the time more important than prose, and one result was that prose became
infected with certain qualities of poetical style. The reign of Augustus
includes only one prose writer of the first rank, the historian Titus
Livius.

Though not living like Virgil or Horace in the immediate circle of
Augustus and under direct court patronage, Livy was in friendly relations
with the Emperor and his family, and accepted the new rule with
cordiality, if without much enthusiasm. Of his life, which seems to have
been wholly spent in literary pursuits, little is known. He was born at
Padua in the year of Julius Caesar's first consulship, and had survived
Augustus by three years when he died at the age of seventy-five. In
earlier life he wrote some philosophical dialogues and treatises on
rhetoric which have not been preserved. An allusion in the first book of
his history shows that it was written, or at all events published, after
the first and before the second closing of the temple of Janus by
Augustus, in the years 29 and 25 B.C. For forty years thereafter he
continued this colossal task, which, like the _Decline and Fall_, was
published in parts from time to time. He lived to bring it down as far as
the death of Drusus, the younger son of the Empress Livia, in the year 9
B.C. The division into books, of which there were one hundred and forty-
two in the whole work, is his own; these again were arranged in
_volumina_, or sections issued as separate volumes, and containing a
varying number of books. The division of the work into decads was made by
copyists at a much later period, and was no part of the author's own
plan. Only one-fourth of the whole history has survived the Middle Ages.
This consists of the first, the third, the fourth, and half of the fifth
decad, or books i.-x. and xxi.-xlv. of the work; of the rest we only
possess brief tables of contents, drawn up in the fourth century, not
from the original work but from an abridgment, itself now lost, which was