T. Livius
59 BC – 17 AD
Titus Livius was born in Patavium (modern Padua) in 59 BC and died there in AD 17, having spent much of his adult life in Rome. He devoted his career to a single, staggering enterprise: Ab Urbe Condita, a history of Rome from its mythical foundation by Romulus to his own day. The finished work ran to 142 books — perhaps 9,000 pages in a modern edition — of which only 35 survive complete (Books 1–10 and 21–45), covering the period from the founding to 167 BC. The rest are known from summaries (periochae), fragments, and the epitomes of later writers.
Livy was not a senator or soldier. Unlike Sallust, Caesar, or Tacitus, he had no political career and no first-hand military experience. His genius was narrative — the ability to take annalistic records, earlier historians, and oral traditions and weave them into scenes of extraordinary vividness. The siege of Veii, Hannibal crossing the Alps, the destruction of the Scipios in Spain, the debate in the Roman senate over the fate of Macedon — Livy makes these feel immediate. Ancient critics noticed a certain "Patavine" quality to his Latin (a provincial flavour that the metropolitan ear detected), but his prose is warm, fluent, and enormously readable.
He was the most widely read of all Roman historians in antiquity. Augustus was said to have called him a Pompeian — his sympathies with the old Republic were transparent — but this did not prevent their friendship. The loss of three-quarters of his work is one of the great catastrophes of classical transmission.
The history of Rome from its founding to Livy's own time — 142 books covering 700 years. Only 35 survive, but they contain some of the most famous sto...