Study guide
Livy, History of Rome: Books I–V (the first pentad)
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Overview
- Author
- Titus Livius (Livy), c. 59 BC – AD 17, from Patavium (modern Padua)
- Full title
- Ab Urbe Condita Libri, 'Books from the Founding of the City'
- Composed
- Books I–V probably written c. 27–25 BC, early in the reign of Augustus; the work as a whole occupied Livy for some forty years
- Scope of the whole
- 142 books, from the arrival of Aeneas to 9 BC; only Books 1–10 and 21–45 survive, with summaries (Periochae) of most of the rest
- Scope of this guide
- The first pentad, Books I–V: from the Trojan prehistory and the founding of Rome (traditionally 753 BC) to the Gallic sack and the refounding of the city (c. 390 BC)
- Genre
- Annalistic history in Latin prose, arranged year by year under the magistrates, with set speeches and dramatic episodes
- Language
- Latin; a rich, periodic style that Quintilian praised for its 'milky richness' (lactea ubertas)
- Main sources
- Earlier Roman annalists such as Fabius Pictor, Valerius Antias, Licinius Macer and Aelius Tubero, whom Livy names and weighs
- Key figures
- Romulus and Remus, Numa, Horatius, Tarquin the Proud, Lucretia, Brutus, Horatius Cocles, Mucius Scaevola, Coriolanus, Cincinnatus, Appius Claudius, Verginia, Camillus
- Translation quoted
- D. Spillan, The History of Rome, Books I–VIII (Bohn's Classical Library, 1849)
Context
Titus Livius was born at Patavium in northern Italy, probably in 59 BC, and died there in AD 17. Unlike most Roman historians he held no public office and commanded no armies; he seems to have lived as a private man of letters, on friendly terms with Augustus, who is said to have teased him as a 'Pompeian' for his warm treatment of the Republic's last defenders. His whole working life went into one enormous project, a history of Rome 'from the founding of the city' (ab urbe condita) in 142 books, of which thirty-five survive. This guide covers the first pentad, Books I–V, which Livy seems to have conceived and published as a unit: it runs from the landing of Aeneas to the sack of Rome by the Gauls and the city's refoundation under Camillus.
The first pentad was written in the late 20s BC, just after the civil wars that ended the Republic and while Octavian was becoming Augustus. A passing remark in Book I, on the closing of the temple of Janus after Actium, and the mention of the title 'Augustus' in Book IV, help date it (Luce 1965). The question of how far Livy's history serves, questions or simply coexists with the new regime has been debated ever since Ronald Syme's classic essay (Syme 1959). Certainly the themes of the first books, refoundation after catastrophe, the danger of kingship, the value of discipline and piety, had urgent meaning for readers who had lived through Philippi and Actium.
Livy's Preface, which stands before Book I in the Latin (it is not printed in the translation quoted here), sets out a moral programme. He admits that the earliest traditions are 'poetic tales' rather than reliable records and declines either to affirm or to refute them. What matters, he says, is to see how Rome's power was won by its men and its customs, how discipline gradually slipped, and how the present age has reached a point where 'we can endure neither our vices nor their remedies'. History is valuable because it sets out 'examples of every kind' on a conspicuous monument, models to imitate and warnings to avoid. This idea of exemplary history governs the whole pentad (Moles 1993) (Chaplin 2000).
For the early centuries Livy had no contemporary evidence. He drew on the Roman annalists of the second and first centuries BC, who had already reshaped family legends, priestly records and Greek models into continuous narrative. Livy often signals uncertainty, reports variant versions and weighs one authority against another, but his aim is literary and moral as much as factual. Modern historians of archaic Rome therefore read him with great caution, while literary critics study how he shapes the tradition into dramatic scenes, speeches and patterns of repetition (Ogilvie 1965) (Cornell 1995) (Forsythe 2005).
Livy was admired throughout antiquity, and after the Renaissance he became one of the most influential of all ancient authors. Machiavelli built his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy around these books; the stories of Lucretia, Horatius, Scaevola, Cincinnatus and Verginia passed into painting, drama and political argument, from Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece and Coriolanus to the republican iconography of the American and French revolutions. To read the first pentad is to read the founding myths of Western republicanism in the form in which later centuries knew them.
Plot overview
Book I tells the regal period. After Aeneas settles in Latium and his son founds Alba Longa, the twins Romulus and Remus, sons of the Vestal Rhea Silvia and, she claims, of Mars, are exposed, suckled by a she-wolf and raised by shepherds. Romulus founds Rome after killing his brother, fills it with refugees and wins wives by seizing the Sabine women. Six further kings follow: the pious Numa, the warlike Tullus Hostilius (under whom the Horatii fight the Curiatii), Ancus Marcius, the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus, the reforming Servius Tullius, and finally Tarquin the Proud, who murders Servius with the help of his daughter Tullia. When the king's son Sextus rapes Lucretia and she kills herself, Lucius Junius Brutus leads the expulsion of the kings.
Book II begins the free Republic under two annual consuls. Brutus executes his own sons for conspiring to restore the Tarquins. Lars Porsena of Clusium besieges the city, and the defence of Rome produces the exemplary deeds of Horatius Cocles at the bridge, Mucius Scaevola at the king's altar and the hostage Cloelia. At home the struggle between patricians and plebeians (the 'Conflict of the Orders') breaks out over debt and military service; the plebs secede to the Sacred Mount, are persuaded back by Menenius Agrippa's fable of the belly, and win their own tribunes. The exiled Coriolanus marches on Rome and is turned back only by his mother.
Book III continues wars with the Aequi and Volsci and the political struggle at home. Cincinnatus is called from his plough to rescue a trapped consular army and lays down his dictatorship after sixteen days. To settle demands for written law, ten men (the decemvirs) replace the consuls and draw up the Twelve Tables, but the second board, led by Appius Claudius, turns tyrannical. When Appius tries to seize the plebeian girl Verginia by a fraudulent claim that she is a slave, her father kills her to save her freedom, and a second secession brings down the decemvirate and restores the consuls and tribunes.
Book IV recounts the struggle over intermarriage and the consulship (the speech of the tribune Canuleius), the killing of Spurius Maelius on suspicion of aiming at kingship, and the wars with Veii and Fidenae, including Cossus' winning of the spolia opima. Book V narrates the ten-year siege and capture of Veii by Marcus Furius Camillus, his exile, and then the disaster at the river Allia, where a Gallic army routs the Romans and sacks the city. The Capitol holds out, saved by the sacred geese and Marcus Manlius; Camillus returns as dictator, drives off the Gauls, and in a great final speech persuades the Romans not to abandon their ruined city for Veii but to rebuild Rome on its own site.
