During the past forty years the dominant preoccupation of scholars writing on Livy has been the relationship between the historian and the emperor Augustus, and its effects on the Ab Urbe Condita. Tacitus’ testimony that the two were on friendly terms, and Suetonius’ revelation that Livy found time to encourage the historical studies of the future emperor Claudius, appeared to have ominous overtones to scholars writing against the political backcloth of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Though the subject had not been wholly ignored previously, the success of the German cultural propaganda-machine stimulated a spate of approving or critical treatments. While some were hailing Livy as the historian whose work signalled and glorified the new order, others following a similar interpretation were markedly scathing.

A recurrent feature of earlier research into Livy’s work has been the assumption, based on the highly rhetorical exordium to the fourth decade1 and also on the difficulty of demonstrating clear principles of structural division, that there is no over-all plan to lend coherence to his interpretation of the history of the Republic. The present climate of Latin literary studies demands fresh scrutiny of this assumption; recent studies of other genres of Augustan literature have underlined the almost obsessive attention paid to artistic structure. Moreover, Livy’s extant books reveal how much care he devoted to the patterning of events by decades and pentads. There is no dispute that I-V form a unit; VI-XV are devoted to the period fom the Gallic crisis to the outbreak of the Punic Wars; XVI-XX cover the First Punic War and its aftermath, XXI-XXX the Second Punic War (with demonstrably careful internal structuring), XXXI-XXXV the Second Macedonian War, XXXVI-XL the wars with Antiochus and Aetolia, and XLI-XLV the Third Macedonian War. P. Jal has recently edited the first books of the fifth decade, and he concludes that the decade as a whole forms one unit, its scope being the years 178-148 B.C. and its theme the death-throes of an independent Macedonia.

Critics nowadays are reluctant to separate historian and writer in any schematic way, but such an approach is justified in the case of Roman rhetorical historiography One fundamental cause of the lack of rigour amongst many Roman historians in ascertaining the truth is the first-century notion that ‘history’ is a description of the manner of writing rather than of scrupulousness of research. L. Ferrero reminds us that when Cicero describes history as ‘opus . . . unum hoc oratorium maxime’ he is claiming for the orator a general competence in eloquence, written no less than spoken, which is his professional qualification: ‘physica ista ipsa et mathematica et quae paulo ante ceterarum artium propria posuisti, scientiae sunt eorum qui illa profitentur; illustrari autem oratione si quis istas ipsas artes velit, ad oratoris ei confugiendum est facultatem.’ The orator has been trained to give public expression to all kinds of’knowledge, including historical analysis. Livy may not have practised at the bar, but he is an orator in this theoretical sense, trained in the science of words.

Livy’s history at once became a classic. During the centuries of empire it was not merely read and quoted, but became the quarry for successive epic poets essaying historical themes. Above all, it was consulted by chroniclers, and after being recommended reading in its own right for students it was studied in more compendious form. Then too the more ambitious historian like Tacitus pays Livy the compliment of artistic imitation.

When we salute a historian as master of his craft, we recognize in him a combination of four outstanding qualities. First, he has made himself thoroughly cognizant of all the evidence, written or otherwise, with which to interpret his period, and he has the skill to evaluate it. Secondly, he possesses the imaginative insight to transmute this evidence into a living experience of the society he describes, so that the reader can enter into the conditions of life and understand the psychology of the people of the time. Thirdly, he has the intellectual capacity to recognize historical patterns of evolution or change, to relate individual incidents and individual careers to this process of historical development; thus historiography becomes more than the description of a series of static situations, for the historian becomes the moving camera which fuses them. Finally, our ideal historian will have the requisite literary talent to channel his skills with clarity and strength, so as to imprint his interpretation indelibly on the reader’s mind.