Rating: 
Summary: Roman historians at their best
Review: In the past there has been a scholarly tendency to criticize Livy and prefer other sources over him. Of late however more and more historians are realizing the true value of his work. He gives a useful view of Roman history as well as a good view of Roman mores in the Augustan period. Livy remains a valuable tool for teaching Roman history as he is interesting as well as informative. Along with Polybius and Tacitus one of the must read ancient historians.
Rating:
Summary: Roman historians at their best
Review: In the past there has been a scholarly tendency to criticize Livy and prefer other sources over him. Of late however more and more historians are realizing the true value of his work. He gives a useful view of Roman history as well as a good view of Roman mores in the Augustan period. Livy remains a valuable tool for teaching Roman history as he is interesting as well as informative. Along with Polybius and Tacitus one of the must read ancient historians.
Rating: 
Summary: Livy The Propagandist
Review: It is strange, but the more one studies the past the more one finds the present. Through out this work, Livy readily admits in his own word's: "...the mists of antiquity cannot always be pierced." He makes up for the lack of information with lively stories of Rome's foundation and early struggles that sound as though they could come from any High School history book on the American Revolution. George Washington, who consciously propagated the image, could be seen as a latter day Cincinnatus. The founding of the Twelve Tables could be likened to the writing of the Constitution. And at the end you can detect in the speech of Camillus the religious fanaticism of a proto-Pat Robertson, claiming all their victories as due to strict religious observance, and clearing the way towards that sense of self-righteous conviction that would purge the Romans of all guilt in their later conquest's. Though it is excellent in its telling, (a proof of its power and danger) Livy has created a masterpiece of nationalist propaganda; the foolish, sentimental example of which has still to be learned from after two-thousand years.
Rating:
Summary: Livy The Propagandist
Review: It is strange, but the more one studies the past the more one finds the present. Through out this work, Livy readily admits in his own word's: "...the mists of antiquity cannot always be pierced." He makes up for the lack of information with lively stories of Rome's foundation and early struggles that sound as though they could come from any High School history book on the American Revolution. George Washington, who consciously propagated the image, could be seen as a latter day Cincinnatus. The founding of the Twelve Tables could be likened to the writing of the Constitution. And at the end you can detect in the speech of Camillus the religious fanaticism of a proto-Pat Robertson, claiming all their victories as due to strict religious observance, and clearing the way towards that sense of self-righteous conviction that would purge the Romans of all guilt in their later conquest's. Though it is excellent in its telling, (a proof of its power and danger) Livy has created a masterpiece of nationalist propaganda; the foolish, sentimental example of which has still to be learned from after two-thousand years.
Rating:
Summary: A Most Readable History
Review: Livy was a contemporary of Augustus, Rome's first emperor. Augustus brought peace to Rome and the empire after a lengthy period of civil strife. Though Augustus brought peace by taking power from the corrupt senate and concentrating it in his own hands, it was fashionable among the senatorial class to idealize the old days when they had exercised power. In this vein, Livy wrote his monumental History of Rome with the idea of using what he saw as the old civic virtues of Rome's past as an example to inspire his decadent contemporaries. In this sense, Livy was as much a moralist as he was a historian. But, moralist or historian, he wrote very good books. His stories were probably based on tradition as much as earlier writers. And, when his sources conflicted, he simply chose one account over another. Nevertheless, his work is one of the best surviving sources for the periods he covers, and he relates events in an amusing, instructive, and dramatic manner.Not all of Livy's work has survived. What we have has been divided by this publisher into three parts. This book is the first of the three and covers the period from the founding of Rome to the time of Camillus. Included in this period are many entertaining stories: the flight of Aeneas from Troy to Italy, the founding of Rome by Romulus, the expulsion of the last king, Tarquin, from the city, Horatius defending the bridge over the Tiber, the victory of Cincinnatus, and many others. Though Livy is perhaps not the most rigorous historian, his work makes for fascinating and informative reading. Some of what he relates is clearly mythical in nature, but he was writing for a popular audience and his goal was to entertain as well as inform. After two thousand years, his work still does exactly that. Read this book. I liked it very much, and I think you will, too.
Rating:
Summary: Facts and opinion, all in one.
Review: Livy's history, at least the part that survives, is a great telling of the founding and growth of early Rome. More than just names and dates, Livy also injects the histories with tales of Roman virtue and religious principles as he saw them through the eyes of the early Empire. It doesn't take too long to figure out where Livy sits in terms of the class struggles that ensued as Rome began to move from an agrarian society to a military and political power, and this sometimes clouds his historical judgement. Livy also takes quite a few liberties in filling in areas where "The veil of antiquity cannot always be pierced", and his pro-Patrician views tend to get in the way when this happens.
Given the time period that Livy is writing his history, he can hardly be blamed for favoring the upper-classes or attributing Rome's successes to adherence to religious rituals, doing anything else could very well have resulted in the destruction of the histories altogether. Thus, the histories should be seen more as a morality play, projecting Livy's contemporary moral code on the early founders of Rome, thereby legitimizing the current political and religious environment of the Empire.
Overall, the histories are a great read, and provide both factual and quasi-mythical stories of the founding of the city that would forever change the world.
Rating:
Summary: Superb history of the early Roman Empire!!!
