on the blindness of men destined to misfortune, or the helplessness of
human wisdom and foresight against destiny. But at the same time he
gravely chronicles miracles and portents, not so much from any belief in
their truth as because they are part of the story. The fact that they had
ceased to be regarded seriously in his own time, and were accordingly in
a great measure ceasing to happen, he laments as one among many
declensions from older and purer fashions.

As a master of style, Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks
the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan
age reached just before it began to fall into decadence. It is no longer
the famous _urbanus sermo_ of the later Republic, the pure and somewhat
austere language of a governing class. The influence of Virgil is already
traceable in Livy, in actual phrases whose use had hitherto been confined
to poetry, and also in a certain warmth of colouring unknown to earlier
prose. To Augustan purists this relaxation of the language seemed
provincial and unworthy of the severe tradition of the best Latin; and it
was this probably, rather than any definite novelties in grammar or
vocabulary, that made Asinius Pollio accuse Livy of "Patavinity." But in
the hands of Livy the new style, by its increased volume and flexibility,
is as admirably suited to a work of great length and scope as the older
had been for the purposes of Caesar or Sallust. It is drawn, so to speak,
with a larger pattern; and the added richness of tone enables him to
advance without flagging through the long and intricate narrative where a
simpler diction must necessarily have grown monotonous, as one more
florid would be cloying. In the earlier books we seem to find the manner
still a little uncertain and tentative, and a little trammelled by the
traditional manner of the older annalists; as he proceeds in his work he
falls into his stride, and advances with a movement as certain as that of
Gibbon, and claimed by Roman critics as comparable in ease and grace to