A Review of Livius

As an assignment for my public history seminar, we were required to review an historical website. For my own target, I chose Livius - Articles on Ancient History, created and maintained by Jona Lendering in Amsterdam. This site has been around for a long time, as I'll mention below, and I've been familiar with it for most of its existence. I hadn't looked at it in a few years as of the assignment, actually; I figured that would be an interesting target for my newfound Mad History Skillz, and reviewed it last week. Without further ado:

Asked why he created Livius on his site's FAQ, Dutch historian Jona Lendering cites his impatience with scholars' tendency to write to specialists more than the general audience. That, along with the lack of clearly-written and easily-accessible, yet still scholarly, material for non-specialists, inspired him to launch his considerable website on ancient and classical history in 1996. For the last eleven years – an eternity in “Internet time!" – Livius has remained more or less exclusively a one-man endeavor. The site is regularly maintained, being modified or expanded roughly once or twice a week. Lendering refuses to accept outside help producing content for the site, preferring to bear sole responsibility – and blame – for any errors on the site. (Many of the site's pictures are the main exception, many of them having been taken by his colleague Marco Prins.)

For a personal project, Livius' scope is vast. As of its September 29 update, the site boasts over 3,200 separate pages. While many of these can be quite short, with Lendering promising to expand them later, several hundred are substantial, encyclopedia-style articles. Nearly all articles are illustrated to one extent or another, with a mixture of maps, images of coins or ancient artwork, and photographs of what different regions discussed look like today. Several articles expand into large subsections in their own right. For example, the section on Julius Caesar is a twelve-section biography with two dozen annotated and translated excerpts from primary sources, a single link in the main index branching into thirty-seven separate pages. The vast majority of articles on the site are heavily cross-linked to others, with some off-site links as well. The scope of the site is impressive geographically and chronologically as well: the broadest sections of the site are nine of the major regions generally accepted within ancient and classical history (Anatolia/Asia Minor, Carthage/North Africa, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Judaea/Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and Rome), with the sections on Greece and Rome the most developed. Other sections have their own strengths: for example, a large collection of Mesopotamian primary sources with images, transliterations, and translations.

Two major problems exist with the site's content: the issue of sourcing and the Livius' inward-looking nature. The first is perhaps the most serious: very few articles have formal bibliographies, although several (particularly in the Greco-Roman and Jewish sections) do discuss primary sources, often at length with excerpts. This is by no means consistent across the site, unfortunately. (Lendering mentions in his site's FAQ that he is reluctant to reference secondary sources often because of growing plagiarism using Livius.) The balance of links is another major problem, as the vast majority of links are within the site itself. While this means the site is very well cross-referenced, it limits the site's use as a jumping-off point to other resources, at least directly. Livius' front page does have a collection of links to “related websites,” however.

Lendering begins to run into accessibility problems with how he organizes and presents his information. Livius is organized as several layers of indices, which means someone accessing the site will usually have to encounter one or two alphabetized lists (sometimes roughly subcategorized into geography, biography, etc.) before getting to the articles they seek. This can be daunting if a reader is seeking general information rather than a particular topic. Lendering has recently added a Google custom search to his main page, however, which makes finding specific articles easier than in the past.

In terms of appearance, Livius betrays its age. Lendering first launched his site in 1996, before the combination of ubiquitous broadband and greatly expanded computer capabilities began to shape Web design. Lendering has continued to use many of the design principles of that earlier era on his page, keeping to a very minimalist, no-frills design which may appear (please pardon the pun!) rather Spartan to contemporary eyes. This approach, combined with a navigation bars at the top or bottom of most pages, makes navigating the site quite easy: links are obvious and pages load quickly, even on dialup connections. However, this sometimes causes problems visually; images are often themselves sized by the standards of lower-resolution monitors. Many appear unpleasantly small on modern screens, particularly for those viewers who like lots of detail or close-ups. As with the rest of the site, however, the images are themselves being steadily updated, with more “modern” sizes appearing in newer articles.

Lendering seems to have had mixed success in his stated goals for Livius. He does accomplish part of his intended purpose, by having a free resource online from which readers can get a fairly good picture of the ancient world, particularly classical times. However, ease of access to this information is limited by the site's significant organizational problems and some gaps in its selection. Livius is a work in progress, and due to the scope of the era which Lendering is attempting to document – and the fact that it is, at its heart, a personal project – it will likely remain so for some time. Perhaps unfortunately for Lendering's intentions, it is likely to be more accessible to students or hobbyists who already have some amount of ancient history knowledge under their belt before visiting, especially if his idea of the “general audience” is those just beginning to study the period. Livius is a site which aspires to be comprehensive and which aspires to be accessible to the wider public, but does not quite – as a living site, perhaps does not yet quite – meet these goals.