Review: Looking for information on the early history of the Empire? Interested in those daring sea battles and hack and slash wars that made Rome great? Then look no further! This book should be on every historian's bookshelf!
Rating:
Summary: Worthwhile introduction to Rome
Review: Robert Graves describes Livy as an idealist, holding up early, Republican Rome as a goal to which his Augustan counterparts should aspire, and I tend to agree with him. While the stories that Livy relates about Roman virtue, bravery, and honor are somewhat interesting and even, at times, inspiring, they in no way compare to the intrigue of Rome in its later times. However, this book is by far the best aid for understanding the early political framework that later gave way to the Julio-Claudian empire. Definitely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Misread by too many
Review: The only other review of this book demonstrates the problem that too many people have with Livy. He (the other reviewer) compared to the stories in Livy to those of the Julio-Claudian emperors. The first thing a historian must do is to look at what the author was trying to achieve. Livy was TRYING to write a moral message to the Roman citizens contemporary to him, and as his device he used HIS representation of Romes history. He wasn't trying to tell the whole truth, rather attempt to use history to quell the moral degredation of Roman Society. On the other hand, Tacitus (The main Julio-Claudian source, and the one the previous reviewer was speaking of) IS attempting to write more of a historical work (though his work is of course colored with his polital views on one man rule and the like). If one is to read Livy understanding the context which he is written, then his work is amazing. Yes, he is one of our few sources for the founding of Rome, but his intention was not to somply inform, he was attempting to re-moralize Roman society.
Rating: 
Summary: Heads Explode, or: Rome Primeval
Review: The statue of Livy at Padua University in northern Italy portrays a stately scholar standing at an extended lectern, holding a book open with his left hand while copying out the text with his right. Indeed, Livy the famous historian and moralist would be nothing without Livy the brilliant plagiarist, guiltlessly assimilating the annals of Roman history up to the Age of Augustus, of which he himself came of age. Livy was a patriot (though probably not a soldier), a propagandist (in the most genial sense possible), ravished by the legend of Aeneas and everything it represented, specifically the Roman Empire as the earthly seat of Jupiter's inviolability, a world-historical Avatar consummating the will of Olympian overlords. And like so many historians after him, he bemoaned the Decline of his culture, the myth of a primeval Golden Age when we all cherished things like honor, integrity, and the propensity to commiserate, when politics (occasionally) worked, when villains were punished, when soldiers fought for Rome rather than their power-broker generals, when warcraft was motivated by something more exalted than the promise of booty. Livy's greatest contribution to his culture was probably his elitist, revisionary, Augustan reworking of Roman mythic history into a pedagogical discourse on human ethics, an influential attempt to get his fellow citizens to rethink and reembrace their cultural identity, to forestall the temptations of licentious sloth and debauchery, renew the martial edicts of Roman pride and a soulful supremacy. Yet beneath the moralizing, the telling *exempla*, the anguished (though sometimes hilarious) meditations on Roman law and politics, the reader's nose is pushed into the primordial muck of an epic strangeness, mythopoeic waves of cultural violence, a screwball miscellany of myth, omen, paranoia, and the outlandish hyper-interpretation of the natural landscape and its signs. To a modern reader, Livy's annals seem to play out the protocols of so-called "postmodern" literature, juxtaposing history with phantasmagoric interludes and grotesque *non sequiturs*, fascinating the reader with some of the most ridiculous (but compelling) "historical" visualizations ever passed off as fact. For example, a parenthesis on the excavation of Rome's sewer-system leads breakneck to the extraordinary episode of Servius's head exploding into flames! (May not be as good as Cronenberg's *Scanners*, but sufficiently strange for Livy's purposes.) Suffice it to say, whenever someone's cranium explodes, or animals start talking, or preserved heads are recovered in the rubble of mining operations, or statues drool blood, or Romans are killed by their pets, or birds catch a strange wind and "fly in the wrong direction," the reader knows that Livy is gearing up for some fresh historical turn. Livy almost surely had access to the annals of the Pontifex Maximus (the Roman high priest), whose job it was to stay in communication with the gods (pretty trippy), to record the portentous omens and signs that were presumably an everyday occurrence in ancient Rome. For example: "Monday: cow talks. Tuesday: raining flesh. Wednesday: Servius's head explodes." And so on. Livy was able to engineer his narrative so that the right omen could be cross-referenced with the "prophesied" event at the arbitrary beck of his dramatic call, so to speak. The problem with Livy's *History of Rome* may not be Livy's problem, but rather ours - that is, the cyclical barbarism imbedded in human nature, the vicious circle of war followed by the briefest pacifist interlude followed by internal political struggle followed by war, and on and on through the centuries. Colleagues such as Plutarch and Suetonius were able to evade this wearing cadence through the refinement of biographical narrative (prophesying Emerson's dictum that history *is* biography), but then Livy is writing about (and creating) events that occurred centuries before his birth, working from second- and third-hand sources, forced to adapt his considerable literary abilities to unremonstrative holes and gaps in the cultural bookkeeping, putting words into the mouths of figures who may not have existed to begin with. The result is a unique, multi-faceted "novel" masquerading as history, perhaps proving once and for all that history being biographical, and our lives being a fiction we trick ourselves into believing, the intertwining of these two into mythopoeic phantasy is in all finality the text we call Home, the human text, as phantasmagoric in our day as Livy's bizarre annals of Rome Primeval.
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