The task of writing a history of our nation from Rome’s earliest days fills me, I confess, with some misgivings and even were I confident in the value of my work, I should hesitate to say so. I am aware that for historians to make extravagant claims is, and always has been, all too common: Every writer on history tends to look down his nose at his less cultivated predecessors, happily persuaded that he will better them in point of style, or bring new facts to light. But however that may be, I shall find satisfaction in contributing, not, I hope, ignobly, to the labor of putting on record the story of the greatest nation in the world. Countless others have written on this theme and it may be that I shall pass unnoticed amongst them. If so, I must comfort myself with the greatness and splendor of my rivals, whose work will rob my own of recognition. My task, moreover, is an immensly laborious one. I shall have to go back more than 700 years, and trace my story from its small beginnings up to these recent times when its ramifications are so vast that any adequate treatment is hardly possible. I am aware too that most readers will take less pleasure in my account of how Rome began and in her early history; they will wish to hurry on to more modern times and read of the period, already a long one, in which the might of an imperial people is beginning to work its own ruin. My own feeling is different; I shall find antiquity a rewarding study. If only, because, while I am absorbed in it, I shall be able to turn my eyes from the troubles, which for so long have tormented the modern world, and to write without any of that over anxious consideration, which may well plague a writer in contemporary life, even if it does not lead him to conceal the truth.
