tials but their arms, and the tactics necessarily dependent on them. Under this aspect, they belong strictly to my subject, particularly in the earliest times: and though, to avoid repetition of things generally known, I thought proper to compress my subsequent narrative of their domestic concerns, yet, in the relation of their foreign affairs, few important transactions are left unexplained, from the building of the city to the dominion of Augustus.
In the compass of eight volumes, I have thus attempted a work that had been pronounced, by good judges, at home and abroad, to be wanting in modern literature —a more authentic, less meagre, and better connected ancient history. That a subject so vast and various, should be comprised within very moderate limits, may be ascribed to the new arrangement here given to it, and to my constant study not to substitute descants on history for history itself; to avoid declamatory reflections and wordy disquisitions. Facts and dates are the province of the historian: he is to tell what was done; to relate when and how each scene was transacted: above all, to trace and brighten the connection between effects and their causes, that the