author
Livy
-58–16
Best known for a sweeping history of Rome that originally filled 142 books, this Roman historian helped shape how later generations imagined the city’s rise. Though much of his work is lost, the surviving books still stand among the most vivid accounts of early Rome.
5 Audiobooks
About the author
Born in Patavium, the city now known as Padua, around 59 BC, Livy lived during one of the most important turning points in Roman history: the end of the republic and the age of Augustus. Ancient sources preserve only a few details about his personal life, but they consistently connect him with his hometown and with a long literary career devoted to Rome’s past.
His great work, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City), told the story of Rome from its legendary beginnings down to Livy’s own era. The full history originally ran to 142 books, although only part of it survives today. What remains is valued not just for the events it records, but for its dramatic storytelling, moral focus, and memorable portraits of Roman leaders and crises.
Livy was not a soldier or statesman writing from the battlefield or the senate floor; he was a literary historian, deeply interested in character, public virtue, and the lessons people draw from the past. That approach made his work hugely influential for centuries, shaping readers from the Roman world to the Renaissance and beyond.