Livy, too, was a friend of the Emperor Augustus, He lived in Rome, enjoying his companions, the libraries of the city, and, most of all, his independence.  Even Virgil was ready to insert a few lines here and there in a poem to gratify his friends, or to choose a subject that he knew would please the Emperor; but Livy wrote on the subject that pleased him and treated it just as he believed to be best.  His great work was his history, and this he begins with a little preface, as independent as it is graceful.  “Whether I shall gain any share of glory,” he says, “by writing a history of the Roman people, I do not know.  The work, however, will be a pleasure to me; and even if any fame that might otherwise be mine should be hidden by the success of other writers, I shall console myself by thinking of their excellence and greatness.”  No such thing happened, however, for the kindly historian was so praised and his work so fully appreciated that he said he had all the fame he could wish.

Herodotus was a Greek who liked to travel.  The world was very small in his day, for little of it was known except some of the lands bordering on the Mediterranean.  To visit Tyre, Babylon, Egypt, Palestine, and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, as he did, made a man a great traveler five centuries before Christ.  Herodotus enjoyed all these wanderings, but they also “meant business” to him.  Whenever he came to a place of historical interest, he stayed awhile.  He explored the country thereabouts, he measured the important buildings, he talked with the people who knew most about the place.  Then, when he came to write of its history, he did not write like a man who had read an article or two in an encyclopaedia and was trying to recite what he had learned, but like one who knew the place which he was describing and liked to talk about it, and about what had happened there.  It is no wonder that his history has always been a favorite; and to be a favorite author for twenty centuries is no small glory.

Ovid was a Latin poet who knew how to tell a story.  He could not only invent a tale, but he could tell it so well that the reader feels as if it must be true.  His most interesting stories, however, he did not invent, for they are a rewriting of the old mythological tales.  In one respect he is like Homer; he never forgets the little things, and he tells so many details that we can hardly believe he is imagining them.  In his story of Baucis and Philemon, for instance, Ovid does not forget to say that the cottage door was so low that the two gods had to stoop to pass through it; that Baucis hurried to brighten the fire with dry leaves and bits of bark; that one leg of the table was too short and had to be propped up with a piece of tile.  He tells us that the kindhearted couple tried to catch their one goose so as to cook it for the supper of their guests; but that they were so old, and the goose so nimble of wing, that he escaped them and flew to the Gods for refuge.  We are