nihilists, as they are called, are only repetitions of such agitations
as those which took place so many centuries ago.

In the midst of a storm in the especially boisterous winter season of
the year 280, the waves of the Mediterranean washed upon the shores of
Southern Italy a brave man more dead than alive, who was to take the
lead in the last struggle against the supremacy of Rome among its
neighbors. The winds and the waves had no respect for his crown. They
knew not that he ruled over a strong people whose extensive mountainous
land was known as the "continent," and that he had left it with
thousands of archers and slingers and footmen and knights; and that he
had also huge elephants trained to war, beasts then unknown in Italian
warfare, which he expected would strike horror into the cavalry of the
country he had been cast upon.

As we study history, we find that at almost every epoch it centres
about the personality of some strong man who has either power to
control, or sympathetic attractiveness that holds to him those who are
around him. It was so in this case. Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, was born
seven years after the great Alexander died, and was at this time
thirty-seven years of age. Claiming descent from Pyhrrus, son of
Achilles, and being a son of Æacides, he was in the direct line the
Kings of Epirus. He was also cousin of an Alexander, who, in the year
332, had crossed over from Epirus to help the Tarentines against the
Lucanians, had formed an alliance with the Romans, and had finally been
killed by a Lucanian on the banks of the Acheron, in 326. After a
variety of vicissitudes, Pyrrhus had ascended the throne of his father
at the age of twenty-three, and, taking Alexander the Great as his
model, had soon become popular and powerful. Aiming at the conquest of
the whole of Greece, he attacked the king of Macedonia and overcame