The Early History of Rome

What It Is

The first five books of Livy's history of Rome, which ran in full to 142 books, of which 35 survive. He began work around 29 BC, as Augustus was consolidating power after a century of civil war, and he kept at it for forty years. These five books take the city from its foundation to the early fourth century BC.

Livy was not a soldier, a senator or a magistrate. He was a writer from Padua who worked from earlier Roman annalists and made something out of them that they never were. He is candid about his materials: he says in the preface that the traditions of the period before the city was founded are more suited to poetry than to sober history, and that he neither affirms nor refutes them.

What he offers instead is set out in the same preface, and it is one of the great statements of why anyone writes history. He wants to give a nation a record of itself, with the examples clearly displayed, so that a reader can see what to imitate and what to avoid.

Why It Matters

These five books are where the Roman self-image lives. Discipline, piety, austerity, the subordination of the individual to the city, the readiness to lose everything rather than break faith: Rome believed these things made it what it was, and Livy is where it wrote them down. Whether the events happened is close to beside the point. The stories worked on people, and they worked for two thousand years.

Machiavelli's most serious book is a commentary on the first ten books of Livy, and it is where he says what he actually thinks about republics, as opposed to what he says about princes. The Renaissance took its political vocabulary from these pages. So did the eighteenth century: David painted them, the French revolutionaries costumed themselves in them, and the men who founded the American republic reached for Roman examples because Livy had made them the common property of educated Europe.

And there is the prose. Livy is the great narrative writer of Latin, and these books are the most fluent thing he did. He can hold a crowd, stage an argument, and turn a battlefield in three sentences.

Before You Read

Twelve to fifteen hours, and not difficult. The sentences are clear and the pace is quick. This is the easiest ancient historian to read for pleasure.

The trap is the annalistic material. Livy is working from year-by-year records, and long stretches consist of consuls elected, minor campaigns against the Aequi and the Volsci, and prodigies reported. It repeats. Move through it briskly. The set pieces are unmistakable: the prose changes gear when Livy reaches one.

Read the preface twice, before and after. It tells you exactly what kind of book you are holding, and readers who skip it spend the whole thing asking the wrong question.

Which Translation to Read

• Aubrey de Sélincourt (Penguin Classics, 1960) — recommended. The most readable Livy in English, and it is not close. De Sélincourt saw that Livy's great gift is narrative momentum and translated for that above all, which is why this version has held the field for sixty years. R. M. Ogilvie's introduction is the best short account of Livy written for a general reader. The cost: he is free with the Latin, the English carries a mid-century flavour, and the notes are thin. View on Amazon →
• T. J. Luce (Oxford World's Classics, 1998), published as The Rise of Rome. More accurate than de Sélincourt and far better annotated, by one of the finest Livy scholars of the last century. The cost: the prose is careful rather than alive, and Livy without momentum is a diminished writer.
• Valerie Warrior (Hackett, 2006). Literal, precise, and footnoted at the foot of the page where notes belong, with the Roman institutions explained as they arise. The cost: the plainest of the three, and it never sings.

Take de Sélincourt to read Livy, Luce to check him, Warrior if you want the political machinery explained without flipping to the back.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as national myth being consciously constructed, not as a record of what happened. Livy is not asking you to believe him. He is asking you to be improved.

Watch where he flags his own doubt. He does it often, with a small dry note that the tradition is uncertain, and then tells the story in full anyway. Those moments are where you can see a historian and a patriot occupying one skull, and they are the most interesting thing in the book.

Read Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy afterwards, or at least the first twenty chapters. It is the greatest reading of this book ever done, and it will send you back to it.

And read the speeches out loud. Livy invented them, everyone knew he invented them, and they are magnificent.