Livy’s historical approach

The project of writing the history of Rome down to the present day was not a new one. Historical research and writing had flourished at Rome for 200 years, since the first Roman historian Quintus Fabius Pictor. There had been two main inspirations behind it—antiquarian interest and political motivation. Particularly after 100 bc, there developed a widespread interest in ancient ceremonies, family genealogies, religious customs, and the like. This interest found expression in a number of scholarly works: Titus Pomponius Atticus, Cicero’s friend and correspondent, wrote on chronology and on Trojan families; others compiled lengthy volumes on Etruscan religion; Marcus Terentius Varro, the greatest scholar of his age, published the encyclopaedic work Divine and Human Antiquities. The standard of scholarship was not always high, and there could be political pressures, as in the attempt to derive the Julian family to which Julius Caesar belonged from the legendary Aeneas and the Trojans; but the Romans were very conscious and proud of their past, and an enthusiasm for antiquities was widespread.

Previous historians had been public figures and men of affairs. Fabius Pictor had been a praetor, the elder Cato had been consul and censor, and Sallust was a praetor. So, too, many prominent statesmen such as Sulla and Caesar occupied their leisure with writing history. For some it was an exercise in political self-justification (hence, Caesar’s Gallic War and Civil War); for others it was a civilized pastime. But all shared a common outlook and background. History was a political study through which one might hope to explain or excuse the present.

Livy was unique among Roman historians in that he played no part in politics. This was a disadvantage in that his exclusion from the Senate and the magistracies meant that he had no personal experience of how the Roman government worked, and this ignorance shows itself from time to time in his work. It also deprived him of firsthand access to much material (minutes of Senate meetings, texts of treaties, laws, etc.) that was preserved in official quarters. So, too, if he had been a priest or an augur, he would have acquired inside information of great historical value and been able to consult the copious documents and records of the priestly colleges. But the chief effect is that Livy did not seek historical explanations in political terms. The novelty and impact of his history lay in the fact that he saw history in personal and moral terms. The purpose is clearly set out in his preface:

I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men and what the means, both in politics and war, by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded, I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch first the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.

What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings.

Although Sallust and earlier historians had also adopted the outlook that morality was in steady decline and had argued that people do the sort of things they do because they are the sort of people they are, for Livy these beliefs were a matter of passionate concern. He saw history in terms of human personalities and representative individuals rather than of partisan politics. And his own experience, going back perhaps to his youth in Patavium, made him feel the moral evils of his time with peculiar intensity. He punctuates his history with revealing comments:

Fortunately in those days authority, both religious and secular, was still a guide to conduct and there was as yet no sign of our modern scepticism which interprets solemn compacts to suit its own convenience (3.20.5). Where would you find nowadays in a single individual that modesty, fairness and nobility of mind which in those days belonged to a whole people? (4.6.12).

In looking at history from a moral standpoint, Livy was at one with other thinking Romans of his day. Augustus attempted by legislation and propaganda to inculcate moral ideals. Horace and Virgil in their poetry stressed the same message—that it was moral qualities that had made and could keep Rome great.

The preoccupation with character and the desire to write history that would reveal the effects of character outweighed for Livy the need for scholarly accuracy. He showed little if any awareness of the antiquarian research of his own and earlier generations; nor did he seriously compare and criticize the different histories and their discrepancies that were available to him. For the most part he is content to take an earlier version (from Polybius or a similar author) and to reshape it so as to construct moral episodes that bring out the character of the leading figures. Livy’s descriptions of the capture of Veii and the expulsion of the Gauls from Rome in the 4th century bc by Marcus Furius Camillus are designed to illustrate his piety; the crossing of the Alps shows up the resourceful intrepidity of Hannibal. Unfortunately, it is not known how Livy dealt with the much greater complexity of contemporary history, but the account of Cicero’s death contains the same emphasis on character displayed by surviving books.

It would be misplaced criticism to draw attention to his technical shortcomings, his credulity, or his lack of antiquarian curiosity. He reshaped history for his generation so that it was alive and meaningful. It is recorded that the audiences who went to his recitations were impressed by his nobility of character and his eloquence. It is this eloquence that is Livy’s second claim to distinction.

Together with Cicero and Tacitus, Livy set new standards of literary style. The earliest Roman historians had written in Greek, the language of culture. Their successors had felt that their own history should be written in Latin, but Latin possessed no ready-made style that could be used for the purpose: for Latin prose had to develop artificial styles to suit the different genres. Sallust had attempted to reproduce the Greek style of Thucydides in Latin by a tortured use of syntax and a vocabulary incorporating a number of archaic and unusual words, but the result, although effective, was harsh and unsuitable for a work of any size. Livy evolved a varied and flexible style that the ancient critic Quintilian characterized as a “milky richness.” At one moment he will set the scene in long, periodic clauses; at another a few terse, abrupt sentences will mirror the rapidity of the action. Bare notices of archival fact will be reported in correspondingly dry and formal language, whereas a battle will evoke poetical and dramatic vocabulary, and a speech will be constructed either in the spirit of a contemporary orator such as Cicero or in dramatically realistic tones, designed to recapture the atmosphere of antiquity. “When I write of ancient deeds my mind somehow becomes antique,” he wrote.

The work of a candid man and an individualistic thinker, Livy’s history was deeply rooted in the Augustan revival and owed its success in large measure to its moral seriousness. But the detached attempt to understand the course of history through character (which was to influence later historians from Tacitus to Lord Clarendon) represents Livy’s great achievement.