contemporaries to learn, in good time, the lessons which the past history of the state had to teach.
It was probably about the time of the battle of Actium that Livy established himself in Rome, and there he seems chiefly to have resided until his retirement to Padua shortly before his death. We have no evidence that he travelled much, though he must have paid at least one visit to Campania (xxxviii. 56), and he never, so far as we know, took any part in political life. Nor, though he enjoyed the personal friendship and patronage of Augustus (Tac. Ann. iv. 34) and stimulated the historical zeal of the future emperor Claudius (Suet. Claud. xli.), can we detect in him anything of the courtier. There is not in his history a trace of that rather gross adulation in which even Virgil does not disdain to indulge. His republican sympathies were freely expressed, and as freely pardoned by Augustus. We must imagine him devoted to the great task which he had set himself to perform, with a mind free from all disturbing cares, and in the enjoyment of all the facilities for study afforded by the Rome of Augustus, with its liberal encouragement of letters, its newly-founded libraries and its brilliant literary circles. As his work went on, the fame which he had never coveted came to him in ample measure. He is said to have declared in one volume of his history that he had already won glory enough, and the younger Pliny (Epist. ii. 3) relates that a Spaniard came all the way from Gades merely to see him, and, this accomplished, at once returned home satisfied. The accession of Tiberius (A.D. 14) materially altered for the worse the prospects of literature in Rome, and Livy retired to Padua, where he died. He had at least one son (Quintil. x. 1. 39), who also was possibly an author (Pliny, Nat. Hist. i. 5. 6), and a daughter married to a certain L. Magius, a rhetorician of no great merit (Seneca, Controv. x. 29. 2). Nothing further is known of his personal history.
Analysis of the History.—For us the interest of Livy’s life centres in the work to which the greater part of it was devoted, the history of Rome from its foundation down to the death of Drusus (9 B.C.). Its proper title was Ab urbe condita libri (also called historiae and annales). Various indications point to the period from 27 to 20 B.C., as that during which the first decade was written. In the first book (19. 3) the emperor is called Augustus, a title which he assumed early in 27 B.C., and in ix. 18 the omission of all reference to the restoration, in 20 B.C., of the standards taken at Carrhae seems to justify the inference that the passage was written before that date. In the epitome of book lix. there is a reference to a law of Augustus which was passed in 18 B.C. The books dealing with the civil wars must have been written during Augustus’s lifetime, as they were read by him (Tac. Ann. iv. 34), while there is some evidence that the last part, from book cxxi. onwards, was published after his death A.D. 14.
The work begins with the landing of Aeneas in Italy, and closes with the death of Drusus, 9 B.C., though it is possible that the author intended to continue it as far as the death of Augustus. The division into decades is certainly not due to the author himself, and is first heard of at the end of the 5th century; on the other hand, the division into libri or volumina seems to be original. That the books were grouped and possibly published in sets is rendered probable both by the prefaces which introduce new divisions of the work (vi. 1, xxi. 1, xxxi. 1) and by the description in one MS. of books cix.-cxvi. as “bellorum civilium libri octo.” Such arrangement and publication in parts were, moreover, common with ancient authors, and in the case of a lengthy work almost a necessity.
Of the 142 libri composing the history, the first 15 carry us down to the eve of the great struggle with Carthage, a period, as Livy reckons it, of 488 years (xxxi. 1); 15 more (xvi–xxx.) cover the 63 years of the two great Punic wars. With the close of book xlv. we reach the conquest of Macedonia in 167 B.C. Book lviii. described the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, 133 B.C. In book lxxxix. we have the dictatorship of Sulla (81 B.C.), in ciii. Caesar’s first consulship (59 B.C.), in cix.-cxvi. the civil wars to the death of Caesar (44 B.C.), in cxxiv. the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, in cxxxiii. and cxxxiv. the battle of Actium and the accession of Augustus. The remaining eight books give the history of the first twenty years of Augustus’s reign.
Of this vast work only a small portion has come down to modern times; only thirty-five books are now extant (i.-x., xxi.-xlv.), and of these xli. and xliii. are incomplete. The lost books seem to have disappeared between the 7th century and the revival of letters in the 15th—a fact sufficiently accounted for by the difficulty of transmitting so voluminous a work in times when printing was unknown, for the story that Pope Gregory I. burnt all the copies of Livy he could lay his hands on rests on no good evidence. Only one important fragment has since been recovered—the portion of book xci. discovered in the Vatican in 1772, and edited by Niebuhr in 1820. Very much no doubt of the substance of the lost books has been preserved both by such writers as Plutarch and Dio Cassius, and by epitomizers like Florus and Eutropius. But our knowledge of their contents is chiefly derived from the so-called periochae or epitomes, of which we have fortunately a nearly complete series, the epitomes of books cxxxvi. and cxxxvii. being the only ones missing.[1] These epitomes have been ascribed without sufficient reason to Florus (2nd century); but, though they are probably of even later date, and are disappointingly meagre, they may be taken as giving, so far as they go, a fairly authentic description of the original. They have been expanded with great ingenuity and learning by Freinsheim in Drakenborch’s edition of Livy.[2] The Prodigio of Julius Obsequens and the list of consuls in the Chronica of Cassiodorus are taken directly from Livy, and to that extent reproduce the contents of the lost books. It is probable that Obsequens, Cassiodorus and the compiler of the epitomes did not use the original work but an abridgment.
Historical Standpoint.—If we are to form a correct judgment on the merits of Livy’s history, we must, above all things, bear in mind what his aim was in writing it, and this he has told us himself in the celebrated preface. He set himself the task of recording the history of the Roman people, “the first in the world,” from the beginning. The task was a great one, and the fame to be won by it uncertain, yet it would be something to have made the attempt, and the labour itself would bring a welcome relief from the contemplation of present evils; for his readers, too, this record will, he says, be full of instruction; they are invited to note especially the moral lessons taught by the story of Rome, to observe how Rome rose to greatness by the simple virtues and unselfish devotion of her citizens, and how on the decay of these qualities followed degeneracy and decline.
He does not, therefore, write, as Polybius wrote, for students of history. With Polybius the greatness of Rome is a phenomenon to be critically studied and scientifically explained; the rise of Rome forms an important chapter in universal history, and must be dealt with, not as an isolated fact, but in connexion with the general march of events in the civilized world. Still less has Livy anything in common with the naïve anxiety of Dionysius of Halicarnassus to make it clear to his fellow Greeks that the irresistible people who had mastered them was in origin, in race and in language Hellenic like themselves.
Livy writes as a Roman, to raise a monument worthy of the greatness of Rome, and to keep alive, for the guidance and the warning of Romans, the recollection alike of the virtues which had made Rome great and of the vices which had threatened her with destruction. In so writing he was in close agreement with the traditions of Roman literature, as well as with the conception of the nature and objects of history current in his time. To a large extent Roman literature grew out of
- ↑ For the fragments of an epitome discovered at Oxyrhynchus see J. S. Reid in Classical Review (July, 1904); E. Kornemann, Die neue Livius-Epitome aus Oxyrhynchus, with text and commentary (Leipzig, 1904); C. H. Moore, “The Oxyrhynchus Epitome of Livy in relation to Obsequens and Cassiodorus,” in American Journal of Philology (1904), 241.
- ↑ The various rumours once current of complete copies of Livy in Constantinople, Chios and elsewhere, are noticed by B. G. Niebuhr, Lectures on the History of Rome from the first Punic War (ed. L. Schmitz, 1844), i. 65.
