LIVY & The Entire History Of Rome | 8 Weeks of Ancient Historians

what's up guys welcome back to your IG TV here on Mon ink so today we rode five of our eight episode series that we have going on right now of the historians that you should really know for a lot of historical academic social context definitely Museum contact so we'll just help you so my name is Erica and today we're going to be walking you through the history of Rome thanks to living so let's start with Libby's name Olivia doesn't sound like a very ancient name completely aware and that's because it isn't so his name was actually titus livius right that's his full name why do we refer to him as living it's simply because it's just a modern way of saying his name it's easier it's funner it's just kind of a modernized way of saying Titus Livius instead of saying that full names it's a bit of it it's a bit of an obnoxious mouthful you know and Livy himself was born around somewhere in the period even between 64 BC and 59 BC so it's somewhere around the period he was born in Padua in Italy which is here on a map but he was born here it didn't used to be called this but it doesn't really matter for the point of this video he was born here supposedly he died here in about 1780 supposedly there are no real like records a bar that's all like you know just the speculation though that's why he died but we know that he then ended up moving to Rome how did he get there though because if he's from this other smaller area which is still under Roman rule technically how did he get to Rome and when did he have room because it's difficult for somebody who isn't educated to get to room but he was educated in fact it was really well educated we know that he his family even they were really wealthy despite not being a senatorial family so they weren't a political family however he was very lucky and did get a very good fancy education so good for him and this kind of entails rhetoric and it involves reading Greek and all that stuff but we know that his Greek was well taught even though it was a little bit rusty because he has some issues in translation supposedly I don't take ancient Greek but everybody who studies ancient Greek is like yeah there are definitely issues in translation so he clearly wasn't in Greece he just went from Padua down to Rome which is new because most people would've gone to Greece but there are lots of other political issues which could have caused him not to go I'm not gonna get into those in the video either way he gets down to Rome at some point when he's young not kid young but young enough old enough even to go young enough that like he was welcome there she goes down to Rome but we know he was definitely there around like 30 BC because he was definitely there for the Battle of Actium which took place in 31 BC now that was super important to the history of Rome their battle because that kind of put Octavian Octavius or Gustus however you know the first emperor of Rome's name it put him on a pedestal for his like ultimate power after defeating Mark Antony so that was very important he was definitely there around that time because it was supposedly around that time that he got the brilliant idea to write down the entire history of her like your man I don't know what he saw but he just kind of looked at the world and just went I'm going to break down everything that we have ever done for this entire world type of mentality that works really well like thank god he's me happen but like I don't know what is running through your head that you're like I'm just gonna write like three books a day for the rest of my life and it's just gonna happen and we'll get into how many books he wrote in a second it's crazy anyways so he was in room around the time of the Battle of Actium and some way or another he caught the attention of the Emperor he caught the attention of Augustus not really sure how but all Gustus took a liking to me ended up being like mr. popular among the Emperor that August's ended up hiring him to look over Claudius who ended up being a future Emperor firm but to look over he's like like literary activities I don't how else to put that like like his literary studies that Livy was actually the one who was helping him with that which is really cool in here so I'm helping a future emperor of Rome but despite him being super what below with the Emperor which obviously great fantastic he was not actually ever referred to as hanging out with the other writers of the time which is a little bit weird because that was around the time where a lot of writers like Horace Ovid and we're trying everyone Virgil like all of them would hang out together but he Livy is never referenced as hanging out with them he never says it nobody else ever says it so despite being very popular with the politics he was not very popular with people who did what he did which is weird weird normal highways hang out whatever I think it's weird either way he wrote a hundred and forty-two books of the history of Rome which is comparable madness and honestly when you're hearing that no I didn't read all 142 and fortunately because if you don't like reading we actually don't have all 142 books so we actually lost the books 11 to 20 and then books 46 to 142 all of that is gone pretty much and we have the other books that fill in the blanks for us however what we do have from those books we do have fragments we do have summaries from those books so we know what happened in those books other people referencing them that's really good and quoting which which is how we get the fragrance from them all of that stuff is really fantastic it really helps us to know what was going on so we do know what goes on in each kind of section of of the Roman histories and each book itself so let's kind of go into that right now so books 1 2 5 we have the foundations of Rome books 6 to 10 we have some might was 11 to 15 is Romans conquering like the whole of Italy and all that kind of jazz we didn't have 16 to 20 room gets bored during this period in the attack college and then 21 to 30 they get bored again and the attack Carthage again then we have 31 to 45 where there's an interruption from all this Carthage attention because they have to fight this other dude then 46 to 70 there's a social war that happened 71 