One may, then, be permitted to object to a common error of judgment regarding the nature of what is called the “scientific method” in ancient history. Students who have to deal with the gullible medieval chronicles seem to assume that historical criticism has but recently succeeded in creating a respect for objectivity and honesty in history, as though the logical processes of the mind were not fully developed in the human race twenty thousand years before the invention of the historical seminar. The incubus of religious authority dominant for centuries in the Middle Ages was a passing phase, as was the overweening respect for dramatic values in the Hellenistic historians and the eagerness to glorify families and the state in the Sullan romancers. But just as Polybius, when transplanted into a soberer atmosphere of action, rid himself with ease of the Hellenistic methods; as Julius Caesar, when occupied with absorbing actualities, could free himself from the habits of his day so far as to record the very crimes for which he was being assailed by Cato in the senate; as Ari Frodi in Iceland escaped churchly influence sufficiently to write the history of his island with the same respect for truth that he used when judging a case at the “thing,” so the early statesmen-annalists of Rome, when recording what was available for the historical period of the Republic, employed documents and personal observations with the same meticulous care that they used when presiding as praetors in the courts or when as senators arguing cases of international relations. Their brief historical notes are largely preserved for us in Polybius, in Cicero’s _De Republica_, in Diodorus, and in the central skeleton structure of Livy, and the continuous existence of these notes in Roman times kept the legends from ever straying wholly beyond the reach of actuality. This also explains why it is that archaeological knowledge now coming to hand is so frequently found to fit in with what we have been wont to call “tradition.” The various currents of Roman historiography united in the vast work of Livy, so that, Augustan though he is, he may be taken as a typical product of the several Republican schools. There is no one formula by which the historian may employ Livy without constant caution. Parts contain unadulterated legend, parts that seem at first glance to be sound record are based upon treacherous sources, much is first-rate history; but who has the magic flail that will shell off the husks? There is no more insistent problem in Roman history than the correct use of Livy, for he is, over large areas, our only source, and over periods where he parallels Appian and Cassius Dio he is generally so much sounder than they that he must be threshed through.