to Messrs. J. M. Dent and Sons for translations from Plutarch's Lives; to Messrs. G. Bell and Sons for translations from Aristophanes by B. B. Rogers, from Theocritus by S. C. Calverley and from Aristotle by Sir F. G. Kenyon; to Messrs. George Allen and Unwin for translations from the Homeric Hymns by Andrew Lang; to Messrs. Edward Arnold and Co. for three poems from Love, Worship and Death by Sir Rennell Rodd; and to Messrs. Longmans, Green and Co. for translations from Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology by J. W. Mackail, and from Greek History for Young Readers by Alice Zimmern.
This book is only intended as an introduction to the history of Greek civilization, and the difficulty of my task has been to decide on what to omit. Everyone will not agree with me as to what I have taken and what I have left, but my aim will have been accomplished, if the book should create a desire to know something more of the great heritage which has come to us from the Greeks.
DOROTHY MILLS.
NEW YORK, March, 1925.