Augustus and under direct court patronage, Livy was in friendly relations
with the Emperor and his family, and accepted the new rule with
cordiality, if without much enthusiasm. Of his life, which seems to have
been wholly spent in literary pursuits, little is known. He was born at
Padua in the year of Julius Caesar's first consulship, and had survived
Augustus by three years when he died at the age of seventy-five. In
earlier life he wrote some philosophical dialogues and treatises on
rhetoric which have not been preserved. An allusion in the first book of
his history shows that it was written, or at all events published, after
the first and before the second closing of the temple of Janus by
Augustus, in the years 29 and 25 B.C. For forty years thereafter he
continued this colossal task, which, like the _Decline and Fall_, was
published in parts from time to time. He lived to bring it down as far as
the death of Drusus, the younger son of the Empress Livia, in the year 9
B.C. The division into books, of which there were one hundred and forty-
two in the whole work, is his own; these again were arranged in
_volumina_, or sections issued as separate volumes, and containing a
varying number of books. The division of the work into decads was made by
copyists at a much later period, and was no part of the author's own
plan. Only one-fourth of the whole history has survived the Middle Ages.
This consists of the first, the third, the fourth, and half of the fifth
decad, or books i.-x. and xxi.-xlv. of the work; of the rest we only
possess brief tables of contents, drawn up in the fourth century, not
from the original work but from an abridgment, itself now lost, which was
then in use. The scale of the history is very different in the two
surviving portions. The first decad carries it from the foundation of the
city through the Regal and early Republican periods down to the third
Samnite war, a period of four centuries and a half. The twenty-five
extant books of the third, fourth, and fifth decads cover a period of
fifty years, from the beginning of the second Punic to the conclusion of
the third Macedonian war. This half century, it is true, was second in
importance to none in Roman history. But the scale of the work had a
constant tendency to expand as it approached more modern times, and more
abundant documents; and when he reached his own time, nearly a book was
occupied with the events of each year.
Founded as it was, at least for the earlier periods, upon the works of
preceding annalists, the history of Livy adopted from them the
arrangement by years marked by successive consulates, which was familiar
to all his readers. He even speaks of his own work as _annales_, though
its formal title seems to have been _Histori'_ (or _Libri Historiarum_)
_ab Urbe Condita_. There is no reason to suppose that he intended to
conclude it at any fixed point In a preface to one of the later volumes,
he observed with justifiable pride that he had already satisfied the
desire of fame, and only went on writing because the task of composition
had become a fixed habit, which he could not discontinue without
uneasiness. His fame even in his lifetime was unbounded. He seems to have
made no enemies. The acrid criticism of Asinius Pollio, a purist by
profession, on certain provincialities of his style, was an insignificant
exception to the general chorus of praise. In treading the delicate
ground of the Civil wars his attitude towards the Republican party led
Augustus to tax him half jestingly as a Pompeian; yet Livy lost no favour
either with him or with his more jealous successor. The younger Pliny
relates how a citizen of Cadiz was so fired by his fame that he travelled
the whole way to Rome merely to see him, and as soon as he had seen him
returned home, as though Rome had no other spectacles to offer.
Roman history had hitherto been divided between the annalists and the
writers of personal and contemporary memoirs. Sallust was almost the only
example of the definite historical treatment of a single epoch or episode
of the past. As a rule each annalist set himself the same task, of
compiling, from the work of his predecessors, and such additional
information as he found accessible to him, a general history of the Roman
people from its beginnings, carried down as far towards his own day as he
found time or patience to continue it. Each successive annalist tried to
improve upon previous writers, either in elegance of style or in
copiousness of matter, and so far as he succeeded in the double task his
work replaced those already written. It was not considered unfair to
transcribe whole passages from former annalists, or even to copy their
works with additions and improvements, and bring them out as new and
original histories. The idea of literary property seems, in truth, to be
very much a creation of positive law. When no copyright existed, and when
the circulation of any book was confined within very small limits by the
cost and labour of transcription, the vaguest ideas prevailed, not at
Rome alone, on what we should now regard as the elementary morality of
plagiarism. Virgil himself transferred whole lines and passages, not
merely from earlier, but even from contemporary poets; and in prose
writing, one annalist cut up and reshaped the work of another with as
little hesitation as a mediaeval romance-writer.
