The following are a few examples of leading problems which ancient historians had before them, dictated by the conditions and events of Greek and Roman life; they were treated from a mental point of view, which no longer found in those facts episodes of the rivalry of Aphrodite and Hera (as formerly in the Trojan War), but varying complex human struggles, due to human interests, expressing themselves in human actions. How did the wars between the Greeks and the Persians originate and develop? What were the origins of the Peloponnesian War? of the expedition of Cyrus against Artaxerxes? How was the Roman power formed in Latium, and how did it afterward extend in Italy and in the whole world? How did the Romans succeed in depriving the Carthaginians of the hegemony of the Mediterranean? What were the political institutions developed in Athens, Rome, and Sparta, and what form did the social struggle take in those cities? What did the Athenian _demos,_ the Roman _plebs,_ the _eupatrides,_ and the _patres_ desire? What were the virtues, the dispositions, the points of view, of the various peoples which entered into conflict among themselves, Athenians, Lacedemonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Gauls, and Germans? What were the characters of the great men who guided the destinies of the peoples, Themistocles, Pericles, Alexander, Hannibal, and Scipio? These problems were solved in a series of classical works by Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, etc., and they will certainly not be blamed for failing to exhaust their themes--that is, for failing to sound the bottom of the universe, because there is no sounding the bottom of the universe--nor because they solve those problems only in the terms in which they had proposed them, neither more nor less than as we solve the problems of our day in our own terms. Nor must we forget that since modern historiography is still much as it was left by the Greeks, the greater part of those events are still thought as they were by the ancients, and although something has been added and a different light illumines the whole, the work of the ancient historians is preserved in our own: a true "eternal possession," as Thucydides intended that his history should be.