Editor’s note: The following is extracted from The Roman Historians, a Series of Lectures Delivered by Louis E. Lord (published 1927).
In a noble passage toward the close of his remarkable History of Rome, Theodor Mommsen says:— “The dawn does not return till after the night has fully set in and run its course. But yet with Caesar there came to the sorely harassed peoples on the Mediterranean a tolerable evening after the sultry noon.” It was into this twilight, this Götterdämmerung, that the world stepped on the death of Caesar.
That morning when he lay dying in the theatre of Pompey, the pulse of the world stood still. Yet, from his shroud, the great man was still able to reach forth and lay the indelible impress of his personality on four more centuries. Nothing in the whole range of Caesar’s life testifies so eloquently to his genius, to his sure judgment in the choice of men, as the selection of Octavius to be his successor. Octavius, or, to call him by his later title, Augustus Caesar, was a lad of eighteen when his foster father was assassinated—about the age of a college sophomore. Where would you find among college sophomores of your acquaintance a youth whom you would care to send to Sacramento or to Washington or to London to be matched against the wiliest politicians of his day? Yet this was the problem which presented itself to Caesar when he made Augustus his heir. He must have suspected that assassination was a possibility; and he must have known that his failing vitality could not long stand the terrible strain that was placed upon it. Yet he chose, in preference to older men, this youth to inherit his fortune and his name.
When Augustus arrived in Rome, he found that the name was the only inheritance left him. The senate had seized the soldiers and Antony had seized the property. Yet, even so, Augustus was able by the magic of Caesar’s name and his own cool judgment to checkmate all his opponents. The army deserted the senate for Caesar’s heir. That name of the man who had so often led them, and never except to victory, was enough to win them from allegiance to the hydra-headed senate, and with a few legions at his back, Augustus began to win the world.
His first alliance was with the senate against Antony. With the assistance of Caesar’s old generals, Hirtius and Pansa, he defeated Antony; and then, since both consuls had fallen in the fight, he demanded the consulship. Cicero, with his usual lack of sagacity, urged the senate to refuse because of Augustus’ youth, and when the senate consented to this proposition, Augustus, stung at the rebuff, united with Antony and Lepidus and formed the second triumvirate. The surrender of the senate promptly followed. The later quarrels among the triumvirs need not concern us. When Antony and Cleopatra deserted their followers at Actium, Augustus became master of the world. He was then less than thirty-two years old, and he lived to be nearly eighty. For almost fifty years he guided with keen intelligence the Roman state.
Perhaps history has never known a greater contrast between two successive rulers than that afforded by Gaius Julius Caesar and his grandnephew, Augustus. It is something like the difference presented in our own day by the contrasting personalities of President Roosevelt and President Wilson. I have been at different times a great admirer of both men. Yet no friend of either man would, I think, deny the truth of the distinction which I am about to make between them. I never saw Roosevelt but twice in my life. Once, when he was Governor of New York, I saw him striding up the side lines at a Yale-Harvard game, and later, as one of a considerable crowd, I heard him speak briefly from the rear platform of a train. I had absolutely no personal. contact with him. He never even appointed me to a post-office. Yet, when in New York one evening I bought a paper and learned that he was dead, I felt the shock of a great personal loss. My first feeling was not that the country had lost a statesman, but I felt that I had lost a friend. There are among my circle of intimate acquaintances few people whose passing would have brought me such poignant sorrow. Such a man was Julius Caesar—a man with warm personal friendships, of intimate contacts.
Mr. Wilson, on the other hand, by the testimony of all his friends, seems to have been a man of intellectual greatness but of little warmth of personality. He never roused the country with the appeal of personal loyalty that Mr. Roosevelt commanded, but he won men to his party by the force of his logic and the idealism of his judgment. Such a man was Augustus Caesar. It is said that Niebuhr, the German historian of Rome, refused to have in his study a bust of the youthful Augustus. The cold hauteur of that keen face repelled him. He was haunted by those unwavering eyes and those cruel, thin lips. Nor is this mere imagination. Augustus offered Horace the position of private secretary, and Horace with his quiet smile declined, apparently because he did not care for the intimacy of so close a relationship with the emperor. There are few men who would dare to refuse to become the emperor’s private secretary, and few emperors whom anyone would not be glad to serve in that capacity. It is further stated on good authority that Augustus carried formality so far that he even made notes of important conversations which he expected to have with his wife. This cold, intellectual type of man it was into whose hands the world fell in 31, when Antony and Cleopatra ran away from Actium.
