Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/12

viii and engagements did not permit him to proceed with it. I accordingly requested and obtained Dr. Mommsen's permission to translate his work.

The translation has been prepared from the third edition of the original, published in the spring of the present year at Berlin. The sheets have been transmitted to Dr. Mommsen, who has kindly communicated to me such suggestions as occurred to him. I have thus been enabled, more especially in the first volume, to correct those passages where I had misapprehended or failed to express the author's meaning, and to incorporate in the English work various additions and corrections which do not appear in the original. The author has also furnished me with some interesting notes, such as that on the Servian census at page 95, that on the word vates at page 240, and that on Appius Claudius at page 292. With reference to the latter I have inserted in an appendix Dr. Mommsen's more matured views as embodied by him in a paper on the Patrician Claudii recently read before the Prussian Academy. The note at page 442, on the treaties with Carthage, has been extracted from the author's work on Roman Chronology—a book which, in addition to its intrinsic merits, derives a peculiar interest from the fact, that it is written in friendly controversy with the author's own brother.

In executing the translation I have endeavoured to follow the original as closely as is consistent with a due regard to the difference of idiom. Many of our translations from the German are so literal as to reproduce the very order of the German sentence, so that they are, if not altogether unintelligible to the English reader, at least far from readable, while others deviate so entirely from the form of the original as to be no longer translations in the proper sense of the term. I have sought to pursue a middle course between a mere literal translation, which would be repulsive, and a loose paraphrase, which would be in the case of such a work peculiarly unsatisfactory. Those who are most conversant with the difficulties of such a task will probably be the most willing to show forbearance towards the shortcomings of my performance, and