In my second illustration, the account of the Scipionic trials, Livy was less successful.[13] His record of the court procedure in the cases in the 38th book is confused in the extreme; but it is doubtful whether the facts were any longer available. No historian was writing at Rome at the time of the impeachments, and even if there had been one he probably would then have omitted mention of them as being outside the true province of political history. Even Polybius, who was devoted to the fame of the great Scipio, did not give any account of the trials, merely referring to them casually when giving a brief character sketch of Scipio. Nor would there have been any records in the archives, since the trials were not completed and the archives kept only the results of completed decisions. Finally, the affair fell at a time when it was not yet generally customary to publish speeches. The two or three that Livy found seemed to be of dubious authenticity and were harangues that gave but few cues to the real facts. In fact no historian wrote up the affair until long afterwards, when partisan legends, some favorable to the Catonian position, and others to the Scipionic view, had obscured all the facts. It seems today that Livy yielded too much to the pro-Scipionic accounts, thereby undervaluing the opposite views, and many attempts have been made to amend him with the aid of an excursus which he inserted—perhaps in a second edition—and with the help of various casual references. In this affair the facts are now beyond reach and probably were so in Livy’s day. Here, then, Livy did not follow hazy sources from choice. There were apparently no accurate records of the affair available. They were all late, and packed with hearsay partisanship.