Livy

Livy (ca. 64 B.C.-ca. A.D. 12), or Titus Livius, was a Roman historian who lived in the period when Augustus was building the Roman Empire out of the ruins of the republican system. In a life of quiet study Livy became the leading historian of his day.

Livy was born in Patavium (Padua), in his day one of the largest and most prosperous cities in Italy. St. Jerome gives 59 B.C. as the date of Livy's birth, but it is probable that he was mistaken and that Livy was born in 64 B.C. In Patavium he received an education similar to that given to any wealthy young Roman except that he did not have the usual culminating period of study in a Greek city. He may have started adult life as a teacher of rhetoric in his native town, and there is some evidence that he also wrote works on philosophy, which have not survived, but soon he conceived a project for a large-scale history of Rome.

By 30 B.C. Livy had moved to Rome, and from this time on he lived and worked mainly in the capital. He saw no military service and took no part in politics, and as far as we know he never traveled outside Italy, apart from a possible trip to Athens. Soon after his arrival in Rome he became acquainted with Augustus and remained on friendly terms with the Emperor and his family thereafter, but there is no sign that he depended on imperial patronage for his livelihood, as Horace and Virgil depended on the patronage of Maecenas. Livy's family was prosperous, and he probably inherited enough property to enable him to devote all his time and energy to his history, on which he continued to work almost to the end of his days. He died in Patavium in A.D. 12 (or 17 according to Jerome.)

Early Roman Historiography

When Livy started his work, Romans had been writing history for 200 years, and the nature of the genre was well established. Earlier historians had either covered the whole story of Rome from its foundation to their own day or had dealt in much greater detail with a short segment of more recent history. Most of them were members of the aristocratic ruling class of Rome and had played some part in the wars and politics of the republic.

These works were written mostly according to the annalists system, that is, with all the events of each year discussed together, even if they had little or no logical connection with each other. This was an awkward system, especially for periods when two or three sets of events might be going on simultaneously for several years in different parts of the Mediterranean world, but by Livy's day the technique had become traditional. Another traditional element which seems odd to modern readers is the custom of including in the narrative lengthy speeches which purport to be the actual words uttered on various occasions by leading men. This practice, taken over by Roman historians from Greek models, Livy also accepted without question.

Livy's History

Livy's great work, Ab urbe condita (From the Foundation of the City), covered the history of Rome from its mythical foundation in 753 B.C. to his own day, and its composition went on continually throughout his life. The first five books were published between 27 and 25 B.C., and Livy continued the history's publication thereafter in periodic batches of several books. It is probable that the last 22 books, covering the career of Augustus to 9 B.C., were not published until after the Emperor's death in A.D. 14 and, therefore, also after Livy's own death.

At its completion, Ab urbe condita was an enormous work in no less than 142 books. Only about a quarter of the text has survived - we have 35 books complete: I-X, which cover the first 460 years of Rome's history, and XXI-XLV, which cover the events of 219-167 B.C. In addition we have Periochae, or summaries, of all but two of the lost books (and of the extant books as well), but these are very brief and were compiled not from Livy's full text but from an abridged edition that is now lost.

Moreover, the anonymous compiler of the Periochae was capable of misunderstanding the text in front of him, and consequently the summaries give only a very shadowy picture of the lost books. The scale of the work increased steadily as Livy got closer to his own times. Book I covered the whole of the regal period, nearly 250 years, and the next 9 books dealt with more than 200 years but the 10 books XXI-XXX cover only the 18 years of the Second Punic War, and by the time he got down to the 1st century B.C., Livy was devoting a whole book to almost every year.

As a Historian

Except for the boldness and scope of his undertaking, and the untiring industry with which he worked at it throughout a lifetime, Livy cannot really be classed as one of the world's major historians. For the most part he depended for his material on earlier writers of the 2d and 1st centuries B.C., and there is no sign that he made any attempt to consult the available documentary evidence, which was not inconsiderable. Unfortunately we cannot judge how he dealt with the history of his own times, for which he must have had to do most of the research himself, as the Periochae of the last 20 books are more than usually brief and uninformative.

