Livy

• 1. Introduction

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  Livy, the Roman historian born in 59 BC in the prosperous northern Italian city of Patavium, devoted the greater part of his adult life to a single staggering project: a complete history of Rome from its earliest legends through the reign of Augustus. His work, titled Ab Urbe Condita, meaning "From the Founding of the City," stretched back to a time centuries before his own birth, covering traditions and events no living person could verify. Yet Romans came to believe his account as though it were settled fact.

  What drove a man who never held public office, never served in the army, and never sat in the Senate to write the defining history of the world's most powerful state? And how did a historian working from a provincial city, whose Latin was once mocked as carrying the accent of the provinces, become so famous that a man from the distant city of Cadiz once travelled all the way to Rome and back for the sole purpose of meeting him?

  Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A City That Shaped the Man

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  Patavium, in the province of Cisalpine Gaul, was not a quiet backwater. At the time of Livy's birth, it ranked as the second wealthiest city on the Italian peninsula and the largest in the entire northern region. The city had a reputation for conservative values in both morality and politics, and Livy carried that reputation with him for the rest of his life.

  His teenage years fell in the 40s BC, a period when civil war tore through the Roman world. The governor of Cisalpine Gaul, Asinius Pollio, tried to pull Patavium into the orbit of Mark Antony, one of the main warring factions. The wealthy citizens of Patavium refused. They went into hiding rather than hand over money and arms. Pollio then attempted to bribe their slaves to give up their masters' locations. That effort also failed. The citizens pledged their loyalty to the Senate instead.

  The upheaval had lasting consequences for the young Livy. The standard path for a well-born Roman youth was a higher education in Rome followed by a tour of Greece. Livy almost certainly never had either. The civil wars closed those routes. Years later, Asinius Pollio would take a parting shot at Livy, mocking his writing as showing "provincialisms" unacceptable in Roman circles. Scholars have noted that Pollio's grudge against Patavium, dating from his failed attempt to recruit the city, likely coloured that criticism. Patavium was merged into Italy proper and its people granted Roman citizenship by Julius Caesar during Livy's own lifetime, a shift that redrew the legal and cultural map of northern Italy.

• 3. The Independent Scholar

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  Livy probably arrived in Rome in the 30s BC. He never became a senator. He never commanded troops. His writings contain elementary errors about military matters, which historians have taken as evidence that he had no direct experience with the Roman army. He was trained instead in philosophy and rhetoric.

  What allowed him to work as freely as he did was financial independence. The source of his wealth is not known, but its effect is clear: Livy spent most of his life writing, without the constraints of a political career or military service. He was known for giving recitations of his work to small audiences, a form of intellectual engagement, but he did not take part in declamation, which was then a widespread pastime among educated Romans.

  He was familiar with Augustus and the imperial household. Suetonius recorded that Livy encouraged the future emperor Claudius, born in 10 BC, to take up the writing of history during Claudius's childhood. That detail speaks to Livy's standing. He was not merely a writer working in isolation but a figure whose views on historical writing carried enough weight to influence the education of imperial family members.

  He was also a husband and father. He had at least one daughter and one son. One of his sons wrote a book on geography. His daughter married Lucius Magius, a rhetorician. He produced other works beyond the History of Rome, including an essay written as a letter to his son and a series of dialogues modelled on those of Cicero, though none of these survive.

• 4. Ab Urbe Condita

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  Livy was already past his youth, probably thirty-three years old, when he began Ab Urbe Condita. He continued working on it until he left Rome for Padua in old age, most likely during the reign of Tiberius, after the death of Augustus. The history spans from Rome's earliest legendary origins, before the traditional founding date of 753 BC, through to the end of Augustus's reign.

  In the preface to the history, Livy stated directly that he did not care whether his own fame "remained in darkness," so long as his work helped to preserve the memory of the deeds of "the world's preeminent nation." That framing signals something important about what Livy thought he was doing. He was writing under Augustus, who had come to power through a civil war against figures like Pompey, a general his own home city of Patavium had supported. Augustus, born Octavian Caesar, had initially wanted to take the name Romulus, the first king of Rome. The Senate persuaded him instead to accept the title Augustus. Rather than dismantling the republic, he reshaped it around himself. Livy's history, with its emphasis on Rome's great triumphs and its embellished accounts of Roman heroism, served that reshaped order. Augustus reportedly called Livy "Pompeianus" because of how warmly Livy had written about Pompey. The nickname was not enough to damage their friendship.

