Between the time of Jugurtha and the consulate of Lepidus, the historical work of Sisenna formed the connecting link. With this Sallust no doubt was satisfied; otherwise he would have treated also of that period.
The great change in the Roman world under Augustus had taken place; the history of the republic was brought to a close. It was believed that nothing more was to be hoped from constitutional forms and their development, but that the great mass of the state was to be kept together by outward force. After such a catastrophe, history appears altogether in a different light, and is written in a different spirit. In these times, just as in Greece after the downfall of the Athenian state, many historians come forth before the public. After Cæsar’s death, Diodorus Siculus wrote, to whom the Roman history is merely a secondary affair. It is probable, that Timæus also in his history of Italy and Sicily had interwoven the Roman one; though not beyond a very early period. Diodorus had the idea, which none but a prosaic mind could have conceived, of writing the whole of ancient history in synchronistical order; first in large periods, and then year by year, down to the consulate of Cæsar, when the latter commenced the Gallic war. He concludes before the civil war, in order to avoid the offence, which he might have given by his narration to one or the other of the two parties. And it was besides a very convenient break; as in all probability he wrote his work before the conclusion of the troubles. That he composed his history after the death of Cæsar, is evident from the introduction, in which he mentions that event, and calls Cæsar Divus. Scaliger had the unfortunate idea of arguing from the passage I, 68 that Diodorus had written as late as 746, that therefore he had left off fifty years before his own time. This opinion passed from Scaliger into the work of Vossius De Historicis Græcis et Latinis, and from the latter into the Bibliotheca Græca of Fabricius. That passage states concerning the Olympiads, that these were a period of four years which the Romans called bissextum; and from this Scaliger infers, that he could not have written before 746, because at that time Augustus had fixed the intercalatio at four years. This interpretation is most ingenious; but the passage is an interpolation, as some of the earlier and all the later commentators have remarked, so that Wesseling entirely expunges it from the text. The term χρόνος for year, which occurs there, is modern Greek; just as tempus instead of annus is met with after the fifth century. Diodorus is an author whose writings have been falsified. These forgeries were made in the age of the restoration of literature, when manuscripts were much sought after, and dearly paid for. There are for the most part omissions; and from the eleventh to the twentieth book he now and then gives fasti, which do not in the least agree with those which we have. The names in them are often not to be recognised at all. All his accounts of the earliest times he probably had from Fabius. Where Polybius begins, he may have made use of him down to the year 608; and he may also have had Posidonius, Rutilius, Sylla and Lucullus.
We now come to the two great authors, who were contemporary writers of Roman history. Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his introduction gives a full account of his circumstances and his works. He came to Rome after the conclusion of the civil wars, and published his history, 743 according to Cato, (745 according to Varro). He calls himself the son of Alexander of Halicarnassus, and was a rhetorician. His rhetorical writings belong to the earlier time of his life. These are of all the Greek rhetorical works the most excellent, those of Aristotle alone excepted. They are full of fine remarks, and are the produce of an amiable mind and an exquisite taste: it is only a pity that they should have been handed down in such a corrupt state. He is very likely to be the same person whom Strabo[20] mentions under the name of Cæcilius. We cannot wonder at this; for if he obtained the Roman citizenship, he was obliged to assume the name of a Roman gens. It can hardly mean Atticus, who indeed, but extremely seldom, is called by the name of Cæcilius. In the lives also of the ten orators, which are found among Plutarch’s Biographies, the name of Cæcilius occurs, which some took to be that of the quæstor Cæcilius, who was in Sicily under Verres, but which seems likewise to mean Dionysius; for all that is quoted of him we find in Dionysius. It is true, that the facts, which we now read in Dionysius, may also have been contained in others; yet the supposition, which we have put forth, is a very probable one, as indeed Josephus also is frequently called Flavius.
