The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pyrrhus, by Jacob Abbott

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Title: Pyrrhus
Makers of History

Author: Jacob Abbott

Release Date: November 12, 2008 [EBook #27240]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Makers of History

Pyrrhus

BY JACOB ABBOTT

WITH ENGRAVINGS

NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1901

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight
hundred and fifty-four, by

HARPER & BROTHERS,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District
of New York.

[Illustration: PYRRHUS VIEWING THE ROMAN ENCAMPMENT.]

PREFACE.

In respect to the heroes of ancient history, who lived in times
antecedent to the period when the regular records of authentic history
commence, no reliance can be placed upon the actual verity of the
accounts which have come down to us of their lives and actions. In
those ancient days there was, in fact, no line of demarkation between
romance and history, and the stories which were told of Cyrus, Darius,
Xerxes, Romulus, Pyrrhus, and other personages as ancient as they, are
all more or less fabulous and mythical. We learn this as well from the
internal evidence furnished by the narratives themselves as from the
researches of modern scholars, who have succeeded, in many cases, in
disentangling the web, and separating the false from the true. It is
none the less important, however, on this account, that these ancient
tales, as they were originally told, and as they have come down to us
through so many centuries, should be made known to readers of the
present age. They have been circulated among mankind in their
original form for twenty or thirty centuries, and they have mingled
themselves inextricably with the literature, the eloquence, and the
poetry of every civilized nation on the globe. Of course, to know what
the story is, whether true or false, which the ancient narrators
recorded, and which has been read and commented on by every succeeding
generatio