247 
Until a comparatively recent period the history of Rome, 
as told by Livy, was implicitly believed j and as much credit 
was given to his account of the regal government of Rome as 
to the annals of the empire by Tacitus, a contemporary writer. 
Machiavel, in his Discourses on the First Decade of Livy, accepts 
the story of the twelve kings as not less real than the story 
of the lives of the twelve Csesars. 
The first scholar who seems to have questioned the truth 
of the old narrative about Rome was Cluverius (a Latinized 
name for Philip Cluver, who was born in Dantzic in 1580). He 
published, in 1624, a book called Italia Antiqua , in which he 
expressed his opinion that Roman history before the capture of 
the city by the Gauls was all uncertain ; and he rejected the 
account of Trojan settlement, in Latium, the Alban dynasty, 
and the story of the foundation of Rome by Romulus. Others 
followed in the same track ; I may mention Bochart, and Peri- 
zonius, and Pouilly, until at last the subject received an exhaus- 
tive examination in the remarkable work of Beaufort, a French 
Protestant refugee, who published at Utrecht, in 1738, his 
Dissertation sur V Incertitude des Cinq Premiers Siecles de l’ His - 
toire Romaine. 
m Beaufort is entitled to the honour of ranking as the 
pioneer of a new school of criticism ; but it was not until the 
publication of Niebuhr's History of Rome, in 1811-12, that the 
subject attracted the attention it deserved. This work may be 
said to have revolutionized the world of thought in relation to 
Roman history. Its destructive power is irresistible, but its 
constructive power is very different. I will not say that Niebuhr 
endeavoured to evolve a history of Rome out of his own con- 
sciousness — like the famous story of the camel evolved by one of 
his countrymen but he certainly trusted a great deal too much 
to sagacity of conjecture, which he dignified by the title of “ dis- 
covery.” He even goes so far as to liken his faculty in that 
respect to the power of divination — the /uavreta of the Greeks 
(vol. iii. p. 318). But it is one thing for a Cuvier or an Owen 
to build up the form of an animal from a single bone, and 
another for a historian to presume to construct a narrative 
of the distant past from a few isolated hints, or even isolated 
facts. In the animal form there is a correlation of parts, and 
a law of typical conformity, which enables the anatomist to 
ascend with almost unerring certainty from bone to limb, and 
from limb to body, and to clothe the body with its proper in- 
teguments, until we can see by the eye of imagination the very 
form that has ceased to exist upon the earth for perhaps millions 
of years. But such an induction is not possible in the case 
of human affairs and human actions ; varium et mutabile semper 
