Some questioned the choice of a novelist as translator, and with reason that fell only just short of cogency. The decision was however based on the nature of the Memoirs themselves which are full of dialogue, dramatic scenes and dramatic presentation of the characters. Some may also feel that Mr Massie's version is indeed, in the event, too racy, too full of contemporary slang (or perhaps the slang of two or three decades ago), and that it suffers from the novelistic determination to make the Emperor's language consistently lively. I am bound to confess that I am sympathetic to these strictures; in our translator's defence I can only say that Augustus's Latin is itself full of expressions never previously encountered in classical prose, and that the style of the Memoirs veers from the extremes of colloquiality to a serene and formal beauty.
Those wishing for a more sober, scholarly and (I fear) accurate rendering must abide the completion of the great annotated edition now being prepared, also under my direction, by the scholars of thirteen American universities, or the even more ambitious quadrilingual edition (with annotations in the same four languages: Latin, Greek, German and English) being undertaken by the team under the direction of Professor Otto Friedrichstrasse, both of which editions, crowning peaks of contemporary scholarship, have been ambitiously and courageously scheduled for publication before the end of the century. Meanwhile the English-speaking reader unable to read Latin (and, alas, how few can do so in these degenerate days!) must content himself with Mr Massie's version, whatever its deficiencies.