Augustan prose achieved no triumphs equal to those of Augustan verse. Oratory subsided as the making of laws and decisions passed in reality if not in form from Senate and assemblies to the secret chambers of the prince. Scholarship continued its quiet course, sheltered from present storms by its ghostly interests. It was only in the writing of history that the age achieved a masterpiece in prose.
Born in Patavium (Padua) in 59, Titus Livius came to the capital, devoted himself to rhetoric and philosophy, and gave the last forty years of his life (23 B.C—A.D. 17) to writing a history of Rome. That is all we know of him; “Rome’s historian has no history.”63 Like Virgil he came from the region of the Po, retained the old virtues of simplicity and piety, and—perhaps through the pathos of distance—developed a passionate reverence for the Eternal City. His work was planned on a majestic scale and was completed; of its 142 “books” only thirty-five have come down to us; as these fill six volumes we may judge the magnitude of the whole. Apparently it was published in parts, each with a separate title, and all under the general heading, Ab urbe condita—“From the city’s foundation.” Augustus could forgive its republican sentiments and heroes, since its religious, moral, and patriotic tone accorded well with the Emperor’s policies. He took Livy into his friendship and encouraged him as a prose Virgil who was beginning where the poet had left off. Halfway on his long journey from 753 to 9 B.C., Livy thought of stopping, on the ground that he had already won lasting fame; he went on, he says, because he found himself restless when he ceased to write.64
Roman historians looked upon history as a hybrid child of rhetoric and philosophy: if we may believe them, they wrote to illustrate ethical precepts with eloquent narrative—to adorn a moral with a tale. Livy was trained as an orator; finding oratory censured and dangerous, “he took to history,” says Taine, “so that he could still be an orator.”65 He began with a stern preface, denouncing the immorality, luxury, and effeminacy of the age; he buried himself in the past, he tells us, to forget the evils of his time, “when we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” He would set forth, through history, the virtues that had made Rome great—the unity and holiness of family life, the pietas of children, the sacred relation of men with the gods at every step, the sanctity of the solemnly pledged word, the stoic self-control and gravitas. He would make that stoic Rome so noble that its conquest of the Mediterranean would appear as a moral imperative, a divine order and law cast over the chaos of the East and the barbarism of the West. Polybius had ascribed Rome’s triumph to its form of government; Livy would make it a corollary of the Roman character.
The chief faults of his work derive from this moral intent. He gives many signs of being privately a rationalist; but his respect for religion is so great that he accepts almost any superstition, and litters his pages with omens, portents, and oracles, until we feel that here too, as in Virgil, the real actors are the gods. He expresses his doubts concerning the myths of early Rome; he gives the less credible ones with a smile; but as he goes on he ceases to distinguish legend from history, follows his predecessors with scant discrimination, and accepts at their face value the laudatory romances that earlier historians had composed to ennoble their ancestry.66 He rarely consults original sources or monuments, and never bothers to visit the scene of an action. Sometimes he paraphrases Polybius for pages.67 He adopts the old priestly method of annals, narrating events by consulates; consequently there is in him, aside from his moral theme, no tracing of causes, but only a succession of brilliant episodes. He makes no distinction between the rude patres of the early Republic and the aristocracy of his day, nor between the virile plebs that had created Roman democracy and the venal mob that had destroyed it. His prejudices are always patrician.
The patriotic pride that makes Rome forever right in Livy was the secret of his greatness. It gave him an enduring happiness in his long toil; seldom has any writer executed so vast a plan so faithfully. It gave his readers, and still gives us, a sense of Rome’s grandeur and destiny. This imperial consciousness contributed to the energy of Livy’s style, the vigor of his characterizations, the brilliance and power of his descriptions, the majestic march of his prose. The invented speeches in which his history abounds are masterpieces of oratory, and became models for the schools. The charm of good manners pervades the work: Livy never shouts, never severely condemns; his sympathy is broader than his scholarship and deeper than his thought. It fails him forgivably when he comes to Hannibal; but he atones with a sweep and splendor of narrative that reaches its zenith in describing the Second Punic War.
His readers did not mind his inaccuracies or his bias. They liked his style and story, and gloried in the vivid picture that he had drawn of their past. They took the Ab urbe condita as a prose epic, one of the noblest monuments of the Augustan age and mood. From that time onward it was Livy’s book that would color for eighteen centuries men’s conception of Rome’s history and character. Even readers in subject lands were impressed by this massive record of unprecedented conquests and titanic deeds. The younger Pliny tells of a Spaniard who was so moved by Livy’s work that he traveled from far Cádiz to Rome in the hope of seeing him. Having accomplished his purpose and tendered his worship, he neglected other sights and returned content to his Atlantic home.68