they slavishly clung to its substance, they succeeded, as a rule, in destroying all traces of its original form and colouring. L. Calpurnius Piso, tribune in 149 B.C. and consul in 133 B.C., prided himself on reducing the old legends to the level of common sense, and importing into them valuable moral lessons for his own generation. By Caelius Antipater the methods of rhetoric were first applied to history, a disastrous precedent enough. He inserted speeches, enlivened his pages with chance tales, and aimed, as Cicero tells us, at not merely narrating facts but also at beautifying them. His successors carried still farther the practice of dressing up the rather bald chronicles of earlier writers with all the ornaments of rhetoric. The old traditions were altered, almost beyond the possibility of recognition, by exaggerations, interpolations and additions. Fresh incidents were inserted, new motives suggested and speeches composed in order to infuse the required life and freshness into these dry bones of history. At the same time the political bias of the writers, and the political ideas of their day were allowed, in some cases perhaps half unconsciously, to affect their representations of past events. Annalists of the Gracchan age imported into the early struggles of patricians and plebeians the economic controversies of their own day, and painted the first tribunes in the colours of the two Gracchi or of Saturninus. In the next generation they dexterously forced the venerable records of the early republic to pronounce in favour of the ascendancy of the senate, as established by Sulla. To political bias was added family pride, for the gratification of which the archives of the great houses, the funeral panegyrics, or the imagination of the writer himself supplied an ample store of doubtful material. Pedigrees were invented, imaginary consulships and fictitious triumphs inserted, and family traditions and family honours were formally incorporated with the history of the state.
Things were not much better even where the annalists were dealing with recent or contemporary events. Here, indeed, their materials were naturally fuller and more trustworthy, and less room was left for fanciful decoration and capricious alteration of the facts. But their methods are in the main unchanged. What they found written they copied; the gaps they supplied, where personal experience failed, by imagination. No better proof of this can be given than a comparison of the annalist’s version of history with that of Polybius. In the fourth and fifth decades of Livy the two appear side by side, and the contrast between them is striking. Polybius, for instance, gives the number of the slain at Cynoscephalae as 8000; the annalists raise it as high as 40,000 (Livy xxxiii. 10). In another case (xxxii. 6) Valerius Antias, the chief of sinners in this respect, inserts a decisive Roman victory over the Macedonians, in which 12,000 of the latter were slain and 2200 taken prisoner, an achievement recorded by no other authority.
Such was the written tradition on which Livy mainly relied. We have next to examine the manner in which he used it, and here we are met at the outset by the difficulty of determining with exactness what authorities he is following at any one time; for of the importance of full and accurate references he has no idea, and often for chapters together he gives us no clue at all. More often still he contents himself with such vague phrases as “they say,” “the story goes,” “some think,” or speaks in general terms of “ancient writers” or “my authorities.” Even where he mentions a writer by name, it is frequently clear that the writer named is not the one whose lead he is following at the moment, but that he is noticed incidentally as differing from Livy’s guide for the time being on some point of detail (compare the references to Piso in the first decade, i. 55, ii. 32, &c.). It is very rarely that Livy explicitly tells us whom he has selected as his chief source (e.g. Fabius xxii. 7; Polybius xxxiii. 10). By a careful analysis, however, of those portions of his work which admit of a comparison with the text of his acknowledged authorities (e.g. fourth and fifth decades, see H. Nissen, Untersuchungen, Berlin, 1863), and elsewhere by comparing his version with the known fragments of the various annalists, and with what we are told of their style and method of treatment, we are able to form a general idea of his plan of procedure. As to the first decade, it is generally agreed that in the first and second books, at any rate, he follows such older and simpler writers as Fabius Pictor and Calpurnius Piso (the only ones whom he there refers to by name), to whom, so far as the first book is concerned, Niebuhr (Lectures, p. 33) would add the poet Ennius. With the close of the second book or the opening of the third we come upon the first traces of the use of later authors. Valerius Antias[1] is first quoted in iii. 5, and signs of his handiwork are visible here and there throughout the rest of the decade (vii. 36, ix. 27, x. 3-5). In the fourth book the principal authority is apparently Licinius Macer, and for the period following the sack of Rome by the Gauls Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, whose annals began at this point in the history. We have besides a single reference (vii. 3) to the antiquarian Cincius, and two (iv. 23, x. 9) to Q. Aelius Tubero, one of the last in the list of annalists. Passing to the third decade, we find ourselves at once confronted by a question which has been long and fully discussed—the relation between Livy and Polybius. Did Livy use Polybius at all, and, if so, to what extent?
