#titus livius

[doobydoobydoowau]

imagine this: you're the baddest bitch in the Roman Republic. you have spent the past few decades fighting, fucking and planning to take control of the known world. you've killed millions of people. you became the fucking pontifex maximus and used some guy's idea to reinvent the calendar. you were the first roman to have a terrible vacation experience in the UK. you won a civil war. your best friend likes to commission naked statues of you and stand in front of them calling you a king at parties.

it's the 15th March 44 b.c.e and life is good. the people love you and you just became a dictator for life. you leave your mansion, ignoring your wife's pleas for you to stay (venus above that woman is in love with you) and shake off the soothsayer who keeps following you around and talking about your doom (spurinna is obsessed with you). you swagger into work, sit down, and are immediately stabbed by a bunch of your coworkers. you stagger around for a bit feeling sorry for yourself, before collapsing down dead at the statue of the guy that you had that civil war against. what a way to go.

[illustratus]

The Continence of Scipio by Pompeo Batoni

[ceterumcenseo14]

Can you all, please shut up about Saguntum?!

Reading about the Hannibalic war, a summary

It’s like a jumpscare

You’ll be in the middle of the war, but some (mostly Roman) dude will suddenly, out of fucking nowhere pull:

“Yo, guys remember Saguntum? In case you forgot, Hannibal started this war, he broke the treaty by attacking our good friends… whom we just watched get destroyed, without lifting a finger in their defence …anyway, the god’s are on our side, fear not!”

It’s not even funny anymore. In the beginning and the end of the war I understand the emphasis, but Livy, my dude, what’s the point in constantly bringing this shit up also in the books in between, at every chance?

We get it, these Carthaginians can’t be trusted and you Romans have your bellum iusticum ac piam shit…

[would-hannibal-eat-them]

[richo1915]

“I invite the reader's attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome's power was first acquired and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”

Titus Livius

[domusplautii]

‘I too am happy to have reached the end of the Punic War. I somehow feel I have personally taken part in its hardships and dangers! I realize that it is most inappropriate for one who has made the rash promise to cover all Roman history to flag in specific sections of such a great work; and yet it does occur to me that the sixty-three years between the beginning of the First Punic War and the end of the Second have taken up as many rolls as did the four hundred and eighty-eight years between the foundation of the city and the consulship of Appius Claudius, the man who began the first war with Carthage. I feel like someone who wades out into the sea after being initially attracted to the water by the shallows next to the shore; and I foresee any advance only taking me into even more enormous, indeed bottomless, depths, and that this undertaking of mine, which seemed to be diminishing as I was completing the earliest sections, is now almost increasing in size.’

Livy, from Ab Urbe Condita 31.1

[brasideios]

Without planning to, I have recommenced reading Roman history at the outbreak of the conflict between Philip of Macedon and Rome in 200 BCE - it’s just the book of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita I was up to when I stopped - and I can’t tell you how jarring it is to go from studying the Arkhidamian War, where Athens basically owned the sea, to this:

‘Pirate ships from Chalcis, formerly a menace to the Athenians, not just on the open sea but also in all their coastal farmland, no longer even dared to ply the sea beyond the Strait of Euripides, much less round Cape Souinon…’

And aside from the specifically Greek context, the idea of Athens so changed, there’s another feeling to it all - like Hellas used to be the whole world, now it’s just a tiny piece of it. It’s really getting me in my feels.

I get that in large part it’s a perspective thing - Thucydides was invested in Hellas, it was personal, small scale - while Livy is an outsider looking in, from a much larger Empire who had just conquered Carthage - But it’s still startling, y’know? An adjustment to make.

[ficus-ruminalis]

Imagine being named TITUS LIVIUS or whatever and then bitches two thousand years and change from your lifetime are walking around calling u livy like ur some diminutive prissy purse dog who belongs to a woman named Jennahveve who drinks bleach laced with rose quartz on a daily basis

[blogdemocratesjr]

Titus Livius statue at the Austrian Parliament Building in Vienna, Austria + Home Alone by Chris Columbus & John Hughes (1990)

I am not unaware that the heedlessness underlying the widespread modern refusal to believe that gods issue portents also causes prodigies no longer to be announced in public or included in the historical record. Nevertheless, as I write about bygone affairs, my mind in some way takes on an antique cast, and a certain spirit of religious respect prevents me from regarding as unworthy of recording in my history matters that the deeply sagacious men of old deemed meritorious of public attention. (43.13)

