The Sabine husbands immediately prepared themselves for war against the Romans, who had stolen their wives. When the battle had begun between the two armies, the Sabine women ran out in the midst of the fighting between their new and old husbands and begged them both to stop. They said they had come to love their new husbands and would not return to their old homes. What do you think of that? It sounds like a pretty bad beginning for a new city, doesn’t it? and you may well wonder how Rome turned out--a city that started with Romulus killing his brother and that was settled by escaped prisoners who stole the wives of their neighbors. We must remember, however, that then they were nearer the time when Primitive Men lived whose only rule of life was: kill or be killed, steal or be stolen; and whose usual way of getting wives was to knock them in the head and drag them off to their caves while they were senseless. Besides, they believed in the same gods as the Greeks, and we have heard how their gods did all sorts of wicked things themselves. This, too, was long before Christ was born, and at that time they did not know anything about the Christian religion or what we call right and wrong. You see I have tried to think of some good excuses for the actions of these first Romans. 17 Kings with Corkscrew Curls After Rome’s bad start she had one king after another, and some of these kings were pretty good and some were pretty bad. But the most important city in the world at this time was far away from Rome on the Tigris River. This city was called Nineveh, and here lived the kings of the country called Assyria, which I told you about some time ago. As usual, the chief thing we hear about Assyria and the Assyrians is that they were fighting with their neighbors. This, however, was not the fault of their neighbors. The Assyrian kings who lived in Nineveh wanted more land and power, and so they fought their neighbors in order to take their land away from them. These kings had long corkscrew curls, and you may think that only girls wear long curls and that a man with curls would be “girl-like.” But these kings were not at all that kind. They were such terrible fighters that they were feared far and near. They treated their prisoners terribly; they skinned them alive, cut off their ears, pulled out their tongues, bored sticks into their eyes, then bragged about it. They made the people whom they conquered pay them huge sums of money and promise to fight with them whenever they went to war. And so Assyria became so strong and powerful that she at last owned everything of importance in the world, the land between the rivers called Mesopotamia, and the land to the east, north, and south, and Phenicia, and Egypt, and pretty nearly everything except Greece and Italy.