Excerpt from The Ideas That Have Influenced Civilization in the Original Documents, Vol. 1 of 10: The Ancient World This leads us to say that we consider the work to contain as many possibilities from an educational standpoint, as any published in years. It is more than a history; it is an education. It is not intended to take the place of schools or text books, but it is intended to put in vivid form, in the shape of illustrative masterpieces which can never grow old, the slow increase one by one of the fund of ideas which should be every man's capital in his struggle to do what little he can to make himself and his community wiser or better. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.