The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

VII

LIVY

227

no notion of the austere methods of historical
research pursued by Thucydides and Polybius.
He entirely disdained the trouble of consulting
primary sources such as inscriptions or the Pontifical Acts. In one of the few cases in which he
refers to an inscription, his attention was called
to it by the Emperor Augustus, who displayed
great interest in the progress of the work. He
did not take to heart the maxim of Polybius that
personal knowledge of topography is necessary for
a historian in narrating military events. He did
not, for instance, take the trouble to visit the scene
of the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and in his story
of that action he has jumbled together two inconsistent accounts. On the whole, there is a great
deal of truth in the Emperor Caligula's criticism
that he was "wordy and careless," verbosus ct
negligens.1
As the work of Sallust reflected, in its temper,
the stirring age of the Civil Wars, so Livy's history
mirrored the calm which settled over the Roman
world after the triumph of Augustus. He was
a Court historian, and his work fitted into the
system of the political ideals of the Emperor.
With its unimpassioned optimism, it is inevitably
far less interesting than the writings of his pre1 It is to be noted that Professor Howard has successfully defended
Livy against the charge that he was at first deceived by the extravagant
statements of Valerius Antias, and, having afterwards become convinced
of that writer's untrustworthiness, avenged his own credulity by holding
him up to obloquy. Howard shows that the evidence is not there, and
that Livy always used Valerius with caution. See his paper on the
question, in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, xvii., 1906.