monwealth as
the controlling power in Italy, remain to us. These, by the accepted
chronology, represent a period of four hundred and sixty years. Books
XI-XX, being the second "decade," according to a division attributed
to the fifth century of our era are missing. They covered seventy-five
years, and brought the narrative down to the beginning of the second
Punic war. Books XXI-XLV have been saved, though those of the fifth
"decade" are imperfect. They close with the triumph of AEmilius, in 167
B.C., and the reduction of Macedonia to a Roman province. Of the other
books, only a few fragments remain, the most interesting of which
(from Book CXX) recounts the death of Cicero, and gives what appears
to be a very just estimate of his character. We have epitomes of all
the lost books, with the exception of ten; but these are so scanty as
to amount to little more than tables of contents. Their probable date
is not later than the time of Trajan. To summarize the result, then,
thirty-five books have been saved and one hundred and seven lost--a
most deplorable record, especially when we consider that in the later
books the historian treated of times and events whereof his means of
knowledge were adequate to his task.

TITUS LIVIUS was born at Patavium, the modern Padua, some time between
61 and 57 B.C. Of his parentage and early life nothing is known. It
is easy to surmise that he was well born, from his political bias in
favour of the aristocratic party, and from the evident fact of his
having received a liberal education; yet the former of these arguments
is not at all inconsistent with the opposite supposition, and the
latter should lead to no very definite conclusion when we remember
that in his days few industries were more profitable than the higher
education of slaves for the pampered Roman market. Niebuhr infers,
from a sentence quoted by Quintilian, that Livy began life as a
teacher of rhetoric. However that may be, it seems certain that he
came to Rome about 30 B.C., was introduced to Augustus and won his
patronage and favour, and after the death of his great patron and
friend retired to the city of his birth, where he died, 17 A.D. It
is probable that he had fixed the date of the Emperor's death as the
limit of his history, and that his own decease cut short his task.

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 p