Livy

Livy (Titus Livius, 59 BC – AD 17) was a Roman historian of Patavium (modern Padua) who enjoyed a long friendship with the emperor Augustus and wrote Ab urbe condita ("From the Founding of the City"), a history of Rome in 142 books of which only books 1–10 and 21–45 survive. In the surviving books each year typically opens with the prodigies reported to the Roman state, and among them are sky notices that later writers have read as aerial craft: a "spectacle of ships" in the sky in 218 BC, shields seen over Arpi in 217, and in 214 BC an altar in the sky at Hadria with figures in white around it. Michael Salla's 2026 briefing for public officials opens the first of its seven levels of the phenomenon with sightings of craft and orbs associated with non-human intelligence that "are found in reports by Roman historians such as Livy".

Livy did not see any of these sights: the notices reached him as year-by-year reports, and the readings differ on who vouches for them. The astronomer Richard Stothers holds that the prodigy lists were derived from the pontifical Annales Maximi, that Roman officials spent time and money verifying them, and that a small residue of the reports resembles modern UFO reports from presumably credible witnesses. Livy himself writes that in the winter of 218–217 BC, once minds were stirred to religious anxiety, many prodigies were reported "and rashly believed", and the classicist D. S. Levene concludes, as the reviewer Christina Kraus reports, that nothing in the work shows whether Livy believed in portents at all. The notices for the years after 167 BC reach modern readers through extractors such as Julius Obsequens, because the books of Livy that carried them are lost.

Ab urbe condita and its prodigy lists

Ab urbe condita ran from the legendary foundation of Rome by Aeneas to the death of Drusus in 9 BC; the summaries called the Periochae cover the lost books, apart from books 136 and 137. The surviving second group, books 21–45, covers the years 218–167 BC, and for 218 BC Livy records that the board of ten (the decemviri) was ordered to consult the books, the city was purified and greater victims were sacrificed, so the notice of ships in the sky sits in a paragraph about expiation.

Livy states his own attitude in the entry for 169 BC, where he gives his reason for recording portents at all:

I am not unaware that, as a result of the same disregard that leads men generally to suppose nowadays that the gods foretell nothing, no portents at all are reported officially, or recorded in our histories. However, not only does my own mind, as I write of old-time matters, become in some way or other old-fashioned, but also a certain conscientious scruple keeps me from regarding what those very sagacious men of former times thought worthy of public concern as something unworthy to be reported in my history.

Of the prodigies of 214 BC Livy writes that the more the simple and devout believed them, the more were reported (quae quo magis credebant simplices ac religiosi homines, eo plura nuntiabantur), and Stothers reads that remark and the one for 218 BC as Livy noting that reports grew with fear of Carthage in the Second Punic War and the publicity of earlier reports, adding that Livy voiced scepticism about some reports without saying which. Kraus reports Levene's finding that Livy modifies, displaces and drops prodigy lists to tighten his narrative, and that the lists are inherited material to an extent that is debated. John Rich, as Satterfield summarises him, makes the lists one more element of the annalistic structure.

Sky notices in the surviving books

Stothers gathers the following notices from the surviving books among the ancient reports he compares with modern ones, and gives the Hadria altar as the only report of occupants.

Stothers finds that the Hadria notice "strikingly recalls" the 1959 sighting by Father Gill and his companions off Papua New Guinea, takes the Reate stone to be possibly a bird or airborne debris, and reports that Franklin Krauss took the Rome ships for clouds or mirages. Livy's own verb for the Lanuvium fleet is dicebatur, "was said", so the passage already reports a report. Colavito notes that Vallée and Aubeck's quotation of the fleet at Lanuvium takes a fragment of a sentence out of context, since the same notice lists wool growing straight from the ground, fish ploughed up by farmers and a shower of stones, and he reads the fleet as a possible mirage of real ships or shapes seen in clouds, one of Livy's portents that he takes to be distortions of meteorological events, part of the Roman need to see the gods at work in every action of nature. He adds that the Scottish historian Hector Boece's navium speciem in coelo apparuisse is an almost word-for-word duplication of Livy's navium speciem de caelo affulsisse at 21.62, a phrase he finds only in those two authors.

The lost books

Livy's text after 167 BC does not survive, and the notices for those years reach modern readers through epitomators. Julius Obsequens set out portent lists for 190 to 12 BC extracted from Livy, and Stothers names Pliny, Plutarch, Obsequens and Orosius together as Livy's extractors, citing Obsequens or Pliny for the cases of 154, 104, 100 and 43 BC. The ancient-sightings writer Jason Colavito notes that Obsequens's portents "are all cataloged from Livy (though in missing books)".

The size of the loss has drawn claims to have recovered it. Charles Fort recounted that in August 1924 Professor Martino-Fusco of Naples announced that he had discovered "the 109 missing volumes" of Livy's history, and that when the professor could not produce them his explanation, that he had been indiscreet, was published and accepted; Fort offered the episode among his instances of scientists who deceived others, and himself, as rankly as the irresponsible witnesses he was cataloguing.

Readings as sighting reports

Stothers writes that Donald H. Menzel's naturalistic study of Pliny in 1953 induced UFO enthusiasts to compile "long, uncritical lists" of ancient sky phenomena, citing those of Harold T. Wilkins in 1954 and Drake in 1977. John Keel wrote in 1970 that "Livy reported 'phantom ships' in the sky in 214 B.C.", and sets it with Josephus's chariots and armed troops over Jerusalem and Pliny's three suns among the things "Early Greek and Roman historians dutifully recorded" in the sky, while Jerome Clark in 1998 gives Livy's ships for 218 and 173 BC among the pre-1800 reports that describe aerial vehicles, and counts the Hadria altar with the appearances that "evolve into complex apparitions too fantastic to believe". Clark sets the ships beside a medieval Irish tale of a ship's anchor hooked in a church arch, and writes that the Greek historians gave prodigies little attention where Livy and Dio Cassius were "much better disposed" to record aerial events, with Cicero speaking for the Romans who doubted them. Stothers's 2007 study sorted the Roman reports by the categories of J. Allen Hynek and concluded that a small set of unexplained reports from presumably credible witnesses remains.

Colavito, crediting the French sceptic Dominique Caudron's research, takes a retelling of the 1960s, in which round objects and ship-shaped objects hung over Apulia on the day of the battle of Cannae in 216 BC with white-clad figures aboard, to be assembled from Livy's notices for 218 (21.62), 217 (22.1) and 214 BC (24.10), "the Italian concoction" whose author he leaves open; he reports that the story first appeared in the Italian magazine Cielo e Terra and that Guy Tarade attached a spurious citation to Obsequens in 1969, that Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck knew the story only from a 1960s Italian magazine, and that their version rendered Livy's ara ("altar") as a plow. Salla's 2026 briefing names Livy as the example of Roman historians whose reports date craft and orbs to antiquity, and sets them beside the sixteenth-century sky battles over Basel and Nuremberg as the most significant ancient sightings.

Open questions

Bibliography

• Stothers, Richard (2007). "Unidentified Flying Objects in Classical Antiquity" (PDF). The Classical Journal. 103 (1): 79–92. ＋

References

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