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Ab urbe condita (The History of Rome)
Some Modern Views of Livy Modern scholars have disagreed about what Livy's goals are for writing his History, and how successfully he accomplished them. Here are some representative quotations from influential studies of Livy. Works cited are listed in the Bibliography below. A. Livy as a Historian (Collingwood 1946: 43-44) Livy set himself the task of writing a history of Rome. Now a modern historian would have interpreted this as meaning a history of how Rome came to be what it is, a history of the process which brought into existence the characteristic Roman institutions and moulded the typical Roman character. It never occurs to Livy to adopt any such interpretation. Rome is the heroine of his narrative. Rome is the agent whose actions he is describing. Therefore Rome is a substance, changeless and eternal. From the beginning of the narrative Rome is ready-made and complete. To the end of the narrative she has undergone no spiritual change. B. Livy's Use of Sources (Walsh 1961: 141) Above all, in considering Livy's choice of sources, one should remember that he is not an original researcher; his aim was to encase reliable facts ascertained by others in a worthy literary framework. One can condemn his lack of historical sense in failing to approach directly the documentary and earliest literary evidence; but one can also applaud the astute choice of sources which were the best available for his literary and patriotic approach, and which were also easily accessible and easily read. C. Livy as a Historian: Contra Collingwood (Luce 1977: 238) The remarkable aspect of Livy's account of the Regal Period [Livy, Book I] is not its lack of historical merit but the striving to lend the material as much historicity as possible. The central theme of his narrative is that the growth of Rome and the genesis of her institutions was a gradual, piecemeal process that took many centuries. D. Livy's Goals as a Historian (Miles 1995: 74) All this is not to say that Livy's critics have been altogether wrong when they castigate him for being careless and indifferent in his analysis of historical evidence. Rather they have in an important sense missed the point of Livy's text; they have been evaluating it by a standard that the text itself not only dismisses but even seeks to discredit, and they have failed to appreciate the positive functions that displays of analytical confusion perform in their immediate contexts and in the larger context of the narrative as a whole....History in this version remains useful not because it represents accurate reconstructions of past events that can serve as analogies in the present but rather because it perpetuates and interprets the collective memory on which the identity and character of the Roman people depend. This is not the only kind of history, to be sure, but one particularly well suited to a society that regulated itself less by a body of written law than by stories, examples, and wisdom transmitted through a rich array of oral traditions that had only recently begun to be reduced to writing. References to Histri and/or Istria are in Books 40, 41 and 43 |
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This page compliments of Marisa Ciceran Created: Monday,
March 04, 2002; Updated
Sunday, May 13, 2007
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