The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic | Page 5

accounts, the war of Troy took place nearly twelve hundred years
before Christ, and that is some three thousand years ago now. It was
before the time of the prophet Eli, of whom we read in the Bible, and
long before the ancient days of Samuel and Saul and David and
Solomon, who seem so very far removed from our times. There had
been long lines of kings and princes in China and India before that time,
however, and in the hoary land of Egypt as many as twenty dynasties of
sovereigns had reigned and passed away, and a certain sort of
civilization had flourished for two or three thousand years, so that the
great world was not so young at that time as one might at first think If
only there had been books and newspapers in those olden days, what
revelations they would make to us now! They would tell us exactly
where Troy was, which some of the learned think we do not know, and
we might, by their help, separate fact from fiction in the immortal
poems and stories that are now our only source of information. It is not
for us to say that that would be any better for us than to know merely
what we do, for poetry is elevating and entertaining, and stirs the heart;
and who could make poetry out of the columns of a newspaper, even
though it were as old as the times of the Pharaohs? Let us, then, be
thankful for what we have, and take the beginnings of history in the
mixed form of truth and fiction, following the lead of learned historians
who are and long have been trying to trace the true clue of fact in the
labyrinth of poetic story with which it is involved.
When the poet Milton sat down to write the history of that part of
Britain now called England, as he expressed it, he said: "The beginning
of nations, those excepted of whom sacred books have spoken, is to this
day unknown. Nor only the beginning, but the deeds also of many
succeeding ages, yes, periods of ages, either wholly unknown or
obscured or blemished with fables." Why this is so the great poet did
not pretend to tell, but he thought that it might be because people did
not know how to write in the first ages, or because their records had
been lost in wars and by the sloth and ignorance that followed them.
Perhaps men did not think that the records of their own times were
worth preserving when they reflected how base and corrupt, how petty

and perverse such deeds would appear to those who should come after
them. For whatever reason, Milton said that it had come about that
some of the stories that seemed to be the oldest were in his day
regarded as fables; but that he did not intend to pass them over, because
that which one antiquary admitted as true history, another exploded as
mere fiction, and narratives that had been once called fables were
afterward found to "contain in them many footsteps and reliques of
something true," as what might be read in poets "of the flood and giants,
little believed, till undoubted witnesses taught us that all was not
feigned." For such reasons Milton determined to tell over the old stories,
if for no other purpose than that they might be of service to the poets
and romancers who knew how to use them judiciously. He said that he
did not intend even to stop to argue and debate disputed questions, but,
"imploring divine assistance," to relate, "with plain and lightsome
brevity," those things worth noting.
After all this preparation Milton began his history of England at the
Flood, hastily recounted the facts to the time of the great Trojan war,
and then said that he had arrived at a period when the narrative could
not be so hurriedly dispatched. He showed how the old historians had
gone back to Troy for the beginnings of the English race, and had
chosen a great-grandson of Æneas, named Brutus, as the one by whom
it should be attached to the right royal heroes of Homer's poem. Thus
we see how firm a hold upon the imagination of the world the tale of
Troy had after twenty-seven hundred years.
Twenty-five or thirty years before the birth of Christ there was in Rome
another poet, named Virgil, writing about the wanderings of Æneas. He
began his beautiful story with these words: "Arms I sing, and the hero,
who first, exiled by fate, came from the coast of Troy to Italy and the
Lavinian shore." He then went on to tell in beautiful words the story of
the wanderings of his hero,--a tale that has