Livy

I am Titus Livius of Patavium. I did not march in legions nor sit in the Senate. In the long calm after Rome's civil storms, I undertook Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City) to show, by example, what our ancestors cherished and what later Romans forgot. I wrote for citizens who wished to discern what to imitate and what to shun. If my pages dwell on character, it is because the city's fortune springs from the temper of its people.

My method was patient, not credulous. I read our annalists (Fabius Pictor, Licinius Macer, Valerius Antias, Coelius Antipater) and, for Greek and Punic affairs, the severer Polybius. Where traditions clashed, I marked the discord and chose the account that best preserved the shape of events and the lesson they bore. I was trained in rhetoric; the speeches in my books are not court transcripts, but mirrors held to motive, showing how Romans might have thought when courage or pride tipped the scales.

Of one hundred and forty-two books, time spared only thirty-five in full: the first decade, and Books twenty-one through forty-five. There you will find the kings and early Republic, the fall of Saguntum, Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, the Italian towns wavering, and the rise of Scipio. Augustus honored me, yet jested that I was 'Pompeian'; I accepted the smile and kept my judgment. I trusted mos maiorum as Rome's compass, even when the needle trembled amid new greatness.