Tauchnitz, whereas at others loose, disjointed paragraphs betray the hand of Boissevain who would not willingly let Xiphilinus and Dio ride in the same compartment.  My main desire through it all has been not so much to attain a logical unity of form as to present a history which shall look well and read well in English.  For this reason also I have banished most of the Fragments (which must have only a comparatively limited interest) to the last volume and have replaced them in my first by portions of Zonaras (taken from Melber) which have their origin in Dio and are at the same time clear, comprehensible, and connected.

Should any person object that even so my text does not offer eye and ear a pellucid 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.