It is conceded on all hands that Livy in this decade makes considerable use of other authorities than Polybius (e.g. Fabius xxii. 7; Caelius Antipater xxi. 38, 46, 47, xxii. 31, &c.), that he only once mentions Polybius (xxx. 45), and that, if he used him, he did so to a much less extent than in the fourth and fifth Polybius.decades, and in a very different manner. It is also agreed that we can detect in Livy’s account of the Hannibalic war two distinct elements, derived originally, the one from a Roman, the other from a non-Roman source. But from these generally accepted premises two opposite conclusions have been drawn. On the one hand, it is maintained (e.g. by Lachmann, C. Peter, H. Peter, Hist. Rom. Relliq.) that those parts of Livy’s narrative which point to a non-Roman authority (e.g. Hannibal’s movements prior to his invasion of Italy) are taken by Livy directly from Polybius, with occasional reference of course to other writers, and with the omission (as in the later decades) of all matters uninteresting to Livy or his Roman readers, and the addition of rhetorical touches and occasional comments. It is urged that Livy, who in the fourth and fifth decades shows himself so sensible of the great merits of Polybius, is not likely to have ignored him in the third, and that his more limited use of him in the latter case is fully accounted for by the closer connexion of the history with Rome and Roman affairs, and the comparative excellence of the available Roman authorities, and, lastly, that the points of agreement with Polybius, not only in matter but in expression, can only be explained on the theory that Livy is directly following the great Greek historian. On the other hand, it is maintained (especially by Schwegler, Nitzsch, and K. Böttcher) that the extent and nature of Livy’s agreement with Polybius in this part of his work point rather to the use by both of a common original authority. It is argued that Livy’s mode of using his authorities is tolerably uniform, and that his mode of using Polybius in particular is known with certainty from the later decades. Consequently the theory that he used Polybius in the third decade requires us to assume that in this one instance he departed widely, and without sufficient reason, from his usual course of procedure. Moreover, even in the passages where the agreement with Polybius is most apparent, there are so many discrepancies and divergencies in detail, and so many unaccountable omissions and additions, as to render it inconceivable that he had the text of Polybius before him. But all these are made intelligible if we suppose Livy to have been here following directly or indirectly the same original sources that were used by Polybius. The earliest of these original sources was probably Silenus, with whom may possibly be placed, for books xxi. xxii., Fabius Pictor. The latter Livy certainly used directly for some parts of the decade. The former he almost as certainly knew only at second hand, the intermediate authority being probably Caelius Antipater. This writer, who confined himself to a history of the Second Punic War, in seven books, is expressly referred to by Livy eleven times in the third decade; and in other passages where his name is not mentioned Livy can be shown to have followed him (e.g. xxii. 5, 49, 50, 51, xxiv. 9). In the latter books of the decade his chief authority is possibly Valerius Antias.
In the fourth and fifth decades the question of Livy’s authorities presents no great difficulties, and the conclusions arrived at by Nissen in his masterly Untersuchungen have met with general acceptance. These may be shortly stated as follows. In the portions of the history which deal with Greece and the East, Livy follows Polybius, and these portions are easily distinguishable from the rest by their superior clearness, accuracy and fulness. On the other hand, for the history of Italy and western Europe he falls back on Roman annalists, especially, it seems, on Claudius Quadrigarius and Valerius Antias—a most unfortunate choice—and from them too he takes the annalistic mould into which his matter is cast.
Livy’s general method of using these authorities was certainly not such as would be deemed satisfactory in a modern historian. He is indeed free from the grosser faults of deliberate injustice and falsification, and he resists that temptation to invent, to which “the minds of authors are only too Critical method.much inclined” (xxii. 7). Nor is he unconscious of the necessity for some kind of criticism. He distinguishes between rumour and the precise statements of recognized authorities (cf. xxi. 46, v. 21, vii. 6). The latter he reproduced in the main faithfully, but with a certain exercise of discretion. Where they disagreed, he calls attention to the fact, occasionally pronouncing in favour of one version rather than another (ii. 41, xxi. 46) though often on no adequate grounds, or attempting to reconcile and explain discrepancies (vi. 12, 38). Where he detects or suspects the insertion of fabulous matter he has no scruple in saying so. Gross exaggerations, such as those in which Valerius Antias indulged, he roundly denounces, and with equal plainness of speech he condemns the family vanity which had so constantly corrupted and distorted the truth. “I suppose,” he says (viii. 40), “that the record and memorial of these matters hath been depraved and corrupted by these funeral orations of praises, . . . while every house and family draweth to it the honour and renown of noble exploits, martial feats and dignities by any untruth and lie, so it be colourable.” The legendary character of the earliest traditions he frankly admits. “Such things as are reported either before or at the foundation of the city, more beautiful and set out with poets’ fables than grounded upon pure and faithful records, I mean neither to aver nor disprove” (Praef.); and of the whole history previous
- ↑ For Livy’s debt to Valerius Antias, see A. A. Howard in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, xvii. (1906), pp. 161 sqq.