In his choice of sources to follow, Livy was often quite shrewd, as when he picked the Greek historian Polybios as his main guide for the Eastern wars of the early 2d century B.C., and if elsewhere his sources were less reliable, that was sometimes because they were all he had. But Livy's use of them was quite uncritical, and his choice between alternative accounts of an event was often determined not so much by logic or reason as by a preference for a story that pointed a moral or redounded to the greater glory of Rome.

Livy's ignorance of war and politics made it hard for him to judge properly the reliability of his sources or to allow for any political bias that might have affected them. In addition he was sometimes careless in matters of chronology, and although his knowledge of geography was slight, he does not seem to have taken much trouble to see for himself even those sites which lay close at hand in Italy. But for all its weaknesses Livy's history is still one of the best accounts of the Roman republic, and the loss of three-quarters of his great work is one of the most serious gaps in our knowledge of Roman literature.

As a Writer

Livy's merit as a writer is incontestable. His style, which owed much to Cicero and to Latin poetry, was vivid and colorful. He approached his task with a vision of the greatness and splendor of that past which was certainly not very realistic but was still a noble and inspiring concept. He brought to his work an old-fashioned concept of moral excellence which may not have enhanced his performance as a historian, but, together with the attractive literary style with which he told so effectively the story of the Roman Republic, and particularly the half-legendary tales of its earliest days, it has made his history an enduring part of the heritage of Western Europe.

Further Reading

There is a complete translation of all that is extant of Livy's history, including the Periochae, by B. O. Foster and others (14 vols., 1919-1959). Extracts from the complete text were translated, with an introduction, by Moses Hadas and J. P. Poe, A History of Rome: Selections (1962); and there are two sets of extracts translated by Aubrey de Selincourt under the titles Early History of Rome: Books I-V (1960) and The War with Hannibal: Books XXI-XXX (1965).

The best full account of Livy's career and work is P. G. Walsh, Livy: His Historical Aims and Methods (1961). Livy and his work are examined in a survey of classical Historiography by Stephen Usher, The Historians of Greece and Rome (1970). The best survey of the earlier Roman historians on whom Livy depended is by E. Badian in T. A. Dorey, ed., Latin Historians (1966), which also contains a brief account of Livy by P. G. Walsh. Another account of earlier Roman historians with some discussion of Hellenistic Historiography is in M. L. W. Laistner, The Greater Roman Historians (1947), which includes what is perhaps a too favorable account of Livy's work.

For more information on Livy, visit Britannica.com.

Livy (Titus Livius) (59 BC–AD 17), Roman historian. He was born at Patavium (Padua) in north-east Italy, probably of a well-to-do family, but little is known of his life. The evidence suggests that he did not come to Rome until his adulthood. There he gave readings of his work, and won and retained the friendship of the emperor Augustus, who respected his republican sympathies, and encouraged the future emperor Claudius in his historical studies. Livy appears never to have held any public office, but to have devoted his life to literature and history. He began his immense ‘History of Rome from its Foundation’ (Ab urbe condita libri) in or shortly before 29 BC, and published it in instalments; it immediately brought him fame. He survived Augustus by three years, and is said to have died at Patavium.

The history consisted of 142 books, of which the last twenty-two dealt with the events of his own day from the death of Cicero in 43 BC. An epitome of it was written as early as the first century AD, and from this were compiled periochae or short abstracts of each book, of which there were perhaps two versions. Of the original work there survive books 1–10, 21–45 (41 and 43 incomplete), and a palimpsest fragment of book 91. The epitome is lost except for the parts covering books 37–40 and 48–55, which have been found on an Egyptian papyrus in the twentieth century; the periochae survive for all the books except 136 and 137. Books 1–5 describe the legendary founding of the city, the period of the kings, and the early republic down to its conquest by the Gauls in 390 BC. Books 6–15 deal with the subjugation of Italy (the Samnite Wars) before the conflict with Carthage, 16–30 with the first two Punic Wars; 31–45 with the Macedonian and other eastern wars down to 167. Of the subsequent books, now lost, 46–70 covered the succeeding period to the outbreak of the Social War; 71–90 to the death of Sulla; 91–108 to the Gallic War; 109–16 the civil war to the death of Caesar; 117–33 to the death of Antony; 134–42 the rule of Augustus down to 9 BC. The whole survived to late antiquity, but the Middle Ages knew no more books than are known today.

