PREFACE
The object of this book is, I hope, sufficiently explained in the introductory chapter. It may, however, be as well to add here that it is an expansion of a short series of lectures given for several successive years to men just beginning the study of ancient history in the school of Literæ Humaniores at Oxford. Few of these men were likely to become specialists, and as the object of my course was therefore purely educational, I saw an opportunity of stimulating their interest, and of widening their historical horizon, by treating the subject as a whole, instead of plunging at once into the examination of a particular period or author. It occurred to me that I might construct in outline a biography, as it were, of that form of State in which both Greeks and Romans lived and made their most valuable contributions to our modern civilisation, tracing it from its birth in prehistoric times to its dissolution under the Roman Empire.
