educated society woman in Sallust's Catiline. However, the analysis of the causes of decadence is comparatively superficial. Roman
political organization and the Roman economy are but briefly mentioned. For Sallust the fundamental causes were prosperity and the
lack of foreign enemies: these gave rein to a sort of original sin, which only the hardships of foreign wars could hold in check. This
notion was not discovered by Sallust: it goes back to the politics and historiography of the second century B.C. But Sallust
transmitted it in a most memorable form.
Livy
T. Livius is the first annalistic writer whose work survives in any quantity, and it is through him and the elements of earlier writings
discernible in his history that we are able to form judgements on the annals of the Republic. Moreover, his history was the last great
annalistic history of the Republic written in Latin. Livy was born at Patavium (Padua) in 59 B.C. and wrote from about the age of
thirty onwards after twenty years of civil war and the conversion of the Republic into a form of monarchy. A man of industry and
learning rather than political or intellectual distinction, he came nearest to fulfilling the expectation which Cicero's friends had of
Cicero-the production of a readable history of Rome. His resources in language and deployment of his material were everything that
Cicero himself could have wished. Avoiding Sallustian abruptness, he yet contrived a swift and varied narrative built from a rich
vocabulary and an immense flexibility of construction. His approach to his subject was conservative, as had probably been
traditional among annalists: in wars he was patriotic, in politics he supported senatorial authority against the demagoguery of
tribunes. Although he shows some sympathy with the plebs in his account of their struggle with the patricians, he shows an immense
fascination with aristocratic hardliners who resisted inflexibly any concession to the plebs or deviation from tradition. It is likely that
he retained this attitude in his lost books on the fall of the Republic and saw a reason for that fall in the failure of such men. One
supreme example would have been Cato Uticensis, who opposed Caesar and had already been highlighted for selfless devotion to
the Republic in Sallust's Catiline. Although Livy wrote in the aftermath of political failure and civil conflict, it was also a period
when Roman imperial power was at its height. Faced by this discrepancy and by the coincidence of prosperity with the moral
turpitude exemplified by the shedding of Roman blood, Livy, like Sallust, argued that Rome had succumbed to the weight of her
own success.
The Battle Of Pydna: detail of the sculptured frieze on the monument set up by Aemilius Paullus at Delphi in honour of his victory in
167 B.C. (above, p. 418). Besides accurately reproducing the army of the combatants (note the characteristic Macedonian round
shield with embossed ornament) the artist corroborates Livy's account of the part played by a runaway pack horse in precipitating
an engagement.