The work opens with an introduction in which Livy explains his purpose, to commemorate the deeds of the leading nation of the world, to describe the men and the mode of life that had raised Rome to greatness, and the decline of morals which brought about the troubles of the first century BC, so that his readers might thereby learn important lessons. His general purpose is thus ethical and didactic. His methods were those of the fourth century Greek Isocrates (see HISTORIOGRAPHY): it is the duty of the historian to tell the truth and be impartial, but the truth must be elaborated and given literary form. Livy's attitude to the early legends which he relates is that he neither affirms nor denies their truth, but regards it as of no great importance: if the legends are not true, they resemble the truth. They illustrate those aspects of Roman character which led to Rome's imperial greatness, as well as the true traditions to which Livy hoped, in the early Augustan period, that Rome might return from the moral decay, luxury, and indiscipline of the recent past. Livy used as his sources the earlier annalists, then Polybius (in books 31–45), and for the latest books Posidonius, Julius Caesar, and Augustus' own Memoirs. He relied on written histories and made comparatively little use of original records, nor does he criticize his source material; he lacked the scientific method and the insight of Thucydides and Polybius. His inexperience of military affairs makes his descriptions of battles unrealistic; he has little understanding of political institutions, and throws little light on economic conditions or social life in Rome. He sometimes confuses his sources or misunderstands them so that his narratives are inconsistent; they are often given an anachronistic or implausible slant because of his ignorance of conditions at different times and in different places, e.g. in early Rome or in the East. But significant events are treated dramatically and memorably: the action is set against what Livy imagines its background to be in time and place; previous deliberations, changes of mind and heart, the characters of the protagonists, all such circumstances are explored and explained, so that the reader is presented with a story fully comprehensible in the way in which Livy wishes it to be comprehended, whatever its relation to actuality. Livy's prose is eloquent, clear, orderly, and full, developed from that of Cicero. Asinius Pollio saw in it an ement which he humorously called ‘Patavinity’, i.e. provincialism.

Livy was much praised by his immediate successors, Tacitus, the Senecas, and Quintilian, and drawn upon by Plutarch and Lucan. He is little heard of in the Middle Ages, but the Renaissance adopted him with enthusiasm. Dante speaks of him as the historian ‘who errs not’. Among the many famous narratives found in the extant books are the following.

Book 1. Romulus and Remus (chapters 4–7); the rape of the Sabines (9–13); the fight of the Horatii and Curiatii and the death of Horatia (24–6); the coming of Lucumo (Tarquinius Priscus) to Rome (34); the accession of Lucius Tarquinius and the crimes of Tullia (46–8); the rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius and the revenge of Brutus (57–60).

Book 2. The execution of the sons of Brutus by their father (5); ‘how Horatius kept the bridge’ (10); Mucius Scaevola's attempt to kill Porsena (12); Cloelia swimming the Tiber (13); Menenius Agrippa and the parable of the belly and the members (32); the meeting of Coriolanus and his mother outside Rome (40); the 306 Fabii marching out against the Veientes (49).

Book 3. The summoning of Cincinnatus from the fields to be dictator (24); Appius Claudius and Verginia (44–58).

Book 4. The fight between Cossus and the Etruscan king, in which the former won the spolia opima (19).

Book 5. The siege of Veii, and the Greeks in Rome.

Book 6. The execution of M. Manlius Capitolinus (20).

Book 7. M. Curtius leaping into the abyss (6).

