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ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL.

COPYRIGHT, 1893, BY

CLEMENT L. SMITH AND TRACY PECK.

ALL RIGHTS Reserved.

323.I

331778

The Athenæum Press
GINN AND COMPANY PRO-
PRIETORS BOSTON U.S.A.

PREFACE.

THE Scope and method of this volume of Livy are the same as were set forth in the preface to Books I. and II. The wants of college students have been kept steadily in view, and the chief object of the commentary is to stimulate such students and aid them in forming the habit of reading Latin as Latin, of apprehending thought in its Latin form and sequence, and of entering with intelligent sympathy into the workings of Livy's mind and his conception of his country's history and destiny.

The text is based upon the recension by August Luchs (Berlin, 1888) of the Codex Puteanus and of its best derivatives. This codex was probably written in the sixth century, and is now in the National Library at Paris. Deviations from Luchs are generally in a closer adherence to the manuscript readings. Luchs' treatment of the text is conservative, but at times his changes do not seem necessary. The best manuscripts more or less misrepresent the original author; but the object of criticism should be to ascertain, not what we may think the author ought to have said, but what, in view of his mental peculiarities and of his surroundings, he probably did say.

On the other hand, the editors have reproduced less often than Luchs the vagaries and inconsistencies of the manuscript spellings. As the oldest Latin manuscripts are centuries later than the authors themselves, and have usually been copied and re-copied under oral dictation, they often contain the accumu

lated blunders and whims of many scribes; their spelling cannot, therefore, be very sacred or trustworthy. Our knowledge of Latin orthography is based in part upon manuscripts, but much more and more securely upon the evidence of inscriptions, the statements of the Roman grammarians, and the fact that the ancient orthography was essentially phonetic. A method thus derived is necessarily conventional, and cannot faithfully reproduce the method of any single writer; but it is, for ordinary purposes, the best attainable. Such forms, therefore, as aecum, arena, exaustum, millia, set, though they are in the best manuscripts of Livy and are of value to specialists, have been discarded.

In the preparation of the commentary, beyond the free use of what has become the common property of scholarship, acknowledgment of aid is due to these works: the editions of Weissenborn-Müller (Berlin, 1891), Wölfflin (Leipsic, 1891), Capes (London, 1889), Dowdall (London, 1888), Riemann and Benoist (Paris, 1888); Kühnast's Die Hauptpunkte der Livianischen Syntax (Berlin, 1872), Riemann's Étude sur la langue et la grammaire de Tite Live (Paris, 1885); R. B. Smith's Rome and Carthage (New York, 1886), Dodge's Hannibal (Boston, 1891), Hesselbarth's Untersuchungen zur dritten Dekade des Livius (Halle, 1889); Taine's Essai sur Tite Live (Paris, 1888).

For an account of Livy's life and writings, and an estimate of his strength and weakness as a historian, the reader is referred to the Introduction to Books I. and II.

The abbreviation 'Gr.' in the notes is for Allen & Greenough's Latin Grammar (Boston, 1888).

JULY 12, 1893.

INTRODUCTION.

ROME AND CARTHAGE.

1. The twenty-first and twenty-second books of Livy treat of the events of 219-216 B.C., the opening years of the second part of the great struggle between Rome and Carthage. It was a struggle between the Indo-European and the Semitic races for supremacy on the Mediterranean Sea, and for the two powers engaged was one for existence even. The Phoenicians, the great commercial nation of the East, had extended their mercantile relations throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and, crowded out of Grecian waters by the activity of the Hellenic tribes, had concentrated their influence upon the European and North African coast in the West, long before the Latins had emerged from the condition of a simple agricultural community. But Rome from her peculiarly advantageous position controlled the whole commerce with the interior of Italy. Hence, though perhaps the Romans were not a commercial nation in the same sense as were the Greeks and Phoenicians, sending their own ships and expeditions to every quarter of the world, yet their wealth and power were really founded upon commerce, and their merchants were seen and their trade was established in every part of the West. In the conduct of this commerce they early came in contact with the Carthaginians, who were their most active rivals. Carthage was a Phoenician colony which had been peaceably established in prehistoric times (probably in the ninth century B.C.) on the northernmost point of the coast of Africa, and had gradually extended its

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