The History of Rome

Livy began at the beginning, with Aeneas landing in Italy after Troy burned and Romulus marking out a city in 753 BCE, then wrote forward for some forty years across 142 books. These first eight, composed in Latin between roughly 27 and 9 BCE, cover the kings, their expulsion, and the long unglamorous decades in which a small town fought its neighbors and slowly became master of Italy. He was candid that the earliest material was more legend than record, and he kept it anyway, because the stories Romans told about Horatius at the bridge, Lucretia, and Cincinnatus at his plow explained to him what Rome had become. Only 35 of the 142 books survive. Books 1 to 8 are free here in PDF and EPUB.