to 80 we have the war until like Marius dies Marius is this general so until he dies within him 81 to 90 which is war until this guy saw the dice thanks cuz solo was an awful dictator so he then dies at the end of this book 91 to 103 lots of stuff actually happens but it ends with Pompey getting his triumphs we then have 104 to 108 which is the last years of the Republic 109 to 116 we see the death of Caesar and the war that happened immediately after that because obviously that was not that was a whole thing then 117 to 133 we have up until the Battle of Actium which I just mentioned not too long ago and then 134 to 142 is kind of up until August as death and kind of up until like levies death it's really just like the last of what he could write down is in those books and the last of the books we think was published kind of like right after August the stars in 1480 we we think because they were kind of it was like a rolling publishing type thing so he wasn't a tortured soul like I said he wasn't a toy so people did appreciate him as he was writing he was very much a writer who people looked at and they were like ah he's actually really good now obviously in order to be a historian you have to be interested in that Tegrity so Libya was super super interested in Rome's antiquity in each of these antiquity and kind of how it all started that's probably also because around that time he was part of the generation which saw Caesar kind of reaches not reach that's a bad word but he traced even he traced his lineage back to a Venus whose the goddess of love so he was kind of around that time when people were tracing their lineages back to these great people not to Troy so he was like alright let me just write this let me figure out exactly how he became as great as everybody says that we are and so he wrote it down because of that and it wasn't really for political motives because he wasn't involved in politics now this is different for writers because a lot of writers there are the well-educated people so they are the ones who engine of getting into the Senate they were the ones who ended up taking up massive political powers they were the ones because they had the education in order to support that so it's extremely weird but Livy wasn't part of the Senate and unfortunately it does kind of show at some points in his writing that's one of the criticisms of him is that sometimes it shows through the lack of firsthand you know like access to documents that he's talking about and writing up he is not in the Senate as they're speaking about certain laws and all of that kind of stuff so a lot of that stuff is second hand or just story time and and what have you not which is fine cuz it's still really really good and it's great that we have it however he wasn't physically there for a lot of that stuff not because of that like usually with people you could just be like well they had political agenda obviously they were in the Senate they were writing this blah but Livi's not one of those people you can't just attach he must have a political motive in order to write because he literally wasn't part of any of that so that makes it slightly more difficult but at the same time it's easier and it's much easier to read because his message is much more moral and it's much more personal than any of the other writers in fact he is one of my favorite quotes in the start of his preface this is the quote right now and it's right in front of you guys so that you can read it too and it shows that actually his history is about education about learning from the past as warnings both and education at the same time which is a quote that I absolutely adore because I think it's like it's just so prominent and how you should read history that it's like these are warnings and things that we can learn from but also good examples you know you can learn from them bad ways and good ways and that's essentially what livings writings are is that it's like look at all these people that came before us and look at what they did wrong or look at what they did great we need to take notes which I I just think is brilliant but also he like laid it out for everybody so nobody was like oh you think that he meant this he's like I'm telling you what I mean and actually I think that's probably a good place to stop this this doesn't go on for too long because knowing me I will sit here and yeah but especially about Livy so those are good things to just leave on and if I'm gonna leave us with three points that you guys should definitely take away from this video definitely the he's a Roman ok that's important because we haven't actually encountered a Roman historian prior to this so this is important he's the first Roman historian that I've mentioned to you guys he wrote the entire Roman history that's a second point he literally from up until he was dying like he wrote all of that history and that's why we get a lot of our references from as a whole it's like a like a proper piece of work by itself a standalone piece of work he wrote the history of Rome and your last point is that he wrote it for moral and personal reasons and that is important because it is a massive comparison to a lot of other historians who we will be discussing okay so we just got through living thank you guys want you're getting through living with me I really do appreciate all of your views if you guys like this video and you guys are on YouTube and definitely hit that thumbs up if you guys are on Instagram then please hit that hot button so that I know that you guys are really engaging with this series and afterwards if you guys like it I will keep doing it just for you so stay tuned for next week where we will be discussing a sick historian next Sunday so we'll see you then guys [Music]

Channel: Moan Inc.

Views: 1,395

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: livy, history, historian, ancient histoy, roman history, rome, ancient rome, carthage, sulla, marius, samnite wars, social war, caesar, augustus, claudius, classics, classical civilisation, education, ancient history lecture, ancient history criticism, ancient history books, ancient history timeline, ancient history lover, Ancient Greece crash course, historian reacts

Id: G8pRK4YPtNo

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020