After Dio, nothing original was any more written by Greeks on Roman history. In the middle ages, works were lost. Of Livy, the first and third decades were read in the schools for the _provectiores_, and for history men contented themselves with Florus, Eutropius, Rufus, Victor, and Orosius. Eutropius was read also, but spuriated, in a continuation of Paul Warnefrid and Sagax; besides which, as a chrestomathy of fine actions, Valerius Maximus, one of the most wretched of writers, was very much in vogue. People in those days generally cared only for what was ready at hand, and that they diligently worked at; but about any thing that was unknown they did not at all trouble themselves. If the glossators had not been tainted with the defects of their age, they might have got access to quite different sources, from which the law books were to be explained. Some men in the middle ages read indeed and collected manuscripts; but they had no comprehensive views--no sort of symmetry--no striving after any thing that was not at once within reach. Since Priscian, there is no direct quotation from Livy, except in Johannes Saresberiensis; and in him moreover, only from the books now extant. When in the fourteenth century the light was dawning, people began again to read Livy; as we see from a strange novel of Francesco Sacchetti, in which he speaks of a Florentine who was so absorbed in the study of Livy, that, when one Saturday, the workmen came to him for their wages, he spoke to them as though they were living in the time of Cato. Petrarch read the war of Hannibal in Livy, and also Cæsar’s Commentaries, with an ardour and a passionate fondness, with which they certainly had not been read since the times of the great Boëthius,--consequently for eight centuries. He in vain wished to have more of Livy; he had as yet only the epitome, of which, perhaps, he was the discoverer. Now awoke in the hearts of the Italians the desire of considering themselves as the successors and heirs of the ancient Romans, and they began to collect books wherever they found them. The letters of congratulation which were written by Leonardus Aretinus, Bartholomæus, and others, to Poggius, when he had discovered new books, are most affecting. The Roman history was read with an interest which beggars belief; and yet they kept to the works which they already had. But now they began to convince themselves that with the means which they had hitherto possessed, they were not capable of understanding the Roman history: and thus the study of Archæology grew up, to which Pomponius Lætus in particular gave an impulse; who, however, did much mischief by the negligent way in which he set about it. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the study of Roman antiquities made rapid progress; and collections of inscriptions and of antiquities were now first made in Italy and France by Mazocchi and others, who lived at that period. In Italy an