Style
Livy wrote in a mixture of annual chronology and narrative—often having to interrupt a story to announce the elections of new consuls. Collins defines the "annalistic method" as "naming the public officers and recording the events of each succeeding year." It is an expansion of the fasti, the official public chronicle kept by the magistrates, which was a primary source for Roman historians. Those who seem to have been more influenced by the method have been termed annalists.
The first and third decades of Livy's work are written so well that Livy has become a sine qua non of curricula in Golden Age Latin. Subsequently the quality of his writing began to decline. He contradicts himself and becomes repetitious and wordy. Of the 91st book Niebuhr says "repetitions are here so frequent in the small compass of four pages and the prolixity so great, that we should hardly believe it to belong to Livy...." Niebuhr accounts for the decline by supposing "the writer has grown old and become loquacious...," going so far as to conjecture that the later books were lost because copyists refused to copy such low-quality work.
A digression in Book 9, Sections 17–19, suggests that the Romans would have beaten Alexander the Great if he had lived longer and had turned west to attack the Romans, making this digression the oldest known alternate history.
Read more about this topic: Ab Urbe Condita (book)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“New is a word for fools in towns who think
Style upon style in dress and thought at last
Must get somewhere.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)