the ancients, the false derivations and spurious antiques which this knowledge enables us to detect, undoubtedly led to much erroneous speculation and possibly to some garbling of facts.
The inclination for critical enquiry seems generally to have been stronger in Greek than in Roman writers. It is very evident in Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius, and more so, as it seems to me, in the despised Dionysius than in Livy. But in neither of the last writers―our principal authorities for early Roman history—is it at all strong in comparison with a contrary tendency from which neither historians nor jurists have ever been free; I mean of unconsciously attributing the principles and procedure of the writer's period to the men of an earlier day: a tendency which, while at some times it will merely produce anachronous detail in an account mainly true, will at others give rise to stories of institution and enactment entirely false. We have the more harmless result in those picturesque touches which make Livy so charming and those speeches and sermons which make Dionysius so dull: the more dangerous one is to be feared in constitutional history proper, to which the latter author devotes much more attention than the former. The above remarks of course apply not merely to the regal period but mutatis mutandis to the whole history of the Roman law. For the early republic, in fact, while we have more information, we have also very evidently a new source of error in the unfair and exaggerated family records from which our historians have probably in great parts drawn their accounts[1]. In this very respect, however, any connected history stands higher than biography proper, which is, beyond question, the least trustworthy of authorities. There is much less scruple in attributing exploits of peace or war to the hero in hand
- ↑ This fact has long been recognised in the case of Livy. It is almost equally clear with Dionysius. See, inter alia, his references to certain τιμητικὰ ὑπομνήματα
