Excerpt from Livy

Its patriotic feeling - Livy writes however as a patriot, not with dispassionate interest in human nature, for he was a Roman citizen in early years, when his birthplace was included in the civic tribes. It was no quiet country town, like Plutarch's Chaeroneia, remote from the stir Of busy life, where the student must learn chie¿y from his books. Patavium was a great commercial centre, and ranked among the first cities Of the Empire. It had been true to Rome in the great crisis Of the Punic struggle, and must have suffered in the long' agony Of the Civil Wars, in the first stage of which it took the Senate's side, and so perhaps decided the so-called Pompeian sympathies of Livy. Like the capital, it also had its foundation legends, and traced its origin to a wanderer from Troy, Antenor, driven like Eneas to find a home in the far West. Both therefore Of these mythic ancestors appear together in the Opening pages among those creatures Of the fancy which the historian had no wish either to maintain or to disprove.'

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