His history comprises, in twenty books, the period from the earliest times to the beginning of the first Punic war. It does not go further, either because Polybius,—for whom he has, however, no particular liking,—begins with that period, or because the much-read history of Fabius rises here into greater importance. The first ten books are complete; the eleventh is in a very corrupt state. Extracts from the others are found in the collections of Constantinus Porphyrogenitus De Virtutibus et Vitiis, and De Legationibus; and also in a collection ἐκλογαὶ Διονυσίου τοῦ Ἁλικαρνασσέως, which is met with in several libraries, but is dreadfully mutilated. Mai has published them from a Milanese manuscript; Montfaucon had already directed attention to them. I respect and acknowledge the merits of Mai; but he has an unfortunate vanity, and thus I believe, that he has intentionally foreborn to mention, that here he has been led into the right path by Montfaucon, conduct for which he has been taken to task by Ciampi. Yet this is merely a secondary question. The collection itself mostly consists of unconnected sentences, remnants perhaps of books of Const. Porphyrogenitus, which have not come down to us. The advantage gained from this discovery is at all events very considerable. Dionysius himself had made an abridgment of his work in five books, to which Mai quite wrongly wants to have those extracts referred. As to the first ten books, there are more very old manuscripts of them extant than of any other ancient author. The Chigi manuscript is of the tenth, that of the Vatican of the eleventh century; the former is kept by Fea locked up from all visitors,—it has been imperfectly collated by Amati, but the result has never been published, nor would he sell it to me; the Vatican codex has been made use of by Hudson. The eleventh book is only to be found in copies which are quite modern. Ever since the old books were no more written on rolls, those which were voluminous had stated divisions. Thus the Pandects, the Theodosian Code, Livy also, were originally divided into decades; and in all likelihood Dionysius too. Of these, the first volume has been preserved entire. Of the second, a copy very probably long existed;—Photius was acquainted with it still;—yet only a few leaves of it have come into the hands of the first Greek copyists. The text is much more corrupt than that of the first half.
Dionysius was first printed by Robert Stephens, and indeed from a very bad manuscript. He had already before that been generally read in a Latin translation. A Florentine, Lapus[21] Biragus, translated him from a very good manuscript, probably a Roman one, in the time of Pope Sextus IV., who has done very great services to ancient literature. But Lapus was a bungling translator, with a very scanty knowledge of Greek; as also were Petrus Candidus, Raphael Volaterranus, Leonardus Aretinus. But the works of these men were much read; and to us they are of importance, because they represent the manuscripts which they made use of.[22] Sylburg has very judiciously used the translation of Lapus. It agrees almost throughout with the Vatican manuscript. H. Glareanus revised again the version of Lapus, and, as he states, corrected it in six thousand places. He likewise availed himself of a manuscript. S. Gelenius of Cologne made a new translation, and one far better than those of his predecessors. He too may serve as a manuscript. Now was the text itself first published. The second edition is that of Sylburg, 1586, one of the most excellent elucidations of an ancient author any where to be found. He had, as it seems, an incomplete collation of the Venetian manuscript; but beside that the translations only. It is a pity that Sylburg should not have restored the text, with the means which he possessed in his apparatus, and in his eminent talent for conjecturing. The annotations are done in a masterly style; and added to this moreover was the double work of a matchless philological index, and of an historical one almost as perfect. No editor has done as much for his author as Sylburg did for Dionysius. Sylburg is not yet sufficiently appreciated. This work, his Etymologicum Magnum, his Pausanias, his Clement of Alexandria, bear evidence that in the faculty of conjecturing, and in profound knowledge of the language, he was not inferior to any one philologian of the first renown, not even to J. Fr. Gronovius himself. He has contributed much to the Thesaurus of Henry Stephens. Particularly important, besides, is his edition and translation of the Syntaxis of Apollonius. His edition of Dionysius, which was published by Wechel at Frankfort, is rare. A reprint of it was made at Leipsic 1691. After Sylburg follows Hudson’s edition, 1704. Hudson was a friend of Dodwell, and passed in England for an eminent philologian. Bentley was at that time run down, as being a Whig; and therefore the whole University of Oxford had conspired against him, and opposed to him Hudson, whom they lauded as a great classical scholar. But Hudson was a sad bungler. He has not done the least thing for his Geographi Græci Minores, just as Reiz did nothing for Lucian. Hudson had a collation of the excellent Vatican Codex of Dionysius, which is in the notes, but of which he made no use at all. The edition is beautifully printed. Sylburg’s annotations are for the most part not given, or else mutilated. But the book enjoyed some fame in Germany, and a bookseller of Leipsic had it reprinted. When the first volume was nearly finished, the publisher applied for the correction of the proof sheets to Reiske. The latter was a friend of my father, and I have a high regard for him; but I am not blind to his defects for all that. His mind was extremely versatile, he had an admirable talent for conjecture; but he was too hasty. He had previously only read Dionysius once; whilst correcting, he inserted into the text readings from the Vatican manuscript, sometimes also his own emendations, of which he gives an account at the conclusion. Yet they are often very unhappy, although now and then very spirited. In Grimme’s Synopsis nothing has been done for criticism. If I could get a collation of the Chigi manuscript, I might perhaps undertake some day to make a critical edition of Dionysius.
