Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/489

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Notice of Vol. III. of Niebuhr's Roman History.
479

and reconciled with Livy's : in other respects the argument and conclusion are unchanged : but the history of the mutiny has been remodelled, and its causes are more clearly explained. In the next chapter which embraces the Military history from SS^ {SS9) to 406 (411)5 Livy's account of the Gallic inroads at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the following century is more decidedly preferred to that of Polybius : and the history of the Hernican and Etruscan wars of the same period is enriched with some additional facts. Much more important additions and corrections have been introduced into the chapter on the confederation between Rome and Latium, which gives a totally different account of the extent of the new Latin state, and a new explanation of the obscure allu- sion in Livy viii. 5 : colonias quoque vestras Latinum Ro^ mano prcetulisse imperium. The dissertation originally in- cluded in this chapter. On the ancient form of the Roman legion, is now separated from it and stands in an entirely new shape by itself under the title: On the earliest constitution of the manipular legion. In the following narrative of the first Samnite war the most material change consists in the description of the Samnite constitution, and the explanation of the causes of enmity between Capua and the Samnite mountaineers. The history of the war itself, a beautiful specimen of Niebuhr'*s powers in this kind of writing, has received but a few slight touches : but we now read with a melancholy interest a note, written, as the editor informs us, in the summer of 1829, in which the long and glorious mili- tary career of M. Valerius is compared with that of the Nestor of German poetry, to whom Niebuhr expresses a hope that he may still be able to dedicate his finished history : little foreboding that before this tribute of gratitude and veneration should meet the public eye, the lips which offered it as well as the ears for which it was intended would be closed in death.

In the next chapter, On the Latin war, the substance of the narrative remains unaltered: but the supposition that the Volscians were included in the Latin confederation before the conclusion of the Samnite war having been abandoned, the original account of the commencement of the Latin war which was founded upon it has been corrected: the relations in which the various Volscian states henceforth stood to Rome