The difference in the state policies which these two men adopted was quite as great as the divergence in personalities. Caesar had, as I have said, the creative touch. Had he lived, he would have given the ailing commonwealth an infusion of fresh blood. Augustus gave it ether. Caesar’s policy was one of progress and extension of boundaries, a change of capital. Augustus’ policy was conservation—keep things as they are. The difference between these policies can be seen by giving two concrete instances. Caesar had increased the senate by three hundred, bringing in new men, fresh ideas, and worst of all, from the point of view of the conservative patrician, new styles of dress. For the Gauls who were made senators, it was said, actually had the effrontery to wear trousers instead of the cumbersome Roman toga. Augustus, on the other hand, banished these men at once from the senate and reduced it to its old number, thereby placating the wrath of the patrician families and the moneyed aristocracy.
Caesar, as I said at the last lecture, was projecting an expedition at the time of his death, that should have added central, and perhaps eastern and northern Europe to the empire. Augustus, after some reverses in Germany, drew in the boundaries of the empire. According to Tacitus, he laid the injunction upon his successors that they should not expand them,—an injunction which was regarded by his successor, Tiberius, with the same religious awe with which some of us look upon Washington’s reflection on “entangling alliances.”
In legislation Augustus was equally conservative. I have spoken of the social conditions in Rome in Caesar’s day. With Augustus the declension in morals continued. It is not necessary to believe everything the satirists say to realize that the social conditions in Rome were as bad as they are today in some of our advanced social centers. We need not believe that some of the women numbered the years by the names of their successive husbands, instead of the consuls, to know that divorce was scandalously prevalent, and easier to obtain even than at Reno.
Against such subversive tendencies as these Augustus set himself firmly, and in this battle for morality he was fortunate to have the assistance of a wife who was worthy to share with him the imperial throne, Livia Augusta from the great Claudian family. Livia was married to Augustus under unusual circumstances. Augustus forced her husband to divorce her and married her himself before the birth of a child of the former marriage. It is not necessary to answer the question “Why this haste?” — thought unseemly even at Rome. It is sufficient to know that Augustus had selected a worthy consort. Livia shared the throne with him during his entire life and survived him two or three years. During all that time there was never any breath of suspicion in their relations. Together they strove to recall the fashionable set to something like the ancient honesty and decency. There is no more impressive proof of the simple frugality of their household than the plain house upon the Palatine where the Emperor and Empress lived—a house much smaller than many of those in provincial Pompeii. Here Livia spun the wool and wove the cloth which made the emperor’s togas, and here she presented to an effete and corrupt court a sample of that ancient frugality which was the foundation of Rome’s greatness.
There were two factors that produced the stability of Augustus’ government—the laws which he enacted, banishing license and extravagance, and the length of life which was granted to him. It is commonly said that you cannot make men moral or even temperate by law, and in the last analysis this is, of course, true, but on the whole, legal enactments do tend to bring about civic righteousness, and the laws which Augustus passed and enforced to the best of his ability, guarding the stability of the home, were no small factors in checking the degenerate tendencies of his day and in giving civilization a new lease of life that kept the Roman Empire intact during the four troubled centuries that followed his death.
