Livy

Front matter

Ancient Classics for English Readers.

EDITED BY THE

(SUPPLEMENTARY SERIES.)

Chapter 1

LIV

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Titus Livius Patavinus—owing this last name to his having been born at Patavium (Padua)—was one of that brilliant circle of authors who lighted the court of Augustus. His birth may be fixed with most probability in 59 B.C., the year in which Julius Cæsar and Bibulus were consuls. Horace would thus be his senior by about five years, and Virgil ten; and although his name is not mentioned by either poet, he was probably well acquainted with both. Though of provincial origin, as were nearly all the great Roman writers, he came of a family which had in its day given consuls to Rome; and his native city, in which his own particular branch of it had settled, was one of the most important in Italy. His original profession was most probably that of a professor of rhetoric: a vocation not only popular and respectable, but often highly lucrative, if the professor could get his lectures well attended. We know nothing of his first intro- duction to the capital; but, if we may trust his contemporary, Horace, literary ability of any kind was a ready passport to the acquaintance of some of the great men about Augustus' court, and through them to the emperor himself. Some such introduction was at least effected; for he mentions in the early part of his history, very simply and as though it were quite an ordinary event, his having accompanied Augustus into the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and heard him read the old inscriptions there. Some degree of intimacy seems also to be implied by the anecdote recorded by the historian Tacitus, that Livy had expressed such a warm admiration of the character of Pompey, the unsuccessful opponent of the first Cæsar, that Augustus used good-humouredly to call him a "Pompeyite," without allowing the fact of this predilection for his uncle's great rival to interfere in any way with their friendship. It is said that he even had apartments assigned him in the imperial palace.

It may very probably have been in accordance with some suggestion from Augustus himself, or some of the able ministers who were in his confidence, that he first turned his attention from rhetoric to history. A crowd of small authors, eager to meet the tastes of a patron who was himself an author—though he had the good sense to burn his tragedies instead of publishing them—were busy writing on the recent civil wars. The great emperor—let his undefined position be so termed, in default of any other word to express it—was always anxious to magnify the historic glories of Rome. As in that interest he had made Virgil an epic poet almost against his will, so we may conceive he recognised in the eloquent rhetorician all the capabilities of a court historian. There can be no doubt, at least, that the author of the 'Annals of Rome' had the hearty concurrence of Augustus in the great work which he undertook. That he must have had free access to public documents and records is evident from the references and quotations in the body of his history. Without such facilities it could never have been written, and to have obtained them implies much more intimate relations with the existing authorities than would be necessarily the case in our more liberal days. Another proof that he enjoyed some degree of intimacy with the family of the Cæsars may be found in the statement of Suetonius, that it was at his suggestion that young Claudius Nero, the step-son of Augustus and future emperor, began the study of history. On this slight ground some of his biographers have built a theory that the education of the young prince had been intrusted to him.

Such biographies of him as are extant—notably that by his own townsman, Giacomo Tomasini, bishop of Citta Nuova—are utterly untrustworthy in their details. All that we know of his private life is that he was certainly married, and had at least one son and one daughter. The latter became wife of Magius or Magirus, who is said by the elder Seneca to have owed his fame as a rhetorician rather to the merits of his father-in-law than to his own. So widespread, indeed, was the reputation of the great historian even during his life, that Pliny relates, in one of his letters, the fact of a man having once made a journey all the way from Cadiz merely to gratify himself with a sight of him. If we want to see how biographies grow, we have only to read the amplification of this fact, if fact it be, by such a respectable writer as St Jerome: "We read," says he (and he must mean in Pliny), "that to drink of the rich stream of eloquence which flowed from Livy there came sundry men of noble birth from the most distant parts of Spain—from Cadiz—and from Gaul: and men whom the sight of Rome itself had failed to attract, were drawn thither by the fame of a single individual. That generation saw a wonder, unheard of in any age, and ever to be remembered, that visitors entered such a city, and yet were seeking something beside and beyond it." Livy returned to end his days in his native town, where he died at the age of seventy-one.

