Excerpt from A Classical and Archaeological Dictionary of the Manners, Customs, Laws, Institutions, Arts, Etc of the Celebrated Nations of Antiquity, and of the Middle Ages, to Which Is Prefixed a Synoptical and Chronological View of Ancient History When we contemplate the manners and customs of the celebrated nations of antiquity (with their poets, historians, philosophers, warriors, and statesmen, - their laws and institutions, their games and festivals, their naval and military operations, their magnificent edifices, their arts and their literature, - with all of which our national education is deeply imbued, and our earliest impressions associated,) we feel, as it were, an instinctive veneration for those brilliant emanations of the human mind - the immortal productions of Greece and Rome, - which, like resplendent mirrors, have reflected to our own times, in faithful imagery, the important realities of distant ages, and the mighty events of the great empires of antiquity. Babylon and Persepolis, with their magnificent palaces, - Memphis and Ephesus, with their gorgeous temples, -and Thebes with her hundred gates and her million of warriors - have all passed away, "like the baseless fabric of a vision." Athens too - the nursing-mother of genius - the beau-ideal of every thing that is beautiful in art and sublime in intellect - presents but the mournful shrine of a once lovely image; - and Rome, - the "eternal city," - the proud mistress of the world - the last and the mightiest of all the mighty empires of antiquity, - now lies prostrate, and fallen from her high estate, - the mere dismembered skeleton of a once giant form; "sic transit gloria mundi." Yet, amidst this ruin of empires, the intellectual emanations of the classic ages have survived the ravages of time, and still continue to instruct and delight mankind, - are still the great storehouses of classical knowledge, - and still remain the grand sources of all the historical information we possess of the manners and customs of the great nations of antiquity. From these therefore, either mediately or immediately, have the materials embodied in the ensuing pages been chiefly derived, as being the only certain foundations, independently of the sacred records, on which the historian and the classical archaeologist can rely. 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.