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LIVY
of Abydus is told in terms of madness {rabies, a word which occurs three times
in Livy's account and for which there is no prompting in his source, Polybius).
History was, for Livy, a psychological record.
One extended example will illustrate the technique. Livy 3.1—8 deals with
a series of minor wars against the Aequi and Volsci, spread over five years. In
themselves they are of no great significance. They are typical of the aimless
happenings (y£v6uevcc) which Aristotle scorned as the raw material of history:
they do not comprise an action, they are not a plot, they have no coherence,
no end. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (9.58—71) relates the same facts from the
same, or very similar, sources and a comparison between the two authors
shows how Livy has handled the problem. In the first place he has concentrated
on two basic themes — Rome's external relations both with the Aequi and
Volsci and with her allies, and Rome's internal difficulties (e.g. plague, unrest)
which affect those relations. As a result he omits a number of irrelevant details
to be found in Dionysius: Aemilius' abortive invasion of Sabine land, Servilius'
activities in 466 B.C., the dedication of the temple of Semo Sancus Dius Fidius,
the fighting on the ramparts, the description of the walls of Rome, the abortive
proposals of Sex. Titius. Secondly he tries to secure a natural and logical flow
in the narrative so that each event seems to be motivated by its predecessor.
One way of achieving this was to make one individual, Q. Fabius, responsible
for much of the initiative. In Dionysius it is the Senate, in Livy Fabius who
proposes the colony at Antium: in Dionysius it is the Senate, in Livy Fabius
who offers peace-negotiations to the Aequi. In Dionysius the unrest at Antium
in 464 B.C. is quite unmotivated: Livy attributes it to the Aequi and Volsci
stirring up feeling among the former inhabitants who have been dispossessed
by the colony. Unlike Dionysius, Livy makes the plague the direct cause of the
Roman inability to help their allies, and transfers the account of the combined
attack by Aequi and Volsci on Tusculum from 462 to 463 B.C. in order to
simplify and smooth the chain of events in 462 B.C. These are all small points:
collectively they bring order out of chaos. But even in the details Livy is at
pains to make the narrative coherent. Dionysius made the Romans retreat in
465 B.C. because their swords were blunt - a charming detail, but improbable,
and omitted by Livy. Dionysius asserts that in 463 B.C., when the plague was
at its height, the allies arrived to ask for help from the Senate on the very day
that the consul died and the senators were carried into the senate-house on
stretchers. That is too melodramatic for Livy's purpose. Finally Livy unites
all the events of these five years by a common thread — the clemency {dementia)
and good faith {fides) of the Romans (3.2.5, 6.5, 7.4, 7.5) against the treachery
(perfidia) and vindictiveness {odium) of the Aequi and Volsci (3.2.4, 2.6, 2.12,
7.1). These moral overtones are not in Dionysius and they serve to give the
whole section unity and significance. Livy pays the highest attention to the
463
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