In the field of history, Latin literature presents us with various attitudes and styles. Historical writing in general may be of at least three salient kinds. The first kind is imaginative, credulous, careless of accuracy so long as the story is attractive, the narrative being, as Quintilian would have it, “akin to poetry.” In the second kind, sheer imagination may play no pronounced part, but there may be a rhetorical tendency to embellish and expand, and to exaggerate the lights and shades. The third kind is direct, simple, impartial, shrewdly critical. In classical Roman history we have (besides the “Lives” of Nepos), the works of Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. We cannot take all these together and refer them to any one of the above-named descriptions. So far as there is a characteristic common to any group of them it is to be found in the fact that Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus all show in various ways the customary Roman taste for rhetorical effect. To this extent they are not greater sinners than Macaulay or Carlyle, who, like them, fall into the second of the divisions described. Meanwhile the _Commentaries_ (or “Notebooks”) of Caesar offer the best example that Latin can supply of the third style. His plain narrative in straightforward Latin is easily distinguished from the rich and picturesque eloquence of Livy, the conscious stylism and laboured point of Sallust, and the epigrammatic brilliance of Tacitus. Once more Suetonius, a naturally inferior writer in a decadent age, is the precursor, in his _Lives of the Twelve Caesars_, of that less ambitious history which gossips and “deals in _ana_” concerning great personages and their surroundings. Among all the Roman writers it is in vain that we seek the historian who will, like Thucydides, describe the facts with a lucid and serene impartiality, while clothing them with that style of supreme art which makes them live before the reader.