and Britain. And therefore it was that the New Testament was
written in Greek, that it might be read and understood by all the
nations of the Roman empire; so that, next to the Jews, and the
Bible which the Jews handed down to us, we owe more to these old
Greeks than to any people upon earth.

Now you must remember one thing--that 'Greeks' was not their real
name. They called themselves always 'Hellens,' but the Romans
miscalled them Greeks; and we have taken that wrong name from the
Romans--it would take a long time to tell you why. They were made
up of many tribes and many small separate states; and when you hear
in this book of Minuai, and Athenians, and other such names, you
must remember that they were all different tribes and peoples of
the one great Hellen race, who lived in what we now call Greece, in
the islands of the Archipelago, and along the coast of Asia Minor
(Ionia, as they call it), from the Hellespont to Rhodes, and had
afterwards colonies and cities in Sicily, and South Italy (which
was called Great Greece), and along the shores of the Black Sea at
Sinope, and Kertch, and at Sevastopol. And after that, again, they
spread under Alexander the Great, and conquered Egypt, and Syria,
and Persia, and the whole East. But that was many hundred years
after my stories; for then there were no Greeks on the Black Sea
shores, nor in Sicily, or Italy, or anywhere but in Greece and in
Ionia. And if you are puzzled by the names of places in this book,
you must take the maps and find them out. It will be a pleasanter
way of learning geography than out of a dull lesson-book.

Now, I love these old Hellens heartily; and I should be very
ungrateful to them if I did not, considering all that they have
taught me; and they seem to me like brothers, though they have all