Livy Sentence Examples

Of George Sand's style a foreigner can be but an imperfect judge, but French critics, from Sainte-Beuve, Nisard and Caro down to Jules Lemaitre and Faguet, have agreed to praise her spontaneity, her correctness of diction, her easy opulence - the lactea ubertas that Quintilian attributes to Livy.

See Livy i.

Livy mentions a temple of Apollo.

I, 22) and professed to detect in Livy's style certain provincialisms of his native Padua (Quintilian, i.

Livy regards him as a less trustworthy authority than Fabius Pictor, and Niebuhr considers him the first to introduce systematic forgeries into Roman history.

He was freely used by Livy in part of his work (from the sixth book onwards).

Livy made great use of him in his third decade.

He is best known for his famous supplements to Quintus Curtius and Livy, containing the missing books written by himself.

But he has carefully consulted the best authorities, and his work and that of Livy are the only connected and detailed extant accounts of early Roman history.

Its chief distinctions are that during the later Republic and earlier Empire it yielded excellent soldiers, and thus much aided the success of Caesar against Pompey and of Octavian against Antony, and that it gave Rome the poet Virgil (by origin a Celt), the historian Livy, the lyrist Catullus, Cornelius Nepos, the elder and the younger Pliny and other distinguished writers?

Livy could never get rid of the idea that the old struggle between patrician and plebeian was something like the struggle between the nobility and the people at large in the later days of the commonwealth.

Its long and noble resistance, told by the Roman historian Livy in no less noble language, ranks with the Spanish defence of Saragossa in the Peninsular War.

If a codex could not be obtained by fair means, he was ready to use fraud, as when he bribed a monk to abstract a Livy and an Ammianus from the convent library of Hersfield.

Poggio's History of Florence, written in avowed imitation of Livy's manner, requires separate mention, since it exemplifies by its defects the weakness of that merely stylistic treatment which deprived so much of Bruni's, Carlo Aretino's and Bembo's work of historical weight.

Taking Varro for his model, Fenestella was one of the chief representatives of the new style of historical writing which, in the place of the brilliant descriptive pictures of Livy, discussed curious and out-of-the-way incidents and customs of political and social life, including literary history.

Cicero and Livy bear testimony to the disappearance of a free plebs from the country districts and its replacement by gangs of slaves working on great estates.

Nepet had become Roman before 386 B.C., when Livy speaks of it and Sutrium as the keys of Etruria.

The chief authority for his life is the portion of Livy dealing with the history of the period.

See Livy v.

See Livy vii.

The collective name for the corps was celeres (" the swift," or possibly from Kan s, "a riding horse"); Livy, however, restricts the term to a special body-guard of ' Romulus.

Livy states that the walls had a length of 12 m.

Its position, at the point where the Volscian Hills reach the coast, leaving no space for passage between them and the sea, commanding the Pomptine Marshes (urbs pron g in paludes, as Livy calls it) and possessing a small harbour, was one of great strategic importance; and it thus appears very early in Roman history.

Livy's account of the siege, too, is full of topographical difficulties (Lupus, 214 sqq.).

The history of Rome, which consisted of eighty books, - and, after the example of Livy, was divided into decades, - began with the landing of Aeneas in Italy, and was continued as far as the reign of Alexander Severus (222-23s).

Abano in the neighbourhood was made illustrious by the birth of Livy, and Padua was the native place of Valerius Flaccus, Asconius Pedianus and Thrasea Paetus.

The Annales have been generally regarded as the same with the Commentarii Pontificum cited by Livy, but there seems reason to believe that the two were distinct, the Commentarii being fuller and more circumstantial.

The style is modelled on that of Livy, of whom Dlugosz was a warm admirer.

None of his great orations has survived, a loss regretted by Pitt more than that of the missing books of Livy and Tacitus, and no art perishes more completely with its possessor than that of oratory.

The idea which inspired Ennius was ultimately realized in both the national epic of Virgil and the national history of Livy.

