Editing Livy (section)

==Dates==

The authority supplying information from which possible vital data on Livy can be deduced is [[Eusebius of Caesarea]], a [[bishop]] of the early [[Christian Church]]. One of his works was a summary of world history in [[ancient Greek]], termed the ''[[Chronicon (Eusebius)|Chronikon]],'' dating from the early 4th century AD. This work was lost except for fragments (mainly excerpts), but not before it had been translated in whole and in part by various authors such as [[St. Jerome]]. The entire work survives in two separate manuscripts, [[Armenian language|Armenian]] and Greek (Christesen and Martirosova-Torlone 2006). St. Jerome wrote in Latin. Fragments in [[Syriac language|Syriac]] exist.<ref>{{cite book |last=Fotheringham |first=John Knight |author-link=John Knight Fotheringham |title=The Bodleian Manuscript of Jerome's Version of the Chronicle of Eusebius |date=1905 |url=https://archive.org/details/bodleianmanuscr00jerogoog |location=Oxford |publisher=[[The Clarendon Press]] |page=1}}</ref>

[[Eusebius]]' work consists of two books: the ''[[Chronicon (Eusebius)#Contents|Chronographia]]'', a summary of history in annalist form, and the ''Chronikoi Kanones'', tables of years and events. St. Jerome translated the tables into Latin as the ''[[Chronicon (Jerome)|Chronicon]]'', probably adding some information of his own from unknown sources. Livy's dates appear in ''Jerome's Chronicon.''

The main problem with the information given in the [[manuscript]]s is that, between them, they often give different dates for the same events or different events, do not include the same material entirely, and reformat what they do include. A date may be in ''Ab Urbe Condita'' or in [[Olympiad]]s or in some other form, such as age. These variations may have occurred through scribal error or scribal license. Some material has been inserted under the aegis of [[Eusebius]].

The topic of manuscript variants is a large and specialized one, on which authors of works on Livy seldom care to linger. As a result, standard information in a standard rendition is used, which gives the impression of a standard set of dates for Livy. There are no such dates.{{citation needed|date=July 2012}} A typical presumption is of a birth in the 2nd year of the 180th Olympiad and a death in the first year of the 199th Olympiad, which are coded 180.2 and 199.1 respectively.<ref name="jerome">{{cite web|url=http://www.attalus.org/translate/jerome2.html|title=St. Jerome (Hieronymus): Chronological Tables|date=29 February 2016|work=Attalus|access-date=14 August 2009}}</ref> All sources use the same first [[Olympiad]], 776/775–773/772 BC by the modern calendar. By a complex formula (made so by the 0 reference point not falling on the border of an Olympiad), these codes correspond to 59 BC for the birth, 17 AD for the death. In another manuscript the birth is in 180.4, or 57 BC.<ref>{{cite book |page=1 |title=Livy |volume=1 |first=Titus |last=Livius |editor-first =John Robert |editor-last=Seeley |editor-link=John Robert Seeley |location=Oxford |publisher=[[Clarendon Press]] |year=1881 |isbn=0-86292-296-8 |url=https://archive.org/stream/livybooks110with00livyuoft#page/n13}}</ref>