Livy the Fragments and Periochae

Livy’s 142-volume history of Rome is one of the high points of ancient historical writing; but three-quarters of that history is lost, known only from indirect sources such as epitomes and quotations. D. S. Levene’s Livy: The Fragments and Periochae provides a text, translation, and commentary on all of the surviving ’para-Livian’ material from antiquity. This includes the various epitomes and ’fragments’ (quotations from or references to the lost books), but it also covers citations from the surviving books and all testimonia to Livy’s life, work, and readership between his death in A.D. 17 and the end of classical antiquity (approximately A.D. 650). This collection of material provides the fullest account ever developed of the reputation of Livy in antiquity and the way he was used and read by later writers. Through it, Levene explores an important but under-studied aspect of the intellectual life of the Roman world.

This pack contains Volumes I and II.

The first volume contains the fragments, citations, and testimonia, which together comprise every reference to Livy in ancient sources. It offers a completely reedited text of these, along with a full literary, textual, and historical commentary. The volumes’s introduction provides a comprehensive synoptic study of the contexts in which Livy was read and quoted.

The second volume contains the first part of the Periochae, the fullest surviving epitome of Livy’s history. The text has been newly translated and reedited with a new scholarly apparatus; there is also a full literary, textual and historical commentary. The volume’s extensive introduction offers the fullest ever study of the Periochae as a literary text, with new evidence for the nature of the text and the circumstances of its writing.

D. S. Levene, Professor of Classics, New York University

D. S. Levene is Professor of Classics at New York University; he has previously held positions in Oxford, Durham, and Leeds. He has written extensively on Latin historiography and other aspects of Latin prose literature, including two previous books on Livy: Religion in Livy (1993) and Livy on the Hannibalic War (Oxford University Press, 2010). He has also published widely in fields including Roman religion, ancient Judaism, and the reception of the classical world in 19th century literature and 20th century cinema.