The Chief Periods of European History

“The beginnings then of European history, more strictly perhaps the beginnings of the brilliant prologue to unbroken European history, will be found in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, among the islands and peninsulas of the Ægæan sea. I am speaking now of history in the narrower sense, of the continuous political history of man. With the strangers who lay without the great brotherhood, ancient as may have been their power, mighty as may have been their works, we have to deal only when they come across the men of our own household. We begin in short with the first beginnings of the recorded history of Greece, with the first Olympiad as a conventional date, but not forgetting times before the first Olympiad so far as our earliest pictures carry us back to yet older times...”