On a superficial glance, no historian could provide a stronger contrast to Sallust than Livy. Instead of the spiky, archaizing style, one has what Quintilian famously characterized as ‘‘milky richness’’ (10.1.32); in place of Sallust’s ‘‘immortal brevity’’ (Quint. 10.1.102) one finds a narrative of phenomenal expansiveness encompassing the whole of Roman history. To challenge the unrelenting gloom that characterizes Sallust one gets frequent representations of deeds of apparently unqualified heroism, characters to whose detriment not a word is breathed, Roman victories and conquests justified and celebrated. And whereas Sallust has little to say of divine influence, large portions of Livy’s narrative are permeated with reminders of the gods’ hand in history, with regular records of supernatural events, as well as Roman piety in responding to those events. In short, the very model of an imperial historian, and justly associated with the Augustan project of political restoration, religious revival, and celebration of the Roman past.
And yet, once one gives Livy more than a superficial glance, those apparent certainties fade away. The surviving portions of his history are astonishingly varied, something which has been unfortunately obscured by the fact that most of his surviving work is little read except by specialists: the brilliance of Books 27 or 44, for example, has rarely received recognition. This neglect in part actually arises from a piece of good fortune. With Livy, unusually among ancient historians, we are able to compare large portions of his narrative with his source, namely Polybius, whom he used extensively and followed closely for many of his later books. This has enabled some fascinating studies of Livy’s working methods (esp. Luce 1977; Trankle 1977), but also has led others to a more superficial and generally unsustainable conclusion: that Livy, at least in his later books, did little but reproduce his sources mechanically, and that his own input is mostly limited to stylistic polish. This prejudice has done little to encourage readers to explore his work more widely; most have tended to stay close to a few books, especially those whose stories are familiar - above all Books 1 (covering the regal period) and 21 (Hannibal’s initial invasion of Italy).
And generalizations about Livy on the basis of a few books are all too often invalid. If one characterizes him as a religious historian, one must nevertheless recognize that in much of his Fourth Decade (Books 31-40) religion is of little importance to his narrative (Levene 1993: 78-103). If one sees him as a celebrator of Roman imperialism, then one must factor in the miserable sequence of immoral and incompetent Roman imperialists whom he describes clearsightedly in Books 42-43. And although it is possible - indeed likely - that Livy’s attitude to Augustus developed through the latter’s reign (see esp. Woodman 1988: 136-140; Badian 1993), ‘‘Livy the Augustan’’ needs considerable qualification once one remembers that in his entire surviving work Augustus is only mentioned three times - the first two of which seem to be later insertions by the author (1.19.3; 4.20.7; 28.12.12: see Luce 1965). Indeed, the sentiments of Livy’s Preface (which is likely to predate Augustus’ victory in 31) have manifestly been strongly influenced by Sallust (Woodman 1988: 128-135): one finds exactly the same pessimism about the current state of Rome contrasted with a belief in the superior virtue of the past.
Even generalizations about his work’s structure and articulation are all too often misleading. It is certainly true that his work is broadly structured annalistically, but that is not entirely uniform, since it does not apply to Book 1 at all, and he is prepared to show considerable flexibility and variation both in the annalistic material he chooses to introduce and in the way he distributes it in his narrative (Rich 1997). And this applies especially to the question of the degree of coverage that he chose for different parts of his work. It was pointed out above that Sallust is at least as starry-eyed as Livy about the virtues of the heroes of the past - indeed, he is more so, as I shall discuss further below. It might at least be objected that even if Sallust and Livy adopt similar attitudes to the past, they respond to it differently: that Sallust chose to focus on the time of present vice, whereas Livy, as he explicitly says at the start of his work (praef. 4-5), decided to escape the evils of the present by concentrating on past glories. But although that is indeed what Livy claims for himself, his actual history does not bear it out. Of its 142 books, nearly two-thirds dealt with the period after the fall of Carthage in 146, the date which for Sallust (and others) had marked a watershed in Roman morals. He spent twenty-five books on the twenty or so years of Caesar’s and Octavian’s civil wars, which is more than he allotted to the regal period and first three centuries of the republic combined.
Nor is this simply a function of his lack of information about earlier periods. Livy’s Greek contemporary, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, wrote a history of early Rome which was far more expansive that Livy’s, despite their having identical source material available to them. Livy’s first book corresponds to Books 1-4 of Dionysius, and the events of Dionysius’ first eleven books are covered by Livy in little more than three books. Livy could certainly have treated the regal period in particular at far greater length than he does: instead his practice is to abridge and summarize even famous stories to a degree that matches Sallust himself. Romulus’ killing of Remus is brushed away in a couple of lines (1.7.2-3), Tarpeia is no more than a minor aside (1.11.6-9). The well-known story of the sale of the Sibylline Books to Tarquinius Superbus (e. g., D. Hal. AR 4.62) does not receive even a passing mention. Far from focusing his attention primarily on the glorious past, Livy from the very start of his history gives the impression of hastening towards the present as swiftly as he decently can, given that his self-imposed task involved comprehensive coverage of the whole of Roman history. Livy, no less than Sallust, turned his spotlight above all on the late republic. It is merely that the accident of survival has meant that those later, more expansive books are now lost to us.