It prepossesses us in favour of Dionysius, who shows himself in his rhetorical writings to have been a man of fine judgment, that, as he tells us, he had devoted twenty-two years to that work; that he had learned the Latin language, and made researches into the annals. His history, which now reaches down only a little beyond the time of the decemvirs, extended, as already observed, to the beginning of the first Punic war; at which period Timæus also left off, and Polybius began. He was befriended by many distinguished Romans, and wrote with a true veneration for the greatness of the Roman people. The name of Archæology appears new in him. When we see that his history does not give in eleven books more than Livy’s does in three; that he takes up a whole book with what happened before the building of the city, and treats of the earliest times so much at length; this prolixity excites our mistrust not only of the credibility, but also of the judgment of the author. As far as regards this point, it is not to be denied that Dionysius has chosen a plan of which we cannot approve. Not to mention that he looks upon the time of the kings as historical, he made a mistake when he undertook to treat history pragmatically from the very earliest times. Yet the more carefully we examine the work, the more worthy of respect Dionysius appears to us, and the more we find his book to be a treasury of the most sterling information. As such it has been first acknowledged by genuine criticism only; before that, it was cried down as a tissue of absurdities. Setting his imperfections aside, we cannot indeed assign too high a rank to Dionysius, as a treasure of ancient history providentially preserved to us. He has borrowed, if not directly, at least indirectly, from the old law books and annalists; and without him we should not know any thing of the most important changes, to which, however, too often he only lends personifications. The careful use which he made of his sources renders him invaluable. Even the matter of his speeches he took from the old annalists; many circumstances at least, which were contained in them, and which he could not receive into the context of his history, he has introduced in his harangues, so that the latter, in which elsewhere the arbitrary fancy of the historian seems to prevail, often retain the traces of tradition. Thus, when there is a rising of the people, these words occur in the speech of a patrician, “If there is no more help for it, why should we not, rather than humble ourselves before these plebeians, grant Isopolity to the Latins?” Now this Isopolity, as we must take it for granted, is in the subsequent peace imparted to the Latins, which is, however, not mentioned in Dionysius. This is one of the passages in which he introduced a notice found in the annalists, on the occasion of the conclusion of the peace, as subject matter into a speech. Only we must discriminate between his mistakes, and the substance of the valuable information which he gives. If he had succeeded in comprehending the language of Fabius, all would have been correct; but he understood the Greek language as it was current in his own time, and thence all his mistakes arose. He has lost the clue in the history of the development of the Roman constitution: he is not aware of the difference between δῆμος and ὅμιλος, but he gives all, though it appears to him a riddle, and tries to find a solution. That he is a rhetorician and not a statesman, we indeed see only too clearly. In his criticism he is faulty, but, for all that, not bad: he was a very clear-headed man. With very little exception his language is correct and well suited to its purpose. What we may object to in him, are the harangues, in which the distinctness of individual character is entirely lost; an ill-timed imitation of those of Thucydides. I have worked through this author from my early youth, as no one perhaps has done since he has written, and I may say that I entertain infinite respect and veneration for him; and I am convinced that except in the speeches and pragmatical reflections, he has not by any means invented or intentionally omitted anything. He worked out his sources, it is true, without selection, and cared only for the abundance of the materials which were offered to him. Nothing is more unjust than the opinion formerly entertained, that all that Dionysius had more than Livy was merely the invention of his brain.