In this matter Livy allowed himself full liberty; and his work absorbed,
and in a great measure blotted out, those of his predecessors. In his
general preface he speaks of the two motives which animate new
historians, as the hope that they will throw further light on events, or
the belief that their own art will excel that of a ruder age. The former
he hardly professes to do, at least as regards times anterior to his own;
his hope is that by his pen the great story of the Republic will be told
more impressively, more vividly, in a manner more stimulating to the
reader and more worthy of the subject, than had hitherto been done. This
purpose at least he amply and nobly carried out; nor can it be said to be
a low ideal of the function of history. So far, however, as the office of
the historian is to investigate facts, to get at the exact truth of what
physically happened, or to appreciate the varying degrees of probability
with which that truth can be attained, Livy falls far short of any
respectable ideal. His romantic temper and the ethical bent of his mind
alike indisposed him to set any very great value on facts as such. His
history bears little trace of any independent investigation. Sources for
history lay round him in immense profusion. The enormous collections made
by Varro in every field of antiquarian research were at his hand, but he
does not seem to have used them, still less to have undertaken any
similar labour on his own account. While he never wilfully distorts the
truth, he takes comparatively little pains to disengage it from fables
and inaccuracies. In his account of a battle in Greece he finds that
Valerius Antias puts the number of the enemy killed as inside ten
thousand, while Claudius Quadrigarius says forty thousand. The
discrepancy does not ruffle him, nor even seem to him very important; he
contents himself with an expression of mild surprise that Valerius for
once allows himself to be outstripped in exaggerating numbers. Yet where
Valerius is his only authority or is not contradicted by others, he
accepts his statements, figures and all, without uneasiness. This
instance is typical of his method as a critical--or rather an uncritical
--historian. When his authorities do not disagree, he accepts what they
say without much question. When they do disagree, he has several courses
open to him, and takes one or another according to his fancy at the
moment. Sometimes he counts heads and follows the majority of his
authors; sometimes he adopts the account of the earliest; often he tries
to combine or mediate between discordant stories; when this is not easy,
he chooses the account which is most superficially probable or most
dramatically impressive. He even bases a choice on the ground that the
story he adopts shows Roman statesmanship or virtue in a more favourable
light, though he finds some of the inventions of Roman vanity too much
for him to swallow. Throughout he tends to let his own preferences decide
whether or not a story is true. _In rebus tam antiquis si quae similia
veri sint pro veris accipiantur_ is the easy canon which he lays down for
early and uncertain events. Even when original documents of great value
were extant, he refrains from citing them if they do not satisfy his
taste. During the second Punic war a hymn to Juno had been written by
Livius Andronicus for a propitiatory festival. It was one of the most
celebrated documents of early Latin; but he refuses to insert it, on the
ground that to the taste of his own day it seemed rude and harsh. Yet as
a historian, and not a collector of materials for history, he may plead
the privilege of the artist. The modern compromise by which documents are
cited in notes without being inserted in the text of histories had not
then been invented; and notes, even when as in the case of Gibbon's they
have a substantive value as literature, are an adjunct to the history
itself, rather than any essential part of it. A more serious charge is,
that when he had trustworthy authorities to follow, he did not appreciate
their value. In his account of the Macedonian wars, he often follows
Polybius all but word for word, but apparently without realising the
Greek historian's admirable accuracy and judgment. Such appreciation only
comes of knowledge; and Livy lacked the vast learning and the keen
critical insight of Gibbon, to whom in many respects he has a strong
affinity. His imperfect knowledge of the military art and of Roman law
often confuses his narrative of campaigns and constitutional struggles,
and gives too much reason to the charge of negligence brought against him
by that clever and impudent critic, the Emperor Caligula.
