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Updated: June 21, 2025
His great work is a history of Rome, which he modestly terms "Annals," in one hundred and forty-two books, of which thirty-five are extant. Besides his history, Livy is said to have written treatises and dialogues, which were partly philosophical and partly historical. The great object of Livy's history was to celebrate the glories of his native country, to which he was devotedly attached.
The monuments, however, existed in Livy's time, and Eustace supposes that "as their forms and materials were probably very plain and very solid, they must have remained for many ages after, and may be some of the many mounds that still stand in clusters about the very place where they fell."
If Bracciolini could get so much for an incomplete copy of Livy's History, what might he not hope to get for a complete one? Imagination wanders into the realms of fairy. The genius of Livy, and also of Sallust, was more in accord with his own than the staid majestic coldness and the solemn curt sententiousness of Tacitus.
Gaius Asinius Pollio, already mentioned as a critic and tragedian, was also the author of the most important historical work of the Augustan age after Livy's. This was a History of the Civil Wars, in seventeen books, from the formation of the first triumvirate in 60 B.C. to the battle of Philippi. Though Pollio was a practised rhetorician, his narrative style was simple and austere.
All this means, as can be seen clearly from Livy's language, that the governing classes were trying to quiet the minds of the people by convincing them that no effort was being spared to set right their relations with the unseen powers; they had invoked in vain their own local and native deities, and had been compelled to seek help elsewhere; they had found their own narrow system of religion quite inadequate to express their religious experience of the last twenty years.
And lastly, without a little of such general knowledge it would be utterly impossible to call up, even faintly, the lives of Romans in successive ages. Read the earlier parts of Livy's histories and try to picture the pristine simplicity of those primeval times. Read Cæsar's Gallic War, the marvellously concise reports of the greatest man that ever lived, during ten years of his conquests.
They swam, sprawled, languished, and frisked; but all would not do: the gazers indeed owned that it was fine; but neighbour Flamborough observed, that Miss Livy's feet seemed as pat to the music as its echo. After the dance had continued about an hour, the two ladies, who were apprehensive of catching cold, moved to break up the ball.
It seems strange that the good Emperors were often worse persecutors than the bad ones, but the fact was that the bad ones let the people do as they pleased, as long as they did not offend them; while the good ones were trying to bring back what they read of in Livy's history, of plain living and high thinking, and shut their ears to knowing more of the Christians than that they were people who did not worship the gods.
The youth and education of Cyrus are invested with poetic interest by both Herodotus and Xenophon, but their narratives have no historical authority in the eyes of critics, any more than Livy's painting of Romulus and Remus: they belong to the realm of romance rather than authentic history. Nevertheless the legend of Cyrus is beautiful, and has been repeated by all succeeding historians.
Livy's speeches often reveal considerable insight; Manlius's account of the Gauls in Asia, and Camillus's sarcastic description of their behaviour round Rome, go to the root of their national character and lay bare its weakness. The Samnites are criticised by Decius in terms which show that Livy had analysed the causes of their fall before Rome.
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