About the same time, 743 according to Cato, and 745 according to Varro, Livy began to write. That he commenced so late seems authenticated. He was born 693 according to Cato, in the consulship of the great Cæsar, at Patavium, and lived during the reign of Tiberius, until 772 according to Cato (774 according to Varro), A.D. 20. Livy commenced his career as a rhetorician. Of his early life nothing is known. He has written on rhetoric also. There are several grounds for fixing the period in which he began to compose his history at so late a date. His first decade has been called the work of his youth, but the following proofs are against it. Mentioning Numa, he speaks of Augustus as the restorer of all the temples, consequently after 730; moreover he talks of the closing of the temple of Janus, of the building of the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and he names Cæsar Augustus in relating the war of Cossus. Dodwell very seldom hits upon the right conclusion, but in this point we must agree with him. In his Annales Velleiani he remarks, that from the manner in which Livy wrote about Spain, it is evident that that country had already then been conquered by Augustus. The ninth book is of later date than the campaign of Drusus; for he says in it concerning the Silva Ciminia, that it had been just as impassable quam nuper fuere Germanici saltus, and the latter were first entered by Domitius Ahenobarbus and Drusus after 740 only. It might be attempted to make this out to be a later revision; but it is easy to tell what books are written in one flow of the pen, and which are revised, and those of Livy undoubtedly belong to the former sort.—It is in accordance with our supposition, that Dionysius did not know him; for if a book written in such a masterly style as that of Livy had existed, Dionysius could not have been ignorant of it; and it would then have been impossible also for him to complain of the utter want of any thing like the working out of the materials of Roman history. In the last books of the first decade, on the other hand, we find several traces that Livy had known Dionysius. From the Excerpta de Legationibus we learn, in what manner Dionysius treated the second Samnite war; the relation of it by Livy cannot possibly have been taken from Roman Annals, but from Greek sources, especially the account how Naples fell into the power of the Romans, which Dionysius seems to have got from a Neapolitan Chronicle. Livy could not know the latter himself, and yet he gives a circumstantial description of the event. He must therefore have had a Greek source, and this is certainly no other than Dionysius. The comparison also of the might of Alexander with that of Rome leads to the same conclusion. And certainly the histories of Pyrrhus king of Epirus, and of the plundering expedition of Cleonymus, are likewise from the Greek; so much the rather, as Livy here calls the Sallentines Messapians,[23] probably because he did not know that this was the Greek name for the Sallentines. Already from the eighth book, Livy must have made use of Dionysius.—Let no one say that his history has too much freshness for it to be deemed the work of an old man: this depends entirely upon the character of the individual. He had yet, even with his mode of working, nearly thirty years’ time for the accomplishment of his immense undertaking. That he did not cut it off where it finishes, but that he died before he had reached his goal, is evident from several circumstances. His history consisted of a hundred and forty-two books, and ended with the death of Drusus without any marked close. The feeling against disproportion in a division by numbers was among the ancients quite decided and developed, and therefore the number itself bears witness to the books not having been completed. There can be no question, but that the division into decades is an original one, and we might see it yet more clearly if we had the second decade left. Even the Greek word decas would not have been invented in later times. The twentieth book must have been double the size of the rest, in order that the war with Hannibal might not begin with the twenty-second book. At the end of the war with Hannibal, the books are extremely short, in order that it might finish with the thirtieth book. He cannot therefore have intended to close the work in the middle of a decade. At least the epitome reaches only as far as book 142, so that at all events we should be obliged to assume, that as two books in the middle, thus also at the conclusion some are still wanting.
When we attentively consider the work of Livy, we find it written in an astonishingly uneven style. The several decades essentially differ from each other, and in the first decade, the first book from the rest. This one is the very perfection of his manner, and shows how matchless he would have been, had his history been more condensed. Throughout the first decade, a high strain of eloquence prevails. In the third, the monotony of the events constantly checks its display; yet beautifully written are the battles on the Trasimene Lake, and at Cannæ. Here, however, is the turning point. In the fourth, the prolixity gains ground more and more, in which traces of extreme old age are to be recognised. The more freely Livy relates, the more beautiful is his composition. The fourth decade is far below the third; in the fourth and fifth he has to a great extent paraphrased Polybius. He could not have chosen better with regard to credibility; but here he is hurried, and it happens also that he contradicts himself, and that, telling the same things twice over, he becomes prolix, which he never is in the first and third decades. But particularly remarkable is the fragment from the ninety-first book; which is written in such a manner, that if it were not inscribed T. Livî liber XCI, and that some circumstances bore evidence for it, one would not take it for a work of Livy. Here we understand how the old grammarians could have reproached him with tautology and palilology;[24] here we see how a great writer may become old and garrulous. If the second decade had not been lost also, it would be easy to explain how the later ones have perished, viz. by their being excluded from the grammatical schools. His preface is characteristic, belonging to the worst parts of the whole work, whilst on the contrary the introductions in those great practical historians, Thucydides, Sallust, Tacitus, are masterpieces. This is to be explained from the fact, that Livy began without being conscious of any definite object, and those other writers with a bold stroke of the pencil drew the results of long lucubration.
