Transcribed from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition by DavidPrice,
FOR MY CHILDREN
by
CHARLES KINGSLEY
illustrated
london:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
and new york
1889
The right of translation ifreserved
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.
to
MY CHILDREN
ROSE, MAURICE, AND MARY
a littlepresent
of old greek fairy tales
My Dear Children,
Some of you have heard already of the old Greeks; and all ofyou, as you grow up, will hear more and more of them. Thoseof you who are boys will, perhaps, spend a great deal of time inreading Greek books; and the girls, though they may not learnGreek, will be sure to come across a great many stories takenfrom Greek history, and to see, I may say every day, things whichwe should not have had if it had not been for these oldGreeks. You can hardly find a well-written book which hasnot in it Greek names, and words, and proverbs; you cannot walkthrough a great town without passing Greek buildings; you cannotgo into a well-furnished room without seeing Greek statues andornaments, even Greek patterns of furniture and paper; sostrangely have these old Greeks left their mark behind them uponthis modern world in which we now live. And as you grow up,and read more and more, you will find that we owe to these oldGreeks the beginners of all our mathematics andgeometry—that is, the science and knowledge of numbers, andof the shapes of things, and of the forces which make things moveand stand at rest; and the beginnings of our geography andastronomy; and of our laws, and freedom, and politics—thatis, the science of how to rule a country, and make it peacefuland strong. And we owe to them, too, the beginning of ourlogic—that is, the study of words and of reasoning; and ofour metaphysics—that is, the study of our own thoughts andsouls. And last of all, they made their language sobeautiful that foreigners used to take to it instead of theirown; and at last Greek became the common language of educatedpeople all over the old world, from Persia and Egypt even toSpain and Britain. And therefore it was that the NewTestament was written in Greek, that it might be read andunderstood by all the nations of the Roman empire; so that, nextto the Jews, and the Bible which the Jews handed down to us, weowe more to these old Greeks than to any people upon earth.
Now you must remember one thing—that‘Greeks’ was not their real name. They calledthemselves always ‘Hellens,’ but the Romans miscalledthem Greeks; and we have taken that wrong name from theRomans—it would take a long time to tell you why. They were made up of many tribes and many small separate states;and when you hear in this book of Minuai, and Athenians, andother such names, you must remember that they were all differenttribes and peoples of the one great Hellen race, who lived inwhat we now call Greece, in the islands of the Archipelago, andalong the coast of Asia Minor (Ionia, as they call it), from theHellespont to Rhodes, and had afterwards colonies and cities inSicily, and S