and gives too much reason to the charge of negligence brought against him
by that clever and impudent critic, the Emperor Caligula.

Yet, in spite of all his inaccuracies of detail, and in spite of the
graver defect of insufficient historical perspective, which makes him
colour the whole political development of the Roman state with the ideas
of his own time, the history of Rome as narrated by Livy is essentially
true and vital, because based on a large insight into the permanent
qualities of human nature. The spirit in which he writes history is well
illustrated by the speeches. These, in a way, set the tone of the whole
work. He does not affect in them to reproduce the substance of words
actually spoken, or even to imitate the tone of the time in which the
speech is laid. He uses them as a vivid and dramatic method of portraying
character and motive. The method, in its brilliance and its truth to
permanent facts, is like that of Shakespeare's _Coriolanus_. Such truth,
according to the celebrated aphorism in Aristotle's _Poetics_, is the
truth of poetry rather than of history: and the history of Livy, in this,
as in his opulent and coloured diction, has some affinity to poetry. Yet,
when such insight into motive and such vivid creative imagination are
based on really large knowledge and perfect sincerity, a higher
historical truth may be reached than by the most laborious accumulation
of documents and sifting of evidence.

Livy's humane and romantic temper prevented him from being a political
partisan, even if political partisanship had been consistent with the
view he took of his own art. In common with most educated Romans of his
time, he idealised the earlier Republic, and spoke of his own age as
fatally degenerate. But this is a tendency common to writers of all
periods. He frequently pauses to deplore the loss of the ancient
qualities by which Rome had grown great--simplicity, equity, piety,