Book by book
Book 1: The Kings: Founding, Growth and the Fall of the Monarchy
Chapters 1–60 (the Preface, which precedes them in the Latin, is not printed in this translation)
Summary
In his Preface Livy confesses the scale of his task and the uncertainty of the earliest traditions, and offers his history as a store of examples for a morally exhausted age. The narrative opens with Aeneas and Antenor escaping from Troy, Aeneas' marriage to Lavinia, daughter of king Latinus, and the foundation of Lavinium and then Alba Longa. Generations later the usurper Amulius forces his niece Rhea Silvia to become a Vestal virgin; when she bears twins, whose father she names as Mars, he orders them drowned. The basket is stranded by the flooded Tiber, a she-wolf suckles the boys, and the shepherd Faustulus raises them.
Grown to manhood, Romulus and Remus restore their grandfather Numitor to the throne of Alba and decide to found a city of their own. They quarrel over the auspices, and in the 'more common account' Romulus kills Remus for leaping his new wall. Romulus fortifies the Palatine, opens an asylum for fugitives, and, refused intermarriage by his neighbours, seizes the Sabine women at a festival. The ensuing war ends when the women throw themselves between their fathers and their husbands, and Romans and Sabines become one people. Romulus vanishes in a storm and is hailed as a god.
The six later kings each add something to the state. Numa gives Rome its religious institutions, guided by the nymph Egeria. Tullus Hostilius fights Alba: the duel of the Roman Horatii and the Alban Curiatii decides the war, but the surviving Horatius kills his sister for mourning her Curiatian fiancé, and is saved from execution only by appeal to the people. Tullus later tears the traitor Mettus Fufetius apart between chariots and destroys Alba. Ancus Marcius extends the city; the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus, urged on by his wife Tanaquil, wins the throne; Servius Tullius, born in the palace, organises the citizen body by wealth in the census.
Servius' daughter Tullia, married to the ambitious Lucius Tarquinius, drives her husband to murder her father and then rides her carriage over his corpse. Tarquin the Proud rules by terror and great public works. During the siege of Ardea the princes test their wives' virtue, and Lucretia, found spinning late at night, wins. Sextus Tarquin returns, rapes her at swordpoint, and the next day she tells her father and husband, makes them swear vengeance, and stabs herself. Brutus, who had feigned dullness to survive, draws the knife from the wound, swears to expel the kings, and rouses the people; Tarquin is shut out and two consuls are elected.
Analysis
Livy's Preface frames everything that follows. He refuses to vouch for the miraculous stories of the founding, yet he will not reject them either, since a people as great as Rome may be allowed to trace its origins to the gods. The real interest of history lies elsewhere: in the patterns of conduct that made Rome great and the decline that threatens it. The reader is invited to look at the past as at a monument and to choose models and warnings for 'yourself and your state' (Moles 1993). Book I puts this programme into practice. Almost every episode is both a story of origins, explaining a place-name, a ritual or an institution, and a moral example.
Even the founding is morally double. The twins are exposed by a tyrant and saved by providence, but Rome begins with fratricide, a population of runaways, and the rape of the Sabine women. Livy does not hide the violence; instead he shows it being converted into community. The Sabine women's intervention turns a war of revenge into a union of two peoples, and Romulus' disappearance is wrapped in alternative explanations (deification or murder by the senators) that Livy reports side by side. Recent critics have stressed how the theme of refoundation, of Rome repeatedly making itself anew, runs from Romulus to Camillus, and how it would have spoken to readers under a new 'founder', Augustus (Miles 1995) (Wiseman 1995).
The book's last movement is a carefully built tragedy of kingship. The monarchy's corruption runs through women's stories: Tanaquil makes kings, Tullia murders one, Lucretia's chastity and death unmake the dynasty. The 'Wicked Street' where Tullia drove over her father is the antitype of Lucretia's household virtue. Feminist readings have shown how Lucretia's body becomes the ground on which the transition from monarchy to Republic is enacted: her violation is a crime against the household and therefore against the state, and the men's oath over her corpse turns private grief into political revolution (Joplin 1990) (Joshel 1992) (Donaldson 1982).
But, in my opinion, the origin of so great a city, and the establishment of an empire next in power to that of the gods, was due to the Fates.
Livy's own voice intervenes before the birth of the twins. Having doubted the legends in his Preface, he still insists that Rome's rise was fated, so that providence and moral explanation work side by side throughout the book.
So shall every one fare, who shall dare to leap over my fortifications.
Romulus' words over Remus' body in the 'more common account'. The city's first wall is sanctified by a brother's blood; later Roman writers, especially after the civil wars, read the fratricide as Rome's original sin.
It were better that we perish than live widowed or fatherless without one or other of you.
The Sabine women, the victims of the rape, become the makers of peace. By claiming both sides as kin they turn a war into a union, an early example of the Roman habit of absorbing former enemies.
So perish every Roman woman who shall mourn an enemy.
Horatius kills his sister for weeping over her Curiatian fiancé. The episode sets patriotic victory against family feeling, and the trial that follows (the first appeal to the people) shows the young state working out how law should judge a hero.
But the body only has been violated, the mind is guiltless; death shall be my witness.
Lucretia separates mind from body, but refuses the consolation that innocence is enough; she kills herself so that no unchaste woman may ever plead her example. Her suicide is both a private vindication and a public exemplum.
By this blood, most pure before the pollution of royal villany, I swear
Brutus turns the knife of Lucretia's suicide into an instrument of oath. The private crime becomes the foundation of the Republic, and the oath against kingship echoes through Roman history down to the Ides of March.
Book 2: The Free Republic: Liberty, Porsena and the Conflict of the Orders
Chapters 1–65
Summary
Livy opens with a reflection on liberty: Rome was ready for freedom only after the kings had bound the people together, and liberty began with the annual consulship rather than any reduction of power. Brutus binds the people by oath never to tolerate a king. A conspiracy of young nobles to restore the Tarquins is discovered, and Brutus as consul presides over the scourging and beheading of his own sons. He dies in single combat with Arruns Tarquinius, and his fellow consul Valerius, suspected of royal ambitions because he builds a house on a hill, publicly lowers his fasces before the people and passes a law of appeal, earning the name Publicola.
