Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Ted Garvin and PG Distributed Proofreaders
By
Titus Livius
Translated by
John Henry Freese, Alfred John Church, and William Jackson Brodribb
With a Critical and Biographical Introduction and Notes by Duffield
Osborne
Illustrated
1904
Of the lost treasures of classical literature, it is doubtful whetherany are more to be regretted than the missing books of Livy. Thatthey existed in approximate entirety down to the fifth century, andpossibly even so late as the fifteenth, adds to this regret. At thesame time it leaves in a few sanguine minds a lingering hope that someunvisited convent or forgotten library may yet give to the world awork that must always be regarded as one of the greatest of Romanmasterpieces. The story that the destruction of Livy was effected byorder of Pope Gregory I, on the score of the superstitions containedin the historian's pages, never has been fairly substantiated, andtherefore I prefer to acquit that pontiff of the less pardonablesuperstition involved in such an act of fanatical vandalism. That thebooks preserved to us would be by far the most objectionable fromGregory's alleged point of view may be noted for what it is worth infavour of the theory of destruction by chance rather than by design.
Here is the inventory of what we have and of what we might have had.The entire work of Livy—a work that occupied more than forty yearsof his life—was contained in one hundred and forty-two books, whichnarrated the history of Rome, from the supposed landing of Æneas,through the early years of the empire of Augustus, and down to thedeath of Drusus, B.C. 9. Books I-X, containing the story of earlyRome to the year 294 B.C., the date of the final subjugation of theSamnites and the consequent establishment of the Roman commonwealth asthe controlling power in Italy, remain to us. These, by the acceptedchronology, represent a period of four hundred and sixty years. BooksXI-XX, being the second "decade," according to a division attributedto the fifth century of our era are missing. They covered seventy-fiveyears, and brought the narrative down to the beginning of the secondPunic war. Books XXI-XLV have been saved, though those of the fifth"decade" are imperfect. They close with the triumph of Æmilius, in 167B.C., and the reduction of Macedonia to a Roman province. Of the otherbooks, only a few fragments remain, the most interesting of which(from Book CXX) recounts the death of Cicero, and gives what appearsto be a very just estimate of his character. We have epitomes of allthe lost books, with the exception of ten; but these are so scanty asto amount to little more than tables of contents. Their probable dateis not later than the time of Trajan. To summarize the result, then,thirty-five books have been saved and one hundred and seven lost—amost deplorable record, especially when we consider that in the laterbooks the historian treated of times and events whereof his means ofknowledge were adequate to his task.
TITUS LIVIUS was born at Patavium, the modern Padua, some time between61 and 57 B.C. Of his parentage and early life nothing is known. Itis easy to surmise that he was well born, from his political bias infavour of the aristocratic party, and from the evident fact of hishaving received a liberal education; yet the former of these argumentsis not at all inconsistent with the opposite supposition, and thelatter should lead t