Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/15

 THE ANCIENT CITY. INTRODUCTION. The Necessity of studying the earliest Beliefs of the An- cients in order to understand their Institutions. It i3 proposed hero to show upon "what ])rinciples and by what rules Greek and Roninn society wns gov- erned. Wc unite in the same study both the Greeks and the Romans, because tliese two peoples, who were two branches of a single race, and who spoke two idioms of a single language, also had the same insti- tutions and the same principles of government, and passed through a series of similar revolutions. We shall attempt to set in a clear light the radi- cal and essential differences which at all times distin- guished these ancient peoples from modern societies. In our system of education, Ave live from infancy in the midst of the Gieeks and Romans, and become ac- customed continually to compare them with ourselves, to judge of their history by our own, and to explain our revolutions by theirs. What wo have received from them leads us to believe that we resemble them. We have some difficulty in considering them as for- 9