The Etruscan king Lars Porsena of Clusium attacks Rome on behalf of the Tarquins. Horatius Cocles holds the Sublician bridge alone until it is cut down behind him and then swims the Tiber in armour. During the siege the young noble Gaius Mucius enters Porsena's camp to assassinate him, kills the wrong man, and, threatened with fire, thrusts his right hand into the altar flame; Porsena releases him in admiration and makes peace. The hostage Cloelia leads a group of girls across the river, and Porsena, honouring her courage, lets her choose half the hostages to free.
After the Latin war and the battle of Lake Regillus, the internal conflict between patricians and plebeians comes to the fore. Debt bondage, harsh creditors and endless military service drive the plebs to secede to the Sacred Mount. Menenius Agrippa persuades them to return with the fable of the limbs that starved the belly, and the plebs gain their own protected officers, the tribunes. Coriolanus, a fierce patrician who opposed cheap grain for the plebs, is exiled, joins the Volscians and leads them against Rome; neither envoys nor priests can move him, but his mother Veturia and wife Volumnia do. The book continues with agrarian agitation, the heroic disaster of the Fabii at the Cremera, and further wars.
Analysis
Book II is the book of libertas. Livy's opening sentence announces a new subject, the 'sovereignty of the laws, more powerful than that of men', and the book tests what that means. Freedom is first defended against the Tarquins and Porsena, then contested from within, as the plebs ask whose freedom the Republic protects. The structure itself changes: from the reign-by-reign narrative of Book I to the annalistic form, year by year under the consuls, that will dominate the rest of the history (Ogilvie 1965) (Vasaly 2015).
The great exemplary figures of the war with Porsena form a set: Horatius, Mucius, Cloelia. Each is a single body standing in for the city, and each act is staged before an audience, Roman and enemy. Livy's narrator draws attention to how such deeds are received and remembered, noting that Horatius' feat will win 'more fame than credit' and recording the monuments (a statue, the Mucian Meadows, Cloelia's equestrian statue) that kept them alive. Matthew Roller has shown how Roman exemplarity works through this chain of deed, audience, commemoration and imitation (Roller 2004) (Feldherr 1998).
Brutus executing his sons is perhaps the most disturbing example in the pentad. Livy lets us see the father's face behind the consul's duty, so that the reader both admires and recoils. The scene shows that the Republic demands the subordination of family to state, a theme already seen in Horatius' killing of his sister and to be seen again with Verginius. Coriolanus reverses the pattern: here the family, in the person of his mother, saves the state from a son who has put his own wounded honour before his country (Chaplin 2000).
The affairs, civil and military, of the Roman people, henceforward free, their annual magistrates, and the sovereignty of the laws, more powerful than that of men, I shall now detail.
A second preface. Livy defines the Republic by three features, freedom, annual office and the rule of law, and so sets the terms by which the rest of the pentad will be judged.
the consulship imposed on the father the office of punishing his own children
Brutus presides over his sons' execution. Livy's phrasing shows the office acting through the man; the father's grief 'bursting forth' makes the example terrible rather than simply admirable.
having dared an act which is likely to obtain more fame than credit with posterity.
A characteristic Livian aside on Horatius Cocles. The historian admits that the story strains belief yet records it for its exemplary power; fame, not factual certainty, is what keeps it alive.
Both to act and to suffer with fortitude is a Roman's part.
Mucius' defiance before Porsena, just before he burns his hand. The sentence became a byword for Roman endurance, and the act is a spectacle that defeats the enemy without a battle.
Before I receive your embrace, let me know whether I have come to an enemy or to a son; whether I am in your camp a captive or a mother?
Veturia confronts Coriolanus. The public voice of Rome speaks through a mother, and her questions force him to see that his war against the city is a war against his own family.
Book 3: Cincinnatus, the Decemvirs and Verginia
Chapters 1–72
Summary
The struggle between the orders continues. The tribune Terentilius Harsa proposes a commission to write down the laws and limit consular power, and the agitation lasts for years. The arrogant young patrician Caeso Quinctius, son of Cincinnatus, is driven into exile, and the Sabine adventurer Appius Herdonius seizes the Capitol with slaves and exiles before being dislodged.
When the consul Minucius and his army are trapped by the Aequi on Mount Algidus, the senate appoints Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus dictator. The envoys find him working his four-acre farm across the Tiber; he puts on his toga, raises an army, surrounds the Aequi, sends them under the yoke, celebrates a triumph, and resigns on the sixteenth day of a six-month office.
At last the patricians agree to a written code. Consuls and tribunes are suspended, and in 451 BC a board of ten (decemviri) is elected with supreme power. The first board produces ten tables of law and governs well; the second, dominated by Appius Claudius, adds two more tables but becomes a tyranny, keeps power beyond its term, and terrorises the citizens. The murder of the outspoken soldier Siccius Dentatus by agents of the decemvirs foreshadows worse.
Appius conceives a lust for Verginia, the betrothed daughter of the plebeian centurion Lucius Verginius. He has his client Marcus Claudius claim her as a slave and, sitting as judge, awards her to the claimant. Verginius, recalled from the army, takes his daughter aside by the shops of the Forum, seizes a butcher's knife and kills her, the only way left to keep her free. The army and plebs secede again, the decemvirs fall, consuls and tribunes are restored by the Valerio-Horatian laws, and Appius dies in prison before his trial. The book closes with renewed wars and further disputes.
Analysis
Cincinnatus is the pentad's most famous image of old Roman virtue: power accepted as a duty, exercised swiftly and laid down at once. Livy introduces him with a pointed address to readers who think that honour and excellence require wealth; the four acres and the plough are the moral argument. But Livy also notes that the plebs regarded Cincinnatus' power as excessive and the man as harsh, and his son Caeso's violence has already been shown. The exemplum is not as simple as later tradition made it.
The Verginia story is explicitly modelled on Lucretia's. Livy announces that the decemvirs fell from the same cause as the kings, lust leading to violence against a chaste woman, and the parallels are close: a tyrant's desire, a father's agonised response, a body displayed to rouse the people, a revolution that restores liberty. The difference is significant: Verginia is plebeian, the threat is a perversion of law rather than open force, and the killing is done by her father in the name of her freedom. The narrative therefore becomes an argument about the meaning of libertas and the right of appeal, the plebs' 'safeguard of liberty' (Joshel 1992) (Vasaly 2015).
