As a kid, I loved history. But whenever a history book started a boring dive into the economy, class structure, and archaeological finds of this or that era, I turned off my flashlight and went to sleep. Kids like stories. Whether these are stories of heroism in scary wars, or of the wisdom and intrigue of ancient kings and rebels, or of the sudden turns of fate that befall fortune-seekers, kids are always fascinated by a story with a plot. They learn from stories, not from dense paragraphs about the phases of the Bronze age, or the injustices of the social order here and there.
I discovered that my kid remembers minute details of Greek mythology - which is a story-based narrative - and can't recall any cities of Ancient Greece, or any historical figures after reading non-fiction on the subject. To him, Ancient Greece is Odysseus and the Sirens. Because that's a memorable story, while the development of agricultural tools is not.
This book follows the old-fashioned, story-based, traditional route of teaching history - through the stories of heroes and kings, with no tribute paid to modern economic and social perspectives. Culture is memes. And that means historical figures, and anecdotes about them.
To write this book, I went back to Herodotus, Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and other ancient sources of biographical anecdotes, and extracted from them the stories that will be most memorable to a modern kid. I retold them without adding any fictional color. I have omitted some things, however. Anything gruesome or seriously cruel is not included. Anything off-color, or outside traditional-family-friendly morality is not included.
Here is a list of the historical figures included in this book: Homer, Aesop, Drakon, Solon, Croesus, Pythagoras, Pheidippides, Leonidas, Themistocles, Pericles, Phidias, Socrates, Aspasia, Hippocrates, Alexander the Great, Diogenes, Plato, Herostratus, Aristotle, Archimedes.
