The History of Rome

Livy opens with a preface acknowledging the difficulty of tracing Roman history from the city's founding, a subject spanning more than 700 years. He concedes that the earliest traditions blend human and divine elements more suited to poetry than to factual record but declines to affirm or refute them. His central purpose is moral instruction: He wants readers to observe how Roman virtues built the empire and how the erosion of discipline produced crises in which Romans "can neither endure our vices, nor their remedies" (xi).

Book I recounts the arrival of Aeneas, a Trojan exile, in Italy. King Latinus granted him hospitality and his daughter Lavinia in marriage. After wars with neighboring rulers and the Etruscans, a powerful civilization in central Italy, Aeneas died and was deified. His descendants established a dynasty of kings at Alba Longa. Generations later, the usurper Amulius forced his niece Rhea Silvia to become a Vestal Virgin, a priestess sworn to chastity. She bore twin sons, Romulus and Remus, whom she claimed were fathered by the god Mars. Exposed on the flooded Tiber, the infants survived, nursed by a she-wolf and raised by a shepherd. As young men they killed Amulius, restored their grandfather, and founded a new city. A quarrel over augury, the practice of reading divine signs, led to Remus's death, and Romulus became sole king of Rome. He created a senate, opened a sanctuary to attract settlers, and orchestrated the abduction of Sabine women to secure wives for his men. The Sabine women eventually halted the fighting between their fathers and husbands, and the two peoples merged. After further victories, Romulus disappeared during a storm and was worshipped as a god.

Livy traces six subsequent kings. The Sabine Numa Pompilius established Rome's religious institutions and maintained decades of peace. The warlike Tullus Hostilius destroyed Alba Longa and doubled Rome's population. Ancus Marcius expanded the territory. Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, an Etruscan immigrant, built Rome's first stone walls and sewers. Servius Tullius instituted the census and divided citizens into classes based on wealth. The final king, Tarquinius Superbus, ruled as a tyrant. When his son Sextus raped Lucretia, a noblewoman who then killed herself, Lucius Junius Brutus, a nobleman who had feigned stupidity to survive the king's purges, led a revolution. The Tarquins were banished, and Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus were elected as Rome's first consuls, annually elected magistrates who replaced the king.

Book II covers the first decades of the Republic. Brutus discovered his own sons among conspirators plotting to restore the Tarquins and ordered their execution; he then died in single combat against the exiled prince Aruns. Lars Porsena, king of the Etruscan city of Clusium, invaded on behalf of the Tarquins but was deterred by acts of Roman courage: The soldier Horatius Cocles defended the Sublician bridge alone, the Roman youth Gaius Mucius thrust his hand into a fire to demonstrate resolve, and the hostage Cloelia swam the Tiber to escape. Domestically, crushing debt drove the commons into bondage. They seceded to the Sacred Mount, refusing military service until their grievances were addressed. The patrician mediator Menenius Agrippa persuaded them to return with the fable of the belly and the limbs, and the settlement created tribunes of the plebs, officials with sacrosanct status and the power to veto consular actions. Livy also recounts the exile of Coriolanus, a patrician who led Volscian armies against Rome but yielded to his mother's entreaties, and the first agrarian law proposed by the consul Spurius Cassius, which led to Cassius's execution on charges of seeking kingship.

Book III centers on Rome's first written legal code. Amid border wars, the dictator Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus was summoned from his farm to rescue a trapped Roman army, defeated the Aequians, and resigned after only 16 days. After years of pressure from tribunes for written laws, 10 patrician commissioners called decemvirs were appointed, replacing all other magistracies. The first decemvirate governed justly and produced the Ten Tables. A second, dominated by the ambitious Appius Claudius, added two tables but degenerated into tyranny. Appius engineered a fraudulent claim to enslave Virginia, a plebeian maiden. Her father, the centurion Virginius, killed her in the forum rather than surrender her. The army mutinied, the commons seceded, and the decemvirs resigned. The Valerio-Horatian laws restored the tribunate, strengthened appeal rights, and established that plebiscites bound the entire people. The Twelve Tables, engraved on bronze, became the foundation of all Roman law.

Book IV records further broadening of political access. The tribune Gaius Canuleius secured the right of intermarriage between patricians and plebeians. Military tribunes with consular power, open to both orders, were created as a compromise to avoid opening the consulship to plebeians. The censorship was established to manage the census and public morals. Livy recounts the killing of Spurius Maelius, a wealthy equestrian accused of seeking kingship after distributing grain during a famine. A landmark reform granted soldiers pay from the public treasury for the first time.

Book V brings the 10-year siege of the Etruscan city of Veii to its climax. Marcus Furius Camillus, appointed dictator, captured Veii by driving a mine into its citadel. Prosecuted for mishandling spoils, Camillus went into exile. Senonian Gauls, a Celtic people from beyond the Alps, then marched on Rome and shattered the army at the river Allia. The Gauls sacked the undefended city. The military youth retreated into the Capitol, where the former consul Marcus Manlius repelled a night assault after the sacred geese of Juno raised the alarm. After months of siege, the Romans agreed to ransom themselves with gold, but the Gallic chieftain Brennus threw his sword onto the scales when the Romans protested false weights, declaring that the vanquished had no right to set terms. Camillus, recalled as dictator, arrived with an army, voided the agreement, and defeated the Gauls. He then opposed the proposal to abandon Rome for Veii, and the city was hastily rebuilt.

Book VI covers the recovery. Camillus won further victories over the Volscians, Aequians, and Etruscans. Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, the hero who had saved the Capitol, championed indebted plebeians but was accused of seeking kingship. His trial was moved to a location from which the Capitol could not be seen, and he was condemned and thrown from the Tarpeian Rock. The tribunes Gaius Licinius Stolo and Lucius Sextius proposed three laws: limiting debt interest, capping landholding, and requiring one consul to be plebeian. After five years of deadlock, the Licinian-Sextian laws passed, and Sextius became the first plebeian consul. The patricians created the praetorship and curule aedileship, new magistracies initially reserved for their own order, as compensating offices.

Book VII records Camillus's death during a pestilence; Livy eulogizes him as "a second founder of the city of Rome" (346). Livy narrates the heroic combats of the young nobleman Titus Manlius Torquatus, who killed a Gallic champion and stripped his golden torque, or neck-chain, and of the warrior Marcus Valerius Corvus, who defeated another Gaul with a crow attacking his opponent's face. A military conspiracy among soldiers garrisoned in Campania was defused by the consul Gaius Marcius Rutilus, while a later armed secession was resolved by the dictator Corvus through an appeal to shared patriotism.

Book VIII recounts the Latin War and the Samnite conflicts. When the Latins demanded equal political partnership, Rome refused. The consul Manlius Torquatus had his own son executed for fighting against orders, establishing "Manlian orders" as a byword for severity. Both consuls had received a dream-vision declaring that one side must sacrifice its general to the gods. When the wing under his co-consul Publius Decius Mus began to falter, he performed the ritual of devotio, consecrating himself and the enemy to the gods of death, and charged to his destruction. The Latins were defeated and incorporated into the Roman state through a graduated system of citizenship. Debt bondage was abolished after a usurer's assault on a young debtor provoked public outrage. The Samnite wars, which Livy identifies as the first in a chain of existential struggles, produced a clash between the dictator Lucius Papirius Cursor and his subordinate Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus, who won a victory in violation of orders. Papirius demanded Fabius's death, but the people won his pardon. Livy closes by acknowledging that funeral eulogies and false inscriptions have corrupted the historical record, leaving the foundations of Roman historiography on uncertain ground.