Livy

Livy wrote a history of Rome in 142 books and spent forty years on it. Born at Patavium, modern Padua, around 59 BC into a comfortable provincial family, he was educated in rhetoric and philosophy and appears to have held no public office, no military command and no priesthood — which distinguishes him from almost every other Roman historian and shows in the work. He moved to Rome and became known to Augustus, who called him a Pompeian without apparently minding. Ab Urbe Condita covers from the foundation of the city to 9 BC. Thirty-five books survive complete — the first ten and books twenty-one to forty-five — and the rest are known through summaries. His method was literary rather than archival. He worked from earlier historians, chiefly Polybius for the Greek material, and did not consult documents, inspect battlefields or reconcile contradictions systematically; he reports variants and moves on. His geography and his understanding of military detail are both weak. What he did instead was construct a moral narrative in prose of exceptional quality. His preface states the purpose plainly: to set out examples of conduct so that readers may imitate what is good and avoid what is shameful, and to record how a people's character built an empire and how, latterly, wealth and licence had corroded it. The early books — Romulus, Lucretia, Horatius, Cincinnatus, the geese of the Capitol — are the source of almost every Roman legend that entered European culture. He died at Padua in AD 17. Machiavelli built the Discourses on his first ten books fifteen centuries later.

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