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Excerpt from Outlines of Ancient History: From the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, A. D. 476 It is a very general complaint that the Manuals of History put into the hands of students are dry and uninteresting. The complaint is not unfounded. Such introductory works are too often mere crowded inventories of events, and so not only fail awakening an intelligent interest in what should be the most engaging of studies, but repel and dishearten the student. If this fault has been avoided, and the narrative is connected and interesting, still the perspective is almost sure to be false id misleading, and the picture of early times foreshortened and distorted. Usually all that lies back of Grecian annals is compressed into a few pages, where everything is lost - or rather brought into being - in a sort of creative nimbus. Indeed, in several works in extensive use in our schools, that vast background is treated as a kind of Hyperborean region, being filled indiscriminately with all manner of myths and legends, until there is no more rational connection between the story thus told of the men and agencies of those early times and the history of later periods than exists between the double writings of the palimpsest. One of our objects, then, in preparing the present volume is to join hands with those who are laboring to turn that period to use in education, and give it that character and prominence in the manual which it has assumed in the larger works of all our best historical scholars. Moreover, we conceive History to be a worthier thing than a trivial record of court intrigues and genealogies. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imp