Nevertheless it was by the work of a number of Roman chroniclers during this period that the materials of early Roman history were systematized, and the record of the state, as it was finally given to the world in the artistic work of Livy, was extracted from the early annals, state documents and private memorials, combined into a coherent unity, and supplemented by invention and reflection.

The prose style of Rome, as a vehicle for the continuous narration of events coloured by a rich and picturesque imagination and instinct with dignified emotion, attained its perfection in Livy.

Although there are some works of this so-called Silver Age of considerable and one at least of supreme interest, from the insight they afford into the experience of a century of organized despotism and its effect on the spiritual life of the ancient world, it cannot be doubted that the steady literary decline which characterized the last centuries of paganism was beginning before the death of Ovid and Livy.

Livy in general adheres to the epoch of Cato, though he sometimes follows that of Fabius Pictor.

It was according to Roman tradition one of the oldest cities of Etruria and indeed of all Italy, and, if Camars (the original name of the town, according to Livy) is rightly connected with the Camertes Umbri, its foundation would go back to pre-Etruscan times.

The position of Sutri was important, commanding as it did the road into Etruria, the later Via Cassia; and it is spoken of by Livy as one of the keys of Etruria, Nepet being the other.

His reading in Livy taught him to admire the Roman system of employing armies raised from the body of the citizens; and Cesare Borgia's method of gradually substituting the troops of his own duchy for aliens and mercenaries showed him that this plan might be adopted with success by the Italians.

Cast in the form of comments on the history of Livy, the Discorsi are really an inquiry into the genesis and maintenance of states.

In point of form the Florentine History is modelled upon Livy.

See Livy xxiv.

In Livy it signifies the oath (q.v.) which soldiers took among themselves not to run away or desert.

The identification with the Fosso della Valchetta is fixed as correct by the account in Livy ii.

Monuments of the tragic story were shown by the Romans in the time of Livy (the altar of Janus Curiatius near the sororium tigillum, the "sister's beam," or yoke under which Horatius had to pass; and the altar of Juno Sororia).

For the life of Marius the original sources are numerous passages in Cicero's works, Sallust's Jugurtha, the epitomes of the lost books of Livy, Plutarch's Lives of Sulla and Marius, Velleius Paterculus, Florus and Appian's Bellum civile.

Roma Regalis (1872) and A Plea for Livy (1873) were written in reply to his critics.

But the authors whom he quotes most frequently are Virgil, and, next to him, Terence, Cicero, Plautus; then Lucan, Horace, Juvenal, Sallust, Statius, Ovid, Livy and Persius.

He also encouraged the transcription of Latin MSS., which became models of style to Widukind of Corvey, the imitator of Sallust and Livy.

His standard authors in Latin prose are Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Frontinus and Orosius.

He here urges that the foundation of all true learning is a " sound and thorough knowledge of Latin," and draws up a course of reading, in which history is represented by Livy, Sallust, Curtius, and Caesar; oratory by Cicero; and poetry by Virgil.

The Latin poets to be studied include Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and (with certain limitations) Horace, Juvenal and Persius, as well as Plautus, Terence and the tragedies of Seneca; the prose authors recommended are Cicero, Livy and Sallust.

Among the Latin authors studied were Virgil and Lucan, with selections from Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, besides Cicero and Quintilian, Sallust and Curtius, Caesar and Livy.

From Livy it would appear that tradition recognized two sons of Aeneas called by this name, the one the son of his Trojan, the other of his Latin wife.

See Livy, i.

Livy tells us it was taken from the Sabines, while Virgil speaks of it as a Latin colony.

See Cicero, Orelli's Ononiasticon; Sallust, Catiline, 18; Suetonius, Caesar, 79; Livy, Epit.

If the rites are not properly performed or not performed by the proper person, no relation is considered as established between the deceased and anybody surviving Livy

See Cicero, Pro Fonteio, 17, Brutus, 22, 30; Livy, edit.