Yet, in spite of all his inaccuracies of detail, and in spite of the
graver defect of insufficient historical perspective, which makes him
colour the whole political development of the Roman state with the ideas
of his own time, the history of Rome as narrated by Livy is essentially
true and vital, because based on a large insight into the permanent
qualities of human nature. The spirit in which he writes history is well
illustrated by the speeches. These, in a way, set the tone of the whole
work. He does not affect in them to reproduce the substance of words
actually spoken, or even to imitate the tone of the time in which the
speech is laid. He uses them as a vivid and dramatic method of portraying
character and motive. The method, in its brilliance and its truth to
permanent facts, is like that of Shakespeare's _Coriolanus_. Such truth,
according to the celebrated aphorism in Aristotle's _Poetics_, is the
truth of poetry rather than of history: and the history of Livy, in this,
as in his opulent and coloured diction, has some affinity to poetry. Yet,
when such insight into motive and such vivid creative imagination are
based on really large knowledge and perfect sincerity, a higher
historical truth may be reached than by the most laborious accumulation
of documents and sifting of evidence.
Livy's humane and romantic temper prevented him from being a political
partisan, even if political partisanship had been consistent with the
view he took of his own art. In common with most educated Romans of his
time, he idealised the earlier Republic, and spoke of his own age as
fatally degenerate. But this is a tendency common to writers of all
periods. He frequently pauses to deplore the loss of the ancient
qualities by which Rome had grown great--simplicity, equity, piety,
orderliness. In his remarkable preface he speaks of himself as turning to
historical study in order to withdraw his mind from the evils of his own
age, and the spectacle of an empire tottering to the fall under the
weight of its own greatness and the vices of its citizens. "Into no
State," he continues, "were greed and luxury so long in entering; in
these late days avarice has grown with wealth, and the frantic pursuit of
pleasure leads fast towards a collapse of the whole social fabric; in our
ever-accelerating downward course we have already reached a point where
our vices and their remedies are alike intolerable." But his idealisation
of earlier ages was that of the romantic student rather than the
reactionary politician. He is always on the side of order, moderation,
conciliation; there was nothing politically dangerous to the imperial
government in his mild republicanism. He shrinks instinctively from
violence wherever he meets it, whether on the side of the populace or of
the governing class; he cannot conceive why people should not be
reasonable, and live in peace under a moderate and settled government.
This was the temper which was welcome at court, even in men of Pompeian
sympathies.
So, too, Livy's attitude towards the established religion and towards the
beliefs of former times has the same sentimental tinge. The moral reform
attempted by Augustus had gone hand in hand with an elaborate revival and
amplification of religious ceremony. Outward conformity at least was
required of all citizens. _Expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse
putemus;_ "the existence of the gods is a matter of public policy, and we
must believe it accordingly," Ovid had said, in the most daring and
cynical of his poems. The old associations, the antiquarian charm, that
lingered round this faded ancestral belief, appealed strongly to the
romantic patriotism of the historian. His own religion was a sort of mild
fatalism; he pauses now and then to draw rather commonplace reflections
on the blindness of men destined to misfortune, or the helplessness of
human wisdom and foresight against destiny. But at the same time he
gravely chronicles miracles and portents, not so much from any belief in
their truth as because they are part of the story. The fact that they had
ceased to be regarded seriously in his own time, and were accordingly in
a great measure ceasing to happen, he laments as one among many
declensions from older and purer fashions.
As a master of style, Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks
the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan
age reached just before it began to fall into decadence. It is no longer
the famous _urbanus sermo_ of the later Republic, the pure and somewhat
austere language of a governing class. The influence of Virgil is already
traceable in Livy, in actual phrases whose use had hitherto been confined
to poetry, and also in a certain warmth of colouring unknown to earlier
prose. To Augustan purists this relaxation of the language seemed
provincial and unworthy of the severe tradition of the best Latin; and it
was this probably, rather than any definite novelties in grammar or
vocabulary, that made Asinius Pollio accuse Livy of "Patavinity." But in
the hands of Livy the new style, by its increased volume and flexibility,
is as admirably suited to a work of great length and scope as the older
had been for the purposes of Caesar or Sallust. It is drawn, so to speak,
with a larger pattern; and the added richness of tone enables him to
advance without flagging through the long and intricate narrative where a
simpler diction must necessarily have grown monotonous, as one more
florid would be cloying. In the earlier books we seem to find the manner
still a little uncertain and tentative, and a little trammelled by the
traditional manner of the older annalists; as he proceeds in his work he
falls into his stride, and advances with a movement as certain as that of
Gibbon, and claimed by Roman critics as comparable in ease and grace to
that of Herodotus. The periodic structure of Latin prose which had been
developed by Cicero is carried by him to an even greater complexity, and
used with a greater daring and freedom; a sort of fine carelessness in
detail enhancing the large and continuous excellence of his broad effect.
