History of Rome

Overview

Livy’s history ran to a hundred and forty-two books, covering Rome from the landing of Aeneas to 9 BCE. Thirty-five survive: books 1 to 10, on the founding and the early republic, and books 21 to 45, on the wars with Carthage and the conquest of the Greek east. The rest is known from summaries. He worked on it for about forty years, under Augustus, and it made him famous enough that a man is said to have travelled from Cadiz simply to look at him.

He was not a soldier, a senator or a magistrate. Unlike Thucydides, Polybius, Caesar and Tacitus, Livy had no public career, did no archival research, and worked from earlier historians whose accounts he compared, paraphrased and improved. When his sources disagree he tends to say so and to choose the better story.

That is not a dismissal, but it does set expectations. Books 1 to 5 are legend told with a novelist’s skill: there is no meaningful evidence for anything in them, and Livy half admits it, saying that traditions from before the city was founded are more suited to poetry than to sober record and that he neither affirms nor denies them. From the Punic wars on he becomes a genuinely valuable source.

Two thousand pages is not a realistic assignment. Books 1 to 5, in the Penguin volume, are the usual one.

What happens

Book I: kings. Aeneas in Italy, Romulus and Remus, the she-wolf, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabine women. Then the seven kings, each supplying an institution: Numa the religion, Servius Tullius the census and the class structure. The book ends with Tarquin the Proud, whose son rapes Lucretia. She summons her father and husband, tells them, makes them swear vengeance, and stabs herself, saying that no unchaste woman shall live and cite her example. Brutus pulls the knife from her body and leads the revolt. The monarchy ends and the word king becomes an insult that survives five centuries.

Books II to V: the early republic. The famous episodes cluster here. Horatius holding the bridge alone while it is cut behind him. Mucius Scaevola, caught after a failed assassination, thrusting his right hand into the fire to show the enemy king what Romans are. Cincinnatus taken from his plough, given absolute power, winning the war in sixteen days and going back to the farm. Coriolanus turned by his mother at the gates of the city he is about to sack.

Alongside the heroics runs the Conflict of the Orders, a two-hundred-year constitutional struggle between patricians and plebeians over debt, land and office, conducted mostly by strike: the plebeians withdraw from the city and refuse to fight until they are given tribunes. Book V ends with the Gauls sacking Rome in 390, the geese on the Capitol waking the garrison, and Brennus throwing his sword onto the scales with the remark that the conquered can expect nothing.

Books XXI to XXX: Hannibal. The best sustained narrative Livy wrote and the reason many readers come back. Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants; the annihilation at Lake Trasimene; Fabius Maximus refusing battle and being despised for it; and then Cannae, where a Roman army of perhaps eighty thousand was enveloped and destroyed in an afternoon, which Livy describes with a restraint that makes it worse. Then Rome’s refusal to negotiate, the long recovery, and Scipio taking the war to Africa and beating Hannibal at Zama.

Books XXXI to XLV: the east. Macedon, Antiochus, Greece, and the transformation of Rome into an imperial power. Livy is increasingly interested in what conquest and eastern wealth are doing to Roman character, which is the argument of his preface arriving on schedule.

How to read it

Read the preface. It is three pages and it states the purpose explicitly: history sets examples plainly before you, so that you may choose what to imitate and what to avoid, and Livy says he is writing partly to look away from a present he finds unbearable.

Read books 1 to 5 as literature and as the self-image of a people, not as a record of events. The right question about Lucretia or Cincinnatus is not whether it happened but what a society is saying by telling itself that story.

Then read books 21 and 22 for Hannibal and Cannae if you want Livy at his best as a narrative historian.

Read Machiavelli’s Discourses next, or alongside. He works through the first ten books asking what a modern state can learn from them, and he reads against Livy’s moralising as often as with it. The two together are much more than either alone.

Watch the speeches. Like all ancient historians Livy composes them, and they are where he puts the analysis: the arguments for and against a course of action, which nobody recorded, arranged to show what was at stake.

Keep Augustus in the frame. Livy is writing about the glory of the republic and the corruption of the present, under a ruler who had destroyed the republic while claiming to have restored it. Augustus reportedly called him a Pompeian and did not mind.

Questions it raises

• Livy says history exists to supply examples. Does that purpose make a historian less reliable, or simply honest about what he is doing?
• Almost nothing in the first five books can be true. Why do these stories keep working anyway?
• Lucretia’s suicide triggers the republic. What does it mean that Rome dated its liberty from a woman’s death and her insistence that she be no precedent?
• Livy blames decline on wealth and luxury. Is moral explanation of political change ever adequate?
• The Conflict of the Orders was settled by withdrawal of labour rather than by violence. What made that possible, and is it replicable?
• Writing under a man who had ended the republic, Livy praises the republic. Is that criticism, nostalgia, or a permitted form of flattery?