atred, ambition and revenge; in a word, selfishness.
Race fought with race, kingdom with kingdom, and city with city, in the
very infancy of society. In secular history the greatest names are those
of conquerors and heroes in every land under the sun; and it was by
conquerors that those grand monuments were erected the ruins of which
astonish every traveller, especially in Egypt and Assyria.

But wars in the earliest ages were not carried on scientifically, or
even as an art. There was little to mark them except brute force. Armies
were scarcely more than great collections of armed men, led by kings,
either to protect their States from hostile invaders, or to acquire new
territory, or to exact tribute from weaker nations. We do not read of
military discipline, or of skill in strategy and tactics. A battle was
lost or won by individual prowess; it was generally a hand-to-hand
encounter, in which the strongest and bravest gained the victory.

One of the earliest descriptions of war is to be found in the Iliad of
Homer, where individual heroes fought with one another, armed with the
sword, the lance, and the javelin, protected by shields, helmets, and
coats of mail. They fought on foot, or from chariots, which were in use
before cavalry. The war-horse was driven before he was ridden in Egypt
or Palestine; but the Aryan barbarians in their invasion rode their
horses, and fought on horseback, like the modern Cossacks.

Until the Greeks became familiar with war as an art, armies were usually
very large, as if a great part of the population of a country followed
the sovereign who commanded them. Rameses the Great, the Sesostris of
the Greeks, according to Herodotus led nearly a million of men in his
expeditions. He was the most noted of ancient warriors until Cyrus the
Persian arose, and was nearly contemporaneous with Moses. The Trojan war
is supposed to have taken place during the period when the Israelites
were subject to the Ammonites; and about the time that the Philistines
were defeated by David, the Greeks were forced by war to found colonies
in Asia Minor.

After authentic history begins, war is the main subject with which it
has to deal; and for three thousand years history is simply the record
of the feats of warriors and generals, of their conquests and defeats,
of the rise and fall of kingdoms and cities, of the growth or decline of
military virtues. No arts of civilization have preserved nations from
the sword