Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City)

Livy's history of Rome, composed across roughly four decades from the reign of Augustus, originally ran to 142 books covering the traditional foundation of Rome in 753 BC down to 9 BC, of which only 35 books survive complete or substantially intact, covering the earliest legendary period and the middle Republic through the Punic Wars, with the rest known only through later summaries (periochae) and fragments. Unlike Sallust's terser, more analytically detached style, Livy writes in an expansive, dramatically shaped narrative mode, building set-piece scenes, invented speeches, and morally pointed episodes, Lucretia's suicide, the Horatii and Curiatii, Hannibal crossing the Alps, that function less as neutral chronicle than as exemplary lessons meant to instruct Roman readers in the virtues that made their ancestors great and the vices Livy, writing after a century of civil war, saw eroding his own generation.

Livy states this moral purpose explicitly in his preface, describing history as a storehouse of examples from which readers can select models to imitate and warnings to avoid, a didactic conception of historiography that differs sharply from the source-critical skepticism modern historians bring to the same material; Livy openly acknowledges conflicting sources and legendary material he cannot verify, particularly for Rome's earliest centuries, without always resolving the contradictions, treating narrative coherence and moral clarity as more important than strict factual certainty. The surviving books on the war with Hannibal, drawing heavily on the Greek historian Polybius among other sources, remain a primary narrative source for the Second Punic War despite Livy's evident Roman patriotic slant against Carthage. Despite its incomplete survival, the history's scale and moral seriousness made it, alongside Virgil's Aeneid, one of the two great literary monuments of the Augustan settlement, and its exemplary episodes became the standard versions through which later European readers, including the American founders who cited Roman republican virtue, knew Rome's founding myths and early history.