Search -
The Historians' History of the World: Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia
The Historians' History of the World Prolegomena Egypt Mesopotamia Author:Henry Smith Williams Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: opment; but the parts of it that treated of later Roman history, concerning which the author could have spoken, and probably did speak, with first-hand knowledge... more », are almost entirely lost. In other words, the copyists of the middle ages preserved the least valuable portion of Livy, doubtless because they found the hero tales of mythical Rome more interesting than the matter- of-fact recitals of the events of the later republic and the early empire. We can hardly suppose that Livy detailed the events of the later period with less art than characterised his earlier work, but different conditions were imposed upon him. He had now to deal with much fuller records than hitherto, and no doubt he treated many subjects that seemed important to him, simply because they were near at hand, but which another generation found tiresome and not worth the trouble of copying. Thus we see emphasised again the salient point that the interesting story rather than the important historical narrative proved itself most fit for preservation in the estimate of Of the other great historians of Rome, Tacitus, Dionysius, Dion Cassius, Polybius, have all fared rather worse than Livy, although a few briefer masterpieces, like the two histories of Sallust and the Gallic Wars of Caesar, and such biographies as the " Lives " of Suetonius and Cornelius Nepos, were able to fight their way through the middle ages and gain the safe shelter of the printing-press without material loss. But perhaps the most suggestive example of all is furnished by the brief world history of Justin, which, if not quite entire, has been preserved as to its main structure in various manuscripts. Tliis work is an artistic epitome of a large, and in its day authoritative, history of the world, written by Trogus Pompeius. Justin, when ...« less