Livy. TITUS LIVIUS (59 B.C.—17 A.D.), Rome's greatest historian, was born, according to St Jerome, at Patavium (now Padua) in the Venetian province, in Julius Cæsar's first consulship. Of a noble and wealthy family, he received the usual education in rhetoric and philosophy, and on coming to Rome was admitted to the court of Augustus. Independent in character and means, he never flattered the emperor like Virgil and Horace, but, avowing his preference for the republic over the monarchy, he foresaw in the growth of luxury the fall of the empire, and in the loss of freedom the end of Rome. He praised Brutus and Cassius and sympathised with Pompey, at the same time stigmatising Cicero, an accessory to the murder of Cæsar, as having got from Antony's bravoes only his deserts. Of the great Cæsar himself he doubted whether he was more of a curse or a blessing to the commonwealth; and throughout his history he seems to have mentioned Augustus but twice, and that incidentally—though in reply to the Greek Timagenes, the detractor while the guest of Augustus, he says that by restoring peace and allaying civil strife the emperor had reinvigorated Rome to overcome a thousand armies more formidable than the Macedonian Alexander's. Such friendship as they had for each other Livy and Augustus never lost—Augustus taking a lively interest in the progress of Livy's work, while Livy seems to have been still intimate enough at court to exhort the future Emperor Clandius (born 10 B.C.) to the study of history. Livy had a son, also, it is believed, a man of letters, and a daughter married to Magius the rhetorician. He visited various parts of Italy—among them Campania and the Neapolitan seaboard, and, probably in disgust at the abasement of the senate and the cruelties of Tiberius, he returned to his native Patavium to die.
Livy's work, recording the history of Rome from her foundation to the death of Drusus, 9 B.C., was published in instalments, and comprised 142 books, of which those from the 11th to the 20th, and from the 46th to the 142d, have been lost. Of the 35 that remain the 41st and 43d are imperfect. The last writer to notice the history as still entire is Priscian the grammarian (5th century). Its voluminousness, the labour and cost of transcription, and possibly the vindictive hatred of emperors, like Caligula, to its republican spirit, combined, it is supposed, to lessen the number of copies, till those that survived must have perished in whole or in part, with such pagan libraries as Gregory the Great is known to have burned. The hope, renewed at intervals, of recovering the lost books has never been realised; the 'periochæ,' or summaries of the contents of each book, composed in the wane of Roman literature, to catalogue names and events for rhetorical purposes, have all, however, come down to us, except those of books 136 and 137. But what has been spared is more than enough to confirm in modern days the judgment of antiquity which places Livy in the forefront of Latin writers. His impartiality, subject always to a conviction just escaping Chauvinism that Rome morally and materially was the greatest 'birth of time,' is not less a note of his work than his veneration for the good, the generous, the heroic in man. His style, save where the text still defies the commentator, is as nearly perfect as is compatible with his ideal of the historian. The narrative flows deep and full, never straying beyond its banks nor growing turbid within them, picturesque on all due occasions, interesting and animated through historic tracts often dreary in themselves. Niebuhr found in his rich, at times sombre, glow of colour another proof of his Venetian origin; certainly for portraiture of character he is the Titian of historians. The fastidious, possibly jealous, Asinius Pollio detected in his Latinity a provincialism redolent of Patavium, but latter-day scholars seek for this 'Patavinitas' in vain—find, in fact, nothing more than the first faint streaks of the silver age revealed in an occasional preference for poetic diction. His defects in the 'fierce light' of modern research are more apparent to us than even to his contemporaries. For investigation of facts he did not go far afield; our own Hume is not more of an arm-chair historian. He declined even at the instance of Augustus to verify an important inscription in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and he omitted to consult the epigraphs inscribed in the temple of Diana on the Aventine, the treaties concluded by Rome with Gabii and Ardea, even the Icilian law which Dionysius examined with such pains. Accepting history as fine art rather than as science, he was content to take his authorities as he found them, and where they differed to act the eclectic, guided by taste or predilection. Yet his work remains monumental, in spite of all the streaks in the marble, and the modern reader never fails to appreciate that impulse of the Spaniard from Gades who made a pilgrimage to Rome just to see Livy, and having done so returned satisfied.
The bibliography accumulated round Livy is a library in itself. Gronovius, Drakenborch, Ruddiman, and, in our own day, Madvig, Alscheffski, Weissenborn, and Cocchius have contributed much to purify his text and illustrate his meaning. He has yet to find an adequate translator in English, though meritorious versions of parts of his history (that of Church and Brodribb for example, Books xxi.—xxv.) have been published, and there is a translation of the whole, in fine Elizabethan English, by Philémon Holland (1600). See the book by the Rev. W. W. Capes in 'Classical Writers' (1879); J. H. Taine's Essai sur Tite Live (1860); and Prof. Seeley's introduction to his edition of Book i. (1871).