Strabo speaks of it as varying seven times in the day, but it is more accurate to say, with Livy, that it is irregular.

He halted his army in pious respect before the birthplace of a Latin writer, carried Livy or Caesar on his campaigns with him, and his panegyrist Panormita did not think it an incredible lie to say that the king was cured of an illness by having a few pages of Quintus Curtius read to him.

On his return to Rome, Nobilior celebrated a triumph (of which full details are given by Livy) remarkable for the magnificence of the spoils exhibited.

The legends as to its foundation, and the accounts of its early relations with Rome, are untrustworthy; but Livy's account of wars between Antium and Rome, early in the 4th century B.C., may perhaps be accepted.

He left untouched Roman history up to the time when Greece and the East came into contact with Rome, possibly because Livy had sufficiently treated it.

His idea of history was more severe and less rhetorical than that of Sallust and Livy, whom he blamed for putting elaborate speeches into the mouths of the characters of whom they wrote.

Thucydides mentions eruptions in the 8th and 5th centuries B.C., and others are mentioned by Livy in 125, 121 and 43 B.C. Catania was overwhelmed in 1169, and many other serious eruptions are recorded, notably in 1669, 1830, 1852, 1865, 1879, 1886, 1892, 1899 and March 1910.

He was the author of a brief epitome of Roman history based upon Livy, which he utilized as a means of displaying his antiquarian lore.

Livy gives their chief towns as Brixia (Brescia) and Verona; Pliny, Brixia and Cremona.

In the early r6th century the use of the vernacular is extended, chiefly in the treatment of historical and polemical subjects, as in Murdoch Nisbet's version of Purvey (in MS. till 1901), a compromise between northern and southern usage; Gau's (q.v.) Richt Vay, translated from Christiern Pedersen; Bellenden's (q.v.) translation of Livy and Scottish History; the Complaynt of Scotlande, largely a mosaic of translation from the French; Ninian Winzet's (q.v.) Tractates; Lesley's (q.v.) History of Scotland; Knox's (q.v.) History; Buchanan's (q.v.) Chamaeleon; Lindesay of Pitscottie's (q.v.) History; and the tracts of Nicol Burne and other exiled Catholics.

Aeginium is described by Livy as a strong place, and is frequently mentioned during the Roman wars; and Stagus appears from time to time in Byzantine writers.

And yet it is singular that no mention of them occurs in Cicero or Livy, and that altogether literary allusions to them are very scarce.

It consists of some translations of Livy and Seneca, and of a very large number of interesting and admirably written letters, many of which are addressed to Peiresc, the man of science of whom Gassendi has left a delightful Latin life.

Livy's practice is exactly opposite to that of Cicero, since he has a marked preference for the S forms, "thereby exemplifying Cicero's saying that long syllables are more appropriate to history than to oratory.'

A tenth province 1 Some writers, following Livy vi.

During this century the best histories - Bruno's and Poggio's annals of Florence, for example - were composed in Latin after the manner of Livy.

The story of his success, related five times under five different years, possibly rests on an historical basis, but the account given in Livy of the achievements of the Roman army is obviously incredible.

See Livy iii.

In the four decades of his Asia, Joao de Barros, the Livy Century of his country, tells in simple vigorous language the "deeds achieved by the Portuguese in the dis History.

Livy's easy independent life at Rome, and his aristocratic leanings in politics seem to show that he was the son of well-born and opulent parents; he was certainly well educated, being widely read in Greek literature, and a student both of rhetoric and philosophy.

He writes of it with despondency as a degenerate and declining age; and, instead of triumphant prophecies of world-wide rule, such as we find in Horace, Livy contents himself with pointing out the dangers which already threatened Rome, and exhorting his contemporaries to learn, in good time, the lessons which the past history of the state had to teach.

It was probably about the time of the battle of Actium that Livy established himself in Rome, and there he seems chiefly to have resided until his retirement to Padua shortly before his death.