Book III also shows Livy's skill with crowds and speeches. The alternation of consular and tribunician voices dramatises the Conflict of the Orders as a contest of rhetoric, in which both sides claim to defend the community. Modern historians debate how much of this struggle reflects fifth-century conditions and how much the politics of the late Republic projected backward by the annalists (Cornell 1995) (Forsythe 2005).
It is worth those persons' while to listen, who despise all things human in comparison with riches
Livy steps forward to point the moral before Cincinnatus enters. The narrator explicitly frames the episode as an exemplum against the luxury and greed of his own age.
Quintius laid down his dictatorship on the sixteenth day, having received it for six months.
The plain statement is the climax. Voluntary surrender of absolute power was the virtue that late-Republican strongmen most conspicuously lacked.
so that the decemvirs not only had the same end as the kings had, but the same cause also of losing their power.
Livy invites the reader to read Verginia against Lucretia. History repeats itself in moral patterns, and the repetition is part of its teaching.
In this one way, the only one in my power, do I secure to you your liberty.
Verginius kills his daughter. Freedom is measured by the body of a woman, as in Lucretia's story; the act is presented as tragic necessity, and it turns the plebs against the decemvirs.
Book 4: Canuleius, Maelius and the Wars with Veii and Fidenae
Chapters 1–61
Summary
In 445 BC the tribune Gaius Canuleius proposes that patricians and plebeians may intermarry, while his colleagues demand that one consul may be plebeian. The patricians protest that mixed marriages will confuse the auspices and family lines. Canuleius replies in a long speech that Rome has always grown by admitting newcomers, even its kings, and that a city meant to last for ever must be able to create new institutions. The marriage law passes; as a compromise for the consulship, military tribunes with consular power are introduced, and in the following years the censorship is created.
During a famine the rich equestrian Spurius Maelius distributes grain at his own expense and is suspected of aiming at kingship. The aged Cincinnatus is made dictator; Maelius refuses his summons and is cut down in the Forum by the master of the horse, Gaius Servilius Ahala. Cincinnatus justifies the killing to the people, and Maelius' house is razed.
War with Veii and Fidenae follows the murder of Roman envoys. Aulus Cornelius Cossus kills the Veientine king Lars Tolumnius in battle and dedicates his armour as the second spolia opima in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. Here Livy pauses to note that Augustus, restorer of the temple, told him that the inscription on the linen breastplate called Cossus consul. The rest of the book records plague, famine, disputes over the military tribunate, further campaigns against Volsci and Aequi, the destruction of Fidenae, and the introduction of pay for soldiers, which allows Rome to fight year-round campaigns.
Analysis
Canuleius' speech is one of the most important statements of Roman identity in Livy. The tribune argues from history itself: Numa was a Sabine, Tarquinius Priscus an Etruscan immigrant, Servius Tullius the son of a captive, and still they were kings; Rome was never a closed aristocracy. The idea that a 'city doomed for eternal duration' must keep inventing new offices and absorbing new citizens is a defence of change in the name of tradition, and it anticipates the claims made for the expansion of citizenship in Livy's own century (Miles 1995) (Vasaly 2015).
The killing of Maelius is a darker counterpart. The tradition praised Ahala as a tyrannicide, and Cicero and others cited him as a precedent for killing would-be kings, most obviously in the debates around the Gracchi and Caesar. Livy gives Cincinnatus a forceful justification but also records the tribunes' complaints that Maelius died uncondemned, so that the episode raises the question of when the state may kill a citizen without trial.
The Cossus digression is the most direct allusion to Augustus in the pentad. In 29 BC Marcus Licinius Crassus had claimed the spolia opima as a proconsul, and Octavian seems to have blocked the claim on the ground that only a commander fighting under his own auspices was entitled to it. Livy reports the emperor's testimony with respect but leaves the contradiction with his sources unresolved. Scholars disagree whether the passage is deference, discreet irony, or simply a historian recording an interesting piece of evidence (Syme 1959) (Luce 1965) (Miles 1995).
remind them that we are their fellow citizens, and that though we possess not the same power, we inhabit the same city?
Canuleius makes shared residence, not shared birth, the basis of citizenship. The phrase states the plebeian claim at its most modest and its most unanswerable.
Who can doubt but that in a city doomed for eternal duration, increasing to an immense magnitude, new civil offices, priesthoods, rights of families and of individuals, may be established?
A key statement of Roman openness to innovation. The idea of the 'eternal city' appears here not as a guarantee of stability but as an argument for change.
had conceived the hope to purchase the liberty of his countrymen for two pounds of corn
Cincinnatus' contempt for Maelius. Generosity to the poor is construed as a bid for tyranny, an argument with obvious resonance in the age of the Gracchi and of Caesar's largesse.
Having once heard Augustus Cæsar, the founder or restorer of all our temples
The historian cites the emperor as a witness. The sentence both honours Augustus and places him inside the tradition of founders and restorers, a role central to his self-presentation.
Book 5: Veii, Camillus and the Gallic Sack
Chapters 1–55
Summary
The siege of Veii, Rome's great Etruscan rival, drags on for ten years, a Roman Troy. Winter campaigning and the soldiers' pay cause political quarrels at home. A prodigy, the rising of the Alban Lake, is interpreted as a sign that Veii will fall only when the lake is drained. Marcus Furius Camillus, appointed dictator, vows a temple to Mater Matuta and a tithe of the spoils to Apollo, tunnels under the city and takes it. Juno, the city's goddess, is invited to Rome and seems to nod her consent. Camillus' triumph with white horses and his demand for the tithe make him unpopular.
Besieging Falerii, Camillus refuses the offer of a schoolmaster who has led the children of the leading citizens into the Roman camp; he has the traitor stripped and driven home by the boys with rods, and the Faliscans, moved by Roman good faith, surrender. The plebs propose to settle half the population at Veii, and Camillus opposes it. Accused over the booty of Veii, he goes into exile at Ardea, praying that Rome may soon regret him.
A voice warns of the Gauls' approach and is ignored. The Gauls, migrating into Italy, besiege Clusium; Roman envoys, the Fabii, break the law of nations by fighting on the Etruscan side, and Rome refuses to surrender them. The Gauls march on Rome, and at the river Allia the Roman army flees almost without a fight. The city is abandoned; the young men hold the Capitol, the Vestals carry the sacred objects to Caere, and the elderly nobles wait in their ivory chairs in their doorways. The Gauls, awed at first, kill them when Marcus Papirius strikes one who strokes his beard, and burn the city.
