What it is
Ab Urbe Condita — "From the Founding of the City" — is Livy's history of Rome from the legendary arrival of Aeneas to the death of Drusus in 9 BCE. The original work ran to 142 books. Thirty- five survive: Books 1–10 cover the founding through the Third Samnite War; Books 21–45 cover Hannibal through the Macedonian Wars. The remaining 107 books are known only through the Periochae, the short ancient summaries of each book that survived independently, and through later authors who used Livy as their source. Even what remains is one of the longest continuous works of Latin prose.
Historical context
Livy was a Patavian, born around 59 BCE; he never held public office. He began the work around 27 BCE — the year Octavian took the title Augustus — and continued it across the following four decades. He was not a court historian. Augustus knew him (he is reported, when teasing Livy, to have called him a "Pompeian"), but Livy's relationship to the new regime was one of cautious respect rather than patronage-deep loyalty. The project was vast: thirty years to reach the Augustan period, another decade or more to bring the narrative down to within living memory.
What it argues
Livy's preface — twelve sections, the most consequential preface in Latin literature — is the work's argument in miniature. The study of history, he writes, is salubre et frugiferum, healthful and fruitful, because the reader is brought face to face with examples of every kind, "from which you might choose, for yourself and your country, what to imitate, and what to avoid as foul in conception and foul in result" (Praef. 10). Rome's distinctive achievement, he argues, is moral: the city grew great because its citizens, generation after generation, formed themselves on the public memory of those who came before them.
The narrative then makes the case from the material. The early books — Romulus, Numa, the kings, the establishment of the Republic, the secessio plebis, Coriolanus, Cincinnatus, the Decemvirs, the fall of Veii, the Gallic sack — read as a sequence of exempla, each shaped to make a moral and political point. The later surviving books, on the wars against Hannibal and Macedon, give the same treatment to the Roman generals of the middle Republic: Fabius Maximus' patience, Marcellus' decisive force, Aemilius Paullus' integrity, the younger Scipio Africanus' magnanimity. The structure is annalistic — year by year, magistrate by magistrate — but the moral argument runs through it without break.
Livy is not a Polybian analyst. He does not stop to anatomise the mixed constitution or to argue causes in the abstract. His method is narrative: the example is the argument, and the cumulative effect of seven hundred years of examples is the case for what civic virtue is and what it requires.
Why it has been read
Ab Urbe Condita shaped the European understanding of early Rome for two millennia. Augustine engaged with it in De Civitate Dei; the Middle Ages copied and read it; Petrarch hunted for missing decades; Machiavelli's Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio takes the first ten books as the primary occasion for the most influential work of Renaissance republican thought. The American founders cite Livy continually: Adams reads him for the constitutional history; Hamilton, Madison and Jay reach for him in The Federalist; Jefferson's library contains him. The conviction that history is moral instruction — a particular Roman conviction — was carried into the modern world above all by Livy.
Citing Ab Urbe Condita
Standard citation is by book and chapter (e.g. Liv. 1.18 for the character of Numa; Liv. 22.51 for the night after Cannae; Liv. 2.10 for Horatius at the bridge). The standard Latin text is the OCT begun by Conway and continued by Ogilvie, Walsh and Briscoe; see our Sources page.