For us the interest of Livy's life centres in the work to which the greater part of it was devoted, the history of Rome from its foundation down to the death of Drusus (9 B.C.).

They have been expanded with great ingenuity and learning by Freinsheim in Drakenborch's edition of Livy.

If we are to form a correct judgment on the merits of Livy's history, we must, above all things, bear in mind what his aim was in writing it, and this he has told us himself in the celebrated preface.

Still less has Livy anything in common with the naïve anxiety of Dionysius of Halicarnassus to make it clear to his fellow Greeks that the irresistible people who had mastered them was in origin, in race and in language Hellenic like themselves.

Livy writes as a Roman, to raise a monument worthy of the greatness of Rome, and to keep alive, for the guidance and the warning of Romans, the recollection alike of the virtues which had made Rome great and of the vices which had threatened her with destruction.

Livy's own circumstances were all such as to render these views natural to him.

And, though we are nowhere told that Livy undertook his history at the emperor's suggestion, it is certain that Augustus read parts of it with pleasure, and even honoured the writer with his assistance and friendship.

Livy was deeply penetrated with a sense of the greatness of Rome.

To the same general attitude is also due the omission by Livy of all that has no direct bearing on the fortunes of the Roman people.

As the result, we get from Livy very defective accounts even of the Italic peoples most closely connected with Rome.

It is in the highest degree natural that Livy should have sought for the secret of the rise of Rome, not in any large historical causes, but in the moral qualities of the people themselves, and that he should have looked upon the contemplation of these as the best remedy for the vices of his own degenerate days.

The prominence thus given to the moral aspects of the history tends to obscure in some degree the true relations and real importance of the events narrated, but it does so in Livy to a far less extent than in some other writers.

Fabius Maximus, in his descriptions of the unshaken firmness and calm courage shown by the fathers of the state in the hour of trial, Livy is at his best; and he is so largely in virtue of his genuine appreciation of character as a powerful force in the affairs of men.

But we find no trace in Livy of any systematic application of philosophy to the facts of history.

If from the general aim and spirit of Livy's history we pass to consider his method of workmanship, we are struck at once by the very different measure of success attained by him in the two great departments of an historian's labour.

It is on the second of these two kinds of evidence that Livy almost exclusively relies.

For more recent times the materials were plentiful, and a rich field of research lay open to the student in the long series of laws, decrees of the senate, and official registers, reaching back, as it probably did, at least to the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. Nevertheless it seems certain that Livy never realized the duty of consulting these relics of the past, even in order to verify the statements of his authorities.

The consequence of this indifference to original research and patient verification might have been less serious had the written tradition on which Livy preferred to rely been more trustworthy.

In the fourth and fifth decades of Livy the two appear side by side, and the contrast between them is striking.

Such was the written tradition on which Livy mainly relied.

Passing to the third decade, we find ourselves at once confronted by a question which has been long and fully discussed - the relation between Livy and Polybius.

It is conceded on all hands that Livy in this decade makes con For Livy's debt to Valerius Antias, see A A Howard in Harvard Studies Classical Philology, xvii (1906), pp 161 sqq.

It is also agreed that we can detect in Livy's account of the Hannibalic war two distinct elements, derived originally, the one from a Roman, the other from a non-Roman source.

It is urged that Livy, who in the fourth and fifth decades shows himself so sensible of the great merits of Polybius, is not likely to have ignored him in the third, and that his more limited use of him in the latter case is fully accounted for by the closer connexion of the history with Rome and Roman affairs, and the comparative excellence of the available Roman authorities, and, lastly, that the points of agreement with Polybius, not only in matter but in expression, can only be explained on the theory that Livy is directly following the great Greek historian.

It is argued that Livy's mode of using his authorities is tolerably uniform, and that his mode of using Polybius in particular is known with certainty from the later decades.

But all these are made intelligible if we suppose Livy to have been here following directly or indirectly the same original sources that were used by Polybius.

