# Livy 1.34-35

Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Livy, Lines 1.34-1.35. Latin.

Canonical: https://interlinea.aeterna-institute.org/library/latin/livy-s-ab-urbe-condita/livy/1.34

It would be misplaced criticism to draw attention to his technical shortcomings, his credulity, or his lack of antiquarian curiosity. He reshaped history for his generation so that it was alive and meaningful. It is recorded that the audiences who went to his recitations were impressed by his nobility of character and his eloquence. It is this eloquence that is Livy's second claim to distinction.
Together with Cicero and Tacitus, Livy set new standards of literary style. The earliest Roman historians had written in Greek, the language of culture. Their successors had felt that their own history should be written in Latin, but Latin possessed no ready-made style that could be used for the purpose: for Latin prose had to develop artificial styles to suit the different genres. Sallust had attempted to reproduce the Greek style of Thucydides in Latin by a tortured use of syntax and a vocabulary incorporating a number of archaic and unusual words, but the result, although effective, was harsh and unsuitable for a work of any size. Livy evolved a varied and flexible style that the ancient critic Quintilian characterized as a "milky richness." At one moment he will set the scene in long, periodic clauses; at another a few terse, abrupt sentences will mirror the rapidity of the action. Bare notices of archival fact will be reported in correspondingly dry and formal language, whereas a battle will evoke poetical and dramatic vocabulary, and a speech will be constructed either in the spirit of a contemporary orator such as Cicero or in dramatically realistic tones, designed to recapture the atmosphere of antiquity. "When I write of ancient deeds my mind somehow becomes antique," he wrote.

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Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Livy. Text: The Latin Library (thelatinlibrary.com), used with permission. Changes: HTML markup removed and the text divided into reading sections by Interlinea.
License: Used with permission (https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/about.html). Source: https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/livius/livybio.html.