 The Roman Way by Edith Hamilton The book's dedication reads, to D. F. R. Nostrorum Sermonum Candidae Udex Acknowledgement is made to theatre arts monthly for permission to reprint the material in chapters 2 and 3 which originally appeared in that magazine. Preface If a personal confession may be allowed, although I have read Latin ever since my father, who knew nothing about methods for softening the rigours of study, started me at the age of seven on six weeks' preparation for Caesar. I have read it, except during the brief intermission of college, for my own pleasure merely, exactly as I would read French or German. I open a volume of Cicero, or Horace, or Virgil, purely for the enjoyment of what they write, not in the slightest degree because they write in Latin, or because they are essential to a knowledge of Roman history. What the Romans did has always interested me much less than what they were, and what the historians have said they were is beyond all comparison less interesting to me than what they themselves said. It was inevitable, therefore, that when I came to think about the outline of the Roman Way I should see it entirely as it was marked out by the Roman writers. I have considered them alone in writing this book. It is in no sense a history of Rome, but an attempt to show what the Romans were as they appear in their great authors, to set forth the combination of qualities they themselves prove are peculiarly Roman distinguishing them from the rest of antiquity. A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. When we read Anthony Trollope or W. S. Gilbert we get an incomparably better view of what mid-Victorian England was like than any given by the historians. They will always be our best textbooks for an understanding of the force back of those years of unparalleled prosperity for the favoured few, the character and the outlook of the upper-class Englishman. That is the kind of textbook I have depended upon exclusively. For each period I have taken only the accounts given by contemporary writers. The contents of the book are the result of a selection based not upon personal preferences, but upon how much a writer shows of the life and character of the men of his own times. Plautus and Terence from this point of view are of the greatest importance, as they not only paint the very first picture we have of Rome, but do so in great detail. The century in between Terence and Cicero is of course passed over, since none of the writings have survived. Cicero's Rome is taken up at greater length than any other period, because his letters are the best source of information we possess for any age, not of Rome only, but of all antiquity.