BOOKS I. AND II. OF THE ANNALS OF TACITUS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH: WITH NOTES AND MARGINAL ANALYSIS OF THE CHAPTERS. BY A. H. BEESLY, M.A. LATE SCHOLAR OF WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD. LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. PREFACE. 6 IT WAS LATELY ASKED, 'For whom does the great army of translators work?' And if we grant Roger Ascham's dictum that even the best translation is for mere necessity but an evil imped thing to fly withal,' the question does not seem very easy to answer. I suppose, however, that any careful translation, though it must be a labour, is a labour of love, and that primarily the translator works to please himself. Good, bad, or indifferent as the present attempt to translate an author and a book, perhaps the least of all authors and books susceptible of translation, may be thought to be, this has certainly been the case with me. I have worked patiently through each chapter, sentence by sentence, never knowingly shirking any difficulty. Indeed, I am afraid that, as in making bread, too much handling of the dough spoils the loaves, I have often injured instead of improved renderings by repeated alterations. At first I tried to reproduce every phrase, even military terms, by the nearest modern equivalent. But as I found that very few technical words admitted of uniform translation, I gave this up, and have left such words as legio, centurio, &c., un |