Some thirteen centuries after his death, the good citizens of Padua thought they had discovered his bones. First of all, in 1360, a tablet was dug up within the monastery of St Justina, bearing an inscription in which certainly occurred the name of T. Livius, and which was at once associated with the great historian. Then, about fifty years afterwards, in digging the foundations of some new buildings, the workmen came upon an ancient pavement, and below it a leaden cist enclosing human bones. The older monks pronounced this to be the very place where the monumental tablet had previously been found; and, there could be no doubt, these were the bones of Livy. Great honour was paid to them, and a costly monument erected at the public expense. But in one respect the citizens were ungrateful: they made a present of the bone of the right arm—the arm which had written the immortal 'Annals'—to Alphonso "the Magnanimous," King of Arragon and the Two Sicilies; whose successors (for he died before it reached him) had it enclosed in a rich shrine. The whole romance, however, which had gathered round the great author's bones, was dissipated by the same relentless modern criticism which has since dealt so hardly with the earlier portions of his 'Annals.' Under competent examination, the abbreviations on the monumental tablet—and therefore probably the bones—were found to belong to a slave who had received his freedom, had in consequence taken the name of his master, which happened to be "Livius," and had subsequently risen to some distinction in the city.

Besides his great historical work, Livy wrote (probably at an earlier period) certain Dialogues and treatises on philosophy, of which we know nothing beyond their mention by Seneca. The 'Annals,' which alone have reached us, and these in a sadly mutilated shape, contained in their entirety the history of Rome from its foundation down to within a few years of the Christian era. Of the hundred and forty-two "books" to which the work extended, we have now but thirty-five, and of these some were recovered only in the sixteenth century. Pope Gregory I. is said to have ordered all the copies of the 'Annals' on which he could lay hands to be burnt, because of the many superstitious stories they contained; and the same is said to have been done by Gregory VII. Considering the character of the legends which the Roman Church of those days adopted for its own, these zealous precautions may seem somewhat inconsistent. There is a fanciful kind of division of the books into "decades," or sets of ten each,—an arrangement due probably to the early editors rather than to the author. We have the first, third, and fourth of these decades entire, with half of the fifth, and a few fragments of the others. Unhappily, the lost portion, as containing the later and more authentic history of the Roman people, and more especially of the period with which the writer was contemporary, is that we should have most wished to see. Lord Bolingbroke said that he would willingly give up all we have for what we have not; but this is not, after all, a very remarkable concession, since the missing books are more than thrice as many as their survivors. Dr Arnold's valuation is more just: he says that we might afford to give up "every line of Livy's history that we at present possess, if we could so purchase the recovery of the eighth and ninth decades only, which contained the history of the Italian War, and the Civil War of Marius and Sylla." Gibbon goes so far as to say that he would readily sacrifice the works of a good many ancient authors which we possess, for Livy's history of the sixty years between A.U.C. 663 and 723. From time to time scholars have been tantalised with hopes of recovering the lost manuscripts, and reports of their existence—often in the most un- likely quarters. Buried in dust in the library of the ignorant and jealous monks of Mount Athos, whence the great Colbert had an idea of sending "two frigates under Maltese colours to fetch them"—hidden in the seraglio of the Grand Turk—in the island of Chios—in St Columba's monastery at Iona,—the lost treasure was heard of, but never found. At one time a complete manuscript was "daily expected from the Escurial;" at another, it was said to have actually "arrived in Dublin." Once, it is said, "a page of the second decade was found by a man of letters in the parchment of his battledore, while he was amusing himself in the country. He hastened to the maker of the battledore, but arrived too late; the man had finished the last page of Livy—about a week before!"

So voluminous a work was not given to the public all at once by its author. The Roman annalist, like so many of his modern successors, seems to have published a volume at a time. The first decade was written and issued at Rome probably between B.C. 27 and 20, at the same time that Virgil was writing his Æneid. But the later books, as is clear from the last events they record, could not have been finished until some twenty years afterwards. Their contents are fortunately known to us by means of epitomes, the work of some unknown compiler of early date—possibly not much later than the original historian—which have survived, though the books of which they form the summary have perished. There are some intervals of Roman history for which these dry skeletons remain as our sole authorities.

It has been remarked as unfortunate that such fragments as we have of Livy's great work form by no means the most valuable portion. The first decade contains the history of 460 years—from the foundation of Rome to her subjugation of her warlike neighbours the Samnites. How far myth supplies the place of history throughout the whole of this period is a question still under debate by scholars. But the old faith which believed in Romulus and Remus as undoubtedly as in Antony and Augustus has at least departed long ago. Critical students have recognised the fact that for all this long period we have absolutely nothing like contemporary authority. Livy made full use, as might be expected, and as he distinctly asserts, of the works of previous annalists and historians. But all these were of comparatively recent date. Quintus Fabius Pictor, the earliest Roman historian of whom we have any mention, and Cincius Alimentus, were both alive during the Second Punic War, and these are the most ancient authorities to whom Livy refers. There is therefore no trace of contemporary history for the first five centuries of Rome. The 'Origines' of Cato the Elder, the History of M. Acilius Glabrio, and the 'Annals' of Calpurnius Piso—to all of which Livy makes reference—were still more modern compilations. So that in the early history of Rome, we have not only to take into account the tendency to the marvellous and the mythical which is the characteristic of all chroniclers in the infancy of a national literature, but also the still more embarrassing fact that Rome seems to have had, for those five hundred years, no written history at all, in our modern sense of the word.