A night assault on the Capitol is betrayed by the cackling of Juno's sacred geese, and Marcus Manlius throws the leading Gaul from the rock. Famine forces the defenders to negotiate a ransom of a thousand pounds of gold; when the Romans protest the Gauls' false weights, Brennus throws his sword on the scale with the words 'Woe to the vanquished!' At that moment Camillus, recalled and made dictator, arrives, annuls the bargain and defeats the Gauls. The tribunes again urge migration to Veii, but Camillus' long speech on the religious bonds that tie Romans to their own soil, sealed by a centurion's chance cry to 'fix the standard', persuades the people to stay and rebuild.
Analysis
Book V gives the pentad its shape. It moves from Rome's greatest conquest so far to its near annihilation and then to a second founding, with Camillus as a new Romulus. The pattern is carefully built: Veii falls like Troy after ten years, and its goddess emigrates to Rome; Rome itself then falls and is refounded. Christina Kraus has shown how Livy plays on the topoi of the captured city and the refoundation to make Book V both an ending and a new beginning (Kraus 1994) (Miles 1995).
Religion is central to the explanation. Livy's Camillus argues that Rome fell because it neglected the gods (the ignored warning voice, the envoys' violation of the law of nations) and was saved by observing them, from the sacred geese to the priests' care for the cult objects. D. S. Levene has shown how Livy uses religious material to shape the moral and causal structure of the narrative, without committing his own voice to belief in every prodigy (Levene 1993).
Camillus' final speech is the pentad's answer to the Preface. Rome's identity is not portable; it is tied to a particular landscape, the hills, the river, the Capitol, and to rites that can be performed only in their proper places. Mary Jaeger has read the History as a 'written Rome', a monument whose topography the reader learns to walk, and this speech is its culmination (Jaeger 1997). For Augustan readers the theme of restoration after destruction, with its stress on temples and ancestral religion, would have had obvious contemporary meaning, though how far Camillus is meant to evoke Augustus remains a matter of interpretation (Syme 1959) (Luce 1977).
Juno, art thou willing to go to Rome
The evocatio of Juno from captured Veii. Livy reports the young soldier's joking question and the later addition that the goddess spoke, carefully distinguishing what is certain from what the tradition embroidered.
There are laws of war as well of peace; and we have learned to wage them justly not less than bravely.
Camillus rejects the traitorous schoolmaster of Falerii. Roman good faith wins the war that arms could not, an ideal of empire founded on justice.
Woe to the vanquished!
Brennus' insult as the gold is weighed. The phrase (vae victis) marks the lowest point of Roman fortune and the moment before Camillus' arrival reverses it.
to recover their country with steel, not with gold
Camillus annuls the ransom. The contrast of iron and gold, courage and money, restates the moral of the Preface and of Cincinnatus' story.
Not without good reason did gods and men select this place for founding a city
Camillus praises the site of Rome: its healthy hills, its river and its nearness to the sea. Geography becomes destiny, and the speech becomes a second founding of the city in words.
Characters
Narrator
- Livy (the narrator)
- A strong presence in his own history. He comments on the reliability of traditions, weighs sources, points morals and addresses the reader directly. His voice combines scepticism about miraculous stories with a conviction that the stories matter as examples.
Kings
- Romulus
- Son of Rhea Silvia and, by tradition, Mars; twin of Remus and founder and first king of Rome. He kills his brother, creates the asylum, the senate and the first institutions, organises the rape of the Sabine women and fights the resulting war. He disappears in a storm and is worshipped as the god Quirinus. Livy presents him as a great warrior-founder whose story is shadowed by violence.
- Remus
- Twin of Romulus. Livy gives two versions of his death: in a brawl over the auspices, or at his brother's hand after leaping the new wall. His death makes the founding of Rome a story of fratricide.
- Numa Pompilius
- The Sabine second king, chosen for his justice and piety. He gives Rome its calendar, priesthoods and religious law, claiming guidance from the nymph Egeria, and keeps the peace throughout his reign.
- Tanaquil
- Etruscan wife of Tarquinius Priscus, skilled in reading omens. She urges her husband to Rome and to the throne, and after his murder secures the succession for Servius Tullius.
- Servius Tullius
- Sixth king, born in the palace, possibly of a captive mother; marked out by a flame about his head. He creates the census and the centuriate organisation of citizens by wealth and is murdered by Tarquin with his daughter Tullia's connivance.
- Tullia
- Servius' younger daughter, a model of criminal ambition. She engineers her own and Tarquin's second marriage by murder, urges him to seize the throne, and drives her carriage over her father's body.
- Tarquin the Proud (Lucius Tarquinius Superbus)
- Seventh and last king. He rules without consulting senate or people, kills his opponents, wins Gabii by treachery and burdens the plebs with forced labour on great public works. He is expelled after his son's crime.
- Sextus Tarquin
- Son of Tarquin the Proud, who rapes Lucretia. He flees to Gabii and is killed there by enemies he had made.
Romans and Sabines
- The Sabine women
- Seized by the Romans at the Consualia, they later end the war by placing themselves between their fathers and husbands. Thirty of their names were said to have been given to the curiae.
Romans
- Horatius (of the Horatii)
- Surviving champion of the triplets who fight the Alban Curiatii. Victorious, he kills his sister for mourning her betrothed among the enemy, is condemned, and is saved by appealing to the people and by his father's plea.
- Lucretia
- Wife of Tarquinius Collatinus, the model of the chaste Roman matron. After her rape she summons her father and husband, names her attacker, demands vengeance and stabs herself. Her death becomes the occasion of the Republic's founding.
Republic
- Lucius Junius Brutus
- Nephew of Tarquin who pretends to be dull (brutus) to survive. He leads the revolt after Lucretia's death, becomes one of the first two consuls, and executes his own sons for conspiring with the Tarquins. He is Livy's founding hero of liberty.
- Horatius Cocles
- Defender of the Sublician bridge against Porsena's army, who holds off the enemy while the bridge is cut down and then swims back across the Tiber.
- Gaius Mucius Scaevola
- Young noble who fails to assassinate Porsena and, to show his contempt for pain, holds his right hand in the altar fire. His surname Scaevola, 'Lefty', commemorates the deed.
