INTRODUCTION
and fury that if any one had heard me in the next room he would surely have thought me mad.”
I should not wish the readers of these moving tales to be quite so violently affected as all this, even when, in later life, they go from them to the same stories as Plutarch himself tells them, which I hope they will be impatient to do. There they will learn much more about the general life of Greece and Rome than they can learn from this book and its mate, Plutarch's Romans, and will see the difference between the two peoples, as Plutarch brings it out by giving first the life of a famous Grecian, and next the life of a famous Roman, and then comparing the two. I think Mr. Gould has done well to put all the Grecians together and all the Romans together, for otherwise it would be confusing to children who did not know their history, and did not realize how long after the Grecians the Romans came. I also like the gentle and right feeling in which he treats the facts, and will not allow any dazzle of glory to blind his readers as to the right and the wrong of the things that happen in the men that do or suffer the things. From time to time he speaks of that awful and cruel crime against human nature, that slavery on which the grandeur and the splendor of the whole ancient world was founded. But he does not, that I remember, make it plain how men and women and children, taken prisoners in war, or even peaceful
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