Works and Other Worthy Writings (Aldine Edition)

THE FIRST BOOK OF HERODIAN’S HISTORY CONCERNING THE EMPIRE AFTER MARCUS, OR CONCERNING HIS OWN TIMES, TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK BY ANGELO POLIZIANO, INTERPRETER, FOR POPE INNOCENT VIII, SUPREME PONTIFF. PROEMIUM.

Those who have handed down ancient events to posterity and have endeavored to renew the old memory of history through literature have, for the most part, while they seek the fame of erudition and attempt to assert their own name against the injury of oblivion, placed less industry in the investigation of truth than in the adorning and composing of their discourse. For they reckoned, evidently, that if anything false were handed down in matters most remote from their own age, it could not be refuted, and that they would nevertheless reap the most ample fruit of their labor and talent from the sweetness of their narration. Others, however, moved by private enmities and hatred of tyrants, or carried away into excessive flatteries of the praises of princes, cities, and private men, have raised up things which were in themselves slight and humble, through the artifice of writing, far beyond the credibility of truth. I, however, on the contrary, have undertaken to write not a history received from others, or one that is unknown, or one lacking witnesses, but one that is still inherent in the senses and memory of those who read, collected with the utmost fidelity and diligence, hoping that the knowledge of these things—which are indeed many and great, and have occurred within no long time—will not be unpleasant to posterity. For if anyone reflects in his mind upon the entire age from the Prince Augustus—since indeed the power of the Romans was devolved to the arbitration of one man—he will not find, even in those approximately two hundred years (for so many are counted almost to the times of Marcus), either such diverse successions of empires, or such varied casualties and outcomes of wars, whether civil or external—so many nations stirred up, so many of our cities and barbarian ones stormed—besides earthquakes and pestilences, and the lives of princes and tyrants so new and unheard of that no similar examples of them are found among the ancients, or at least very few, some of whom held power for a long time, others for a short time, some