There were, however, certain public records from which Fabius and Cincius, and other writers, may be supposed to have drawn their information. There were the "Annals," as they were called, in which the Pontifex Maximus set down the chief events of each year. There were the "Commentaria," or notes of events, kept in the sacred colleges of pontiffs and augurs, and those of the censors, which appear to have been carefully preserved in their respective families. There were, again, certain registers written on linen (libri lintei), preserved in the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol, which gave at least the names of the consuls and other public officers for the year, and which Livy himself quotes more than once, though at second-hand. But such records, even allowing them to have been correctly kept as to the succession of magistrates and the leading events of each year—laws passed, treaties made, and even victories won—could not, from their very nature, enter into those details of person, and circumstance, and motive, which the historian requires in order to make his narrative readable. The 'Annales Maximi' of the pontiffs which Aulus Gellius had seen were, he assures us, very jejune and dry, and far from pleasant reading. There comes in again another difficulty as to the authenticity of even these dry bones of history them- selves,—that both Livy and other writers distinctly state that when Rome was burnt by the Gauls, most of these public records perished in the conflagration; so that Fabius Pictor and his successors would not have had even these authorities to work from—authorities which, however meagre, would be trustworthy so far as they went. Probably the Romans would not be slow to repair such destruction in the only way they could, by substituting new records more or less imaginary. As our own monastic bodies in England could always produce charters of the earliest date, though admitting in their own chronicles that the whole contents of their monastery had been burnt by the Danes; so an unbroken list of consuls, dictators, and censors was drawn up, from whatever sources, in the reign of Augustus or Tiberius, and is still extant, in a somewhat mutilated condition, as the 'Fasti Capitolini.'

Besides these official records, materials for history would be at hand in the copies of treaties made with neighbouring states, which were in most cases engraved on brazen plates or pillars, and kept for safe custody in the temples; as well as in the laws passed from time to time, which were engraved and preserved in the same way. But of these, again, Livy says that many were destroyed in the burning of the city. Even in cases where they still existed, there are, unfortunately, many indications that he was too little sensible of their value, and too negligent in consulting them. Other sources from which the early historian of Rome might draw very tempting but not very trust- worthy information, for the biographical part of his work, would be the funeral orations pronounced over distinguished men, recounting their deeds and those of their ancestors, copies of which were religiously preserved in their families, and in the commemorative inscriptions on the statues of deceased heroes. But the latter, as Livy himself admits, were often notoriously false. Dr Arnold pronounces them "the most unscrupulous in falsehood of any pretended records of facts that the world has yet seen." Indeed, if we bear in mind the character of our old-fashioned funeral sermons and epitaphs, or a more modern French funeral "oration," we may judge how far this kind of biographical record is likely to contribute to the strict facts of history. More to be depended upon, in their spirit if not in their details, would be the ancient chants and lays, preserved from age to age in the national memory, even if not committed in every case to writing, and recited or sung at religious festivals and at private banquets. That such was the Roman custom may be gathered from many allusions in Roman writers; but how early the production of such historical lays may have been, is quite uncertain. Niebuhr considers that they form a large portion of the substructure of such early Roman history as we have. He thinks that he can trace distinct poems on the adventures of Romulus, the rule of Tullus Hostilius, the combat of the Horatii with the Curiatii, the destruction of Alba, the story of the Tarquins, the battle of the Lake Regillus, the exploits of Coriolanus, and other romantic episodes of Roman history; and he even claims to have detected in the pages of Livy fragments of the old metrical diction. Such investigations must always be more or less fanciful; yet there can be no reasonable doubt but that the exploits of national heroes were worked into song at a very early period by the Romans as well as by other nations; and they must have had some share, and perhaps a large share, in the making of national history. Although this early poetry has wholly perished (as has been the fate, no doubt, of much traditional literature of this kind in all nations), there are fragments still preserved of metrical annals of a later date. Ennius, who lived nearly two centuries before Livy, wrote eighteen books of "Annals" in verse; and it is not likely that his was the first attempt at a metrical chronicle. Nothing remains of his work but a few lines preserved here and there in the pages of other writers; but Livy must have seen it, and Niebuhr thinks he was indebted to it for his 'History of the Kings.'

