Anonymus Periochista
The Periochae — brief summaries of each book of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita — are the work of an unknown compiler, probably active in the fourth century AD. They survive for all 142 books of Livy's history, making them our single most important guide to the content of the 107 lost books. Without the Periochae, we would know almost nothing of Livy's account of the late Republic — the Gracchi, the Social War, Sulla, Pompey, the civil wars.
The summaries vary enormously in detail. Some are mere sentences; others run to a substantial paragraph. They preserve the bare skeleton of events — who fought whom, who died, who triumphed — but strip away everything that made Livy worth reading: the speeches, the character studies, the narrative art. They are an index to a masterpiece, written by someone who had the masterpiece in front of him. The compiler's identity is unknown, but his work has been indispensable to every historian of Rome since the Renaissance.
The *Periochae Livianae* are anonymous summaries of all 142 books of Livy's monumental history *Ab Urbe Condita*. Compiled in the 4th century AD, they...