ncident and may
perhaps feel called upon immediately, under the strictness of his
self-imposed regime, to apologize or justify himself.

The style of the original is rendered somewhat difficult by a
conscious imitation of the involved sentence-unit found in Thukydides
(though reminiscences of Herodotos and Demosthenes also abound) but
gives an effect of solidity that is symmetrical with both the method
and the man. Moreover, one may assert of it what Matthew Arnold
declared could _not_ be said regarding Homer's style, that it rises
and falls with the matter it treats, so that at every climax we may be
sure of finding the charm of vividness and at many intermediate points
the merit of grace. It is a long course that our historian, pressed by
official cares, has to cover, and he accomplishes his difficult task
with creditable zeal: finally, when his Thousand Years of Rome is
done, he compares himself to a warrior helped by a protecting deity
from the scene of conflict. Surely it must have been one of the major
battles of his energetic life to wrest from the formless void this
orderly record of actions and events embroidered with discussion of
the motives for those actions and the causes of such events.

Dio has apparently equipped himself extremely well for his
undertaking. A fragment edited by Mai (see Fragment I) seems to make
him say that he has read every available book upon the subject; and,
like Thukydides, he is critical, he is eclectic, and often supports
his statements by the citation or introduction of documentary
testimony. His superstition is debasing and repellent, but works harm
only in limited spheres, and it is counterbalanced by the fact that he
had been a part of many events recounted and had held high
governmental offices, enjoying a career which furnished him with
standards by which to judge the likelihood of allegations regarding
earlier periods of Rome,--that, in a word, he was no mere
carpet-knight of History. He is honestly conscientious in his use of
language, attempting to give the preference to standard phrases and
words of classical Greek over corrupt idioms and expressions of a
decadent tongue; it is this very conscientiousness, of course, which
leads him to adopt so much elaborate syntax from bygone masters of
style. Finally,--the point in which, I think, Dio has come nearest to
the gloomy Athenian,--something of the matter-of-fact directness of
Thukydides is perceptible in this Roman Histo