It is evident that when Livy commenced his work, he was far from being well versed in Roman history; he had read some of the old books, and he may have been, compared with others, well acquainted with ancient history: but he was entirely deficient in general and comprehensive historical knowledge. He wrote it, as he himself states in the preface, from the pleasure which he took in history, and for consolation in a cheerless and most gloomy period; the rising generation were to be refreshed with the remembrance of the glorious times of old; after having once resolved upon this work, he had set about it in the first exultation of enthusiasm. In writing the history of the kings, he apparently followed Ennius. We perceive that clearly it is consistent, and of a piece. As he went on, he gradually got hold of more authors, but always a very limited number. As in Dionysius every thing is connected, so in Livy all is isolated. He had not at all made it his task to write a learned and scrupulously sifted history. With foreign histories he is altogether unacquainted. He could not have written that the Carthaginians first came to Sicily in 324, if he had known that fifty years before they had already undertaken their first great expedition thither. That of Alexander of Epirus would, according to him, have lasted eighteen years. He also mistakes Heraclitus, Philip’s ambassador to Hannibal, for the philosopher of the same name.
The ancients were generally in the habit of dictating their works; this is to be seen in none more clearly than in Livy. He worked out each of the years separately; and very often the later ones are in contradiction to those which go before, so that we find that he did not even once submit the whole to a connected revision. Fabius, Valerius Antias, Tubero, and Quadrigarius,—whether this last from the beginning cannot be ascertained,—are the authors whom he made use of; and perhaps, though I doubt it, Cato’s Origines also. He read himself, or had some one to read to him, the events of a year, and then dictated his narrative from it, taking one annalist in preference as his groundwork; and therefore in most cases there are no contradictions in the history of the same year. As he went on, he got hold of authors whom he had not known originally; for instance, the Annales Pontificum for the first time just before the end of the first decade, Polybius not earlier than the middle of the war of Hannibal. The account of the siege of Saguntum, which is so poor in incident, and that of the passage of Hannibal over the Alps, would surely have been differently told by him, if instead of Cœlius Antipater, he had availed himself of Polybius. It was only when he reached the history of Philip of Macedon, that he looked into Polybius; in the fourth decade, he translates from him every thing that he has not taken from the next annalists concerning the internal affairs of Rome. Thus he certainly had before him Posidonius after Polybius, and then the Memoirs of Rutilius and of Sylla; in later times, perhaps Asinius Pollio, Theophanes, and others. The farther he advanced, the nearer he came to the work for which he was really fitted, only he had unfortunately become old in the meanwhile. The delineation of the character of Cicero from Livy in M. Seneca’s Suasoria, is done in a masterly style. One is more and more convinced how richly Livy was endowed with a talent for description and narration of the kind which we prize in the novelists of our time. What he is utterly deficient in, is comprehensiveness of view. He often takes from an annalist an account, which presupposes quite different circumstances from those which he himself has set forth. Wherever he wants to give a summary, one sees that what a little while since he had written, nay, even what he had quite close before him, was not at all present to his mind. Thus the enumeration of the nations which fell off immediately after the battle of Cannæ is entirely wrong, there being several among them who only revolted some years afterwards. He shows himself to be no critic in the war of Hannibal, where he repeats the tales which Cœlius Antipater only could have devised; and moreover we find in him an entire absence of judgment with regard to an event and the actors in it, whether they were right or wrong. In early life, he was on Pompey’s side; that is to say, a partisan of that chaos which had grown up out of the Roman constitution. He was then very young, being only ten years old when Cæsar came to Italy. This bygone time before the dictatorship of Cæsar, appeared to his imagination as a golden age. Thus a friend of my youth, a Frenchman and a staunch royalist, remarked to me, that the French nobles who at the outbreak of the Revolution were still young, were the most fiercely zealous against its ideas, and looked upon the period immediately preceding it as a time of the highest felicity. Livy seems to have been one of those men who never put to themselves the question, What ought then to have happened, if matters had not come to a crisis? Yet it is natural that after Cæsar’s victory noble minds should have inclined to Pompey, who seemed to uphold the ancient usages and constitution; and it is only now that we are able to recognise Cæsar to have been the most beneficial of the two leaders. Livy, moreover, applies his party names to persons and to circumstances which were quite different, and he looks upon every thing that belongs to the tribunes as seditious. When he tells us of Tarquin the Proud, how he usurped the dominion over the Latins, and how Turnus Herdonius, evidently with the greatest justice, withstood him, he calls the latter homo seditiosus, iisque artibus potentiam nactus. Thus Livy must have proverbially become what is called in France an Ultra. In this sense Augustus called him a Pompeian; though he did not fear him, because no real effects were to be expected from such daydreams.