Table Of ContentA COMMENTARY ON
LIVY
BOOKS VI-X
A COMMENTARY ON
LIV Y
BOOKS VI-X
S. P. Oakley
Volume I
Introduction and Book VI
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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ISBN .978-0-19-815277-4
For James Diggle
Preface
Tus book is the first instalment of a commentary on books vi-x
of Livy; it contains an introduction to all five books and the
commentary on book vi. The second volume, which is already in
the press, will contain the commentary on books vii and viii. The
third, which I hope to finish within two years, will contain the
commentary on books ix and x. After completing the commentary I
intend to produce a new text of these books.
The project owes its origin to the late Professor R. M. Ogilvie.
Early in 1980, when I was in my final year as an undergraduate, |
wrote to him seeking advice about research on Livy, who had long
been my favourite author. He replied that book ix ‘cries out for a
proper commentary’; and later in that year an afternoon’s conver-
sation with him convinced me that book ix was indeed the book
on which to work. I have never regretted this advice: my Ph.D.
thesis, on book ix chapters 1-28, was finished in 1984, and for over
a decade further research on books vi-x has brought the greatest
pleasure.
Ogilvie's own famous commentary on books i-v of Livy was the
first work of classical scholarship that I purchased and has long pro-
vided an inspiration. In it he combined—perhaps for the first time
in a commentary on a classical author— historical, archaeological,
topographical, literary, linguistic and textual comment; and he
wrote stylishly and elegantly, being unfailingly lucid in synthesis
and economical in his use of space. Ín trying to produce a commen-
tary which gives equal attention to both historical and literary
matters I have been ever conscious of his example; and if my own
commentary is rather longer and more detailed than his, that 1s
because it became apparent that more space was needed to develop
the approach which he had so successfully pioneered.
The format of a commentary, while it is ideal for the study of
detailed problems posed by a text, may be thought less effective for
the wider exploration of general issues, and it may encourage an
antiquarian rather than a truly historical or literary approach. Yet
the antiquarian detail which a commentator is forced to handle will
Preface
often turn out to provide an essential evidential basis for discussion
of more interesting concerns; and of these our text provides no
shortage—the transmission of Latin texts from Antiquity to the
Renaissance; the application of stemmata in the editing of classical
texts; the vocabulary appropriate for Latin historical writing; the
structuring of Livy’s own history; the nature of his literary artistry;
the character and reliability of the Roman annalistic tradition which
lies behind his work; and the processes by which in little more
than a century Rome conquered the whole of peninsular Italy. Evi-
dence relating to all these important themes may be found in the
detailed notes in the commentary; and the long introduction has
been written so as to provide an overview of them, and to compen-
sate for the inevitably fragmented nature of individual notes.
'The reliability of the evidence which Livy presents for early
Roman history has long been disputed. I am amongst those who
believe that a ‘hard core’ of reliable material lies behind the dis-
tortions and literary elaborations which Livy and his annalistic pre-
decessors have superimposed on their material. To some this may
seem unduly credulous, but it will become apparent that for many
problems extreme scepticism is far from inevitable. On the other
hand, much detail in Livy's accounts of battles and political dis-
putes is likely to have been invented, and regularly cited in the
commentary are parallels which show that many of these details are
stock motifs of the annalistic tradition.
Often I have written more than is strictly necessary for the bare
elucidation of Livy's meaning and have sought to provide a full dis-
cussion of the phenomenon under consideration, whether it be an
aspect of Latin style, or a literary device, or an ancient military or
political practice. Not all will approve of this, but scholars tend to
use commentaries as works of reference, and Í have always found
most useful those which contain short essays of this kind. When
a particular phenomenon recurs more than once in books vi-x it is
generally discussed at the earliest opportunity: this explains why the
commentary on book vi, and especially on its earlier chapters, is
often longer than that for later books, and why the commentary on
book x has a higher proportion of cross-references. Occasionally it
seemed better to tie discussion of a phenomenon to one of the later
passages in which it occurs: this means that in the first two volumes
there are some cross-references to notes which have not yet been
published; but I hope that long-term consistency will compensate
for short-term inconvenience.
