Makers of History
Cyrus the Great
BY
JACOB ABBOTT
WITH ENGRAVINGS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1904
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand
eight hundred and fifty, by
Harper & Brothers,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District
of New York.
Copyright, 1878, by Jacob Abbott.
PREFACE.
One special object which the author of this series has had in view, inthe plan and method which he has followed in the preparation of thesuccessive volumes, has been to adapt them to the purposes oftext-books in schools. The study of a general compend of history,such as is frequently used as a text-book, is highly useful, if itcomes in at the right stage of education, when the mind issufficiently matured, and has acquired sufficient preliminaryknowledge to understand and appreciate so condensed a generalizationas a summary of the whole history of a nation contained in an ordinaryvolume must necessarily be. Without this degree of maturity of mind,and this preparation, the study of such a work will be, as it toofrequently is, a mere mechanical committing to memory of names, anddates, and phrases, which awaken no interest, communicate no ideas,and impart no useful knowledge to the mind.
A class of ordinary pupils, who have not yet become much acquaintedwith history, would, accordingly, be more benefited by having theirattention concentrated, at first, on detached and separate topics,such as those which form the subjects, respectively, of these volumes.By studying thus fully the history of individual monarchs, or thenarratives of single events, they can go more fully into detail; theyconceive of the transactions described as realities; their reflectingand reasoning powers are occupied on what they read; they take noticeof the motives of conduct, of the gradual development of character,the good or ill desert of actions, and of the connection of causes andconsequences, both in respect to the influence of wisdom and virtue onthe one hand, and, on the other, of folly and crime. In a word, theirminds and hearts are occupied instead of merely their memories.They reason, they sympathize, they pity, they approve, and theycondemn. They enjoy the real and true pleasure which constitutes thecharm of historical study for minds that are mature; and they acquirea taste for truth instead of fiction, which will tend to direct theirreading into proper channels in all future years.
The use of these works, therefore, as text-books in classes, has beenkept continually in mind in the preparation of them. The running indexon the tops of the pages is intended to serve instead of questions.These captions can be used in their present form as topics, inrespect to which, when announced in the class, the pupils are torepeat substantially what is said on the page; or, on the other hand,questions in form, if that mode is preferred, can be readil