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antiquity. We disbelieve a great part of the narrative of Livy 
for the following reasons. We know that he could have had no 
trustworthy authority for many of his statements respecting the 
early history of Home : some of those statements are intrinsi- 
cally improbable, if not incredible : he lived centuries later 
than many of the events which he records, and he had not the 
critical faculty which enables an historian of the past, by a kind 
of instinct, to separate the true from the false. To this I must 
add the essentially Roman prejudice in favour of everything 
that would tell in favour of the greatness and glory of Rome. 
Hence his unfair account of the early wars of the Republic, 
and the injustice with which he has treated Hannibal. 
We believe the story of the Anabasis and Retreat of the 
Ten Thousand, because the historian was the general who com- 
manded the Greeks in that famous expedition ; but we reject 
his fables about dreams, omens, and prophecies, because we 
know that he was credulous about such things, and they were 
not matters which came within the scope of his own personal 
observation. 
Our own early historians were as careless as their readers 
were credulous. King Lear, the son of Bladud, was accepted 
as an historical personage; and even Milton, iu his History of 
England, admits the fable “ of Brutus and his line with the 
whole progeny of kings to Julius Caesar,” although it is impos- 
sible not to see that he has little faith in it. But he says, 
“ certain or uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom 
I must follow ; so far as keeps aloof from impossible and absurd, 
attested by ancient writers from books more ancient, I refuse 
not as the due and proper subject of story.” Now, why do we 
refuse to believe the narrative ? Simply because, although it 
may contain nothing “ impossible or absurd,” which is Milton's 
sole rule of exception, we know that the authors could not 
possibly have had any authentic information about the facts 
which they record. A child is as competent to write history as 
a grown-up man, if the statements of preceding authors are 
merely servilely copied, and no critical examination is made 
of the sources of their authority and the means they had of 
ascertaining the truth. 
Dates are often of the utmost importance in verifying 
historical facts, but the dates themselves are sometimes uncer- 
tain. In Grecian history the general custom was to reckon by 
the year of the Olympiad, and therefore it is essential to know 
the date of the first year of the first Olympiad. Now, how do 
we ascertain this ? If you will look into Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, 
p. 150, you will see that it is taken to correspond with 776 b.c., 
and this is proved by a curious consensus of authorities. The 
