Life and works
A book's title, Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City"), makes Livy's ambition clear, but not his method. He wrote within the mixture of annual chronology and narrative—often having to interrupt a story to announce the elections of recently consuls at Rome as this was a way that a Romans saved track of the years. a deficiency of historical information before the sacking of Rome within 386 BC by the Gauls made Livy's project other hard.

Livy wrote a majority of his works when you took a reign of Caesar Augustus, in fact, he was hired by Augustus to write a stories & was section of the Augustan Literary Circle. Nevertheless, he is typically identified using an attachment to the Roman Republic and a want for its restoration. Since a late books discussing a prevent of the Republic and the rise of Augustus did non live, this occurs as debate point. Certainly Livy questioned the few of the values of the newly regime however these are in all likelihood that his position was additional complex than a elementary 'republic/empire' preference.

Livy's operate was originally composed of 142 books, of which exclusively 35 come extant; which are actually One-10, & 21-45 (sustaining major lacunae in 40-45). The fragmental palimpsest of the 91st book was discovered in the Vatican Library in 1772, and the papyrus fragment of the Eleventh book was detected around Egypt in the 1980's. the few idea of the contents of the leftover books may be gleaned from either a thinly epitome, the Periochae, & an epitome of books 37-40 & 48-55 found at Oxyrhynchus. The total of Roman authors utilized Livy, including Aurelius Victor, Cassiodorus, Eutropius, Festus, Florus, Granius Licinianus and Orosius. Julius Obsequens used Livy, or the source using access to Livy, to compose his De Prodigiis, an account of supernatural events in Rome, from either a consulship of Scipio and Laelius (A.U.C. 453) thereto of Paulus Fabius and Quintus Aelius (A.U.C. 742).

a digression around book Nine, sections 17-19, of this book, suggests that the Romans would stand beaten Alexander the Great if he lived longer & turned west to attack a Romans, making this a oldest known alternative history.