But it is still more important that Livy is in fact not an uncritical didactic admirer of Roman heroes and Roman history. There are many virtuous characters in the work whom Livy shows as contributing substantially to Roman success - but on closer reading it is surprisingly rare for those characters to be presented without significant qualification. Camillus is the second founder of Rome, the hero who preserves the state after the Gallic sack in Book 5 - but in Book 6 he is seen in a more contentious light as the upholder of class privilege. Scipio Africanus carries off the invasion of Africa and the spectacular defeat of Hannibal, but his flirtation with Hellenism and his tendency to self-promotion even through deceit are more uncomfortable. Cato is the firm upholder of traditional moral values but takes that to an excess that can hardly be justified. And there are many Roman figures of even greater ambivalence in the work: Coriolanus warring against his own country, Manlius Capitolinus saving the Capitol only to be executed by being thrown from it after (apparently) a failed revolt, Manlius Torquatus putting his son to death in order to provide a salutary lesson to his troops, Flaminius irreligiously blundering into a trap but dying a heroic death. This complexity is all too often overlooked even today, largely because Livy’s subtle mode of presenting character rarely involves him in a direct authorial commentary: actions are allowed to speak for themselves. One must read Livy with far more attention to the detailed implications of his story than is often shown. But the upshot is that there may be a case for saying that Sallust excessively idealizes the Roman past (perhaps precisely because he was not narrating it in detail). There is little case for saying it about Livy.
The same is true of Rome as a whole. Livy’s mission was not to question Rome’s right to her empire; but the process of acquiring that empire, even if justified overall, regularly leads to serious and unresolved moral questions. Hannibal (in Livy’s account) is a treaty-breaker and aggressor - and yet one reason he can obtain such success as he does is that he is, at least at the beginning, far more scrupulous than the Romans in his behavior towards both the gods and his allies. (How does one assess a war where the illegal aggressor behaves better than his victims?) Manlius Vulso achieves a major triumph against the Gallogrecians in Asia - and yet that victory is also a major cause of Rome’s decline into luxury (39.6.7-9). (Is military success a satisfactory compensation for moral laxity, and is it worth fighting a war at all if its ultimate consequences will be so disastrous?) Throughout Livy’s narrative these issues are tacitly raised, even though he rarely points up the problems himself: it is for the reader to be alert to them.
Nor is the supposed political naivete of Livy in evidence nearly as much as is sometimes implied. It is of course true that, as a non-senator, it is unlikely that he participated in high politics. But there is no reason to believe that such participation was an essential prerequisite for a sophisticated political understanding at Rome, any more than it is today. Deciding what in Livy’s (or any other writer’s) narrative might serve as evidence of political acumen is (needless to say) highly subjective, since it will largely depend on the reader’s own presuppositions about the actual nature of political life (there is an all too common tendency to assume that a writer is naive who fails to mirror one’s own level of cynicism). But if one criterion may be suggested to be a willingness to question the specious motives that politicians put forward for their activities, and to see instead a complex of personal, social, and systemic causes underlying political events, then Livy’s history furnishes very many examples. The so-called ‘‘Struggle of the Orders’’ - the class conflict that is such a major theme in the early books - provides many instances. Patricians and plebeians alike, both individually and collectively, claim to be acting in the interests of the state, while advocating policies that they primarily favor because of their class allegiances and personal advantages. Much of the contention revolves around the introduction and development of institutions and laws; but those institutions and laws themselves become a major cause of subsequent political behavior. It is little surprise that these books provided the material for Machiavelli’s Discourses, some of his profoundest studies of political institutions and political affairs.
All of this indicates that it is a considerable over-simplification to make a sharp dichotomy between the Sallustian and the Livian approaches to writing history - and by extension one should be equally wary of similar dichotomies about those authors whose works are lost. What Sallust and Livy share is at least as important as what separates them - indeed, perhaps even more important in the context of providing a general characterization of the period. They share a basic understanding of Roman history in terms of moral decline; they further see that decline as the result of her military conquests, in terms of the influx of wealth and the abandonment of reasons for moral restraint. They both are interested in ambivalent figures, and show something of that ambivalence emerging even in their most heroic characters. They both are, at least some of the time, wary of accepting declared motives at face value, and focus on social conflict as a primary underlying motivation for many political events. This is not, of course, to suggest that there are no differences between them: for example, their prose styles certainly are radically apart; the expansive, multi-layered complexity of much of Livy’s narrative contrasts sharply with the amazingly focused intensity of Sallust’s monographs; and there is nothing in Livy to parallel Sallust’s remarkable prefaces. But those differences need to be seen in the context of immense continuity between them in both their general conception of history and the manner in which they articulate that conception in their narratives.
World History
