Book I.] DEDICATION. 7 



Father, yourself, and your Brother, in a history of our own 

 times, beginning where Aufidius Bassus concludes ^ You 

 will ask, Where is it ? It has been long completed and its 

 accuracy confirmed^ ; but I have determined to commit the 

 charge of it to my heirs, lest I should have been suspected, 

 during my lifetime, of having been unduly influenced by 

 ambition. By this means I confer an obligation on those 

 who occupy the same ground with myself; and also on 



Sosterity, who, I am aware, will contend with me, as I have 

 one with my predecessors. 



You may judge of my taste from my having inserted, in 

 the beginning of my book, the names of the authors that I 

 have consulted, l^or I consider it to be courteous and to 

 indicate an ingenuous modesty, to acknowledge the sources 

 whence we have derived assistance, and not to act as most 

 of those have done whom I have examined. !For I must 

 inform you, that in comparing various authors with each 

 other, I have discovered, that some of the most grave and of 

 the latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from 

 former works, without making any acknowledgement ; not 

 avowedly rivalling them, in the manner of Virgil, or with 

 the candour of Cicero, who, in his treatise " De Republica^," 

 professes to coincide in opinion with Plato, and in his Essay 

 on Consolation for his Daughter, says that he follows 

 Crantor, and, in his Offices'*, Pansecius ; volumes, which, as you 

 well know, ought not merely to be always in our hands, but 

 to be learned by heart. For it is indeed the mark of a per- 

 verted mind and a bad disposition, to prefer being caught in 



^ " A fine Aiifidii Bassi ; " as Alexandre remarks, "rinis autem Au- 

 fidii Bassi intelligendus est non mors ejus, sed tempus ad quod suas ipse 

 perduxerat historian. Quodnam Ulud ignoramus." Lem. i. 18. For an 

 accovmt of Aufidius Bassus we are referred to the catalogue of Hardouin, 

 but his name does not appear there. Q.uintiLian (x. 1) informs us, that 

 he wrote an account of the Grermanic war. 



2 *' Jam pridem peracta sancitur." 



3 This sentiment is not found in that portion of the treatise which has 

 been lately published by Angelus Mains. Alexandre in Lemaire, i. 19. 



* The following i^ probably the passage in the Offices to which Pliny 

 refers : " Pansecius igitur, qui sine controversia de officiis accuratissime 

 disputavit, quemcjue nos, correctione quadam exhibita, potissimum secuti 

 Bumus . . . . " (iii. 2.) 