  The historian Tacitus, writing about a century later, preserved in his account of the trial of Cremutius Cordus a speech in which Cordus defends himself before Tiberius by citing Livy: "Titus Livius, pre-eminently famous for eloquence and truthfulness, extolled Cn. Pompeius in such a panegyric that Augustus called him Pompeianus, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship." Whether or not those were Cordus's exact words, the speech shows how later Romans invoked Livy's name as a standard of both literary and moral authority.

  Together with Polybius, Ab Urbe Condita is considered one of the main surviving accounts of the Second Punic War. Seneca the Younger described Livy as an orator and philosopher who had written historical treatises in those fields as well. The work also played a role in ancient debates about Etruscan origins. Livy wrote that the Greeks called them the "Tyrrhene" and noted that the Alpine tribes, particularly the Raeti, were of the same kind as the Etruscans, though the Raeti had become so uncivilized through their environment that they retained only their language, and even that was corrupted. Scholars such as Karl Otfried Muller drew on that passage as evidence for a "northern theory" of Etruscan origins.

• 5. Lost and Recovered

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  Livy died in Patavium in AD 17, returning at the end to the city where he had started. A tombstone found in Padua may belong to him and his wife, though the identification is not certain.

  By the Middle Ages, the full text of Ab Urbe Condita had already begun to slip away. The work was long, expensive to copy, and required significant storage. Literate readers turned to summaries rather than the original. Manuscripts disappeared without replacement. When the Renaissance brought renewed urgency to the problem, the scale of what had been lost became apparent. Large amounts of money changed hands as collectors scrambled for Livian manuscripts. The poet Beccadelli sold a country home to fund the purchase of a single manuscript that had been copied by Poggio. Petrarch and Pope Nicholas V both launched searches for the missing books.

  Laurentius Valla published an amended text of Livy that effectively founded the scholarly field of Livian studies. Dante praised Livy in his poetry. Francis I of France commissioned extensive artwork on Livian themes. Niccolo Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, a major work on republican theory, took the form of a running commentary on the History of Rome.

  Pliny the Younger had already reported, back in the imperial era, that Livy's fame reached the far edges of the known world. The man from Cadiz who made the journey to Rome for the sole purpose of seeing Livy became a celebrated anecdote, passed down through centuries as a measure of the historian's reach. Walter Scott, writing in Waverley in 1814, recorded as historical fact that a Scotsman involved in the Jacobite uprising of 1715 was recaptured and executed because, having escaped captivity, he lingered nearby in the hope of recovering his favourite copy of Titus Livius.

• 6. The Problem of His Dates

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  Livy's birth and death dates look settled at first glance. The standard dates, 59 BC to AD 17, appear in Jerome's Chronicon, a Latin translation of a work by Eusebius of Caesarea, a bishop of the early Christian Church. Eusebius wrote a summary of world history in Greek, known as the Chronikon, dating from the early 4th century AD. The original Greek was largely lost, surviving only in fragments and in translations, including a complete Armenian version, a Greek manuscript, and fragments in Syriac. St. Jerome translated the tables into Latin, probably adding material of his own from sources that are no longer known.

  The manuscripts do not always agree. They sometimes give different dates for the same event, omit material the others include, and present dates in different formats: in Ab Urbe Condita reckoning, in Olympiad numbering, or as ages. A typical scholarly assumption is that Livy was born in the second year of the 180th Olympiad and died in the first year of the 199th Olympiad, coded as 180.2 and 199.1. All sources use the same first Olympiad, dated to 776-773 BC by the modern calendar. Working through the conversion formula, those codes yield 59 BC for the birth and AD 17 for the death. A different manuscript puts the birth in 180.4, which works out to 57 BC instead.

  The discrepancies probably arose through scribal error or deliberate scribal adjustment over centuries of copying. There are no definitive dates for Livy, only a consensus that scholars have settled on by convention. That uncertainty sits at the edge of everything known about a man whose own words have shaped how the world remembers Rome.