Category: History - Ancient
As in the order of time, so likewise in the order of importance, Marathon stands first among the Battles of Destiny. Without Marathon there would have been no Thermopylæ, Salamis, Platæa, Mycale; no Attic supremacy; no Age of Pericles: and would the world be just what it is to...
As in the order of time, so likewise in the order of importance, Marathon stands first among the Battles of Destiny. Without Marathon there would have been no Thermopylæ, Salami...
3. CHAPTER II.The life of Alexander the Great is of perennial interest, for it holds in epitome the life of the world when the world was young. Plutarch tells with quaint truthfulness what ca...
4. CHAPTER III.Had the battle of Zama been won by the Carthaginians and lost by the Romans, then Semitic influence rather than Aryan, would have moulded the civilization of Europe. These two m...
5. CHAPTER IV.In Germany, in the modern principality of the Lippe, may still be seen traces of the historic struggle between the Roman legions under Varus and the Germanic barbarians led by A...
6. CHAPTER V.Among the struggles of the past which seem decisively to have subverted the old order of things and ushered in the new, is the battle of Adrianople. There Valens, Emperor of Rom...
7. CHAPTER VI.If, in the battle of Chalons, Attila and his Huns had been victorious over the combined forces of the semi-Christianized Visigoths under Theoderic and the Romans under Ætius--th...
8. CHAPTER VII.The battle of Tours had as result the dominance of the Aryan race over the Semitic in Europe; and of the Cross over the Crescent throughout the world. As Gibbon says speaking of...
9. CHAPTER VIII.“If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you: If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you Yet make allowance for their doubting too...
10. CHAPTER IX.What France won in three years (1428-1431) under the leadership of Joan of Arc restored all that France had lost during the Hundred Years’ War. Cressy, Poitiers, Agincourt were...
11. CHAPTER X.Cross or Crescent! We of the present time can form no adequate idea of the import couched in those words in mediæval time. Strange that rivers of blood should flow in the intere...
12. CHAPTER XI.Spain’s proudly invincible Armada left Lisbon, May 20, 1588 with one hundred and forty ships and thirty thousand four hundred and ninety-seven men; fifty-three shattered vessels...
13. CHAPTER XII.The battle of Naseby was, perhaps, the anticipative preventive of an English “French Revolution.” The difference between Cromwell’s Ironsides and the gay Frondeurs measures the...
14. CHAPTER XIII.Where is all that we know when it is not in play upon the plane of consciousness? Where is the music of a Rachmaninoff--while he sleeps? the reminiscent wealth of a Gladstone--w...
15. CHAPTER XIV.Russia came into existence as a nation on the day of the victory of the Muscovite troops under Peter the First over the Swedes and allies under Charles XII. of Sweden, at Pultow...
16. CHAPTER XV.The surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga, though not, perhaps, properly classed among battles, is, nevertheless, properly classed among events momentous in their influence...
17. CHAPTER XVI.“Bury my heart in Valmy,” said Kellerman, soldier of the Seven Years’ War, victor of Valmy, Marshal of France under the first Napoleon, and court favorite of the Bourbons--as th...
18. CHAPTER XVII.Waterloo stands for the sudden darkening of the blazing comet, Napoleon; and for the return of France to the realm of the real after twenty-five years of hysterical unreality. C...