Edward A. Freeman
Published: 2015-07-03
Total Pages: 660
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Excerpt from History of Sicily, Vol. 1: From the Earliest Times These two volumes are the beginning of a work which, if I did not think before I thought of the History of the Norman Conquest, I certainly thought of before the plan of that work had taken any definite shape. I believe my thoughts were first drawn towards Sicily, nearly fifty years back, by a Pindar lecture of the late Isaac Williams. That gave me, and I suppose others, some dim notion of one side of the story of the great Mediterranean island. The other side was suggested to me some years later by Gaily Knights Normans in Sicily. The two sides were put into their fitting relation to one another by a few memorable words of Grote (chap, xliii. vol. v.p. 277); "We are here introduced to the first known instance of that series of contests between the Phoenicians and Greeks of Sicily, which, like the struggles between the Saracens and the Normans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries after the Christian aera, were destined to determine whether the island should be a part of Africa or a part of Europe - and which were only terminated, after the lapse of three centuries, by the absorption of both into the vast bosom of Rome." Those words I wish to have looked on as the text of all that I have since thought and written on Sicilian history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."