- Cloelia
- A hostage given to Porsena who escapes across the Tiber with other girls; returned under the treaty, she is honoured by the king and by Rome with an equestrian statue.
- Menenius Agrippa
- Ambassador to the seceding plebs, who tells them the fable of the body's members and the belly and persuades them to return.
- Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus
- Hero of the capture of Corioli, exiled for his hostility to the plebs, who leads the Volscians against Rome and withdraws only at his mother's plea.
- Veturia
- Mother of Coriolanus, who, with his wife Volumnia and the Roman matrons, turns him back from the city. A temple of Fortuna Muliebris commemorates the women's service.
- Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
- Patrician farmer called from his plough to be dictator. He rescues the besieged army, triumphs and resigns within sixteen days; in old age he is dictator again to deal with Spurius Maelius.
- Appius Claudius
- Leading decemvir who turns the board of lawgivers into a tyranny and tries to seize Verginia through a fraudulent lawsuit. Arrested after the secession, he dies in prison.
- Verginia and Lucius Verginius
- The plebeian girl claimed as a slave by Appius' client, and her centurion father, who kills her to preserve her freedom and leads the army in revolt against the decemvirs.
- Gaius Canuleius
- Tribune of 445 BC who carries the law allowing marriage between patricians and plebeians, defending it in a speech on Rome's openness to newcomers.
- Spurius Maelius
- Wealthy equestrian who distributes grain in a famine and is killed by Servilius Ahala on suspicion of aiming at kingship.
- Marcus Furius Camillus
- Conqueror of Veii and Falerii, exiled through popular resentment, recalled as dictator to defeat the Gauls, and called a second founder of Rome after his speech against migration to Veii. He is the central figure of Book V.
- Marcus Manlius
- Former consul who, woken by the sacred geese, repels the Gauls' night assault on the Capitol and earns the name Capitolinus. Book VI will tell of his later fall.
Gauls
- Brennus
- Chieftain of the Gauls who defeats the Romans at the Allia, sacks the city and, at the weighing of the ransom, throws his sword onto the scales.
Themes
Exemplary history
Livy's Preface offers history as a collection of examples, models to imitate and warnings to avoid, set out as if on a public monument. The first pentad is full of such exempla: Lucretia's chastity, Brutus' severity, Horatius' and Mucius' courage, Cincinnatus' restraint, Camillus' good faith. Characters inside the story also use examples, appealing to precedent, comparing themselves with predecessors and imitating earlier deeds (Chaplin 2000) (Roller 2004).
The examples are rarely simple. Horatius kills his sister, Brutus his sons, Verginius his daughter; Cincinnatus is resented by the plebs; Camillus is exiled. Livy leaves the reader to judge, so that reading history becomes an exercise in moral discrimination rather than the passive reception of models.
Liberty and kingship
The pentad turns on the expulsion of the kings and the definition of libertas. Freedom means annual magistrates, the rule of law and, for the plebs, protection by tribunes and the right of appeal. Its opposite is regnum, kingship, which becomes the gravest charge in Roman politics: against Valerius, Spurius Cassius, Maelius and later Manlius.
Livy also shows that liberty has preconditions. In the opening chapters of Book II he argues that Rome was ready for freedom only after the kings had made it a community. Liberty is presented as a fragile achievement that depends on discipline and concord, and its abuse can be as dangerous as its absence (Vasaly 2015).
Concord and the Conflict of the Orders
Much of Books II–V is taken up by the struggle between patricians and plebeians over debt, land, law, intermarriage and access to office. Livy treats it with sympathy for both sides and with a constant concern for concordia. Menenius' fable, the secessions and the compromises of Canuleius' year all show a community that bends rather than breaks.
The theme had obvious relevance to readers who had seen civil discord destroy the Republic. Livy's early Rome repeatedly resolves conflicts that late-Republican Rome failed to resolve, and the pattern implies a lesson about moderation on both sides.
Women, the household and the state
Women are at the centre of several turning points: the Sabine women make peace, Tanaquil and Tullia make and unmake kings, Lucretia's death ends the monarchy, Veturia saves the city from Coriolanus, Verginia's death ends the decemvirate. The household (domus) is a model of the state, and crimes against it become political crimes.
Feminist scholarship has shown how these stories make women's bodies the ground on which male political change is enacted: Lucretia and Verginia are praised for chastity and then killed, and their bodies are displayed to move the crowd. Livy's narratives both honour the women and reveal how much the Republic's foundation depends on their sacrifice (Joplin 1990) (Joshel 1992).
Religion and the gods
Piety and impiety explain much of the narrative. Numa's institutions, the auspices, prodigies, vows and the careful treatment of sacred objects all matter. In Book V the neglect of a divine warning and of the law of nations brings the Gallic disaster, and religious observance brings recovery.
Livy's own position is nuanced. He reports prodigies and miracles but often distances himself ('they say', 'it is reported'), and he treats religion as a public bond as much as a matter of personal belief (Levene 1993).
Foundation and refoundation
Rome is founded more than once in these books: by Aeneas' descendants, by Romulus, by Brutus as founder of liberty, and by Camillus after the Gallic sack. Each refoundation follows a crisis and restores the city's identity.
This pattern spoke directly to Livy's contemporaries, who were living through a restoration after civil war under a ruler who presented himself as a new Romulus and restorer of temples. The first pentad does not simply flatter Augustus, but it gives his age a language in which to imagine renewal (Miles 1995) (Kraus 1994).
Truth, tradition and the historian
Livy is open about the uncertainty of his material. He gives alternative versions, notes disagreements between sources, and sometimes declines to decide. For the earliest period, he says, poetic tales cannot be confirmed or refuted.
This scepticism is not a weakness but part of his method: he invites readers to judge evidence and to see how traditions are formed. Critics now read Livy as a sophisticated author who uses the gaps in his evidence to explore how a society remembers its past (Luce 1977) (Miles 1995) (Woodman 1988).
Motifs
Spectacle and the watching crowd
Livy repeatedly stages events before an audience: the twins' fight over the auspices, Horatius' trial, Brutus executing his sons, Mucius at the altar, Lucretia's body in the Forum, Verginia's death. The reactions of the spectators guide the reader's response and show how examples enter collective memory (Feldherr 1998).