The latter Livy certainly used directly for some parts of the decade.

In the fourth and fifth decades the question of Livy's authorities presents no great difficulties, and the conclusions arrived at by Nissen in his masterly Untersuchungen have met with general acceptance.

In the portions of the history which deal with Greece and the East, Livy follows Polybius, and these portions are easily distinguishable from the rest by their superior clearness, accuracy and fulness.

Livy's general method of using these authorities was certainly not such as would be deemed satisfactory in a modern historian.

Further than this, however, Livy's criticism does not go.

At the most it only presupposes a comparison with other versions, equally second-hand, but either less generally accepted or less in harmony with his own views of the situation; and in many cases the reasons he gives for his preference of one account over another are eminently unscientific. Livy's history, then, rests on no foundation of original research or even of careful verification.

Thus many of Livy's inconsistencies are due to his having pieced together two versions, each of which gave a differently coloured account of the same event.

In other cases where the same event has been placed by different annalists in different years, or where their versions of it varied, it reappears in Livy as two events.

Without doubt, too, much of the chronological confusion observable throughout Livy is due to the fact that he follows now one now another authority, heedless of their differences on this head.

Finally, Livy cannot be altogether acquitted on the charge of having here and there modified Polybius in the interests of Rome.

Serious as these defects in Livy's method appear if viewed in the light of modern criticism, it is probable that they were easily pardoned, if indeed they were ever discovered, by his contemporaries.

Tried by this standard, Livy deservedly won and held a place in the very first rank.

Nor is anything more remarkable than the way in which Livy's fine taste and sense of proportion, his true poetic feeling and genuine enthusiasm, saved him from the besetting faults of the mode of treatment which he adopted.

At the same time they are not treated as mere tales for children, for Livy never forgets the dignity that belongs to them as the prelude to the great epic of Rome, and as consecrated by the faith of generations.

Perhaps an even stronger proof of the skill which enabled Livy to avoid dangers which were fatal to weaker men is to be found in his speeches.

The substance, no doubt, of many of them Livy took from his authorities, but their form is his own, and, in throwing into them all his own eloquence and enthusiasm, he not only acted in conformity with the established traditions of his art, but found a welcome outlet for feelings and ideas which the fall of the republic had deprived of all other means of expression.

To us, therefore, they are valuable not only for their eloquence, but still more as giving us our clearest insight into Livy's own sentiments, his lofty sense of the greatness of Rome, his appreciation of Roman courage and firmness, and his reverence for the simple virtues of older times.

But, freely as Livy uses this privilege of speechmaking, his correct taste keeps his rhetoric within reasonable limits.

With a very few exceptions the speeches are dignified in tone, full of life and have at least a dramatic propriety, while of such incongruous and laboured absurdities as the speech which Dionysius puts into the mouth of Romulus, after the rape of the Sabine women, there are no instances in Livy.

With Livy this portrait-painting was a labour of love.

The general effect of Livy's narrative is no doubt a little spoilt by the awkward arrangement, adopted from his authorities, which obliges him to group the events by years, and thus to disturb their natural relations and continuity.

In style and language Livy represents the best period of Latin prose writing.

From the tendency to use a poetic diction in prose, which was so conspicuous a fault in the writers of the silver age, Livy is not wholly free.

But in Livy this poetic element is kept within bounds, and serves only to give warmth and vividness to the narrative.

These merits, not less than the high tone and easy grace of his narrative and the eloquence of his speeches, gave Livy a hold on Roman readers such as only Cicero and Virgil besides him ever obtained.

Plutarch, writers on rhetoric like the elder Seneca, moralists like Valerius Maximus, went to Livy for their stock examples.

The received text of the extant thirty-five books of Livy is taken from different sources, and no one of our MSS.

A bibliography of the various editions of Livy, or of all that has been written upon him, cannot be attempted here.

The Augustan age produced in Livy a great popular historian and natural artist and a trained rhetorician (in the speeches), - but as uncritical and inaccurate as he was brilliant.

