This was the temper which was welcome at court, even in men of Pompeian sympathies. So, too, Livy's attitude towards the established religion and towards the beliefs of former times has the same sentimental tinge. The moral reform attempted by Augustus had gone hand in hand with an elaborate revival and amplification of religious ceremony. Outward conformity at least was required of all citizens. _Expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus;_ "the existence of the gods is a matter of public policy, and we must believe it accordingly," Ovid had said, in the most daring and cynical of his poems. The old associations, the antiquarian charm, that lingered round this faded ancestral belief, appealed strongly to the romantic patriotism of the historian. His own religion was a sort of mild fatalism; he pauses now and then to draw rather commonplace reflections on the blindness of men destined to misfortune, or the helplessness of human wisdom and foresight against destiny. But at the same time he gravely chronicles miracles and portents, not so much from any belief in their truth as because they are part of the story. The fact that they had ceased to be regarded seriously in his own time, and were accordingly in a great measure ceasing to happen, he laments as one among many declensions from older and purer fashions. As a master of style, Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began to fall into decadence. It is no longer the famous _urbanus sermo_ of the later Republic, the pure and somewhat austere language of a governing class. The influence of Virgil is already traceable in Livy, in actual phrases whose use had hitherto been confined to poetry, and also in a certain warmth of colouring unknown to earlier prose. To Augustan purists this relaxation of the language seemed provincial and unworthy of the severe tradition of the best Latin; and it was this probably, rather than any definite novelties in grammar or vocabulary, that made Asinius Pollio accuse Livy of "Patavinity." But in the hands of Livy the new style, by its increased volume and flexibility, is as admirably suited to a work of great length and scope as the older had been for the purposes of Caesar or Sallust. It is drawn, so to speak, with a larger pattern; and the added richness of tone enables him to advance without flagging through the long and intricate narrative where a simpler diction must necessarily have grown monotonous, as one more florid would be cloying. In the earlier books we seem to find the manner still a little uncertain and tentative, and a little trammelled by the traditional manner of the older annalists; as he proceeds in his work he falls into his stride, and advances with a movement as certain as that of Gibbon, and claimed by Roman critics as comparable in ease and grace to that of Herodotus. The periodic structure of Latin prose which had been