The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Friend of Caesar, by William Stearns Davis

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Title: A Friend of Caesar
A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C.

Author: William Stearns Davis

Release Date: April 24, 2005 [EBook #15694]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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A Friend of Caesar

A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic

Time, 50-47 B.C.

By William Stearns Davis

"Others better may mould the life-breathing brass of the image,
And living features, I ween, draw from the marble, and better
Argue their cause in the court; may mete out the span of the heavens,
Mark out the bounds of the poles, and name all the stars in their turnings.
_Thine_ 'tis the peoples to rule with dominion--this, Roman, remember!--
These for thee are the arts, to hand down the laws of the treaty,
The weak in mercy to spare, to fling from their high seats the haughty."

--VERGIL, _AEn._ vi. 847-858.

New York
Grosset & Dunlap Publishers
1900

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
Caesar." The Age