Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/750

 L I V Y himself, 27-25 B.C. In the epitome of book lix. there is a reference to a law of Augustus which was passed in 18 B.C. The books dealing with the civil wars must have been written during Augustus s lifetime, as they were read by him (Tac., Ann., iv. 34), while there is some evidence that the last part of the work, from book cxxi. onwards, was published after his death (14 A.D.). Livy s history begins with the landing of ./Eneas in Italy, and closes with the death of Drusus, 9 B.C., though it is possible that he intended to continue it as far as the death of Augustus. The original title of the work is unknown, but of its general plan it is possible to speak with more certainty. The division into decades is certainly not due to the author himself, and is first heard of at the end of the 5th century ; on the other hand, the division into &quot; libri &quot; or &quot; volumina &quot; seems to be original. It is referred to by Livy himself (x. 31, &quot;per quartum jam volumen&quot; ; xxxi. 1, &quot; multa volumina&quot;), as well as by Pliny (N. //., prsef.) and by later writers. That the books were grouped and possibly published in sets is rendered probable both by the prefaces which introduce new divisions of the work (vi. 1, xxi. 1, xxxi. 1) and by the description in one MS. of books cix.-cxvi. as &quot;bellorum civilium libri octo.&quot; Such arrangement and publication in parts were moreover common with ancient authors, and in the case of a lengthy work almost a necessity. Of the 142 &quot;libri&quot; composing the history, the first 15 carry us down to the eve of the great struggle with Carth age, a period, as Livy reckons it, of 488 years (xxxi. 1) ; 15 more (xvi.-xxx.) cover the 63 years of the two great Punic wars. With the close of book xlv. we reach the conquest of Macedonia in 167 B.C. Book Iviii. described the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, 133 B.C. In book Ixxxix. we have the dictatorship of Sulla (81 B.C.), in ciii. Caesar s first consulship (59 B.C.), in cix.-cxvi. the civil wars to the death of Caesar (44 B.C.), in cxxiv. the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, in cxxxiii. and cxxxiv. the battle of Actium and the accession of Augustus. The remaining eight books give the history of the first twenty years of Augustus s reign. Such in outline was the vast work of which Martial (xiv. 190) complains that his whole library could not contain it. But a small portion of it, however, has come down to modern times ; only thirty-five books are now extant (i.-x., xx. -xlv.), and of these xli. and xliii. are incomplete. The lost books seem to have disappeared between the 7th cen tury and the revival of letters in the 15th, a fact suffi ciently accounted for by the difficulty of transmitting so voluminous a work in times when printing was unknown, for the story that Pope Gregory I. burnt all the copies of Livy he could lay his hands on rests on no good evidence. Only one important fragment has since been recovered, the portion of book xc. discovered in the Vatican in 1772, and edited by Niebuhr in 1820. Very much no doubt of the substance of the lost books has been preserved both by such writers as Plutarch and Dion Cassius, and by epitomizers like Floras and Eutropius. But our know ledge of their contents is chiefly derived from the so-called &quot; periochae &quot; or epitomes, of which we have fortunately a nearly complete series, the epitomes of books cxxxvi. and cxxxvii. being the only ones missing. These epitomes have been ascribed without sufficient reason to Floras (2d cen tury); but, though they are probably of even later date, and are disappointingly meagre, they may be taken as giving, so far as they go, a fairly authentic description of the original. They have been expanded with great ingenuity and learn- ing by Fremsheim in Drakenborch s edition of Livy. 1 1 The various rumours once current of complete copies of Livy in Constantinople, Chios, and elsewhere are noticed by Niebuhr Introd Lect., p. 6,, Eng. transl. See also Pauly, Real-Encydopfidie s. The received text of the extant thirty-five books of Livy is taken from different sources, and no one of our MSS. contains them all. The MSS. of the first decade, some thirty in number, are with one exception derived, more or less directly, from a single archetype, viz., the recension made in the 4th century by the two Nicomachi, Flavianus and Dexter (not by one only, as Niebuhr thought), and by Victorianus. This is proved in the case of the older MSS. by written subscriptions to that effect, and in the case of the rest by internal evidence. Of all these descendants of the Xicomachean recension, the oldest is the Codex Parisinus of the 10th century, and the best the Codex Mediceus or Florentinus of the llth. An independent value attaches to the ancient palimpsest of Verona, of which the first complete account was given by Mornmsen as recently as 1868 (Berliner Monatsbcr., January). It contains the third, fourth, fifth, and fragments of the sixth book, and, according to Mommsen, whose conclusions are accepted by Madvig (Emend. Livianss, 2d ed., 1877, p. 37), it is derived, not from the Nico- machean recension, but from an older archetype common to both. For the third decade our chief authority is the Codex Puteanus, an uncial MS. of the 8th century, now at Paris. For the fourth we have two leading MSS., Codex Bambergensis, llth century, and the slightly older Codex Moguntinus, which is only known through the Mainz edition of 1518-19. What remains of the fifth decade de pends on the Laurishamensis or Vindobonensis from the monastery of Lorsch, edited at Basel in 1531. It belongs to the 6th century. If wo are to form a correct judgment on the merits of Livy s history, we must, above all things, bear in mind what his aim was in writing it, and this he has told us himself in the celebrated preface which Niebuhr rather unaccountably denounces as &quot; the worst part of his work &quot; (Introd. Lect., p. 60). He set himself the task of record ing the history of the Roman people, &quot;the first in the world,&quot; from the beginning. The task was a great one, and the fame to be won by it uncertain, yet it would be something to have made the attempt, and the labour itself would bring a welcome relief from the contemplation of present evils ; for his readers too this record will, he says, be full of instruction : they are invited to note especially the moral lessons taught by the story of Rome, to ob serve how Rome rose to greatness by the simple virtues and unselfish devotion of her citizens, and how on the decay of these qualities followed degeneracy and decline. He does not therefore write, as Polybius wrote, for students of history. With Polybius the greatness of Rome is a phenomenon to be critically studied and scientifically explained; the rise of Rome forms an important chapter in universal history, and must be dealt with, not as an isolated fact, but in connexion with the general march of events in the civilized world. Still less has Livy anything in common with, the naive anxiety of Dionysius to make it clear to his fellow Greeks that the irresistible people who had mastered them was in origin, in race, and in language Hellenic like themselves. Livy writes as a Roman, to raise a monument worthy of the greatness of Rome, and to keep alive, for the guidance and the warning of Romans, the recollection alike of the virtues which had made Rome great and of the vices which had threatened her with destruction. In so writing he was in close agreement with the traditions of Roman literature, as well as with the conception of the nature and objects of history current in his time. To a large extent Roman literature grew out of pride in Rome, for, though her earliest authors took the form and often the language of their writings from Greece, it was the greatness of Rome that inspired the best of them, and it was from the annals of Rome that their themes were taken. And this is naturally true in an especial sense of the Roman historians; the long list of annalists begins at the moment when the great struggle with Carthage had for the first time brought Rome into direct connexion with the historic peoples of the ancient world, and when Romans themselves awoke to the importance of the part reserved for Rome to play in universal history. To write the annals of Rome became at once a task worthy of the best of her citizens. Though