Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/749

 L I V L I V 725 destroyed (1566). The war of the order with John IV. in 1550 led to a division of Livonia, its northern part, Dorpat included, being taken by Russia, and the southern part falling under the dominion of Poland. From that time Livonia formed a subject of dispute between Poland and Russia, the latter only formally abdicating its rights to the country in 1582. In 1621 it was the theatre of a war between Poland and Sweden, and was conquered by the latter power, enjoying thus for twenty-five years a milder rule. In 1654, and again at the beginning of the 17th century, it became the theatre of war between Poland, Russia, and Sweden, and at last was finally conquered by Russia. The official concession was confirmed by the treaty of Nystadin 1721, Russia guaranteeing the privileges of the nobility and citizens, and the freedom of the evangelical confession. (P. A. K.) LIYY, the Koman historian, belonged by birth to those regions of northern Italy .which had already given to Roman literature Catullus, Cornelius Nepos, and Virgil. He was born in 59 B.C., the year of Caesar s first consulship, and was thus eleven years younger than Virgil and six years younger than Horace. His native city Padua (Patavium) could challenge comparison, in the days of Augustus, even with such great centres of industry as Alexandria or Gades ; and, while its active municipal life, and long traditions of hard won independence, may have quickened Livy s sympathies with republican freedom, its ancient connexion with Rome naturally helped to turn his attention to the study which became the work of his life. For Padua claimed, like Rome, a Trojan origin, and Livy is careful to place Antenor, the founder of Padua, side by side with ^Eneas. A more real bond of union was found in the dangers to which both had been exposed from the assaults of the Celts (Livy, x. 2), and Padua must have been drawn to Rome, as the conqueror of her hereditary foes, by much the same motives as those which led the Greeks in southern Italy to seek Roman aid against the Oscan invader. Moreover, at the time of Livy s birth, Padua had long been in possession of the full Roman franchise, and it is possible that the historian s family name had been taken by one of his ancestors out of compli ment to the great Livian gens at Rome, whose connexion with Cisalpine Gaul is a well-established fact (Livy, xxvii. 35 ; Suet., Tib., 3), and by one of whom his family may have been enfranchised. Livy s easy, independent life at Rome, and his aristo cratic leanings in politics, have been taken as proof that he was the son of well-born and opulent parents ; and it if certain that he was able to afford the luxury of a good education, for he was widely read in Greek literature, and a student both of rhetoric and philosophy. We have also evidence in his writings that he had prepared himself for his great work by researches into the history of his native town. His youth and early manhood, spent perhaps chiefly at Padua, were cast in stormy times, and the impression which they left upon his mind was ineffaceable. He was ten years old when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and civil war began. In his fifteenth year came the murder of the great dictator, of whom he afterwards declared that he knew not &quot; whether it were better for him to have been born or not,&quot; and one year later the murder of Cicero, to whose memory he paid an eloquent tribute. Of the part taken by Padua in the troubles which distracted the em pire from 49 B.C. till the decisive victory at Actium we know nothing beyond the fact that in 43 B.C. it closed its gates against Antony, and was afterwards punished for doing so by Asinius Pollio. Livy s personal sympathie: were with Pompey and the republican party (Tac., Ann., iv. 34) ; but far more lasting in its effects was his experi ence of the licence, anarchy, and confusion of these dark days. The rule of Augustus he seems to have accepted as a necessity, but he cannot, like Horace and Virgil, welcome it as inaugurating a new and glorious era, While he endeavours to stifle his recollections of the horror he had witnessed, by fixing his whole mind on older and better times, he writes of the present with despondency as a degenerate and declining age; and, instead of triumphant prophecies of world-wide rule, such as we find in Horace, Livy contents himself with pointing out the dangers which already threatened Rome, and exhorting his contemporaries to learn, in good time, the lessons which the past history of the state had to teach. It was probably about the time of the battle of Actium that Livy established himself in Rome, and there he seems chiefly to have resided until his retirement to Padua shortly before his death. We have no evidence that he travelled much, though he must have paid at least one visit to Campania (xxxviii. 56), and he never, so far as we know, took any part in political life. Nor, though he enjoyed the personal friendship and patronage of Augustus (Tac., Ann., iv. 34), and stimulated the historical zeal of the future emperor Claudius (Suet., Claud., xli.), can we detect in him anything of the courtier. There is not in his history a trace of that rather gross adulation in which even Virgil does not disdain to indulge. His republican sympathies were freely expressed, and, it should be added, as freely pardoned by Augustus. We must imagine him devoted to the great task which he had set himself to perform, with a mind, as he tells us himself in his preface, free from all disturbing cares, and in the enjoyment of all the facilities for study afforded by the Rome of Augustus, with its liberal encouragement of letters, its newly-founded libraries, and its brilliant literary circles. As his work went on, the fame which he had never coveted came to him in ample measure. He is said to have declared in one volume of his history that he had already won glory enough, and the younger Pliny (Epist., ii. 3) relates that a Spaniard came all the way from Gades merely to see him, and, this accomplished, at once returned home satisfied. The accession of Tiberius (14 A.D.) materially altered for the worse the prospects of literature in Rome, and Livy may have feared for himself the fate which afterwards befell Cremutius Cordus, who was tried before the senate, for having in his annals spoken of Brutus and Cassius as the last of the Romans (Tac., Ann., iv. 34). However this may have been, Livy retired to Padua, and died there in the third year of the reign of Tiberius (17 A.D.), at the ripe age of seventy-six. When we have added that he had at least one son (Quintil., x. 1), who was possibly also an author (Pliny, Nat. Hist., i. 5, 6), and a daughter married to a certain L. Magius, a rhetorician of no great merit (Seneca, Controv., x. 29, 2), we have reached the end of all that is known with certainty of Livy s personal history ; and the apocryphal nature of the details which have been added by later admirers has been too often exposed to make it necessary to deal with them here. 1 But for us, as for Livy himself, the interest of his life centres in the work to which the greater part of it was devoted. For we must decline to believe with Niebuhr that his history was all written in his later years. On the contrary, various indications point to the period from 27 to 20 B.C., as that during which the first decade was writ ten. In the first book(i. 19) the emperor is called Augustus, a title which he assumed early in 27 B.C., and in ix. 18 the omission of all reference to the restoration, in 20 B.C., of the standards taken at Carrhae seems to justify the in ference that the passage was written before that date. In the third decade, the allusion in xxviii. 12 to victories in Spain may, as Weissenborn thinks, refer to Agrippa s cam paigns in 19 B.C., but the words &quot; ditctu auspicioque Au- gusti Caesaris &quot; point more naturally to those of Augustus 1 For Livy s life see the introduction to Weissenborn s edition, Bei-liu, 1871, aiid the article in Smith s Dictionary of Biography.