This enthusiasm for Rome and for Roman virtues is, moreover, saved from degenerating into gross partiality by the genuine candour of Livy’s mind and by his wide sympathies with every thing great and good. Seneca (Suasoriae vi. 22) and Quintilian (x. 1. 101) bear witness to his impartiality. Thus, Hasdrubal’s devotion and valour at the battle on the Metaurus are described in terms of eloquent praise; and even in Hannibal, the lifelong enemy of Rome, he frankly recognizes the great qualities that balanced his faults. Nor, though his sympathies are unmistakably with the aristocratic party, does he scruple to censure the pride, cruelty and selfishness which too often marked their conduct (ii. 54; the speech of Canuleius, iv. 3; of Sextius and Licinius, vi. 36); and, though he feels acutely that the times are out of joint, and has apparently little hope of the future, he still believes in justice and goodness. He is often righteously indignant, but never satirical, and such a pessimism as that of Tacitus and Juvenal is wholly foreign to his nature.
Though he studied and even wrote on philosophy (Seneca, Ep. 100. 9), Livy is by no means a philosophic historian. We learn indeed from incidental notices that he inclined to Stoicism and disliked the Epicurean system. With the scepticism that despised the gods (x. 40) and denied that they meddled with the affairs of men (xliii. 13) he has no sympathy. The immortal gods are everywhere the same; they govern the world (xxxvii. 45) and reveal the future to men by signs and wonders (xliii. 13), but only a debased superstition will look for their hand in every petty incident, or abandon itself to an indiscriminate belief in the portents and miracles in which popular credulity delights. The ancient state religion of Rome, with its temples, priests and auguries, he not only reverences as an integral part of the Roman constitution, with a sympathy which grows as he studies it, but, like Varro, and in true Stoic fashion, he regards it as a valuable instrument of government (i. 19. 21), indispensable in a well-ordered community. As distinctly Stoical is the doctrine of a fate to which even the gods must yield (ix. 4), which disposes the plans of men (i. 42) and blinds their minds (v. 37), yet leaves their wills free (xxxvii. 45).
But we find no trace in Livy of any systematic application of philosophy to the facts of history. He is as innocent of the leading ideas which shaped the work of Polybius as he is of the cheap theorizing which wearies us in the pages of Dionysius. The events are graphically, if not always accurately, described; but of the larger causes at work in producing them, of their subtle action and reaction upon each other, and of the general conditions amid which the history worked itself out, he takes no thought at all. Nor has Livy much acquaintance with either the theory or the practice of politics. He exhibits, it is true, political sympathies and antipathies. He is on the whole for the nobles and against the commons; and, though the unfavourable colours in which he paints the leaders of the latter are possibly reflected from the authorities he followed, it is evident that he despised and disliked the multitude. Of monarchy he speaks with a genuine Roman hatred, and we know that in the last days of the republic his sympathies were wholly with those who strove in vain to save it. He betrays, too, an insight into the evils which were destined finally to undermine the imposing fabric of Roman empire. The decline of the free population, the spread of slavery (vi. 12, vii. 25), the universal craving for wealth (iii. 26), the employment of foreign mercenaries (xxv. 33), the corruption of Roman race and Roman manners by mixture with aliens (xxxix. 3), are all noticed in tones of solemn warning. But his retired life had given him no wide experience of men and things. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that he fails altogether to present a clear and coherent picture of the history and working of the Roman constitution, or that his handling of intricate questions of policy is weak and inadequate.
Sources.—If from the general aim and spirit of Livy’s history we pass to consider his method of workmanship, we are struck at once by the very different measure of success attained by him in the two great departments of an historian’s labour. He is a consummate artist, but an unskilled and often careless investigator and critic. The materials which lay ready to his hand may be roughly classed under two heads: (1) the original evidence of monuments, inscriptions, &c., (2) the written tradition as found in the works of previous authors. It is on the second of these two kinds of evidence that Livy almost exclusively relies. Yet that even for the very early times a certain amount of original evidence still existed is proved by the use which was made of it by Dionysius, who mentions at least three important inscriptions, two dating from the regal period and one from the first years of the republic (iv. 26, iv. 58, x. 32). We know from Livy himself (iv. 20) that the breastplate dedicated by Aulus Cornelius Cossus (428 B.C.) was to be seen in his own day in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, nor is there any reason to suppose that the libri lintei, quoted by Licinius Macer, were not extant when Livy wrote. For more recent times the materials were plentiful, and a rich field of research lay open to the student in the long series of laws, decrees of the senate, and official registers, reaching back, as it probably did, at least to the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. Nevertheless it seems certain that Livy never realized the duty of consulting these relics of the past, even in order to verify the statements of his authorities. Many of them he never mentions; the others (e.g. the libri lintei) he evidently describes at second hand. Antiquarian studies were popular in his day, but the instances are very few in which he has turned their results to account. There is no sign that he had ever read Varro; and he never alludes to Verrius Flaccus. The haziness and inaccuracy of his topography make it clear that he did not attempt to familiarize himself with the actual scenes of events even that took place in Italy. Not only does he confuse Thermon, the capital of Aetolia, with Thermopylae (xxxiii. 35), but his accounts of the Roman campaigns against Volsci, Aequi and Samnites swarm with confusions and difficulties; nor are even his descriptions of Hannibal’s movements free from an occasional vagueness which betrays the absence of an exact knowledge of localities.
