imperfect grasp of military science, are admirable as works of art. Among
others may be specially instanced, as masterpieces of execution, the
account of the victory over Antiochus at Magnesia in the thirty-seventh
book, and, still more, that in the forty-fourth of the fiercely contested
battle of Pydna, the desperate heroism of the Pelignian cohort, and the
final and terrible destruction of the Macedonian phalanx.

Yet, with all his admiration for great men and deeds, what most of all
kindles Livy's imagination and sustains his enthusiasm is a subject
larger, and to him hardly more abstract, the Roman Commonwealth itself,
almost personified as a continuous living force. This is almost the only
matter in which patriotism leads him to marked partiality. The epithet
"Roman" signifies to him all that is high and noble. That Rome can do no
wrong is a sort of article of faith with him, and he has always a
tendency to do less than justice to her enemies. The two qualities of
eloquence and candour are justly ascribed to him by Tacitus, but from the
latter some deduction must be made when he is dealing with foreign
relations and external diplomacy. Without any intention to falsify
history, he is sometimes completely carried away by his romantic
enthusiasm for Roman statesmanship.

This canonisation of Rome is Livy's largest and most abiding achievement.
The elder Seneca, one of his ablest literary contemporaries, observes, in
a fine passage, that when historians reach in their narrative the death
of some great man, they give a summing-up of his whole life as though it
were an eulogy pronounced over his grave. Livy, he adds, the most candid
of all historians in his appreciation of genius, does this with unusual
grace and sympathy. The remark may bear a wider scope; for the whole of
his work is animated by a similar spirit towards the idealised
Commonwealth, to the story of whose life he devoted his splendid literary