To My Father

William Vail Wilson Davis

Who Has Taught Me More
Than All My Books




Preface


If this book serves to show that Classical Life presented many phases
akin to our own, it will not have been written in vain.

After the book was planned and in part written, it was discovered that
Archdeacon Farrar had in his story of "Darkness and Dawn" a scene,
"Onesimus and the Vestal," which corresponds very closely to the scene,
"Agias and the Vestal," in this book; but the latter incident was too
characteristically Roman not to risk repetition. If it is asked why such
a book as this is desirable after those noble fictions, "Darkness and
Dawn" and "Quo Vadis," the reply must be that these books necessarily
take and interpret the Christian point of view. And they do well; but
the Pagan point of view still needs its interpretation, at least as a
help to an easy apprehension of the life and literature of the great age
of the Fall of the Roman Republic. This is the aim of "A Friend of
Cæsar." The Age of Cæsar prepared the way for the Age of Nero, when
Christianity could find a world in a state of such culture, unity, and
social stability that it could win an adequate and abiding triumph.