But, even so, Augustus never could have founded the Roman Empire if he had not been granted by providence length of days. The battle of Actium marked the close of nearly one hundred years of civil war. It was followed by almost exactly a hundred years of civil peace. Fifty of these fell within the lifetime of the first emperor. When Augustus came to Rome in 44 B. C. he was confronted by a generation of men who knew the republican traditions, some of whom were eager to have them carried on. They were a generation that looked back with affection to the time of a free republic. When Augustus died, these men had practically all passed away. He was survived only by those who were accustomed to the forms of the monarchy. He had given them the “pax Augusta” and for this they were grateful. They looked back to the bloody days of Pompey and Caesar, of Sulla and Marius, with disgust, and when Augustus in 9 B. C. set up the ara pacis Augustae beside the Via Lata it was a visible symbol to all that the time of the Civil War had passed and that the state had entered upon a new era. The “pax Romana,” which Rome boasted she had given to the provinces, had at last settled upon the storm-tossed capital and it was the “pax Augusta.”
But the closing years of Augustus’ own life were not to go untroubled. One by one the heirs on whom he had hoped to settle the succession died. The touching lament which Virgil utters for the untimely death of Marcellus in Book VI of the Aeneid might have been matched over and over again, and at last the Emperor was forced to make his heir the taciturn and gloomy Tiberius. Augustus had striven for moral rectitude, but his only child, Julia, was so notoriously dissolute that he was forced to banish her.
It was one of Augustus’ proudest boasts that he had been able to bring back from Parthia the eagles of the legions which had been lost by Crassus at Carrhae. But as his life drew to a close, his own commander, Varus, was surprised in the forests of Germany and his legions wiped out. Those eagles never came back. It is said that on his deathbed in his delirium Augustus kept saying to his attendants, “Varus, Varus, give me back my eagles.”
His shy and haughty temperament had during his earlier years set him apart from the friends he might have won. As his triumphs multiplied and his dignity increased, so his isolation became greater and greater till, with the death of his heirs and the banishment of his daughter, he was forced to tread his path alone. His solitary eminence is scarcely paralleled in history. In his case it was loneliness, not dignity, that “doth hedge about a king.” To him most aptly apply the verses of Kipling in his “Lay of Diego Valdez.” Valdez is a roving corsair who has made himself high Admiral of Spain and who reflects on what loss of freedom his dignity has brought:
“Yet, ’spite my tyrant triumphs,
Bewildered, dispossessed
My dream held I before me—
My vision of my rest;
But, bound by Fleet and People,
And crowned by King and Pope-
Stands here Diego Valdez
To rob me of my hope.
No prayer of mine shall move him,
No word of his set free
The Lord of Sixty Pennants
And the Steward of the Sea.
His will can loose ten thousand
To seek their loves again—
But not Diego Valdez,
High Admiral of Spain.
There walks no wind ’neath Heaven
Nor wave that shall restore
The old careening riot
And the clamorous, crowded shore—
The fountain in the desert,
The cistern in the waste,
The bread we ate in secret,
The cup we spilled in haste.
Now call I to my Captains—
For council fly the sign;
Now leap their zealous galleys,
Twelve-oared, across the brine.
To me the straiter prison,
To me the heavier chain—
To me Diego Valdez,
High Admiral of Spain.”
At last when he was granted that easy death, the euthanasia for which he had prayed, he turned his wan, cold smile upon those who gathered about his bed and inquired if he had played the drama well. To him life had been a drama in which he was playing a part. He had never entered it wholeheartedly and his triumphs had left him cold, but the world had been infinitely the gainer.
I have spoken of the change in attitude which men adopted toward his government at the time of his succession and at the close of his life. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the poems of Horace.
When Horace returned to Rome after the defeat of Brutus at Philippi, impoverished and despondent, he wrote an epode in which he encouraged all friends of good government to join him in leaving Italy and sailing westward to the islands of the blessed. The epode is fanciful. It may have been suggested by an earlier episode in Roman history, but the utter distaste for the government, the feeling that the loss of liberty was irrevocable, these were genuine things. Eugene Field has paraphrased the poem:
“Oh, come with me to the Happy Isles
In the golden haze off yonder
Where the song of the sun-kissed breeze beguiles,
And the ocean loves to wander.
Fragrant the vines that mantle those hills,
Proudly the fig rejoices;
Merrily dance the virgin rills,
Blending their myriad voices.