It has been urged, on the other hand, that it is all but incredible that a people like the Romans, extending as they did so widely, even in those earlier times, their rule and their commerce, should for so many years have possessed no contemporary and authentic history. It is possible, of course, that Fabius and Piso may have had access to chronicles which were afterwards lost; and as their own works have perished, we have no means of ascertaining what opportunities they enjoyed, or to what authorities they may have referred. There may have been an earlier historical literature known to them, though not to Livy. But it must be confessed that the whole of his account of the Seven Kings of Rome reads rather like a series of romantic legends than a record of actual events; and only as such can it reasonably be accepted. We may fairly say of this portion of his 'Annals' what he says himself of the times before the foundation of Rome—that "they had more of the embellishments of fable than of the simplicity of fact." And it may be strongly suspected that what he here asserts of antecedent traditions he would have admitted to be true of such traditions as he has embodied in his work. It is not likely that the age of legend came to a close, and the age of history began, at a date exactly coinciding with the building of Rome. What amount of fact is embalmed in the pleasant fable—for that some substratum of fact there is cannot reasonably be doubted—is a question which has furnished, and will probably continue to furnish, discussion for more learned and ambitious volumes than ours.

The form into which Livy has thrown his work—that of Annals, naming the public officers and recording the events of each succeeding year—was probably adopted from his predecessors, but is very inconvenient. It interrupts awkwardly the continuous story of a campaign or of a great political revolution, and is a source to the reader of bewilderment rather than of assistance. Especially does it seem unsuited to the author's picturesque and somewhat diffuse style, which suffers much in its general effect from these constant formal interruptions. The annalistic method will not be followed in these pages; and only such dates are inserted as seemed of special importance.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS.

(BOOK I. B.C. 753-509.)

It has been already said that these 'Annals' begin with the foundation of the city of Rome. The author adopts—he could scarcely do otherwise—the current legend of Æneas having led a colony of Trojans into Latium, the fated end of his wanderings after his escape from Troy. The belief in this old heroic descent, true or false, was too strong in the Roman mind for any writer of national history to venture upon questioning it, even had historical criticism been understood in those times. It was seriously referred to, from time to time, in public acts and documents. Augustus himself encouraged it as a point of national pride; acute and philosophical historians like Sallust—to use Sallust's own words—"accepted" it. It is not necessary to examine too closely into the private and personal belief of either historian in this national pedigree, any more than into his personal faith in the national theology. Livy's own expression when he introduces the story—"satis constat"—does not necessarily mean more than "it is universally admitted." He took the tale as he found it. He was by no means prepared, as all our modern historians are, with a plausible theory of his own which should sift, or interpret, or altogether explode, the popular story; and the public for whom he was writing would have been very far from appreciating his work if he had propounded any theories of the kind.

The beginning of this history, then, is, in fact, a continuation of the Æneid, and scarcely professes to be more historical. We have the landing in Italy of Æneas and his Trojans; his marriage with Lavinia, daughter of Latinus the king; and his foundation of a city called Lavinium, after her name. Here, indeed, Livy gives his readers the choice between two of the current legends: either this marriage was the result of an amicable arrangement between the intruder and the natives, or the hand of the princess and the partition of the kingdom were the prizes of a victorious battle fought by Æneas against the king. We have also, as Virgil gives us, the attempt of Turnus, the young king of the Rutulans, to exact vengeance for the loss of Lavinia, who had already been affianced to him, his appeal for aid to the powerful Etruscans, and his defeat and death in battle. And here the historian gives us the fulfilment of those foreboding words which the poet has put into the mouth of his hero when he is bidding farewell to his young son before he goes to this his last victory,—

Learn of thy father to be great— Of others to be fortunate."

In that battle on the banks of the Numicius the great Æneas died, says our historian, and was buried there; disappeared in some mysterious fashion, said another and more popular legend, adapting itself to that passionate hero-worship which, as in the case of the Britons and Arthur, would not admit any such common circumstance as death.

The widowed Lavinia is said to have ruled the new kingdom during the infancy of her son Ascanius; for, in these pages, it is she who is the mother of the young chief, and not the unhappy Creusa. All goes on happily under her government; the warlike Etruscans have been reduced to quiet, and consent to let the Tiber be the boundary between them and the new Latin kingdom, whose prosperity is so great that Ascanius, when he grows to manhood, leads part of its increasing population to found a new settlement under the Alban Hills, which he calls Alba Longa ("the Long White Town"). There reigned, according to the story, a succession of kings called Silvii, from Silvius the son of Ascanius, from whom in course of time spring Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.