The consequence of this indifference to original research and patient verification might have been less serious had the written tradition on which Livy preferred to rely been more trustworthy. But neither the materials out of which it was composed, nor the manner in which it had been put together, were such as to make it a safe guide. It was indeed represented by a long line of respectable names. The majority of the Roman annalists were men of high birth and education, with a long experience of affairs, and their defects did not arise from seclusion of life or ignorance of letters. It is rather in the conditions under which they wrote and in the rules and traditions of their craft that the causes of their shortcomings must be sought.
It was not until the 6th century from the foundation of the city that historical writing began in Rome. The father of Roman history, Q. Fabius Pictor, a patrician and a senator, can scarcely have published his annals before the close of the The Annalists. Second Punic War, but these annals covered the whole period from the arrival of Evander in Italy down at least to the battle by Lake Trasimene (217 B.C.). Out of what materials, then, did he put together his account of the earlier history? Recent criticism has succeeded in answering this question with some degree of certainty. A careful examination of the fragments of Fabius (see H. Peter, Historicorum Romanorum Relliquiae, Leipzig, 1870; and C. W. Nitzsch, Röm. Annalistik, Berlin, 1873) reveals in the first place a marked difference between the kingly period and that which followed the establishment of the republic. The history of the former stretches back into the regions of pure mythology. It is little more than a collection of fables told with scarcely any attempt at criticism, and with no more regard to chronological sequence than was necessary to make the tale run smoothly or to fill up such gaps as that between the flight of Aeneas from Troy and the supposed year of the foundation of Rome. But from its very commencement the history of the republic wears a different aspect. The mass of floating tradition, which had come down from early days, with its tales of border raids and forays, of valiant chiefs and deeds of patriotism, is now rudely fitted into a framework of a wholly different kind. This framework consists of short notices of important events, wars, prodigies, consecration of temples, &c., all recorded with extreme brevity, precisely dated, and couched in a somewhat archaic style. They were taken probably from one or more of the state registers, such as the annals of the pontiffs, or those kept by the aediles in the temple of Ceres. This bare official outline of the past history of his city was by Fabius filled in from the rich store of tradition that lay ready to his hand. The manner and spirit in which he effected this combination were no doubt wholly uncritical. Usually he seems to have transferred both annalistic notices and popular traditions to his pages much in the shape in which he found them. But he unquestionably gave undue prominence to the tales of the prowess and glory of the Fabii, and probably also allowed his own strong aristocratic sympathies to colour his version of the early political controversies. This fault of partiality was, according to Polybius, a conspicuous blot in Fabius’s account of his own times, which was, we are told, full and in the main accurate, and, like the earlier portions, consisted of official annalistic notices, supplemented, however, not from tradition, but from his own experience and from contemporary sources. But even here Polybius charges him with favouring Rome at the expense of Carthage, and with the undue exaltation of the great head of his house, Q. Fabius Cunctator.
Nevertheless the comparative fidelity with which Fabius seems to have reproduced his materials might have made his annals the starting point of a critical history. But unfortunately intelligent criticism was exactly what they never received. It is true that in some respects a decided advance upon Fabius was made by subsequent annalists. M. Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.) widened the scope of Roman history so as to include that of the chief Italian cities, and made the first serious attempt to settle the chronology. In his history of the Punic wars Caelius Antipater (c. 130 B.C.) added fresh material, drawn probably from the works of the Sicilian Greek Silenus, while Licinius Macer (70 B.C.) distinguished himself by the use he made of the ancient “linen books.” No doubt, too, the later annalists, at any rate from Caelius Antipater onwards, improved upon Fabius in treatment and style. But in more essential points we can discern no progress. One annalist after another quietly adopted the established tradition, as it had been left by his predecessors, without any serious alterations of its main outlines. Of independent research and critical analysis we find no trace, and the general agreement upon main facts is to be attributed simply to the regularity with which each writer copied the one before him. But, had the later annalists contented themselves with simply reproducing the earlier ones, we should at least have had the old tradition before us in a simple and tolerably genuine form. As it was, while 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[3] 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 Polybius. did so to a much less extent than in the fourth and fifth 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.