Translator's Preface
This volume furnishes one span of a bridge ultimately to connect the Vth (1929) with the IXth
(1935), that is, to link book XXII, the last of those
translated by Professor Foster, with book XXXI,
where the late Professor Sage began his work upon the
Fourth Decade. In these three books (XXIII-XXV)
are covered the years 216-212 B.C., including the
consequences of disaster at Cannae, also Capua
taken, Syracuse besieged for two years and finally
captured, and the successes of Publius and Gnaeus
Scipio in Spain, until they were separately overwhelmed by numbers.
For works dealing with this period of the Second
Punic War the reader is referred to the
Cambridge
Ancient History, Vol. VIII, and the bibliographies for
its chapters ii-iv, pp. 721 if. Lists so recent and so
generally accessible make it unnecessary to insert
here a bibliography, to supplement those already
contained in Vols. V (pp. xiii ff.) and IX (p. xv ff.).
A recent work of Professor Fabricius, of Copenhagen,
correcting current errors in the topography of Syracuse, is discussed in the Appendix.
The text here offered represents careful and oft-repeated consideration of its many problems. Obligations to a long line of previous editors, including
Madvig, Weissenborn, H. J. Müller, Riemann, are
gratefully acknowledged. In particular every student
of Livy is now constantly aware of his great indebtedness to the labours of the late Professors Walters and
[p. viii]
Conway, whose Oxford text edition reached a third
volume in 1928 (books XXI-XXV). Every citation
of the Puteanus made by them has been verified
for the present volume by collation of the facsimile
published by the Bibliotheque Nationale, with corrections in a very few instances.
Limited space for critical notes on so small a page
obviously forbade the inclusion of the mass of interesting conjectures, often of recent date, especially
many of the plausible
supplementa suggested by
Conway or Walters, where a short line (14-22 letters)
may have been omitted in P or its archetype; also
such emendations as Professor G. H. Hirst's
aries for
acies in XXIII. xvi. 12 (p. 54;
Classical Review XXV,
109), or Professor E. H. Warmington's suggestion
that in XXV. xxxvii. 11 (p. 480)
ad arma may originally have been directly followed by
ad portas, which
in the MSS. and in our text follows the second
discurrunt, suspiciously repeated and hence, he thinks,
to be omitted (as also
ac, which may have been
inserted later before
velut).
The translator is indebted to the publishers of the
Cambridge Ancient History for permission to use
three maps from Vol. VIII, with such alterations
as were deemed necessary. The map of Syracuse
is based upon a large Italian sheet (Catania, 1931),
with important additions and radical changes due
chiefly to the map of the Danish historian Fabricius
mentioned above.
It may be added that this translation was begun,
as it happened, at Syracuse, with the passages in
XXIV and XXV dealing with the siege and capture
of the city, and that such an opportunity was due
to a second visit after an interval of forty years.
[p. ix]
