Every Roman historian had great difficulties to encounter with regard to the period of antiquity, and this extended more or less to the time of Sulla. Down to a certain period, patriotism required adherence to a traditional form which could not stand investigation; for other epochs the Greeks, especially Polybius, had formed a conception which had acquired a canonical value. Only critical judgment and a general scheme of treatment on a grand scale could have been effective; but Livy was not the man for this. To him history was another name for the arranging of annalistic reports which he put together; the most obvious contradictions were rejected, and a certain system introduced into the chronology and adhered to as far as might be without too great scrupulousness; where he had older authors of merit, such as Polybius, to draw upon, his work was benefited; where this was not the case, he did not scruple to combine accounts essentially contradictory. He considered his principal office to be delineation, not arrangement, investigation, and criticism, and the rhetorical elaboration made up, in the eyes of the reader, for the want of exactness and a definite conception.[f] MERIVALE’S ESTIMATE OF LIVY It was in the schools of rhetoric, we may believe, that Livy learned that indifference to historical accuracy, that sacrifice of the substance to the form of truth, which has cast so fatal a shade over the lustre of his immortal work. As a friend of the ancient oligarchy, and an aristocrat in prejudices and temper, it seems improbable that he would have carried his Roman history down to his own times, had he not submitted to throw a veil over his sentiments, and made his book such as Augustus himself might sanction for the perusal of his subjects. The emperor, indeed, is said to have called him a Pompeian, and to have complained of the colours in which he portrayed the men of the opposite side; but this could only have been in jest; the favour in which he was held by the courtiers of the empire, and his being suffered to assist the studies of the young prince, Claudius Germanicus, show that he was not seriously regarded as a disaffected politician. The scorn which Livy heaps on the tribunes and demagogues, and his ignorant contempt for the plebs, evince the leaning of his mind to the side of the nobility. But these are obviously the views of the rhetorician rather than of the historian; and Augustus, tribune and demagogue as he was, could distinguish between the hollow commonplaces of a perverted education and the stern judgment of a genuine conviction. The loss of all the latter portions of this extensive work must be deplored for the number of facts it has swept into oblivion; but the facts would have been valuable rather from the inferences which modern science might deduce from them, than from the light in which the author would himself have placed them. Livy, taking the pen in