From the Foundation of the City Vol. 01

Livy's History of Rome is the nearest thing we have to a complete Roman account of their own rise from shepherd settlements to Mediterranean empire, and barely a quarter of it survives. Written during the reign of Augustus, when the republic had become an empire and Rome was grappling with what it had become, Livy composed a narrative that begins with Aeneas fleeing the burning ruins of Troy and ends with the death of Drusus in 9 BC. What remains traces the legendary kings, the founding of the republic, the wars that made Rome great, the civil wars that broke it, and the princes who reassembled it under a new name. Livy gives us something no other source can: a Roman's view of Roman power, his meditations on virtue and its loss, the role of fate and fortune, and the long arc by which a small city on the Tiber became the center of the world. This first volume carries us from Troy to the early republic, establishing the moral framework that Romans themselves believed explained their destiny. For anyone who wants to understand what Rome believed about itself, there is no other book.