Besides his History, Livy is said[968] to have written books which professed to be philosophical, and dialogues, the subjects of which are partly philosophical, and partly historical. Late in life he returned to Patavium, and there died A. D. 18, in the seventy-seventh year of his age.[969] He left one son, and one daughter who married L. Magius, a teacher of rhetoric, of no great talent, who owed his reputation principally to his connexion with the historian.[970] Livy had one great object in view in writing his History, namely, to celebrate the glories of his native country, to which he was devotedly attached. He was a patriot: his sympathy was with Pompey, called forth by the disinterestedness of that great man, and perhaps by his sad end, after having so long enjoyed universal popularity. The character of the historian would lead us to suppose that his attachment was personal rather than political, for the general spirit of his work shows that he was a man of pure mind and gentle feelings. He began his great work about nine or ten years before the Christian era, a period singularly favourable for such a design. The passages in which especially he delights to put forth his powers, and on which he dwells with the greatest zest, show the truth of Quintilian’s well-known criticism, “that he is especially the historian of the affections, particularly of the softer sensibilities.”[971] A lost battle is misery to him; he trembles at the task of relating it. Nor does he appear to have been a stern republican. He could admire enthusiastically, and describe with spirit, the noble qualities and self-devotion which the old republican freedom fostered; but his object is rather to paint the heroes, and to give graphic representations of the struggles which they maintained in defence of liberty, than to show any love of liberty in the abstract, or a predilection for any particular form of constitution. To Livy political struggles were no more than subjects for picturesque delineations, the moral of which was the elevation of national grandeur, just as successful foreign wars were the records of national glory. Hence he is a biographer quite as much as an historian: he anatomizes the moral nature of his heroes, and shows their inner man, and the motive springs of their noble exploits. This gives to his narratives the charm of an historical romance, and makes up for the want of accurate research and political observation. His characters stand before us objectively, like epic heroes; and thus he is “the Homer of the Roman people,” whilst the charm of his narratives makes him the “Herodotus of Roman historians.”