—Livy, Rome's Mediterranean Empire

Livy’s history of Rome is known in Latin as Ab Urbe Condita (‘From the Foundation of the City’) and originally consisted of 142 ‘books’ (the longest is about sixty-five pages in English). He begins with Aeneas’ flight to Italy after the Trojan War. Book 120 ends in 43 bce with the death of Cicero, which may originally have been intended as the conclusion. Livy eventually went at least as far as 9 bce; the death of Augustus’ stepson Drusus in that year was included in Book 142. Of the original work, Books 1-10 and 21-45 survive. The rest were lost before the manuscripts of late antiquity and the Middle Ages were published in modern book form during the Renaissance. Almost the entirety of Ab Urbe Condita, however, is preserved in summaries. Within a century of Livy’s death, there was at least one abbreviated version in circulation. Currently, two sets of summaries are known: one, referred to as the Periochae and varying in length from a few pages to a few sentences per book, covers all but Books 136 and 137; the second, the ‘Oxyrhynchus’ epitomes, is incomplete and fragmentary.

—Jane D. Chaplin, Intro to Rome's Mediterranean Empire by Livy

[scientia-rex]

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

[willgrahamsadface]

Will Graham builds a boat to sail to Italy and face Hannibal, and names it Nola. That could refer to the city of New Orleans, for Will is from Louisiana, but its symbolic meaning could go way deeper: in the battle of Nola (214 BC), Hannibal was defeated by the Romans, after he tried unsuccessfully to conquer the town three times. It's considered a minor victory, but paramount to the Roman morale.

But whether the victory was on such a scale or less, a very great thing - I rather think the greatest in that war - was accomplished that day. For not to be defeated by Hannibal was a more difficult thing than it was later to defeat him.

Titus Livius, Ab Urbe Condita [History of Rome]

And then, when they're back from Italy, Will says this, knowing he's about to actually defeat Hannibal by rejecting him:

Rejecting Hannibal is the most difficult thing Will has to do, because by now he knows he wants to run away with him. But that would mean to be defeated by his Hannibal.

Will is the definitive master of strategy.

[duxfemina]

Quintus Sertorius - you expect it to be a boring military centric date but then he takes you to the forest and there you discover the hardened rebel general is in fact a Disney princess and he introduces you to his pet albino fawn and all around he seems like a swell guy to see regularly though his attachment to his mother could be a problem down the road

Publius Clodius Pulcher - you met him when he was doing a bit of crossdressing and he invited you to a party at his house. You know you attended the party. You can't remember any of it. What you do remember is waking up in jail and then having Clodius help nurse you through your hangover before his wife Fulvia showed up to bail her husband out and knowing he got you into this she pays your bail too. You later hear gossip around Rome about how apparently you and Clodius along with one of his gangs destroyed some public buildings

Titus Annius Milo - Cicero set you up on a blind date with Milo to which he showed up late, barely said anything and when you told him you didn't intend to foot the entire bill for dinner he had to go find Pompeius Magnus in the restaurant and borrow the money to pay for dinner off of him. He did send an armed escort to walk you home though so if you like having body guards maybe give him a second chance

Marcus Livius Drusus - he will try to take you to the best Italian restaurant in town but then a bunch of senators block the road and start hazing him about what he's been saying about Italian enfranchisement so y'all decide to dine-in and Drusus calls on some allies to cater in some real good rural Italian cuisine

Marcus Junius Brutus - takes you to dinner out so his mom can't pry into his business and he can speak his mind freely to you about his concerns over Caesar's growing arrogance after a couple glasses of wine. Just before dessert Cassius shows up and Brutus doesn't even try to stop him from third wheeling and you spend dessert forced to listen to two men discuss politics and how much they don't trust Caesar or Mark Antony all while you ponder how neither of those men would completely ignore their date like this

Ancient Roman Politicians on a Modern Date

Gaius Julius Caesar: He invites you to a dinner party at his house and is a fairly witty and engaging host, but all of his stories seem to be about himself. However, friends assure you he's "every woman's man and every man's woman," so stick around for the nightcap he offers you if that makes you curious.

