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Livy and Polybius

Trankle's review of McDonald's text of books 31—5 (Gnomon 1967), his article on the development of Livy's style {Wiener Studien, 1968) and his monograph on Livy's use of the elder Cato (Abhandlungen of the Mainz Academy, 1971), were themselves major contributions to Livian scholarship. The present book, a penetrating and detailed study of the way Livy uses Polybius in the fourth and fifth decades, and an application of the results of this study to the problem of the extent of Livy's direct dependence on Polybius in the third decade, constitutes the most important work on Livy to have appeared for many years. Transcending the traditional division between historians who, following Nissen, had been exclusively concerned with the factual discrepancies between Polybius and Livy, and the philologists — in the German sense of Philologen — like Witte and Burck — who were interested only in Livy's Kunst, Trankle analyses the divergences between the two historians in relation both to matters of fact and to changes made by Livy for literary reasons. The general theme apart, there is a multitude of perceptive comments on individual passages including at least nine new textual emendations. It is impossible to do full justice to the wealth of material in a brief review and I must restrict myself to a few main points. * Trankle identifies three different ways in which Livy adapts Polybian material — abbreviation, expansion (including the achievement of greater clarity by pinpointing essentials, the rearrangement of material to make it more intelligible, and the elaboration of speeches), and deliberate factual alterations. Under this last heading, he collects together the changes which have often been regarded as having been made for 'patriotic reasons' — particularly the removal of most of Polybius' imputations against Flamininus and the toning down of Acilius Glabrio's brusque attitude to the Aetolians inl91. Rather than seeing these simply as deliberate alterations by Livy, Trankle argues that Livy found a different version in his annalistic predecessors and reconciled the two by leaving out what was in one and not the other. Trankle labels this a 'procedure of subtraction' and holds that it was Livy's standard practice in the case of a conflict between his authorities (e.g. he omits Polybius' mention of the renewal of Flamininus' command at 18. 11. 1 because he had already described it, from an annalistic source, at 32. 28. 9). Now earlier in the book Trankle has a section on 'annalistic insertions' into Polybian material and argues that these are