Never a spell shall blight our vines,
Nor Sirius blaze above us,
But you and I shall drink our wines
And sing to the loved that love us.
So come with me where Fortune smiles
And the gods invite devotion,—
Oh, come with me to the Happy Isles
In the haze of that far-off ocean!”
At the close of his life, when Augustus had been unexpectedly detained on a journey to the western provinces, Horace could write:
“Oh thou who wert born when the gods were kind, blessed guardian of the race of Romulus, too long hast thou been absent. Thou didst promise a speedy return to the sacred assembly of the senate. Come back. Restore the light of thy countenance, good leader, for, like spring, when thy countenance shines upon the people, happier go the days and brighter shines the sun. As a mother calls for her son with vows and omens and prayers, her son whom the east wind with envious blast has delayed beyond the waters of the Carpathian Sea, tarrying for more than a year from his sweet home, and she turns not her face from the curved shore, so the fatherland, smitten with sincere longing, calls for Caesar.”
“Thine age, oh Caesar, hath brought back the rich fruits of the fields; it hath restored to the temple of our Jove the standards torn from the haughty pillars of the Parthians; it hath closed the gates of Janus free from war; it hath put a check upon license that was wandering beyond right order; it hath removed sin and restored the ancient arts, through which the name and strength of Italy have increased and the fame and majesty of the empire have been flung from the rising of the sun to his couch in the west. Those who drink of the deep Danube shall not break the edicts of Caesar, nor the Scythian, nor the Chinese, nor the faithless Persians, nor those who spring by the flood of the Don.”
“Mayest thou grant, oh good leader, a long holiday to the land of the setting sun. This is our prayer in the morning, with the day before us, ere we have drunk, and this is our prayer when we have drunken and the sun hath sunk beneath the Ocean.”
It was during this great period of transition from anarchy to stable peace that Livy, the great narrator of Roman history, lived. He was born at the strictly moral town of Patavium in 59 B. C., four years after Augustus, and he died in 17 A.D., three years after Augustus passed away.
There are two types of historians: men of great affairs who write history incidentally, like Thucydides and Caesar, Macaulay and Cromer; and second, the literary type, men who are narrators, or students who out of their examination of the facts construct a narrative of other people’s actions. Such historians are Herodotus and Gibbon. There is also a third class consisting, fortunately, entirely of H. G. Wells. This class we will not discuss. It is to the second type of historians that Livy belonged. He spent his life entirely in the composition of his history. He was a man of means, and apparently received most of his education at Rome. He spent the greater part of his life there and returned to Patavium only shortly before his death, and there he was buried. He took no part in public life. He married and left a son who achieved some distinction in literature.
We cannot tell exactly when he began to write, but the date of publication of the first part of his history is very clear. He says that the temple of Janus had only twice been closed, the second time by Augustus. Octavius received the title Augustus in 27 B. C. This must, therefore, have been written after that event. It must also have preceded 25, because in that year Augustus closed the temple a third time. The history was very extensive and naturally was published in parts, probably in groups of ten books each. It began with the voyage of Aeneas, and the last book written, the 142nd, brought the narrative down to the death of Drusus, 9 B. C. The death of Drusus was an event hardly important enough to anyone but Drusus to bring so magnificent a narrative to a close. It seems probable that Livy intended to write 150 books and to bring the narrative down to the death of Augustus in 14 A. D. On the other hand, this is a decision that Livy could scarcely have reached until Augustus’ death three years before his own, for he could have hardly determined to close with Augustus’ passing, until he knew when the passing would occur.
Like all the longer histories of Rome, the narrative became more detailed as it approached the writer’s own time. The first book covers over two hundred years, and the first four books average seventy-three years per book. Books XXI to XXX devote an average of a book to every two years, while during the Civil War between Pompey and Caesar, three-fourths of a year was found to be enough to complete a book. Of the whole 142 books, we have the first ten, and Books XXI to XLV complete, with a few unimportant fragments. Book XXI begins with the Second Punic War, 218 B. C., and Book XLV brings to a close the Third Macedonian War in 167 B. C.
