language, attempting to give the preference to standard phrases and
words of classical Greek over corrupt idioms and expressions of a
decadent tongue; it is this very conscientiousness, of course, which
leads him to adopt so much elaborate syntax from bygone masters of
style. Finally,--the point in which, I think, Dio has come nearest to
the gloomy Athenian,--something of the matter-of-fact directness of
Thukydides is perceptible in this Roman History. The operator unrolls
before us the long panorama of wars and plots and bribes and murders:
his pictures speak, but he himself seldom interjects a word. Sometimes
the lack of comment seems almost brutal, but what need to darken the
torture-chamber in the House of Hades?

There are two ways of writing history. One is to observe a strictly
chronological order, describing together only such events as took
place in a single year or reign; and the other, to give all in one
place and in one narration the story of a single great movement,
though it should cover several years and a fraction,--or, again, to
sketch the condition of affairs in one province, or valley, or
peninsula for so long a time as the story of such a region seems to
possess unity of development. The first kind of writing takes the year
or the reign as its standard, whereas the second uses the matter under
discussion or some part of the earth in the same way: and they may
accordingly be called, one, the chronological method, and the other,
the pragmato-geographical. The difference between the two is well
illustrated by the varying ways in which modern works on Greek history
treat the affairs of Sicily.

The first plan is that which Dio follows, and his work would have been
called by the Romans _annales_ rather than _historiæ_. The method has
its advantages, one of which is, or should be, that the reader knows