Titus Livius

Titus Livius: One Hundred and Forty-Two Books

Augustus called him a Pompeian — a partisan of the republic's losing side — and stayed his friend anyway. The joke was affordable because the man in question held no office, commanded no legions and had, so far as anyone can tell, never served in the army. He simply wrote: 142 books covering more than seven centuries, from the founding of Rome to within living memory. About three-quarters of it is gone. What survives is still the reason most people picture ancient Rome the way they do.

Padua

Titus Livius was born at Patavium — modern Padua — in the northern Italian hinterland, then the second-wealthiest city on the peninsula. The standard dates give him 59 BCE to 17 CE, though the biographical record is thin and much of what is said about his life is inference from his own text. He was educated in philosophy and rhetoric, and in Roman religious tradition. He grew up through the civil wars that destroyed the republic, which matters: the constitutional order he spent his life narrating had collapsed while he was a boy.

The Writer Without a Career

He reached Rome by about the age of thirty. He was financially independent, never pursued political office, and devoted his adult life to a single work — an extraordinary arrangement in a culture where history was normally written by senators and generals in retirement, men who had governed provinces and could claim to know how power actually behaved. Livy's authority came from reading and from art rather than from experience, and both his strengths and his defects follow from that. He was on good terms with the Julio-Claudian family and a friend of Augustus, who teased him for glorifying Pompey without withdrawing his favour. Whatever else the regime was doing to Roman letters, it did not silence him.

Ab Urbe Condita

He began at about thirty-three. *Ab Urbe Condita* — "From the Founding of the City" — ran to 142 books, from Rome's legendary origins in 753 BCE down to 9 BCE, and he stated his purpose plainly: to preserve the memory of the deeds of the world's preeminent nation. Thirty-five books survive, covering 753 to 243 BCE and 219 to 167 BCE; the rest is known mainly through the ancient summaries called periochae. The lost portion includes his account of the civil wars and of Augustus himself, which is the single most painful gap in Roman historical writing.

Method and Manner

Livy worked from earlier historians — Valerius Antias, Polybius and others — and he did attempt to weigh them against each other, flagging where his sources disagreed. But he was not an archival researcher in the modern sense, and he did not need to be, because his ambition was different. His books are built around intensely personal psychological portraits of Rome's military and political figures, and they contain over two thousand speeches, composed by him and put into the mouths of men who had been dead for centuries. He wrote with a sympathy for Stoic views about the providential determination of history: Rome's rise was, in his telling, a moral process, and the moral was for the reader's use.

The defects are documented and not small. There are anachronisms, mistaken chronology, and topographical and geographical confusion, particularly in the battle narratives — a predictable weakness in a historian who never soldiered. His patriotism shades into prejudice against other nations, the Greeks especially.

Why Livy Is Called a Genius

The quality is narrative construction on an almost unimaginable scale. To take seven hundred and fifty years of a nation's history and shape it into a single continuous story, sustained across 142 books, with a governing moral argument holding throughout and individual characters vivid enough to have supplied European art and drama with subjects for two thousand years, is a feat of architecture and stamina that no other ancient historian attempted at that length. Its instrument is the psychological portrait: Livy's Hannibal, his Scipio, his Camillus are people rather than functions, and the two thousand speeches, whatever their evidentiary worthlessness, are what make his Rome inhabitable. His long-term influence is the proof. Renaissance scholars hunted his manuscripts as treasure, and Machiavelli built the *Discourses on Livy* — one of the founding texts of modern political thought — by reading his republican books as a working manual for how free states rise and rot.

The counter-case is real and is made by historians rather than by cranks. Livy is not a reliable source in the way Thucydides or Polybius are. He did not consult documents systematically, he could not always get a battlefield or a calendar right, he invented his speeches, and his national bias runs through the whole. He was, in the sharpest formulation, an artist working with historians' material — a magnificent writer of prose whose relationship to evidence would fail any modern standard. That verdict is accurate and it still leaves the achievement standing, because much of what we know about early Rome exists only because Livy preserved traditions and used sources that have otherwise vanished. He is a genius of narrative and of scale; he is not an authority, and treating him as one has misled readers for centuries.

Legacy

What Livy actually transmitted was a version of Rome — the austere early republic, the citizen-farmer, the disaster at Cannae, the incorruptible consul, the slow corruption that follows conquest and wealth. That version has been the raw material of European political imagination ever since: it runs through Machiavelli into republican theory, into the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century revolutions, into painting and drama and school curricula. His preservation of early Roman tradition and of lost source material also makes him indispensable to working historians who distrust him. The final irony fits the man who was scolded by an emperor for admiring the wrong side: the books that survive are the republican ones, and the account of his own age, the one he alone was placed to write, is the part we lost.

Achievements

• Notable work: History of Rome
• Genres: historiography