Livy

Livy came from Padua to Rome under Augustus and spent forty years writing the history of the city from its founding, one hundred and forty-two books of which thirty-five survive: the legendary kings and the early republic, and the wars with Hannibal and Macedon. He wrote to show the virtues that had made Rome great and the vices that were losing them, in a prose Quintilian called milky, and he did not go to the archives. Machiavelli’s Discourses are a commentary on the first ten books; Shakespeare took Lucrece from him; and the founders of the American republic learned their examples of virtue from him and Plutarch.