Quote:I likely will never fully believe history.
Nor should you. Livy was, first and foremost, a moralist. He lived in what he considered a time of gross immorality where the old virtues of the Roman Republic ( mythology dies hard ) had been junked.
If you read Livy at any length you begin to see certain patterns; such as, whenever the Romans win a battle he usually notes that the commander maintained good order among his army and avoided rash decisions. Whenever the Romans lost a battle it was because the commander failed to restrain his men and they scattered in search of plunder or were lured into a trap. Sometimes, defeat would be avoided when another commander arrived who had kept his men in proper control and so rescued the miscreants from their indiscipline!
Read enough of it and you'll see what I mean.
Livy also has no sense of scale. Particularly early on he describes as "wars" what must have been little more than rock and stick swinging riots between miserable mud-hut villages. There is a lot of horseshit in Livy.