Livy’s history was too vast to be read even in so leisurely a time as the Augustan period. Edward Everett Hale tells how he read the seven volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on a trip from Albany to Buffalo, but then he went by canal. Livy’s history was soon abridged, and the abridgments displaced the original. We have for each of the lost books a brief summary, and it is thus possible to tell what period each book covered. The entire work was in existence as late as the third century A.D., for we hear of a misguided youth who then translated the entire 142 books into iambic verse. From that time on there is no trace of Livy until he appeared again in the twelfth century, and then there existed only the parts we now have. Dante frequently mentions Livy, “che non erra” — “who makes no mistakes.”
The quest for the lost books of Livy has been almost as great among classical students as the pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone has been among chemists and alchemists. One of the great students of the Renaissance undertook a perilous journey across Europe because he was told that a monastery in the far north possessed a complete Livy; and we have in our own day seen the classics put upon the front page of our newspapers by the unfortunately false report that a complete Livy had been discovered in the basement of the Castel dell’ Ovo in Naples. I remember well seeing the flaming advertisement of a great London paper which outlined the important news of the morning as follows: “American Girl Elopes with Chauffeur.” “Livy Bubble Burst.”
Livy’s reputation has always been a magnificent one. Even in his own time he was known as the greatest of Roman historians. Pliny tells of a man who came from Spain to see the sights of Rome, and having seen Livy, the historian, he turned about and returned satisfied. The fact that we have lost all previous histories of Rome is due undoubtedly to the fact that Livy’s works simply displaced them. He put them out of business as completely as the newest text of Caesar today displaces all that have been issued more than five years. Livy’s reputation in modern times has hardly been less than in his own day. It is always interesting to learn what one great author thinks of another in his own field. When the great historian of Rome, Mommsen, was asked to name the two other greatest living historians besides himself, he mentioned without hesitation his own colleague, Harnack, and Macaulay. We have already had occasion to note Macaulay’s opinion of other historians. Of Livy he speaks in no uncertain terms:
“Livy had some faults in common with these writers. But on the whole, he must be considered as forming a class by himself; no historian with whom we are acquainted has shown so complete an indifference to truth. He seems to have cared only about the picturesque effect of his book, and the honor of his country. On the other hand, we do not know, in the whole range of literature, an instance of a bad thing so well done.”
And Munro, who was no mean student of classical antiquity, says that in his opinion Livy has the greatest prose style ever written.
We have here, of course, two questions. First, Livy’s veracity as an historian; and, second, the question of his style.
It must be admitted at the outset that Livy was not too well equipped to write accurate history. A man of affairs like Tacitus or Cromer or Macaulay inevitably becomes a judge of men and their actions. He learns to evaluate motives and he judges what may reasonably be supposed to have happened in the past by what he knows has happened in his own experience. This touchstone of experience the scholarly historian lacks, and the lack of this knowledge often leads him into absurd blunders. Livy’s methods of treating his authorities is often ludicrous. He frequently adds them up pro and con and strikes a balance. When he is in doubt about the number of the enemy killed in battle, he accepts the largest number cited by any author with the possible exception of Valerius Antias, and on the Roman side it strikes him as probable that the most conservative estimate of dead is likeliest to be true. After recounting the rescue of the elder Scipio by his son, he says, “There is a tradition that the rescuer was a Ligurian slave, but I prefer that it be true about the son.” In another instance he says, “In regard to things that happened so long ago, if anything seems probable, let us accept it as true.”
On the other hand his credulity cannot be too far abused. I have already spoken of the disgust with which he discards Valerius Antias after he has found him to be a liar, and his record of the prodigies that occurred each year during the Hannibalic War seems rather to have been added as a matter of good religious form than otherwise. In fact, he says in one place, “These things were either seen or reported to have been seen, as usually happens when men’s minds are set on religion.”
