A Child's History of the World

by V. M. Hillyer

Although this was four hundred years before Christ was born, and before, therefore, there were any such things as Christians or a Christian religion, yet Socrates believed and taught two things that are just what Christians also believe.

One of these things he believed was that each of us has inside a conscience, which tells us what is right and what is wrong; we don’t have to read from a book or be told by another what is right or what is wrong.

Another thing he taught was that there is a life after death and that when we die our souls live on.

No wonder he was not afraid himself to die!

28

Wise Men and Otherwise

Have you ever been playing in your yard when a strange boy who had been watching from the other side of the fence asked to be let into the game, saying he would show you how to play? You didn’t want him around, and you didn’t want him in, but somehow or other he got in and was soon bossing everybody else.

Well, there was a man named Philip who lived north of Greece, and he had been watching Sparta and Athens—not playing but fighting—and he wanted “to get into the game.” Philip was king of a little country called Macedonia, but he thought he would like to be king of Greece, also, and it seemed to him a good time, when Sparta and Athens were “down and out” after the Peloponnesian War, to step in and make himself king of that country. Philip was a great fighter, but he didn’t want to fight Greece unless he had to. He wanted to be made king peaceably, and he wanted Greece to do it willingly. So he thought up a scheme to bring this about, and this was his scheme.

He knew, as you do, how the Greeks hated the Persians whom they had driven out of their country over a hundred years before. Although the Persian Wars had taken place so long ago, the Greeks had never forgotten the bravery of their forefathers and the tales of their victories over the Persians. These stories had been told them over and over by their fathers and grandfathers, and they loved to read and reread them in Herodotus’s history of the world.

So Philip said to the Greeks: