CHAPTER VI REPUBLICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LIVY The Romans, like all builders of empires, were avid readers and writers of history. Their first two epics were the stories of the growth of Rome; the numerous autobiographies of the Republican period were the political _apologiae_ of public men like Marius, Sulla, Scaurus, and Lucullus, who had given all their time to the affairs of state; before Livy composed his great work, at least a score of historians had written bulky accounts, now all lost, of the whole or some part of Rome’s amazing story. Now that we have only fragments left of that splendid historical library it is easy to fall into serious misconceptions regarding the ideals and aims of those who wrote the nation’s history. To these errors the Middle Ages contributed not a little by canonizing all the ancient authorities so that when modern historical criticism came into vogue the reaction against authority went too far and skepticism overleaped the mark. Furthermore, a group of modern critics, who know little about the past, impressed by the absence of rationalism in the medieval writers, have invented a theory of progress which denies all intelligence to human beings who lived before the eighteenth century. A recent book, misnamed _The Making of the Modern Mind_, actually begins its account with the dark ages, thereby succeeding fairly well in creating an impression of consistent progress, but it wholly neglects the great civilization which had reached the heights and fallen before the period discussed. One might with equal fairness write a biography of Ruskin by ignoring his creative early period and beginning with his emergence from his mental coma during his old age.