Samuel Butler

“ The disadvantage of having to turn perpetually from the text of a volume to a map at its end, or a few pages away, is often enough to prevent the effective use of the one in elucidating the other. Despite some slight variations of spelling in the classical place-names used by different authors, there need be no difficulty in adapting the same Atlas to various works, whether they are English versions of historians like Herodotus or Livy, or English histories of the ancient world, such as Grote's and Gibbon's. ”

“ By comparing in the same way the place-names in Gibbon's and other histories, the reader will need no glossarist in using the Atlas to lighten their geographical allusions. It is not only when he comes to actual wars, campaigns and sieges that he will find a working chart of advantage. When he reads in Grote of the Ionic colonization of Asia Minor, and wishes to relate the later view of its complex process to the much simpler account given by Herodotus, he gains equally by having a map of the region before him. ”

“ The good service of the Classical Atlas, however is not defined by any possible extension of Everyman's Library. The maps of Palestine in the time of our Lord and under the older Jewish dispensation, of Africa and of Egypt, and that, now newly added, of the Migrations of the Barbarians, and the full index, give it the value of a gazetteer in brief of the ancient world, well adapted to come into the general use of schools where an inexpensive work of the kind in compact form has long been needed. ”