Titus Livius (59 BCE - 17 CE), known in English as Livy, was a Roman historian and the author of Ab Urbe Condita Libri, a history of Rome from its legendary origins to his own day. [1] Of its 142 books only thirty-five survive intact, the remainder known chiefly through ancient summaries. [2] Written in a full, rhetorical Latin and organised around moral example, the work became the standard account of early Rome for later antiquity and for Renaissance Europe.
Life
Livy was born at Patavium, modern Padua, in Cisalpine Gaul, traditionally in 59 BCE. [1] Little is recorded of his family or his education, though his writing shows a thorough training in rhetoric, and ancient critics detected in his Latin a provincial flavour they attributed to his northern origin.
He moved to Rome, probably in early adulthood, and appears to have devoted his life almost entirely to writing rather than to public office or military service, an unusual course for a Roman historian of his standing. [2] He was acquainted with the emperor Augustus, who is said to have teased him for republican sympathies without withdrawing his favour, and he encouraged the young Claudius, later emperor, in the study of history. He died at Patavium in 17 CE.
Ab Urbe Condita
Livy's single work was a history of Rome in 142 books, beginning with the arrival of Aeneas in Italy and the founding of the city, and carried forward to the death of Drusus in 9 BCE. [1] He worked on it for roughly four decades, publishing it in instalments.
Books 1 to 10 cover the regal period and the early Republic to 293 BCE; books 21 to 45 treat the Second Punic War and Rome's subsequent expansion into the Greek east. These thirty-five books survive. The rest are lost apart from fragments and the Periochae, brief ancient summaries of each book that preserve the outline of the missing narrative. [3]
Method and style
Livy worked mainly from earlier historians rather than from archives, inscriptions or personal enquiry, and modern scholars have criticised his treatment of geography, military detail and chronology, and his tendency to follow whichever source made the better story. [2] He composed speeches for his characters in the manner accepted by ancient historiography.
His purpose was avowedly moral. He presented the Roman past as a repository of examples of conduct to be imitated or avoided, and framed the growth of Rome as the product of discipline, piety and self-restraint whose decline he saw in his own age. [1] The narrative of the early books, including the stories of Romulus, Lucretia, Horatius and Cincinnatus, is largely legendary but became the canonical version of Rome's origins.
Influence
The work was read and abridged throughout antiquity and survived the Middle Ages in incomplete manuscripts. [3] Petrarch worked to assemble the surviving books, and Niccolò Machiavelli built his Discourses on Livy around the first ten, using them to argue about republican government.
Through such readings Livy shaped European ideas of civic virtue and of the Roman Republic well into the modern era, and his account remains a principal source for the early history of Rome even where its factual reliability is doubted. [2]
