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The History of Rome

by Livy

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Pages: 528

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About this book

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.

About the author

Livy

Livy (Titus Livius, who lived from roughly 59 BCE to 17 CE) was born at Patavium, modern Padua, and gave his adult life to a single project: a history of Rome from its founding to his own day. Augustus read him and teased him for his republican sympathies.