Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A History of Latin, Vol. 1 of 2: Literature From Ennius to Boethius
There are other difficulties less directly due to our ignorance. How shall we separate what belongs to biography, what belongs to philosophy, what belongs to history in the narrower sense from what belongs to literature? The history of the talent of Tacitus is complete without the history of his career, even if we guess that his enforced compliances under Domitian imbittered him. Can we say the same of the talent of Horace? Can one judge fairly of the intention, the good faith, the effectiveness of speeches like Cicero's and apologetical memoirs like Caesar's without some appreciation of the political situation? If political his torians have done something less than justice to Cicero, something else than justice to Casar, can one take the political history for granted? Can one even take for granted the convenient classification of orators as adher ents of assumed aristocratical and democratical parties? Can one discuss the method of Lucretius's philosophi cal poem, or even Cicero's philosophical tracts, without trenching a little upon their matter? We need a fur ther knowledge of early Roman history to form an adequate opinion of the unconscious hypocrisy of Livy, who neglects, to an extent we do not know, the real springs of affairs - of which we generally know just as much as he allows us to guess - ih favor of all sorts of imaginary motives, coined sometimes in the interests of edification, sometimes in the interests of family or national vainglory.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
