The War with Hannibal

"Yes, but very sadly…I did a book called The Bookseller of Florence , which was about ancient manuscripts and the attempts to recover them. People often ask me, ‘What books do I wish that we had that have been lost?’ Probably in my top three, if not my top one or two, would be Livy’s history of Rome. 35 books of it have survived, but there were 142 or so, so we’ve only got about a quarter. So he was going back to the origins of ancient Rome and coming forward to his own time, which was the age of Augustus . It was meant to be comprehensive, but we’ve lost most of it, which is really tragic. Of the books that are lost, I suppose what I would want to read most of all is what he says about the Social War (91-87 BCE) and the last decades and extinction of the Republic. We don’t have those, and it would be great to get them. It would just fill the knowledge gaps that we have of what was happening in the first half of the 1st century BCE, just before Julius Caesar and Augustus. But we’ve lost all that. Livy is probably an easier or more entertaining read than Polybius. Livy’s whole thing is storytelling. He’d be a good BBC historian, popping up and doing documentaries, tramping around fields to tell us where things happened, and then stopping the camera and giving us a mini lecture or dramatically acting out what was said at a particular moment. He’s very rhetorical and into the narrative. He tells us some of the same stories that Polybius does—he gives us Hannibal crossing the Alps, for example. But Livy makes it much more dramatic. He is just a better writer. One of my favorite passages in historical writing is Livy’s account of Hannibal crossing the Alps. It’s absolutely classic. And I guess the knock against him—as opposed to Polybius or Tacitus, who’s coming up—is that maybe he’s not always 100% reliable. It goes back to how much is myth and how much is factual. Traditionally, people have looked at Livy and said that he’s not reliable because he doesn’t match other sources. And the other sources and records must be right because they don’t match Livy and Livy is unreliable. There is a bit of circular thinking. So there is some dispute about how accurate Livy is, because he does not let the truth get in the way of a good story. I think some of his stories might be entirely invented. Because it’s one thing to do what I do, which is to tell a story that someone else has made up and repeat it, but also say, ‘This is almost certainly made up.’ It’s another thing to do what Livy does (and someone else on the list also does), which is to make something up and pass it off as the truth. So some of the stories that Livy tells are not reflected in other sources. We don’t have access to all the sources he had, and so it’s difficult to judge the truth of them. In 27 CE, Octavian was declared Augustus. Livy comes right up to his own day, but we’ve lost most of that. What we’ve got is the earlier stuff. It’s fairly comprehensive up to after Hannibal. Then it becomes very patchy, and massive amounts are lost. It’d be wonderful to have Livy’s reflections on his own time, but alas we don’t."