Few historians have had so great ability as Livy in descriptive writing. His “purple patches,” as Macaulay called them, are famous. He does not illumine a situation with a single lightning-flash as does Tacitus, but he paints in the details with his “lactea ubertas” till the picture is complete. Among literary artists Tacitus is a Rembrandt, Livy a Ráphael. Take the passage from the first book which describes the fall of Albá Longa, the parent city of Rome:
“While this was going on, horsemen had already been sent on to Alba to fetch the inhabitants to Rome, and afterwards the legions were marched over to demolish the city. When they entered the gates, there was not, indeed, the tumult and panic which usually follow the capture of a city, when its gates have been forced or its walls breached with a ram or its stronghold stormed, when the shouts of the enemy and the rush of armed men through the streets throw the whole town into a wild confusion of blood and fire. But at Alba, oppressive silence and grief, that found no words, quite overwhelmed the spirits of all the people; too dismayed to think what they should take with them and what leave behind, they would ask each other’s advice again and again, now standing on their thresholds, and now roaming aimlessly through the houses they were to look upon for the last time. But when at length the horsemen began to be urgent, and clamorously commanded them to come out; when they could now hear the crash of the buildings which were being pulled down in the outskirts of the city; when the dust arising in different quarters had overcast the sky like a gathering cloud; then everybody made haste to carry out what he could, and forth they went, abandoning their lares and penates, and the houses where they had been born and brought up. And now the streets were filled with an unbroken procession of emigrants whose mutual pity, as they gazed at one another, caused their tears to start afresh; plaintive cries, too, began to be heard, proceeding chiefly from the women, when they passed the venerable temples beset by armed men, and left in captivity, as it seemed to them, their gods. When the Albans had quitted the city, the Romans everywhere leveled with the ground all buildings, both public and private, and a single hour gave over to destruction and desolation the work of the four hundred years during which Alba had stood. But the temples of the gods were spared, for so the king had decreed.” (Foster’s Translation)
Livy was a strong republican, so strong that Augustus accused him of being a partisan of Pompey. Like many another man of his time he idealized the past. In his preface, which was written doubtless before the whole work was completed, he speaks with the same passionate pessimism of the condition of his times that Horace employed in his younger days. He says, “As a reward for my toil I ask this boon; that from the sight of the evils which our age has beheld now for these many years, I may avert my eyes, certainly for as long as I am devoting my thoughts to those earlier times free from every care which, though it cannot turn the author’s mind from the truth, can still fill him with foreboding.”
Had Livy’s later books survived, we might perhaps have seen this pessimistic view changed to some such contentment with the imperial government as Horace manifests.
Livy is further a sturdy champion of the great Roman houses. Perhaps few pictures in history are more ludicrous than the one he draws of the plebeian champion Flaminus, and his relations with the Roman senate. Livy tells how, on the eve of his campaign against Hannibal, Flaminius violated every religious scruple of the Romans and at last went off to camp leaving the Latin Festival uncelebrated, and the other religious duties incumbent on a newly elected consul unperformed. Portent after portent follows this atheistic radical until his final defeat and death at the hands of Hannibal in the slaughter at the Trasimene Lake. Yet even here Livy does not forget his patriotism. He gives the plebeian upstart his due. In the midst of the battle, when the Roman lines are thrown into confusion by the Carthaginian attack, Livy says of the hated Flaminius, “The consul in the midst of all this confusion, himself quite unmoved in the midst of terror, arranged his disordered lines, listening intently to the distracting clamor, and whenever time and place allowed him, and wherever he could go and be heard, he bade them stand and ordered them to fight.”
It is, after all, this note of patriotism, to which I have alluded, that Livy strikes most often and with the surest touch. His sketch of Hannibal’s character may illustrate this quality. In vivid touches he draws a picture of the young commander, the idol of his soldiers and his superior officers; impervious to heat and cold; sleeping in the midst of the soldiers upon the ground; conspicuous not for his dress but for his horse and his armor; the best horseman and footman in the army; the first to go down into battle and the last to leave the stricken field. But, having drawn this picture of the brilliant and attractive youth, he fears that he is altogether too beautiful a character to have been that treacherous and abominated Hannibal, whom the Roman historian must later picture, so he catches himself and says, “These great virtues were equalled by vast vices: inhuman cruelty; depravity even beyond the Carthaginian variety; no respect for truth nor for sacred things; no fear of the gods; no respect for his oath; no religion.”
