ous legends rested, to a certain extent, on monuments, habits, and oral tradition. Their lively narratives charmed and satisfied the public mind and gratified their pride. It was only in later years that the philosophers explained them away.

In the early days they had no standard by which to criticise them. All they required was that they should offer a pleasing explanation. The wisest of the Greeks came, ultimately, to believe in one God who ruled with wisdom and justice, and they laid the foundation of all useful knowledge by teaching men to think and reason; but true science was not possible in their age of the world. They, however, prepared the way for it.

9. Their religion was cheerful and bright, they had altars and temples in great numbers, and countless ceremonies in honor of particular deities. One class of these was festivals, or games, established, according to tradition, by their divine heroes. The Olympian Games were the most celebrated, and took place every fiftieth month at Olympia. In the year 776 B. C. they began to record the name of the victor in these games, and as that was done ever afterward, this became a fixed date and the interval between each was called an Olympiad. It was the beginning of reliable history, although it was one hundred and fifty years later that men of real wisdom, extensive observation and careful study began to flourish. But the eagerness with which the people sought information, and the honor in which they held men of thought and wisdom, encouraged study, reflection and travel for the sake of knowledge, so that this class, in time, became extremely numerous.

Their researches, and systems of what they held to be truth, were often imperfect, and, in many parts, false; but they were upright and earnest in the studies that were then possible, and did as much good, one might say, by their failures as by their successes. Inquirers, in after times, noted where and how they failed; so that all their pioneer work was useful— their mistakes for a warning, their success for instruction.

10. The course of Grecian development took two contrary directions under the two leading states, Sparta and Athens.

The last represents the generally received idea of Greece

as

a land where the people were lively and beautiful, intelligent and richly endowed with taste in the arts, or an exquisitely quick and thorough judgment of fitness, developed to the very highest point. Sparta, on the other hand, through its whole career, was a military state. Somewhere about one hundred years before the first Olympiad (B. C. 776), a lawgiver, named Lycurgus, had reformed the institutions of the Spartan state with the avowed and only object to render it capable of producing the most vigorous and hardy warriors. He made an equal distribution of lands, which were cultivated by the ancient inhabitants, reduced to slavery. They were called Helots, and were treated with great cruelty. Lycurgus abolished every species of luxury, subjected the young, both boys and girls, to the most rigorous training, and discouraged all the amenities of family and social life that he supposed might interfere with the rude hardiness of the soldier. The whole intelligence, activity and vigor of the Greek mind was, in this state, confined to military life. These institutions continued to exist in Sparta for more than five hundred years. Among any other race they would have secured to them the supreme dominion of the nation; but among this liberty loving people they merely sufficed to render them the general leaders in war, and one, only, among the most powerful and respectable Greek states. Besides, this experiment shows that there is little real advantage in systematically trampling down the native instincts of humanity in order to promote superiority in a particular direction.

11. The entirely spontaneous character of the Athenians made them, in general, the equal of the Spartans in military fame, and gloriously eminent in many other directions. But the various members of the Greek nation seem to have been made, by their intelligence and the earnestness, the completeness, of all their lines of development, the pioneers of humanity in their experiments. They exhausted all the capacities of a complete military education in an entire state, and presented the

most perfect achievements of a genius that had no models to commence on, in poetry, in painting, in sculpture, in philosophy and in such elements of science as were possible to humanity in their day.

It is worthy of remark that most of the Greek colonies, the Phenicians and their colonies, and a great part of the numerous nations in Italy became republican about the same time as did the Romans later-and that those states which preserved hereditary monarchy, or tyrants-as those kings were called who were elected by the populace had counterbalanced the individual despotism of the kingly office by various instiutions that controlled and limited it.

