These merits, not less than the high tone and easy grace of his narrative and the eloquence of his speeches, gave Livy a hold on Roman readers such as only Cicero and Virgil besides him ever obtained. His history formed the groundwork of nearly all that was afterwards written on the subject. Plutarch, writers on rhetoric like the elder Seneca, moralists like Valerius Maximus, went to Livy for their stock examples. Florus and Eutropius abridged him; Orosius extracted from him his proofs of the sinful blindness of the pagan world; and in every school Livy was firmly established as a text-book for the Roman youth. _Text._--The received text of the extant thirty-five books of Livy is taken from different sources, and no one of our MSS. contains them all. The MSS. of the first decade, some thirty in number, are with one exception derived, more or less directly, from a single archetype, viz., the recension made in the 4th century by the two Nicomachi, Flavianus and Dexter, and by Victorianus. This is proved in the case of the older MSS. by written subscriptions to that effect, and in the case of the rest by internal evidence. Of all these descendants of the Nicomachean recension, the oldest is the Codex Parisinus of the 10th century, and the best the Codex Mediceus or Florentinus of the 11th. An independent value attaches to the ancient palimpsest of Verona, of which the first complete account was given by Mommsen in _Abhandl. der preussischen Akad. der Wissenschaften_ (1868). It contains the third, fourth, fifth and fragments of the sixth book, and, according to Mommsen, whose conclusions are accepted by Madvig (_Emend. Livianae_, 2nd ed., 1877, p. 37), it is derived, not from the Nicomachean recension, but from an older archetype common to both. For the third decade our chief authority is the Codex Puteanus, an uncial MS. of the 5th century, now at Paris. For the fourth we have two leading MSS.--Codex Bambergensis, 11th century, and the slightly older Codex Moguntinus, now lost and only known through the Mainz edition of 1518-1519. What remains of the fifth decade depends on the 5th century Laurishamensis or Vindobonensis from the monastery of Lorsch, edited at Basel in 1531.