About the same time, 743 according to Cato, and 745 according to Varro, Livy began to write. That he commenced so late seems authenticated. He was born 693 according to Cato, in the consulship of the great Cæsar, at Patavium, and lived during the reign of Tiberius, until 772 according to Cato (774 according to Varro), A.D. 20. Livy commenced his career as a rhetorician. Of his early life nothing is known. He has written on rhetoric also. There are several grounds for fixing the period in which he began to compose his history at so late a date. His first decade has been called the work of his youth, but the following proofs are against it. Mentioning Numa, he speaks of Augustus as the restorer of all the temples, consequently after 730; moreover he talks of the closing of the temple of Janus, of the building of the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and he names Cæsar Augustus in relating the war of Cossus. Dodwell very seldom hits upon the right conclusion, but in this point we must agree with him. In his _Annales Velleiani_ he remarks, that from the manner in which Livy wrote about Spain, it is evident that that country had already then been conquered by Augustus. The ninth book is of later date than the campaign of Drusus; for he says in it concerning the _Silva Ciminia_, that it had been just as impassable _quam nuper fuere Germanici saltus_, and the latter were first entered by Domitius Ahenobarbus and Drusus after 740 only. It might be attempted to make this out to be a later revision; but it is easy to tell what books are written in one flow of the pen, and which are revised, and those of Livy undoubtedly belong to the former sort.--It is in accordance with our supposition, that Dionysius did not know him; for if a book written in such a masterly style as that of Livy had existed, Dionysius could not have been ignorant of it; and it would then have been impossible also for him to complain of the utter want of any thing like the working out of the materials of Roman history. In the last books of the first decade, on the other hand, we find several traces that Livy had known Dionysius. From the _Excerpta de Legationibus_ we learn, in what manner Dionysius treated the second Samnite war; the relation of it by Livy cannot possibly have been taken from Roman Annals, but from Greek sources, especially the account how Naples fell into the power of the Romans, which Dionysius seems to have got from a Neapolitan Chronicle. Livy could not know the latter himself, and yet he gives a circumstantial description of the event. He must therefore have had a Greek source, and this is certainly no other than Dionysius. The comparison also of the might of Alexander with that of Rome leads to the same conclusion. And certainly the histories of Pyrrhus king of Epirus, and of the plundering expedition of Cleonymus, are likewise from the Greek; so much the rather, as Livy here calls the Sallentines Messapians,[23] probably because he did not know that