The History of Rome, Books 37 to the End: With the Epitomes and Fragments of the Lost Books

Livy was not a neutral chronicler. He was a Roman who believed his city had been touched by divine providence, and that belief pulses through every page of this continuation of his monumental history. Here, Rome stands at the precipice of empire, turning its gaze eastward toward the Hellenistic kingdoms where Antiochus III commands armies that dwarf anything the Republic has faced. We witness the first Roman general to set foot in Asia, the naval battle at Myonnesus, and the diplomatic chess game played across Greece and Anatolia. But Livy is equally fascinated by the human drama: the rivalry between the Scipiones, the fate of a young man taken hostage and returned, the desperate supplication of the Aetolians begging for mercy after their rebellion. These are not dry annals but a living narrative, written in the generation after the events, by a man who still remembered the Republic's glory and feared the autocrats who would soon destroy it. For anyone who wants to understand how Rome became an empire, there is no better window than Livy's prose, with its grave moral seriousness and its conviction that history teaches, if men will listen.