Unless, however, I am misled by affection for my undertaking, there has
							never existed any commonwealth greater in power, with a purer morality,
							or more fertile in good examples; or any state in which avarice and
							luxury have been so late in making their inroads, or poverty and
							frugality so highly and continuously honoured, showing so clearly that
							the less wealth men possessed the less they coveted. In these latter years wealth has brought avarice in its train, and the
							unlimited command of pleasure has created in men a passion for ruining
							themselves and everything else through self-indulgence and
							licentiousness. But criticisms which will be unwelcome, even when
							perhaps necessary, must not appear in the commencement at all events of
							this extensive work. We should much prefer to start with favourable omens, and if we could
							have adopted the poets' custom, it would have been much pleasanter to
							commence with prayers and supplications to gods and goddesses that they
							would grant a favourable and successful issue to the great task before
							us. Aeneas in
									 Italy . To begin
							with, it is generally admitted that after the capture of Troy , whilst the rest of the Trojans
							were massacred, against two of them —Aeneas and Antenor —the Achivi
							refused to exercise the rights of war, partly owing to old ties of
							hospitality, and partly because these men had always been in favour of
							making peace and surrendering Helen. Their subsequent fortunes were different. Antenor sailed into the
							furthest part of the Adriatic, accompanied by a number of Enetians who
							had been driven from Paphlagonia by a revolution and after losing their king
							Pylaemenes before Troy were looking for a settlement and a leader.