narratur_'--it is _our_ history to which we have been listening.

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World--the world
of classical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts
are not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They are
largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are
made. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations
of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours
of our ancestors. We _are_ the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now
are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world,
at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and
single. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the
unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the
hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the
history of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of
Classical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own
youth.

Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.

This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you to
approach the study of Classical Antiquity--not merely in that of
gratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile
curiosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world.
For what other knowledge matters?

This quest is but the beginning of a search which is and must be
lifelong. Perhaps I am wrong in calling it the beginning, and there are
others who would and do bid you begin earlier. I can only ask you to