Book 8. T. Manlius Torquatus ordering the execution of his son who, in defiance of orders, had fought and killed an enemy chief (7); P. Decius Mus ‘devoting’ himself to death (see DEVOTIO) for the victory of his army (9); the anger of Papirius Cursor against his magister equitum, Q. Fabius Maximus Rullus (30).

Book 9. The disaster of the Caudine Forks (1); and the unexpected digression on what would have happened had Alexander the Great encountered the Romans (17).

Book 21. The character of Hannibal (4), the siege of Saguntum (12), Hannibal's crossing of the Alps (30), the battle of the Trebia (52).

Book 22. The battle of Lake Trasimene (4); the conflict of Q. Fabius Maximus (grandson of Fabius above) with his impetuous magister equitum, Minucius (14); the defeat at Cannae (44); Maharbal's criticism of Hannibal's delay, that he knew how to conquer but not how to use his victory (51).

Book 23. Hannibal at Capua, the debilitating effect of Capuan luxury on his army (45), and the turning point of the war.

Book 24. The siege of Syracuse by Marcellus and the defensive devices of Archimedes (34).

Book 25. The capture of Syracuse (24) and the death of Archimedes (31).

Book 26. Hannibal's approach within three miles of Rome (10; the land on which his camp stands is sold in the city at its full price, 11); Scipio Africanus appointed commander in Spain at the age of 24 (18), and capturing Nova Carthago (46); his generosity and restraint in the treatment of a beautiful Spanish captive (50).

Book 27. The interception and defeat of Hasdrubal.

Book 30. The romantic story of Sophonisba, Syphax, and Masinissa (15); the battle of Zama (32).

Book 33. The defeat of Philip V of Macedon at Cynoscephalae (7); the notable speech of Flamininus on making peace with a defeated enemy (12); the proclamation of Greek freedom at the Isthmian games (32).

Book 34. The repeal of the Oppian sumptuary law (1).

Book 35. The conversation of Scipio and Hannibal at Ephesus about great military commanders (14).

Book 38. The proud reminder by Scipio Africanus when tried for embezzlement that the day was the anniversary of his victory at Zama (51).

Book 39. The discovery and suppression of the Bacchanalian orgies (8); the character of Cato the Censor (40).

Book 44. The victory of Pydna (40).

(Titus Livius) [Na]

Roman historian born around 60 bc whose major work documents the history of Rome in 142 books. Of particular relevance to archaeologists of proto-historic Europe are his accounts of the sack of Rome at the hands of the Gauls and of subsequent Roman campaigns in Gaul and against the Cumbri. Livy died around ad 12.

Livy (Titus Livius) (lĭv'ē), 59 B.C.–A.D. 17, Roman historian, b. Patavium (Padua), probably of noble family. He lived most of his life in Rome. The breadth of his education is apparent in his evident familiarity with the ancient Greek and Latin authors. His life work was the History of Rome from its founding in 753 B.C. The narrative comes to an end with Drusus (9 B.C.). Of the original 142 books of the work (published in sections) 35 are extant (Books I–X, XXI–XLV). There are fragments of some others, and all but two are known through epitomes. Livy's history reflects his admiration for the civilization of early Rome, and his belief that the importance of history was its applicability to contemporary life. As such he was a romantic, and not a scientific, historian. His sources included mainly the writings of previous authors, but he does not evaluate these sources critically. He chose what seemed to him most authentic and credible, and presented it with the enthusiasm of a patriot in the form of annals. Livy's accuracy is often questionable; he ignored certain sources and had little practical knowledge of military affairs or the workings of politics. His reputation and popularity are based on his elegant portraits of historical figures, his vivid depictions of events, his freedom of expression, and his masterly style (developed from Cicero). There are many English translations of Livy's history; the best have been published by Penguin Classics.

Bibliography

See P. G. Walsh, Livy: His Historical Aims and Method (1961); T. A. Dorey, ed., Livy (1971).

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