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Updated: June 22, 2025
I am not insensible of the benefits of elegant luxury; yet I reflect with some pain, that if the importers of silk had introduced the art of printing, already practised by the Chinese, the comedies of Menander and the entire decads of Livy would have been perpetuated in the editions of the sixth century.
Nevertheless, and despite the facts that Livy means to be honest and that he questions much on grounds that would not shame the repute of many of his modern critics, the charge is doubtless true that his writings are not free from prejudice in favour of his country.
Still the fact that he is quoted by Livy oftener than any other writer, shows that he was too well-known to be neglected, and perhaps Livy has exaggerated his defects. His daily converse with political life, and his thoughtful and studious habits, combined to qualify him for this department.
And therein it is that more than one sovereign and more than one age have found their purest glory to consist. Virgil, Horace, and Livy contributed quite as much as the foundation of the empire to shed lustre on the reign of Augustus.
This Council is that in regard whereof Cicero and other great wits so frequently inveigh against the people, and sometimes even Livy as at the first institution of it.
The following account of Disraeli's schooldays, given by one of his school-fellows, is quoted by Sir William Fraser: 'I cannot say that Benjamin Disraeli at this period of his life exhibited any unusual zeal for classical studies; and I doubt whether his attainments in this direction, when he left the school for Mr. Cogan's at Walthamstow, reached higher than the usual grind in Livy and Cæsar.
I am sure with the funeral oration of Pericles, a common audience would have sat with mouths open, incapable of following a single sentence. So also with the orations of Livy. In fact, if the speeches delivered in the Roman Senate or the Athenian Forum were anything like the speeches reported, to listen to them must have been a great strain upon the mind and attention of the hearer.
Brown has, perhaps, more distinctly termed them, suggestions. "In contemplating antiquity, the mind itself becomes antique," was finely observed by Livy, long ere our philosophy of the mind existed as a system.
Then it disappeared from public view. A few copies still kept their place on the shelves of friends, presentation copies, of course, as there is no evidence that any were disposed of by sale; and now, one might as well ask for the lost books of Livy as inquire at a bookstore for "Gaspings for Immortality."
When Galileo, Fallopius, Fabricius, and other celebrated men were professors at this university, it could boast of numerous students from all parts of the world: Tasso and Columbus were educated here. Shakespeare bears witness to the respect in which its learned doctors were held, in his immortal "Merchant of Venice." Livy was born here 50 B.C., dying in his seventy-sixth year.
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