This title presents the Roman view of history through the eyes of Livy. The modern age is not the only one in which Romans and visitors to Rome have been fascinated with the city’s striking juxtapositions of past and present. Rome’s wealth of history also captured the imagination of the ancients.
Livy’s Written Rome , by Mary Jaeger, shows how one writer explored the relationship between events in Roman history, the landscape in which they occurred, and the monuments that commemorated them.While Augustus reconstructed the physical city to reflect the ideology of the Empire, the historian Livy created a written Rome and taught his readers to look beyond the city’s dramatically altered landscape. In so doing, the Romans gained insight into the lessons of the lost Republic.
Livy’s Written Rome
will be of interest to classicists and historians, students of ancient historiography and classical rhetoric, as well as general readers interested in memory, monuments, and historical narrative.