In estimating the quality of the thirty-five books extant[9]—unfortunately his early work and not the maturest product of his mind—we must distinguish between the results that are due to his own aims and capacities and those that are due to the nature of his varying sources. Everyone now admits with Tacitus[10] that Livy was scrupulously honest, that he was fair, that he did not permit himself to fabricate—as Caelius and Valerius seem to have done—and that he chose good sources when they were available; but a historian needs more than these virtues. What we miss most in this respect is his failure to go insistently to primary sources. To be sure, it was impossible for a man who set out to write a vast popular history—about three times the size of Gibbon’s great life-work—to delve in the archives. Those documents were not then catalogued and classified as they now are. Cato the younger, for instance, when he needed an abstract of the treasury office for a relatively brief period had to pay his assistants some 30,000 denarii to have it made.[11] Ten times the amount would not have sufficed for Livy’s extensive needs. He accordingly made use of what had been published, such things as the _Annales Maximi_, collected down to the Gracchan period, the magisterial lists as they had been revised by various hands, and collections of laws and senatorial decrees that had been made for the use of lawyers and law-makers. And some of these skeleton bones of history he took from conscientious annalists like Fabius and Piso, who specialized on such matters because they wrote not for the public but for members of the senate and the ruling nobility. Livy’s purpose seems to have been to write a readable and full history of Rome which would displace the unreliable fictionalized history of Valerius Antias by being equally well written but far more reliable. But if he had insisted upon primary sources only he would not have completed one-tenth of his very extensive task. Given his aim and purpose, his duty was to find and exploit the best published documents and histories for each period, and with very few exceptions this is what he did.