Page:The Children's Plutarch, Romans.djvu/15

 philosophy was the study of the good and wise Emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a slave with all the chances of a slave's misery. Not all of the Greeks and Romans were blind to the despair which underlay their highest and bravest hopes, and when Christianity came to them it brought liberty to their bondsmen long after they had lost their own free citizenship.

I believe that if the children realize this they will the more perfectly realize the nobleness and greatness of the Romans whose lives are told in this book. It will be well for them to understand that human nature is a mixed and contradictory thing, and that out of the warring good and evil in it the good often triumphed. Socrates truly said that a slave could have no virtues, and yet the slave Epictetus taught in his book and in his life all the virtues. The young readers should also be made to see how, in every time, human nature has continued capable of the same results; and how very modern in the high things the civilized Greeks and Romans were, while in the low things they remained savage. It will be curious and instructive for them to note how, in the earliest and strongest of the Grecian states, one of the latest dreams of government had come true. The Sparta which the laws of Lycurgus created was a state in which the people were equal sharers in the rights and duties of all; none were rich or poor, except as the