Livy’s Use of Thucydides in His Account of the Siege of Syracuse.

This paper briefly presents the few ancient testimonies connecting Livy to Thucydides, and the more numerous Thucydidean echoes found in Livy by modern scholars. It then explores the allusions to Thucydides in Livy’s account in Books 24 and 25 of the Roman siege of Syracuse in 213–212. There are several more or less secure echoes of Thucydides, but Livy chose to compose a less Thucydidean account than he could have. There may be some reversals of Thucydidean model situations, and if so, they consistently follow a pattern: Livy’s Syracusans continuously play the part of Thucydides’ Athenians and Livy’s Romans always perform better than Thucydides’ Greeks did. It is suggested that this was a means by which Livy intended to ensure his readers that this siege would end in Roman victory and to suggest the superiority of his own account over that of the Peloponnesian War’s historian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]