Even where he copies Polybius most closely he invariably puts life and
grace into his cumbrous Greek. For the facts of the war with Hannibal we
can rely more safely on the latter; but it is in the picture of Livy that
we see it live before us. His imagination never fails to kindle at great
actions; it is he, more than any other author, who has impressed the
great soldiers and statesmen of the Republic on the imagination of the
world.
_Quin Decios Drusosque procul, saevumque securi
Aspice Torquatum, et referentem signa Camilium....
Quis te, magne Cato, tacitum, aut te, Cosse, relinquat?
Quis Gracchi genus, aut geminos, duo fulmina belli.
Scipiadas, cladem Libyae, parvoque potentem
Fabricium, vel te sulco, Serrane, serentem?--
his whole work is a splendid expansion of that vision of Rome which
passes before the eyes of Aeneas in the Fortunate Fields of the
underworld. In the description of great events, no less than of great
characters and actions, he rises and kindles with his subject. His eye
for dramatic effect is extraordinary. The picture of the siege and
storming of Saguntum, with which he opens the stately narrative of the
war between Rome and Hannibal, is an instance of his instinctive skill;
together with the masterly sketch of the character of Hannibal and the
description of the scene in the Carthaginian senate-house at the
reception of the Roman ambassadors, it forms a complete prelude to the
whole drama of the war. His great battle-pieces, too, in spite of his
imperfect grasp of military science, are admirable as works of art. Among
others may be specially instanced, as masterpieces of execution, the
account of the victory over Antiochus at Magnesia in the thirty-seventh
book, and, still more, that in the forty-fourth of the fiercely contested
battle of Pydna, the desperate heroism of the Pelignian cohort, and the
final and terrible destruction of the Macedonian phalanx.
Yet, with all his admiration for great men and deeds, what most of all
kindles Livy's imagination and sustains his enthusiasm is a subject
larger, and to him hardly more abstract, the Roman Commonwealth itself,
almost personified as a continuous living force. This is almost the only
matter in which patriotism leads him to marked partiality. The epithet
"Roman" signifies to him all that is high and noble. That Rome can do no
wrong is a sort of article of faith with him, and he has always a
tendency to do less than justice to her enemies. The two qualities of
eloquence and candour are justly ascribed to him by Tacitus, but from the
latter some deduction must be made when he is dealing with foreign
relations and external diplomacy. Without any intention to falsify
history, he is sometimes completely carried away by his romantic
enthusiasm for Roman statesmanship.
This canonisation of Rome is Livy's largest and most abiding achievement.
The elder Seneca, one of his ablest literary contemporaries, observes, in
a fine passage, that when historians reach in their narrative the death
of some great man, they give a summing-up of his whole life as though it
were an eulogy pronounced over his grave. Livy, he adds, the most candid
of all historians in his appreciation of genius, does this with unusual
grace and sympathy. The remark may bear a wider scope; for the whole of
his work is animated by a similar spirit towards the idealised
Commonwealth, to the story of whose life he devoted his splendid literary
gifts. As the title of _Gesta Populi Romani_ was given to the _Aeneid_ on
its appearance, so the _Historiae ab Urbe Condita_ might be called, with
no less truth, a funeral eulogy--_consummatio totius vitae et quasi
funebris laudatio_--delivered, by the most loving and most eloquent of
her children, over the grave of the great Republic.
VI.
THE LESSER AUGUSTANS.
The impulse given to Latin literature by the great poets and prose
writers of the first century before Christ ebbed slowly away. The end of
the so-called Golden Age may be conveniently fixed in the year which saw
the death of Livy and Ovid; but the smaller literature of the period
suffered no violent breach of continuity, and one can hardly name any
definite date at which the Silver Age begins. Until the appearance of a
new school of writers in the reign of Nero, the history of Roman
literature is a continuation of the Augustan tradition. But it is
continued by feeble hands, and dwindles away more and more under several
unfavourable influences. Among these influences may be specially noted
the growing despotism of the Empire, which had already become grave in
the later years of Augustus, and under his successors reached a point
which made free writing, like free speech, impossible; the perpetually
increasing importance of the schools of declamation, which forced a
fashion of overstrained and unnatural rhetoric on both prose and verse;
and the paralysing effect of the great Augustan writers themselves, which
led poetry at all events to lose itself in imitations of imitations
within an arbitrary and rigid limit of subjects and methods.
