Lessons from Livy’s Ab urbe condita

Captured by Rabbi Ben Scolnic
Edited by Altay Coskun
Summer 2026

View on the Forum Romanum from Capitoline Hill. Photography: Stefan Bauer, 2005. Source: Wikipedia.

Trying to understand what made Rome into the most powerful empire of all times, Rabbi Ben returned to reading Livy’s Ab urbe condita many years after having studied parts of it as an undergraduate student. Then it had appeared to him like a daunting piece of antiquarian scholarship with some nationalistic finish, collecting all the details of over 750 years of Roman history in 142 volumes (of which 35 survive). The stories seemed to be telling the Romans how great they were, thanks to their heroic bloodline that made them the descendants of the Trojans and owed to the favor of the gods that they enjoyed before even the city’s foundation by Romulus.

Much matured, however, through life and study, Ben’s rereading brought to light a very different message that might even speak to us today. At the beginning of all good things, the city foundation, her constitutional safeguards, her growth in wealth and power, came toil and sacrifice. Glory is nothing you start with, but striving hard, always facing failure as a possible outcome, yet holding course in solidarity, with courage and purpose - this is the path to success and excellence that Livy was whispering into Ben’s ears while the grand narrative was playing out before his eyes with the turning of page after page ...

  • I am Titus Livius of Patavium, and I have spent my life's breath tracing the span of seven hundred years—from the humble shepherd's huts on the Palatine to this immense Empire which now labors under its own weight. Men of a lesser age mistake silence for stability and consensus for strength. They look upon the "tumults" of early Rome—the shouting in the Forum and the secessions of the Plebeians—as a fever to be cured. But as I recorded in the First Secession (Book 2.32), when the Plebs withdrew to the Sacred Mount, the state discovered its own necessity. Consider the wisdom of Menenius Agrippa, who taught us that the "belly and the limbs" must work in concert; a city that does not breathe through its tensions is a city that has already begun to suffocate.

    This discord was the crucible of our greatness. Those modern thinkers who condemn the friction between the Senate and the Plebs see only the noise, missing the beautiful, unintended architecture it built. They do not see that in every republic there are two distinct humors—that of the great, who wish to dominate, and that of the people, who wish merely not to be dominated. In the long struggle for the Terentilian Law (Book 3.9), the people’s demand for written laws was not an act of rebellion, but a refusal to be crushed by the unwritten biases of the nobility. They understood that without a public record of the law, the magistrate is merely a tyrant in a toga.

    When the Licinian-Sextian Rogations (Book 6.42) finally opened the Consulship to the Plebeians, it proved that a state must allow its internal "modes" to evolve if it wishes to expand. By allowing the people to share in the honors of the state, we ensured they would share in its burdens. Because a Roman knows he has a voice in the Forum and a shield in the law, he fights as a part-owner of the Republic.

    If Rome wished to remain quiet, she would have had to remain small; but to remain small is to invite destruction by those who grow. It is better to have a city of restless, free men who are invincible in the field than a quiet, orderly graveyard of slaves who will flee at the first glitter of an enemy spear.

  • forthcoming next Friday

Minerva on the Silver Bowl from Hildesheim, probably produced in Alexandria, 1st century CE. Her majestic depiction can be read as the embodiment of strength and imperial power. Photograph: Andreas Praefke, 2006. Source: Wikipedia.