Quote Originally Posted by dsyrow1
I'm not interested in what "most professionals in the field" say. Most professionals in the field, if we are going to go by your standard of judgment, would have said that Troy doesn't exist, that names in Homer are fictitious, that Mycenae even if existed was some mud village, and a ton of other such cynical beliefs. They would not have found the actual site of Troy, the grandeur of Mycenae, the letters from Hittites to "Achaeans" and to "Alexander" of "Troia" or anything else, were it not for Schliemann or other intrepid amateur classicists, who had little patience with such cynical ivory-tower beliefs. These men went and collapsed all of what "most professionals in the field" believed, and suffered ridicule from the "professionals" for decades to boot. None of these "professionals in the field" have contributed by making any such great discoveries, have decoded Linear B, or anything else really worthy of merit. So I suggest you check your premises. Most professionals in the field are just stuck-up ivory tower types, who have contributed little other than their own vituperation to the study of history.

This is a massively sweeping generalization (and quite mean-spirited, too) and also completely misses the point about Livy's reliability and accuracy.
But Schliemann will do as well- yes he found important archeological sites, and then proceeded to slash through them in a way that makes historians and archeologists today weep for the lost opportunities destroyed by his brutal methods. He got the dating wrong both at Troy and Mycenae- that famous gold mask? not Agammemnons, or at least hundreds of years too early for the period. It took these useless ivory tower professionals to clean up the mess he left behind and make sense of the things that he found. Yes, of course, it is better that he did find these sites than that they go undiscovered, but he was not a philanthropist and was in that game to become rich and famous.

But nothing that you wrote really applies to the discussion about LIvy anyways. Livy was a wonderful writer, is important to historiography, and is not a primary source for the history of the early republic. He had a pronounced political bias (definitely not a Howard Zinn- and I dare you to accuse him of 'vituperation') and was a little vague on some of those pesky details.

It's shame you're not interested in what people who devote their professional lives to these subjects have to say. They are not always right, but that is very different from being always wrong. Plus, it's rude.