The Historians' History of the World 06

Thus, conquest, the fruit of Roman genius, destroyed both the genius of peoples, and the peoples themselves; leaving behind it because it was a system, a system of institutions on a dead foundation. But in this debasement of every force and of every earthly hope, man took refuge within himself. Helped by oriental mysticism, he discovered in a new religion a new world.

This is what the modern philosophers have added to Livy. The criticism commenced by him, renewed by Beaufort, nearly perfected by Niebuhr, and the philosophy hidden under his eloquence, which was turned by Machiavelli into a practical channel and is still imperfect in Montesquieu, become each day more exact and more profound. The corrections thus made honour those by whom they are made without lowering those who suffer them. The first authors are the fathers of science, and Livy alone has done more for Roman history than all those who have desired to set him right.i

FOOTNOTES

[4] Niebuhr’sh remarks on the dates of Livy’s history (Rom. Hist. iv.) may be compared with the more common view given in Smith’s Dictionary and elsewhere. I think the beginning of the work must be placed in 29-24 B.C.; but adopting the idea that it was originally divided into decades, the fact now demonstrated, that it reached to a hundred and forty-second book, seems to show that it was not left complete according to the author’s intentions. It is also well remarked that the death of Drusus does not furnish a point of sufficient importance for the termination of the great epic of Roman history. This view is supported by the interesting statement of Pliny, that in one of his latter books Livy had declared: Satis jam sibi gloriæ quæsitum; et potuisse se desinere, nisi animus inquies pasceretur opere. (Plin. Hist. Nat. præf.) A period of more than forty years thus devoted to the elaboration of a single work is not unparalleled. Froissart was engaged forty years upon his Chronicles

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Roman Compass

(In the British Museum)

Roman Death Mask

CHAPTER XXXII. THE LAST YEARS OF AUGUSTUS

Octavian divorced his first two wives, the daughter of Publ. Servilius, to whom he had been married at eighteen, and Clodia, daughter of Antony’s wife Fulvia by her first husband P. Clodius the triumvir, after a short period of wedded life; and a year after she had borne him a daughter, Julia by name, he put away his third wife Scribonia, being captivated by the charms of Livia, the wife of Ti. Claudius Nero, who came into his house as his fourth wife with the consent of her former husband. Her two sons, Tiberius (born 42 B.C.) and Drusus, whom she brought into the world three months after her union with Augustus, were brought up in the house of their father Cl. Nero, but were received by Augustus into his own house on the death of the former, who had appointed him their guardian.

The person who had the likeliest prospect of the succession seemed to be M. Marcellus, the son of the emperor’s sister Octavia by her first marriage. He was treated with the utmost distinction by Augustus, who loaded him with honours in quick succession and married him at an early age to his daughter Julia, to the great mortification of the haughty and ambitious Livia, who, having borne no children to her imperial spouse, desired to secure the first place after the monarch and the reversion of the throne for her sons Tiberius and Drusus.

[21 B.C.-2 A.D.]