field for smooth advance, I must reply that the
original is likewise very far from being a serene and joyous highway;
and it has not appeared to me necessary or desirable to improve upon
the form of Dio's record further than the difference in the genius of
the two languages demanded. I am reminded here of what Francisque
Reynard says regarding the difficulties of Boccaccio, and because of a
similarity in the situation I venture to quote from the preface of his
(French) version of the Decameron:

"Dans son admiration exclusive des anciens, Boccace a pris pour modele
Ciceron et sa longue periode academique, dans laquelle les incidences
se greffent sur les incidences, poursuivant l'idee jusqu'au bout, et
ne la laissant que lorsqu'elle est epuisee, comme le souffle ou
l'attention de celui qui lit.... Aussi le plus souvent sa phraseologie
est-elle fort complexe, et pour suivre le fil de l'idee premiere,
faut-il apporter une attention soutenue. Ce qui est deja une
difficulte de lecture dans le texte italien, devient un obstacle
tres serieux quand on a a traduire ces interminables phrases en
francais moderne, prototype de precision, de clarte, de logique
grammaticale.... Je sais bien qu'il y a un moyen commode de
l'eluder...: c'est de couper les phrases et d'en faire, d'une seule,
deux, trois, quatre, autant qu'il est besoin. Mais a ce jeu on change
notablement la physionomie de l'original, et c'est ce que je ne puis
admettre."

As is Boccaccio to Cicero, so is Cassius Dio, _mutatis mutandis_, to
Thukydides; and of course the imitator improves upon the model.
Imagine a man who out-Paters Pater when Pater shall be but a memory,
and you begin to secure a vision of the style of this Roman senator,
who accentuates every peculiarity of the tragic historian's packed
periods; and whereas his great predecessor made sentences so long as
to cause mediaeval scholars heartily to wish him in the Barathron,
books and all, comes forward six hundred years later marshaling phrase
upon phrase, clause upon clause, till a modern is forced to exclaim:
"What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?" Now I have
dealt with these complexes in different ways; and sometimes I have
cleft and hacked and wrenched them out of all semblance of their
original shape, and sometimes I have hauled them almost entire, like a
cable, tangled with particles, out of the sea-bed of departed days.

This principle of inconsistency which I have pursued in vary