From Livy to Tacitus the gulf is greater than from Herodotus to Thucydides.

His discoveries, co-ordinated and arranged in vast corpora inscriptionum, stand now alongside Herodotus or Livy, furnishing a basis for their criticism.

This site, moreover, corresponds with Livy's testimony, and would account for his statement that the towns of Palaeopolis and Neapolis were near together and identical in language and government.

Confirmation of this may be found in Cicero's description (Pro Milone, 85) of the destruction of the shrines and sacred groves of Alba by the construction of Clodius's villa, in the local application of the adjective Albanus, and in the position of Castel Gandolfo itself, which exactly suits Livy's description.

It is a striking fact that Ammianus, though a professional soldier, gives excellent pictures of social and economic problems, and in his attitude to the non-Roman peoples of the empire he is far more broad-minded than writers like Livy and Tacitus; his digressions on the various countries he had visited are peculiarly interesting.

It was not long afterwards that the dual kingship ceased and Sparta fell under the sway of a series of cruel and rapacious tyrants - Lycurgus, Machanidas, who was killed by Philopoemen, and Nabis, who, if we may trust the accounts given by Polybius and Livy, was little better than a bandit chieftain, holding Sparta by means of extreme cruelty and oppression, and using mercenary troops to a large extent in his wars.

Among older writers Juan de Mariana, who ends with the Catholic sovereigns, professedly took Livy as a model, and wrote a fine example of a rhetorical history published in Latin (1592-1609), and then in Spanish translated and largely re-written by himself.

He compiled, chiefly from Livy, a brief sketch of the history of Rome from the foundation of the city to the closing of the temple of Janus by Augustus (25 B.C.).

Of Polybius's anxiety to get at the truth no better proof can be given than his conscientious investigation of original documents and monuments, and his careful study of geography and topography - both of them points in which his predecessors, as well as his successor Livy, conspicuously failed.

In respect of form, Polybius is far the inferior of Livy, partly, owing to his very virtues.

So Livy and Clara (Spaulding) sat down forlorn, and cried, and I retired to a private, place to pray.

This has been discredited because it is not mentioned by Polybius, Livy or Plutarch; but it is probable that Archimedes had constructed some such burning instrument, though the connexion of it with the destruction of the Roman fleet is more than doubtful.

Nevertheless, Livy at first made use of him as one of his chief authorities, until he became convinced of his untrustworthiness.

The testimony of Livy (xxi., xxii.) and Polybius (ii., iii.) - no friendly critics - shows that Flaminius was a man of ability, energy and probity.

Hunt, who have also produced fragments of the Paeans of Pindar and many other classic texts (including a Greek continuation of Thucydides and a Latin epitome of part of Livy) in the successive volumes of the Oxyrhynchus papyri and other kindred publications.

Savona is the ancient Savo, a town of the Ingauni (see Albenga), where, according to Livy, Mago stored his booty in the Second Punic War.

For Padua claimed, like Rome, a Trojan origin, and Livy is careful to place its founder Antenor side by side with Aeneas.

Still less has Livy anything in common with the naïve anxiety of Dionysius of Halicarnassus to make it clear to his fellow Greeks that the irresistible people who had mastered them was in origin, in race and in language Hellenic like themselves.

This enthusiasm for Rome and for Roman virtues is, moreover, saved from degenerating into gross partiality by the genuine candour of Livy's mind and by his wide sympathies with every thing great and good.

Florus and Eutropius abridged him; Orosius extracted from him his proofs of the sinful blindness of the pagan world; and in every school Livy was firmly established as a textbook for the Roman youth.

Livy, however, notwithstanding the extent to which he used his writings (see LivY), speaks of him in such qualified terms as to suggest the idea that his strong artistic sensibilities had been wounded by Polybius's literary defects.

In 1871, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) began building the new home for his beloved, Livy (Olivia).

In 1903, the Twains sold the home and a year later Livy died.