Excerpt from Roman History
No historian ever told a story more delightfully. The available translations leave much to be desired, but to the student of Latin Livy"s style is pure and simple, and possesses that charm which purity and simplicity always give. If there is anything to justify the charge of "Patavinity," or provincialism, made by Asinius Pollio, we, at least, are not learned enough in Latin to detect it; and Pollio, too, appears to have been no gentle critic if we may judge by his equally severe strictures upon Cicero, C?sar, and Sallust. This much we know: the Patavian"s heroes live; his events happen, and we are carried along upon their tide. Our sympathies, our indignation, our enthusiasm, are summoned into being, and history and fiction appear to walk hand in hand for our instruction and amusement. In this latter word - fiction - lies the charge most often and most strongly made against him - the charge that he has written a story and no more; that with him past time existed but to furnish materials "to point a moral or adorn a tale." Let us consider to what extent this is true, and, if true, in what measure the author has sinned by it or we have lost.
No one would claim that the rules by which scientific historians of to-day are judged should be applied to those that wrote when history was young, when the boundaries between the possible and the impossible were less clearly defined, or when, in fact, such boundaries hardly existed in men"s minds. In this connection, even while we vaunt, we smile. After all, how much of our modem and so-called scientific history must strike the reasoning reader as mere theorizing or as special pleading based upon the slenderest evidence! Among the ancients the work of the historians whom we consider trustworthy - such writers, for instance, as C?sar, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Tacitus - may be said to fall generally within Rawlinson"s canons I and 2 of historical criticism - that is, (I) cases where the historian has personal knowledge concerning the facts whereof he writes, or (2) where the facts are such that he may reasonably be supposed to have obtained them from contemporary witnesses. Canon 2 might be elaborated and refined very considerably, and perhaps to advantage.
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