The Early History of Rome

The first five books of Livy’s history of Rome, written under Augustus and covering the city from its legendary founding to the Gaulish sack of 390 BC — Romulus, the kings, the expulsion of the Tarquins, the founding of the republic, and the long constitutional fight between patricians and plebeians. Livy is explicit that he is offering examples rather than a chronicle: the reader is meant to see what conduct built the republic and what began to dissolve it.

For the earliest material he had little more than legend and family tradition to work from, and he occasionally says so. It is read as the Romans’ own account of their origins rather than as archaeology.

Context: At Lexile 1390 this is among the hardest entries in the band, which matches the curator’s own warning that the adult list “takes no prisoners”. It is also one of the texts The Founders and the Classics identifies as formative for the American revolutionary generation.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Livy — the author, a writer rather than a magistrate, working under Augustus.
• Rome — the republic whose founding story this is.
• Institutions — the books are largely about how the republic’s offices and checks were argued into existence.
• Annals (Tacitus) — the other end of the same arc, on the same list: the republic’s forms surviving after the power has gone.
• The Founders and the Classics — the study of how the Americans read exactly these texts.
• History — history written to instruct, which is what Livy says he is doing.