For as the historian did not dream of questioning the traditional descent from Troy, still less would he have run counter to the national boast that the Romans were the sons of the war-god and the nurslings of the she-wolf. So we have given us in full detail the legend of the Twins, sons of the god Mars by the mortal princess, Rhea Silvia, who had been condemned by an usurping uncle to perpetual virginity; the Twins who escape the doom pronounced by the usurper when he hears of their birth—

The children to the Tiber, The mother to the tomb"—

who are suckled by the wolf and found by the shepherd, who live by robbing the robbers, whom their old grandfather Numitor recognises by their noble bearing, and who slay the usurper Amulius, and restore the kingdom to its rightful heir. Did any one doubt the story? Was there not, as our author points out, the fig-tree called Ruminalis yet standing, under which the Twins were suckled? And was there not, he might have added, the famous statue of the wolf and her nurslings, set up under that fig-tree, still to be seen? Such memorials were far more to the Roman taste than any amount of historical criticism.

So Romulus and Remus, continues the legend, proceeded to build their new city; but the brothers quarrelled, and the younger fell by the elder's hand. And Romulus went on with his work alone, and called it from his own name, Rome. But the circuit which in his ambition he had enclosed within his new walls proved too large for his present colony, and he opened an "asylum," to which he invited all the reckless and discontented spirits in the neighbouring tribes. So the town was at last filled with citizens; and Romulus chose a senate of a hundred elders, and for his own greater dignity assumed (from the Etruscans, as our author thinks) the ivory "curule chair," and the white robe with the purple border, and the twelve "lictors" to attend him in state, bearing the rods and axes in token of executive power—the well known emblems which ever after accompanied the sovereignty of Rome.

But the new population, as might be expected from the manner in which it had been got together, was deficient in the matter of wives; and this deficiency the neighbouring tribes were by no means willing to supply. Upon which the Romans had recourse to a stratagem which reads very much like a piece of the actual history of a rude age. It is an almost exact repetition of the raid of the men of Benjamin at Shiloh. Romulus proclaimed a festival; and when the daughters of the Sabines came to see, at a given signal they were seized and carried off to become the wives of the Romans. The outrage is said to have aroused, as it well might, the wrath not only of the Sabines, but of other neighbouring tribes, against this lawless young community. But when these latter marched their forces against him, Romulus defeated them all in succession, slaying and stripping with his own hand the chief of the Cæninans (Acro, Plutarch tells us, was his name), and solemnly offering the spoils in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol—the first of those spolia opima, as they were afterwards called, won by one general from the person of another. The Sabines proved a more formidable enemy. They had actually forced their way into Rome, and a fierce conflict within the walls was being waged with doubtful success, when the captured women—already reconciled to their compulsory bridegrooms—rushed between the lines, and entreated their fathers and husbands not to shed each other's blood. The result was not only peace, but a fusion of the two peoples; and in compliment to their new friends, the Romans took the additional name of Quirites, from the Sabine town of Cures or Quiris; and it was agreed that the nation should form three tribes,—the Ramnenses, taking its name from Romulus; the Titienses, from Tatius, king of the Sabines; while for the third, the Luceres, Livy can find no derivation.

The rest of this first Book contains the history, or rather the series of legends which passed for history, of Rome under its seven kings. Romulus, after reducing to subjection the neighbouring towns of Fidenæ and Veii, disappeared in a violent storm, said the popular fable, and was seen no more upon earth. Some would have it, says the historian, that he was made away with—"torn limb from limb"—by the senate, with whom he was never popular, although the darling of the army. He was succeeded by Numa Pompilius, a Sabine from Cures, the law-maker of the new commonwealth, as Romulus had been its conquering hero. He was the Alfred of Roman history, civilising his rude subjects, reforming their calendar, and dividing the country into cantons. His reign of forty-three years was purely peaceful—a new age of gold. To him succeeded Tullus Hostilius, who reduced Alba, the mother-city of Rome, into subjection to the younger but stronger power. To this war belongs the picturesque legend of the combat between the three brothers on each side—the Horatii for the Romans, and Curiatii on the Alban side—with the fatal blow given by the one surviving Horatius to his sister, when, instead of welcoming him after his victory, she meets him with tears of regret for her lover whom he has slain.