Makers of History
Pyrrhus
By JACOB ABBOTT
WITH ENGRAVINGS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1901
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eighthundred and fifty-four, by
Harper & Brothers,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern Districtof New York.
Pyrrhus Viewing the Roman Encampment.PREFACE.
In respect to the heroes of ancient history, who lived in timesantecedent to the period when the regular records of authentic historycommence, no reliance can be placed upon the actual verity of theaccounts which have come down to us of their lives and actions. Inthose ancient days there was, in fact, no line of demarkation betweenromance and history, and the stories which were told of Cyrus, Darius,Xerxes, Romulus, Pyrrhus, and other personages as ancient as they, areall more or less fabulous and mythical. We learn this as well from theinternal evidence furnished by the narratives themselves as from theresearches of modern scholars, who have succeeded, in many cases, indisentangling the web, and separating the false from the true. It isnone the less important, however, on this account, that these ancienttales, as they were originally told, and as they have come down to usthrough so many centuries, should be made known to readers of the[Pg vi]present age. They have been circulated among mankind in theiroriginal form for twenty or thirty centuries, and they have mingledthemselves inextricably with the literature, the eloquence, and thepoetry of every civilized nation on the globe. Of course, to know whatthe story is, whether true or false, which the ancient narratorsrecorded, and which has been read and commented on by every succeedinggeneration to the present day, is an essential attainment for everywell-informed man; a far more essential attainment, in fact, for thegeneral reader, than to discover now, at this late period, what theactual facts were which gave origin to the fable.
In writing this series of histories, therefore, it has been the aim ofthe author not to correct the ancient story, but to repeat it as itstands, cautioning the reader, however, whenever occasion requires,not to suppose that the marvelous narratives are historically true.