It is assumed that users of the commentary will have access to
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Preface
the Oxford Latin Dictionary; and if consultation of that work reveals
that there is nothing unusual about an expression, then often
nothing has been said about it, even when earlier commentators
provided some annotation; but I have followed no hard and fast
rule, and sometimes discuss quite common expressions simply
because they interest me.
From bare references in an apparatus criticus it can be extremely
difficult to discover the date and place of publication of a conjecture,
and thus for conjectures published after Drakenborch’s edition I
have taken some pains to establish these facts. In doing so I have
unearthed many conjectures which have long been ignored. Some
of these are meritorious, and their merits are given full discussion.
Others bring less credit to their proposers, and there is a case for
leaving them in oblivion; but since there is no repertorium of
conjectures on Livy, it seemed useful briefly to note them, either in
lists of conjectures for loci desperati, in foot-notes, or in the first
appendix to each volume. As there is no satisfactory text of these
books of Livy, my lemmata correspond to what I currently intend
to print in my projected text; again, the short-term inconvenience of
this procedure should be outweighed by long-term consistency.
Writing this commentary on Livy has taken far longer, and has
proved far more exacting, than I had once imagined that it would.
As each year passes, I have become increasingly conscious of how
much more than I can master the ideal commentator on Livy should
aspire to know; and when reading the successfully completed books
of others, the words of Aeneas have often sprung to mind:
uiuite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta
iam sua: nos alia ex aliis in fata uocamur.
uobis parta quies: nullum maris aequor arandum,
arua neque Ausoniae semper cedentia retro
quaerenda.
But this makes acknowledging what I owe to others, and what I
have learnt from them, all the more pleasurable. It will at once be
apparent that this commentary is greatly indebted to existing
publications. In particular, I have exploited fully the standard
works of reference, amongst which I must make special mention of
H. 1. Müller's revision of Weissenborn's commentary on Livy, the
commentaries on Livy of Briscoe and Ogilvie, Packard's Con-
cordance to Livy, the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, the Latin grammars
of Kühner-Stegmann and Hofmann-Szantyr, Mommsen’s Staats-
ix
Preface
recht, and Miinzer’s prosopographical articles in RE. So familiar
have Livian and other scholars become with these aids that there is
the temptation to forget how hard it would be to do without them.
In the preface to her excellent commentary on book vi Dr C. 5.
Kraus has already noted that we did not exchange drafts of our
work; but I have none the less enjoyed two advantages over her:
I have had access to her 1988 doctoral thesis, which contains a
commentary on the first twenty chapters of book vi; and, after its
publication late in 1994, I was able to make some use of her finished
commentary. By then I had already completed my final checking of
references, but as I found in it much that was new to me, it seemed
sensible to incorporate references to it (usually with a 'K.' after a
parallel to make clear my debt). Two scholars working on the same
material over a number of years are almost certain to share many
similar findings; in such places I have not altered my commentary,
but I gladly acknowledge that Dr Kraus has priority in claiming
credit for any new ideas or material which we both adduce. The
frequency of my disagreements with K. J. Beloch's Rómische
Geschichte may suggest that I have a low regard for the scholarship
contained in it. On the contrary: no one has written a more elegant
and incisive history of early Rome; and it is Beloch's very acumen
which makes it worthwhile to argue against some of his assumptions
and conclusions. Likewise, the frequent disagreement with the
views of E. 'T. Salmon expressed in the commentary on books vii-x
must not obscure the fact that I owe to his Samnium and the
Samnites much of my interest in the Samnites.
Amongst institutions I thank the Clarendon Press for being
willing to publish the kind of commentary that I wished to write,
and for the helpfulness of its officials in seeing it through the press;
the British School at Rome for grants towards topographical
research in 1981 and 1986; Queens’ College, Cambridge for the
award of a Munro studentship in the academical year 1983/4; the
British Academy for a grant towards the purchasing of microfilms in
1994; and the Finance Committee of the Faculty Board of Classics
in the University of Cambridge for several grants towards the cost
of travel in Italy, and for a particularly generous grant towards the
purchase of microfilms in 1994. The libraries whose manuscripts I
have inspected in person or on microfilm are too numerous to name.
From the staff of almost all I have met with co-operation and
efficiency, but future researchers may be interested to learn of the
extraordinary dispatch in the supplying of microfilms exhibited by
the officials of the Herzog-August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), the
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