I have already declared in the previous book, and now of necessity repeat, in accordance with your instruction concerning the past conflicts of the world: that neither everything nor everything in full that was done, and as it was done, can be set out, since great and innumerable matters have been written most copiously and by very many authors; and those writers, though they did not have the same purposes, nevertheless had the same events before them — for they unfold wars, while we unfold the miseries of wars.
1 Et superiore iam libro contestatus sum et nunc necessarie repeto secundum praeceptum tuum de anteactis conflictationibus saeculi: nec omnia nec per omnia posse quae gesta et sicut gesta sunt explicari, quoniam magna atque innumera copiosissime et a plurimis scripta sunt, scriptores autem etsi non easdem causas, easdem tamen res habuere propositas, quippe cum illi bella, nos bellorum miserias euoluamus.
Moreover, from this very abundance of which I complain a strait arises for me, and a more knotted anxiety hems me in. For if, in my zeal for brevity, I omit some things, they will be thought either to have been unknown to me now or not to have happened at that time; but if, striving to indicate everything without spelling it out, I gird it up in compendious brevity, I shall make it obscure, and for most readers it will be so told that it will not seem to have been told at all:
2 praeterea ex hac ipsa de qua queror abundantia angustia oritur mihi et concludit me sollicitudo nodosior. si enim aliqua studio breuitatis omitto, putabuntur aut mihi nunc defuisse aut in illo tunc tempore non fuisse; si uero significare cuncta nec exprimere studens conpendiosa breuitate succingo, obscura faciam et ita apud plerosque erunt dicta, ut nec dicta uideantur:
especially since, on the contrary, we are concerned to convey the force of events, not their mere image; and brevity and obscurity — or rather brevity, which is always obscure — though it holds out the image of knowing, nevertheless takes away the vigour of understanding. But I, knowing that both must be avoided, shall do both, so that in one way or another each may be tempered by the other, if neither much seems to have been passed over nor much to have been compressed.
3 maxime cum e contrario nos uim rerum, non imaginem commendare curemus; breuitas autem atque obscuritas, immo ut est semper obscura breuitas, etsi cognoscendi imaginem praefert, aufert tamen intellegendi uigorem. sed ego cum utrumque uitandum sciam, utrumque faciam ut quocumque modo alterutra temperentur, si nec multa praetermissa nec multum constricta uideantur.