The body and the body politic
Bodies stand for the state: Menenius' fable of the belly, the violated bodies of Lucretia and Verginia, Mucius' burned hand, Mettus torn apart for dividing his loyalty. The physical and the political continually mirror each other.
Monuments and aetiology
Many episodes end by explaining a place-name, a rite or a monument: the Ruminal fig, the Lacus Curtius, the Sororium Tigillum, the Mucian Meadows, Cloelia's statue, the Aequimaelium. Livy's Rome is a landscape of memory in which the reader learns to read the city (Jaeger 1997).
Knives and oaths
Blood-oaths and blades mark the crises of liberty: the knife of Lucretia raised by Brutus, the butcher's knife of Verginius, the oath never to allow a king. Violence and sacred obligation are fused at each founding moment.
Fathers and sons
Paternal authority (patria potestas) runs through the pentad: Horatius' father, Brutus and his sons, Cincinnatus and Caeso, Verginius and Verginia. The father who judges his children reflects the state's claim on its citizens.
Symbols
The she-wolf
The she-wolf that nurses the twins becomes the emblem of Rome. Livy records the rationalising alternative that lupa also meant 'prostitute', showing his method of reporting both the legend and its sceptical reading.
The walls and the pomerium
Remus dies for leaping the new wall; the sacred boundary defines the city. The theme returns when the Gauls breach Rome and when Camillus insists that the city's holy places cannot be moved.
The plough and the toga
Cincinnatus at his plough, putting on his toga to receive the envoys, symbolises the old union of farmer and citizen-soldier and the idea that power should be taken up and laid down as a duty.
Gold and iron
From Tarpeia's bribe to the Gallic ransom, gold signals betrayal and humiliation; iron, the sword of Camillus, signals courage and recovery. The opposition carries the Preface's critique of wealth and luxury.
Critical debates
Livy and Augustus
How far is Livy's history an Augustan work? Older scholarship saw it as an expression of the new regime's ideals: restoration of religion, morality and ancestral virtue. Ronald Syme argued that Livy was largely independent, a man formed in the late Republic whose views coincided with, but did not depend on, Augustan propaganda (Syme 1959).
Recent critics have read the relationship as more complex. The Cossus digression shows Livy deferring to Augustus' testimony while noting the conflict with his sources; the themes of refoundation and the dangers of kingship can be read either as support for a restored Republic or as a warning to a new monarch. Gary Miles and Ann Vasaly emphasise that the pentad offers models of leadership that Augustan readers could apply to the present in more than one way (Miles 1995) (Vasaly 2015) (Luce 1965).
Historical reliability of the early books
Livy himself admits that records of the period before the Gallic sack were few and that many perished in the fire. Modern historians disagree about how much of his narrative preserves genuine tradition. Tim Cornell argues that the basic framework of the regal period and early Republic, including the Etruscan kings, the reforms of Servius and the Conflict of the Orders, rests on real information, even if the stories are elaborated (Cornell 1995).
Gary Forsythe and others are more sceptical, stressing how much the annalists invented, borrowed from Greek history or projected from later politics (Forsythe 2005). R. M. Ogilvie's commentary remains the standard guide to Livy's sources and to the layers of the tradition in Books I–V (Ogilvie 1965).
Exemplarity: simple models or moral problems?
Livy's Preface promises examples to imitate and avoid. Older readings took the exempla as straightforward moral lessons. Jane Chaplin has shown that Livy's characters themselves use and misuse examples, and that the lessons drawn from the past often conflict (Chaplin 2000).
Matthew Roller's analysis of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia describes a cultural process in which deeds are witnessed, evaluated, commemorated and imitated, sometimes with contested meanings (Roller 2004). The current consensus is that the exempla are tools for moral reasoning rather than simple rules, especially in troubling cases like Brutus and Verginius.
Lucretia, Verginia and the gendered foundations of the Republic
Why does the Republic need dead women? Patricia Joplin and Sandra Joshel have argued that Livy's narratives use women's bodies to define male political community: the violation and death of the chaste woman provide the occasion for men to bond, swear and act (Joplin 1990) (Joshel 1992).
Others emphasise that Lucretia is given agency and speech, and that Livy presents her choice with admiration. Ian Donaldson traced the long afterlife of her story, in which writers from Augustine to Shakespeare and beyond have argued over whether her suicide was noble or mistaken (Donaldson 1982).
Livy as historian or literary artist
Nineteenth-century critics often dismissed Livy as an uncritical compiler who wrote beautifully but understood little about politics, war or evidence. P. G. Walsh's study rehabilitated him as a historian with clear aims and methods (Walsh 1961), while T. J. Luce showed how carefully Livy planned the structure of his work in pentads and decades (Luce 1977).
A. J. Woodman's argument that ancient historiography was primarily a rhetorical genre, judged by plausibility rather than strict truth, changed the terms of the debate (Woodman 1988). Critics now tend to treat Livy's literary artistry and historical thinking as inseparable (Kraus 1997) (Mineo 2015).
Spectacle and the reader
Andrew Feldherr argued that Livy writes history as spectacle: public scenes, rituals and executions are presented visually, so that the reader becomes a spectator alongside the Roman crowd and is incorporated into the community (Feldherr 1998).
Mary Jaeger extended this to the city itself: the History builds a 'written Rome' whose monuments and topography carry memory, and Camillus' speech in Book V is the climax of this process (Jaeger 1997). These readings explain why place-names and monuments are so prominent in the first pentad.
Myth and the founding legends
Where did the stories of Romulus and Remus come from? T. P. Wiseman argued that the twin Remus was a relatively late addition to the legend, perhaps of the fourth or third century BC, reflecting the political partnership of patricians and plebeians (Wiseman 1995).
Others see older Italian or Indo-European roots. Matthew Fox has examined how Augustan writers, Livy among them, reshaped the regal period to explore their own concerns about monarchy and history (Fox 1996).
Key passages
But, in my opinion, the origin of so great a city, and the establishment of an empire next in power to that of the gods, was due to the Fates.
Just after doubting the legends, Livy affirms that Rome's rise was fated. The two attitudes, scepticism about details and faith in the city's destiny, coexist throughout the pentad. The phrase 'next in power to that of the gods' shows the scale of the history he is beginning.
But the body only has been violated, the mind is guiltless; death shall be my witness.
Lucretia insists on her innocence while choosing death. Her distinction between mind and body was much debated in later ages, notably by Augustine. In Livy her speech makes her death an act of will and judgement, and it turns private violation into public cause.
