trace of that antique worth is now left among us, I cannot but at once
marvel and grieve; at this inconsistency; and all the more because I
perceive that, in civil disputes between citizens, and in the bodily
disorders into which men fall, recourse is always had to the decisions
and remedies, pronounced or prescribed by the ancients.

For the civil law is no more than the opinions delivered by the ancient
jurisconsults, which, being reduced to a system, teach the jurisconsults
of our own times how to determine; while the healing art is simply
the recorded experience of the old physicians, on which our modern
physicians found their practice. And yet, in giving laws to a
commonwealth, in maintaining States and governing kingdoms, in
organizing armies and conducting wars, in dealing with subject nations,
and in extending a State's dominions, we find no prince, no republic, no
captain, and no citizen who resorts to the example of the ancients.

This I persuade myself is due, not so much to the feebleness to which
the present methods of education have brought the world, or to the
injury which a pervading apathy has wrought in many provinces and cities
of Christendom, as to the want of a right intelligence of History, which
renders men incapable in reading it to extract its true meaning or to
relish its flavour. Whence it happens that by far the greater number
of those who read History, take pleasure in following the variety of
incidents which it presents, without a thought to imitate them; judging
such imitation to be not only difficult but impossible; as though the
heavens, the sun, the elements, and man himself were no longer the same
as they formerly were as regards motion, order, and power.

Desiring to rescue men from this error, I have thought fit to note down
with respect to all those books of Titus Livius which have escaped