Ancient Classics
FOR
English Readers
BY VARIOUS AUTHORS.
EDITED BY
Rev. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
Author of ‘Etoniana,’ ‘The Public Schools,’ &c.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
“We gladly avail ourselves of this opportunity to recommend the other volumes of this useful series, most of which are executed with discrimination and ability.”—Quarterly Review.
“These Ancient Classics have, without an exception, a twofold value. They are rich in literary interest, and they are rich in social and historical interest. We not only have a faithful presentation of the stamp and quality of the literature which the master-minds of the classical world have bequeathed to the modern world, but we have a series of admirably vivid and graphic pictures of what life at Athens and Rome was. We are not merely taken back over a space of twenty centuries, and placed immediately under the shadow of the Acropolis, or in the very heart of the Forum, but we are at once brought behind the scenes of the old Roman and Athenian existence. As we see how the heroes of this ‘new world which is the old’ plotted, intrigued, and planned; how private ambition and political partisanship were dominant and active motives then as they are now; how the passions and the prejudices which reign supreme now reigned supreme then; above all, as we discover how completely many of what we may have been accustomed to consider our most essentially modern thoughts and sayings have been anticipated by the poets and orators, the philosophers and historians, who drank their inspiration by the banks of Ilissus or on the plains of Tiber, we are prompted to ask whether the advance of some twenty centuries has worked any great change in humanity, and whether, substituting the coat for the toga, the park for the Campus Martius, the Houses of Parliament for the Forum, Cicero might not have been a public man in London as well as an orator in Rome?”—Morning Advertiser.