In mere amount of production, however, literature remained active during
the first half-century of the Christian era. That far the greater part of
it has perished is probably a matter for congratulation rather than
regret; even of what survives there is a good deal that we could well do
without, and such of it as is valuable is so rather from incidental than
essential reasons. _Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim_, Horace
had written in half-humorous bitterness; the crowd of names that flit
like autumn leaves through the pages of Ovid represent probably but a
small part of the immense production. Among the works of Ovid himself
were included at various times poems by other contemporary hands--some,
like the _Consolatio ad Liviam_, and the elegy on the _Nut-tree_, without
any author's name; others of known authorship, like the continuation by
Sabinus of Ovid's _Heroides_, in the form of replies addressed to the
heroines by their lovers. Heroic poetry, too, both on mythological and
historical subjects, continued to be largely written; but few of the
writers are more than names. Cornelius Severus, author of an epic on the
civil wars, gave in his earlier work promise of great excellence, which
was but imperfectly fulfilled. The fine and stately passage on the death
of Cicero, quoted by Seneca, fully reaches the higher level of post-
Virgilian style. Two other poets of considerable note at the time, but
soon forgotten after their death, were Albinovanus Pedo and Rabirius. The
former, besides a _Theseid_, wrote a narrative and descriptive poem in
the epic manner, on the northern campaigns of Germanicus, the latter was
the author of an epic on the conflict with Antonius, which was kept alive
for a short time by court favour; the stupid and amiable aide-de-camp of
Tiberius, Velleius Paterculus, no doubt repeating what he heard in
official circles, speaks of him and Virgil as the two most eminent poets
of the age! Tiberius himself, though he chiefly wrote in Greek,
occasionally turned off a copy of Latin verses; and his nephew
Germanicus, a man of much learning and culture, composed a Latin version
of the famous _Phaenomena_ of Aratus, which shows uncommon skill and
talent. Another, and a more important work of the same type, but with
more original power, and less a mere adaptation of Greek originals, is
the _Astronomica,_ ascribed on doubtful manuscript evidence to an
otherwise unknown Gaius or Marcus Manilius. This poem, from the allusions
in it to the destruction of the three legions under Varus, and the
retirement of Tiberius in Rhodes, must have been begun in the later years
of Augustus, though probably not completed till after his death. As
extant it consists of five books, the last being incomplete; the full
plan seems to have included a sixth, and would have extended the work to
about five thousand lines, or two-thirds of the length of the _De Rerum
Natura_. Next to the poem of Lucretius it is, therefore, much the largest
in bulk of extant Latin didactic poems. The oblivion into which it has
fallen is, perhaps, a little hard if one considers how much Latin poetry
of no greater merit continues to have a certain reputation, and even now
and then to be read. The author is not a great poet; but he is a writer
of real power both in thought and style. The versification of his
_Astronomica_ shows a high mastery of technique. The matter is often
prosaically handled, and often seeks relief from prosaic handling in ill-
judged flights of rhetoric; but throughout we feel a strong and original
mind, with a large power over lucid and forcible expression. In the
prologue to the third book he rejects for himself the common material for
hexameter poems, subjects from the Greek heroic cycle, or from Roman
history. His total want of narrative gift, as shown by the languor and
flatness of the elaborate episode in which he attempts to tell the story
of Perseus and Andromeda, would have been sufficient reason for this
decision; but he justifies it, in lines of much grace and feeling, as due
to his desire to take a line of his own, and make a fresh if a small
conquest for Latin poetry.
_Omnis ad accessus Heliconis semita trita est,
Et iam confusi manant de fonitibus amnes
Nec capiunt haustum, turbamque ad nota ruentem:
Integra quaeramus rorantes prata per herbas
Undamque occultis meditantem murmur in antris._
In a passage of nobler and more sincere feeling, he breaks off his
catalogue of the signs of the Zodiac to vindicate the arduous study of
abstract science--