By this blood, most pure before the pollution of royal villany, I swear
Brutus' oath transforms grief into revolution. By swearing on Lucretia's blood he binds the founders of the Republic together and makes liberty a sacred obligation. The scene was one of the most often painted moments of Roman history.
The affairs, civil and military, of the Roman people, henceforward free, their annual magistrates, and the sovereignty of the laws, more powerful than that of men, I shall now detail.
The opening of Book II acts as a second preface. It defines the Republic by freedom, annual office and the rule of law, and so provides the standard by which the tyranny of the decemvirs and the ambitions of Maelius or Manlius will be judged.
Both to act and to suffer with fortitude is a Roman's part.
Mucius' words before Porsena define Roman virtus as endurance as well as action. The sentence became one of the best-known Roman maxims. The burning of his hand then turns the words into a spectacle that defeats the enemy king without battle.
It is worth those persons' while to listen, who despise all things human in comparison with riches
Livy addresses his contemporaries directly before telling the story of Cincinnatus. The aside links the exemplum to the Preface's critique of greed and luxury, and shows how history is meant to correct the present.
In this one way, the only one in my power, do I secure to you your liberty.
Verginius kills his daughter to keep her from Appius. The scene repeats Lucretia's story in a plebeian key: freedom is preserved through a woman's death, and the father's act becomes the signal for the overthrow of the decemvirs.
remind them that we are their fellow citizens, and that though we possess not the same power, we inhabit the same city?
The plebeian tribune states the claim to equality in its simplest form. His speech defends innovation as part of Roman tradition and makes Rome's openness to outsiders a source of its strength.
Woe to the vanquished!
The Gallic chieftain's insult over the ransom scales is the lowest point of Roman fortune in the pentad. The phrase vae victis became proverbial, and its reversal by Camillus' arrival makes the scene a turning point from humiliation to refoundation.
Standard-bearer, fix your standard! it is best for us to remain here.
A chance remark overheard in the Forum is taken as an omen and settles the debate about moving to Veii. The scene closes the pentad with a sign that the gods want Rome to stay where it was founded, and the rebuilding begins.
Questions for study
What does Livy's Preface say about the purpose of history, and how do the stories of Book I put that purpose into practice?
Consider the idea of examples to imitate and avoid, the image of the monument, and Livy's attitude to the legends. Choose two or three episodes (the Sabine women, Horatius, Lucretia) and ask what they teach and how clearly.
How does Livy handle the founding of Rome by Romulus, and what does his treatment of Remus' death and Romulus' disappearance suggest about his method?
Look at the alternative versions he reports and the comments he makes. Think about how violence is acknowledged and then turned into community.
Compare the stories of Lucretia and Verginia. What is the significance of the similarities and the differences?
Livy draws the comparison himself at 3.44. Consider class, the role of the father, the nature of the threat (force or law), and the political outcome.
Horatius kills his sister, Brutus his sons, Verginius his daughter. What is Livy's attitude to these acts, and what do they suggest about the relationship between family and state?
Pay attention to the reactions of spectators within the story and to Livy's own comments. Are these models, warnings or tragic necessities?
How do the exploits of Horatius Cocles, Mucius Scaevola and Cloelia work as exempla? Why is a woman included in the set?
Think about audience, commemoration (statues, place-names) and Porsena's reactions. Consider what Cloelia's courage and her choice of hostages add.
What is the Conflict of the Orders, and how does Livy represent the positions of patricians and plebeians?
Use Menenius' fable, the decemvirate and Canuleius' speech. Does Livy take sides, or does his concern for concord shape the narrative?
Why is Cincinnatus such a powerful example, and what complications does Livy include in his story?
Consider the address to readers at 3.26, the speed of his resignation, the resentment of the plebs, and his later role in the death of Maelius.
How does the Cossus digression in Book IV bear on the question of Livy's relationship to Augustus?
Consider the political context of the spolia opima in 29 BC and how Livy balances Augustus' testimony against his sources.
How does Book V use the fall of Veii and the sack of Rome to create a pattern of destruction and refoundation?
Think about Veii as a second Troy, the transfer of Juno, the Allia, the geese and Camillus as a second Romulus.
What arguments does Camillus use against moving to Veii, and why might they have mattered to readers in the 20s BC?
Consider religion, the sacred topography of the city, and the theme of restoration after disaster in the age of Augustus.
Further reading
- Chaplin, Jane D. Livy's Exemplary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Cornell, T. J. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC). London: Routledge, 1995.
- Donaldson, Ian. The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
- Feldherr, Andrew. Spectacle and Society in Livy's History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
- Forsythe, Gary. A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
- Fox, Matthew. Roman Historical Myths: The Regal Period in Augustan Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
- Jaeger, Mary. Livy's Written Rome. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
- Joplin, Patricia Klindienst. 'Ritual Work on Human Flesh: Livy's Lucretia and the Rape of the Body Politic.' Helios 17 (1990): 51–70.
- Joshel, Sandra R. 'The Body Female and the Body Politic: Livy's Lucretia and Verginia.' In Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, edited by Amy Richlin, 112–130. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Kraus, Christina Shuttleworth. '"No Second Troy": Topoi and Refoundation in Livy, Book V.' Transactions of the American Philological Association 124 (1994): 267–289.
- Kraus, C. S., and A. J. Woodman. Latin Historians. Greece and Rome: New Surveys in the Classics 27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
- Levene, D. S. Religion in Livy. Mnemosyne Supplements 127. Leiden: Brill, 1993.
- Luce, T. J. 'The Dating of Livy's First Decade.' Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 96 (1965): 209–240.
- Luce, T. J. Livy: The Composition of His History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
- Miles, Gary B. Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
- Mineo, Bernard, ed. A Companion to Livy. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
- Moles, John. 'Livy's Preface.' Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39 (1993): 141–168.
- Ogilvie, R. M. A Commentary on Livy, Books 1–5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
- Roller, Matthew B. 'Exemplarity in Roman Culture: The Cases of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia.' Classical Philology 99 (2004): 1–56.
- Syme, Ronald. 'Livy and Augustus.' Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 64 (1959): 27–87.
- Vasaly, Ann. Livy's Political Philosophy: Power and Personality in Early Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- Walsh, P. G. Livy: His Historical Aims and Methods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
- Wiseman, T. P. Remus: A Roman Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- Woodman, A. J. Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies. London: Croom Helm, 1988.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-21.