12. At the period when history began to be carefully writ ten and dates accurately given, civilization was under full career and rapidly moving westward. The Greeks had been struggling with the difficulties of the early times for more than a thousand years and had already begun to mature the insti tutions and to show the traits of character that afterwards made them so eminent and so useful in advancing the progress of mankind. The Tyrians, or commercial people of Phenicia had formed the net-work of communication with all the parts of the earth then sufficiently civilized to produce anything which could be useful to the rest of the world, and Italy was alive with the energies of the primitive races, mainly Aryan -some of them transplanted from the East, and possessing many of the highest elements of the ancient culture-who fought the Romans with a vigor and persistence that contributed much to the discipline and strong development of that remarkable people, to whose instruction the Greek colonies in eastern Italy added not a little.

From this point the advance of the center of development toward the western continent, and of mental preparation for more perfect ideals of government was continuous. A more complete view of this progress will be gained by considering the general events of each century apart, or in chronological

order.

13. B. C. 776. This is the first definite and positive date in reliable history and commences the first Olympiad. The Olympic religious and national festival was celebrated by foot and chariot races, boxing, wrestling, etc., and was commenced by religious sacrifices and ceremonies, mainly in honor of the god Apollo. This peaceable assembly of all the representatives of the Grecian race was one of the chief means of maintaining the national union, and greatly promoted the maintenance and importance of a kind of national congress, called the Amphictyonic League. The first object of this League was the protection of their common worship; but it came to have, afterward, considerable importance as a political body; its decrees having the character and force of the Laws of Nations in modern times. It was composed of two delegates from each of the twelve leading states of Greece, and held two meetings yearly; one at Delphi, where was a celebrated temple and oracle of Apollo, and one at Thermopylæ. The twelve chief cities of the Eolian colonies of Greece in Asia Minor, and also the same number of Ionian colonies on the same coast more to the south, had each Amphictyonic, or International Leagues; but the Greeks from all the various regions they settled, as well as from the mother country, took a pride in participating in the Olympic games.

14. B. B. 753. This is one of the most important dates in the history of mankind. In this year, Rome, "The Eternal City," was founded by a band of adventurers and outlaws, under the lead of the twin brothers, Romulus and Remus. A spirit of adventure was the most characteristic feature of that era, in Greece and about the Mediterranean sea, together with a passion for colonizing, or founding new states. Education, or growth, seems to pursue parallel lines in the same era, so that the same general tendencies move the masses of widely separated nations. Greece began, at this period, to send out a large number of colonists, in rapid succession, to Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean. The tendency had commenced more than three centuries before, but the colonies had

not gone far from the native state, and only one had been established in Italy, at Cumæ. Carthage, a commercial colony of the Tyriens, had been founded 127 years before, and was now beginning to rival the parent city.

Rome gathered its population from all the neighboring states. The mingling of races has always been favorable to the progress of mankind. A single race, isolating itself and receiving no new blood or impulses from without becomes stationary and fixed in all its habits and advancement ceases beyond a certain point. The men who founded Rome were, apparently, a crowd of adventurers who had resolved to found a state. After building the walls of their city and providing themselves with habitations, they were destitute of wivesa serious want which would soon leave their new city without inhabitants. They remedied it in true Roman style - by violence. They made a festival without the walls to celebrate the founding of their state, and invited their nearest neighbors, the Sabines, to take part in it. The Sabines came with their wives and daughters. At a concerted moment the young Romans each seized a young Sabine woman, and carried her off into the city; the gates were closed and each proceeded to make his captive his wife.

The Sabines were powerless to prevent the deed, but they soon made war on their violent sons-in-law, and the young city would have been destroyed but for the interference of the stolen women who had become satisfied with the bold deed which gave them valiant husbands. The Sabines were induced to unite with the young state so far as to build a new city adjoining and take part in its rising fortunes. Romulus was elected king by his followers, but popular institutions were established to limit his power, under the strong instinct of vigorous organization that, from the first, characterized the new nation. The people maintained their right to make laws in conjunction with the king, and preserved a limited monarchy for 250 years. At this time the prophet Isaiah flour