We speak of the grandeur, the majesty, the dignity of Rome. Nowhere in history do these qualities live as they do in the pages of Livy. When the army of Flaminius had been annihilated at the Trasimene Lake, the disaster was so complete that scarcely a man escaped to bring the news. Here is Livy’s account.
“When the first news of the slaughter reached Rome, a crowd of people rushed into the Forum in great terror and confusion. Women were wandering up and down the streets, inquiring of those they met what fresh disaster had been reported, or what was the fortune of the army. Then, like an assembly, the crowd gathered in the comitium, and facing the senate house they kept calling for the magistrates. At last, as the sun was setting, Marcus Pomponius, the Praetor, appeared and said, “There has been a great battle, we have been defeated.” Nothing is added the setting sun, the lengthening shadows, the gathering gloom and the praetor’s four tense words — “Pugna magna, victi sumus.”
But Rome was to undergo another and a worse defeat—the memorable battle of Cannae. Livy hesitates to attempt to describe the situation at Rome among the common people, a reign of terror which any description, he says, would belittle. “One might compare the defeat the Carthaginians suffered at the Aegates Islands, a defeat which caused them to yield Sicily and Sardinia and become tributaries to Rome, and that later defeat in Africa to which Hannibal himself yielded. They deserve comparison in no respect except that they were borne with less fortitude.” And later, summing up the situation, he says:
“How much greater was the disaster than all preceding defeats, can be gathered from the fact that the loyalty of the allies (which till that day remained unshaken) then began to waver, for no other reason, of course, than because they despaired of the government’s safety. There deserted to the Carthaginians the following peoples: the Campanians, the Atellani, the Calatini, the Hirpini, part of Apulia, the Samnites, except the Pentri, all of Bruttium, the Lucanians, except those of Uzentium, all the Greek Coast, the peoples of Tarentum, Metapontum, Croton, Locri, and all Cisalpine Gaul.
“Still, these disasters and the desertion of the allies never caused the Romans to make any mention of peace, either before the consul returned to Rome, or after he did return and recall the memory of the disaster that had befallen.
“At that time so courageous was the state that when the consul returned from this great slaughter of which he was himself the chief cause, crowds of all orders went out to meet him and he was publicly thanked because he had not despaired of the state. But if he had been a Carthaginian general, there is no torture which would not have been inflicted upon him.”
And, as Mommsen says:— “This was no empty phraseology veiling the disaster under sounding words, nor was it bitter mockery over a poor wretch; it was the conclusion of peace between the government and the governed. In the presence of the gravity of the time and the gravity of such an appeal, the chattering of demagogues was silent; henceforth the only thought of the Romans was how they might be able jointly to avert the common peril.”
That is the spirit in which Rome faced defeat, the spirit that abides in men like Regulus and Appius Claudius, like Fabius Maximus and Claudius Marcellus, that “monumental resolution and resignation that is the gift of the lords of human things, the masters of the world.”
If history is to be estimated by Quintilian’s dictum, “non ad probandum sed ad narrandum,”[1] Livy’s history is a great success. It will always be read, and it is, in spite of its critical defects, our best, our surest guide of the history of the Roman Republic. The latest writer on early Roman history pays her tribute to Livy by saying that the history of the Kings of Rome as told by Livy is practically substantiated by archaeological evidence. And perhaps we may leave him with the tribute of that prince of Roman critics, Quintilian:
“Let Herodotus not object when Livy is declared his equal, for in his narrative there is wonderful charm and most beautiful clearness, and in his speech there is an eloquence beyond description, for everything which is said is suited not only to the circumstances but even to the character of the speakers; and the emotions, especially those which are more pleasant, to put it briefly, no historian has better expressed.”
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[1] “Not to prove, but to tell.” (ed.)
