1. In the Forest
Evolution is a slow, enduring process. Each small, unnoticed step builds to a dramatic, permanent alteration of the being. It takes many long epochs to create species and for animals to learn to be efficient in making their ways in the world. This is a story of the forest dweller, who had little thought of where he came from, where his antecedents were, or how they lived. He lived in the present and rarely wondered about anything.
2. Anatolia
This is the story of how Ishamai died at the market place of Wassukkani. It is not a special story. It is a story of an event like thousands of others and more, too many to count, that took place in the course of the evolution of man.
3. Egypt – After Alexander
Ptolemy was one of the greatest of Alexander’s generals. He fought in many battles, and he fought well. He came to be called Soter, Savior, by grateful citizens of Rhodes, whom he had saved from foreign dominance. He was at first satrap and then king of Egypt. This, however, is the story of the things Ptolemy did that made him be come to be regarded wise and the reason he had for doing them. It is not a story found in the histories.
4. Carthage
The history of Hannibal is fairly well recorded and known, considering our information is left entirely by his enemies. Some, of course, is made up; and some truth left out. It is natural to expect that the Roman historians were interested in recording all his faults carefully and recording his only virtue as native military genius. If his character was noble or his nature kind, we have no way of knowing it from them. They do not tell what they could not have known, of Hannibal’s quiet horror of Carthaginian victory, which he kept even from himself and which prevented him from pressing the Punic cause when he could have finished Rome. Nor do they tell another story they never discovered, the true events surrounding Hannibal’s death.
5. Latium
The history of one Gaius Marcus (a name the man had assumed) was forgotten soon after he died. He once had a most remarkable horse, however, and it became a legend in the Roman army.
6. Egypt
In Roman Egypt there lived one Berenice, a descendent of the Ptolemies who had once ruled that land. She was rich, proud, and spoiled; but she was also good hearted, kind, and generous to the people around her. The love they gave her, she deserved. Though her story is not ours to tell, we may tell that of a baby she purchased in the marketplace in Ptolemais in Lower Egypt.
7. Britannia
In a small village in Gaul, little more than its inn, people long remembered the tale of one Quintillus, a centurion of exceptional military quality, a Roman who had settled there in his retirement just as a new religion was taking hold on the popular mind.
8. Illyria
In the time of the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, few provinces suffered quite so much as Illyria, in the place we now call Yugoslavia. Wave after wave of Germanic tribes came through on their way from plundering Greece or Thrace to plundering Italy, Gaul, or Spain. On some occasions they were offered Illyria as a place to settle and rule in the vain hope that this would placate them, but they inevitably went on to somewhere else to plunder.
The people of Illyria moved from confusion to bondage and back as pawns in the diplomatic games of the age. Many suffered. A few profited. Most were not safe. This is the story of one who was, a man who kept himself and his family free from harm. It is the story of Theodoric; a story often told by his daughter, Martha, to her little nephew whom she loved.
9. Illyria, the White Prince
Shortly after Theotsar died, Germania again fell to the confusion of the times. Little was spared by another invading force as it went through. Three of Theotsar’s daughters had moved out of Illyria altogether, Theodosia to a hilly part of Thrace, Anna to Italy (though she had not been heard of since shortly after she got there), and Theodora to Constantinople. Their relatives hoped these were safe. Two of Theotsar’s daughters, Apollonia and Elisabet, were killed. The other two, Martha and Constantia, lost their husbands. Martha returned to the stone hunting-lodge in the hills to live. She was shortly joined by her little nephew, Theodoric, when his mother died of an illness. This story is of Constantia’s little son, whom Theotsar never knew.
Lives Lost and Found 