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Updated: June 21, 2025
This Ovid learned to his cost when he was driven into exile because his books gave too much delight to too many ladies at Rome. By the order of Augustus these books were removed from the libraries, which did not hinder their coming down to us entire, while many a more serious work like Livy's history, for example has been either entirely or in large part lost.
Cities like Cremona and Mantua were truer guardians of the puritanic ideals of Cato's day than Rome itself. The clear expressive diction of Catullus' lyrics, full of old-fashioned turns, the sound social ideals of Vergil's Georgics, the buoyant idealism of the Aeneid and of Livy's annals speak the true language of these people.
Two months after he had written for Ptolemy's maps, Plutarch's Lives, and the works of Suetonius and other historians of the first Roman Emperors, he addressed another letter to his Florentine friend, Niccoli, dated the 8th of January, 1424, in which he hinted at no less a forgery than the whole of Livy's History, and if circumstances had been favourable to it, we should have, doubtless, had a composition so like the original, even so much more like than even what was afterwards honourably and admirably done by Freinshemius, as to have defied detection.
The land of the Volscians and Aequians, once densely populated, was a desert even in Livy's time. Samnium remained the wilderness that Sulla had left it; and Apulia was a lonely sheep-walk. The causes of this depopulation have been often discussed, both in antiquity and in our own day.
Here the arrival of a glorified beefsteak and a shining pint-pot of foaming ale give an appropriate finish to Livy's lecture. She fell upon her lunch like a famished woman, and was speechless till much meat had vanished, and the ale was low in the pot. 'It is good, admitted Amanda, who took to her beer like a born Englishwoman, and swallowed some of her prejudices with her delicious beef.
A glance at the map of Italy will show us at once how apt is Livy's remark that Rome was placed in the centre of the peninsula.
Yet, with all his admiration for great men and deeds, what most of all kindles Livy's imagination and sustains his enthusiasm is a subject larger, and to him hardly more abstract, the Roman Commonwealth itself, almost personified as a continuous living force. This is almost the only matter in which patriotism leads him to marked partiality.
The point, however, to which I tend is, that the portions of Livy's history from which we must judge of his trustworthiness treat, for the most part, of periods concerning which even his evidence was of the scantiest and poorest description. He doubtless had family records, funeral panegyrics, and inscription all of which were possibly almost as reliable as those of our own day.
Compilers like Florus, Orosius, Eutropius, &c. entirely supplied his place. A word should perhaps be said about POMPEIUS TROGUS, who about Livy's time wrote a universal history in forty-four books.
which of olden time my cacoethes produced as regularly as recurred the summer solstice. Unlike that of Livy's, I am satisfied that this poor Decade be irrevocably lost; but, for dear recollection's sake of days gone by, intend it at least to be spared from malicious incremation. Records of roamings in romantic youth, witnesses of wayward way-side wanderings, gayly with alliterative titles might your contents,
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