Works and Other Worthy Writings (Aldine Edition)

PREFACE OF ANGELO POLIZIANO TO POPE INNOCENT VIII, SUPREME PONTIFF, REGARDING THE HISTORY OF HERODIAN, TRANSLATED FROM GREEK INTO LATIN.

When I was in Rome about three years ago, accompanying the Florentine embassy which had come to congratulate you, Holy Father Innocent, Supreme Pontiff, upon your recent elevation to the pinnacle of that supreme dignity, I remember that you entrusted me with great celebration with the task of translating into Latin the history of the deeds of the Roman princes, if any such records were still found among the monuments of the Greeks that remained untouched by our men. Therefore, when I realized that by the judgment of your celestial mind, I had received not so much an honor as a burden, as soon as I returned to Florence, I began to survey with the deepest concern which of the entire abundance of the Greeks I might best undertake to translate. In particular, this Herodian occurs to me—an excellent writer of events, who long frequented the imperial court, and who, having set out to compose a history of his own times in his declining years, neither lacked the praises of eloquence nor, above all, failed to retain fidelity and freedom. Once this work was completed by us with neither much effort nor—as I believe—an unwilling Minerva, those times soon arrived in which our studies were hindered, and almost all alacrity for writing—which counts for the most—was extinguished. But afterwards, when through your providence you both restored peace to Italy, which you desired, and entered into a private affinity with my patron Lorenzo de' Medici—a man of most ample fortune, but of even more ample talent and prudence—that cloud, so to speak, departed, and serenity was restored to the world, so that we now gather ourselves, and like flowers weighed down by rain and almost drooping, we are raised up toward the rays of a new light. Therefore, it is now our pleasure to publish old works and to forge new ones, from which some celebrity may be produced for your most sacred name, or clarity for our times, or even utility for studious men. Moreover, we ask, Supreme Pontiff, that you receive this Herodian of ours with a joyful countenance, as some prelude to true and just labor, until we bring forth greater and perhaps better things for you, for you shall discover in it a great variety of affairs and persons, much novelty of events, and frequent examples—on either side of fortune, as it were—of unstable