Marcus Licinius Crassus: For a man who is absolutely the wealthiest you've ever met, it seems a little convenient that he 'forgot his wallet' on your date to that expensive gastropub, so you couldn't go halfsies and had to pay for both your meals. The gold flake dessert shines bright, but you sort of wish he'd choke on it.

Gnaeus Pompeius Maximus: It's kind of weird how he takes you around to show you his art collection since it mainly consists of statues of himself, but hey, at least he's interested in art? He also tells a lot of stories about himself. However, he has a reputation for being a devoted husband and he's in between spouses, so if you're ready for that, give him a chance.

Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus aka Augustus: He literally wrote out a plan for your entire date, how it would go, and what he would say to the most commonly asked smalltalk questions. Do not deviate from his script. He takes you somewhere like a museum or a fancy restaurant where they barely feed you, but although he is polished, his romantic delivery seems a little flat until you run into his best friend Agrippa... They are just besties, right?

Marcus Antonius aka Mark Antony: Ok, there are a couple ways this could go. He is either an absolutely fantastic date who takes you to see a hilarious play and finishes off with a fun night on the town, or he takes you to a bar in a seedy part of town where you dance and drink and party all night. Either way he gives you nice gifts and is charming and funny. Most likely a good time date, just don't expect things to get serious unless you're the Queen of Egypt.

Marcus Aemilius Lepidus: He never showed up for your date. Completely ghosted you. You track down his coworkers Mark Antony and Octavian and they say they have no idea where he is either. Weird.

Marcus Agrippa: He takes you on a tour of the city, pointing out all the architecture and finishes this off with dinner. He seems nice, intelligent, and is very attentive to your needs. So why isn't he off the market yet? His attachment to his slightly creepy best friend and roommate Octavian, maybe? They were roommates.

Sextus Pompeius Magnus Pius: A much better date than his father, he takes you to his private boat and gives you a seaside tour. He valiantly fights off pirates during your date, but did you catch one of them winking at him? Regardless, it's an unforgettable adventure.

Who would you rather date? And again, I'm sorry, Lepidus.

As always, thanks to @just-late-roman-republic-things for inspiring these posts.

[richo1915]

I am a Roman,' he said to the king; 'my name is Gaius Mucius. I came here to kill you - my enemy. I have as much courage to die as to kill. It is our Roman way to do and to suffer bravely. Nor am I alone in my resolve against your life; behind me is a long line of men eager for the same honor. Brace yourself, if you will, for the struggle - a struggle for your life from hour to hour, with an armed enemy always at your door. That is the war we declare against you: you need fear no action in the battlefield, army against army; it will be fought against you alone, by one of us at a time.'

Porsena in rage and alarm ordered the prisoner to be burnt alive unless he at once divulged the plot thus obscurely hinted at, whereupon Mucius, crying: 'See how cheap men hold their bodies when they care only for honor!' thrust his right hand into the fire which had been kindled for a sacrifice, and let it burn there as if he were unconscious of the pain. Porsena was so astonished by the young man's almost superhuman endurance that he leapt to his feet and ordered his guards to drag him from the altar. 'Go free,' he said; 'you have dared to be a worse enemy to yourself than to me. I should bless your courage, if it lay with my country to dispose of it. But, as that cannot be, I, as an honorable enemy, grant you pardon, life, and liberty.'

'Since you respect courage,' Mucius replied, as if he were thanking him for his generosity, 'I will tell you in gratitude what you could not force from me by threats. There are three hundred of us in Rome, all young like myself, and all of noble blood, who have sworn an attempt upon your life in this fashion. It was I who drew the first lot; the rest will follow, each in his turn and time, until fortune favor us and we have got you.'

The release of Mucius (who was afterwards known as Scaevola, or the Left-Handed Man, from the loss of his right hand) was quickly followed by the arrival in Rome of envoys from Porsena. The first attempt upon his life, foiled only by a lucky mistake, and the prospect of having to face the same thing again from every one of the remaining conspirators, had so shaken the king that he was coming forward with proposals for peace.

Titus Livius

[louis-antoine-leon-saint-just]

@camijust

Such a sweet and refreshing question, citizen!

Let's see... Unlike what some might think, I prefer simple flowers, like the ones that grow in the fields and trees around my house in Blérancourt. I must admit I have a soft spot for poppies. I believe this is why I knowingly altered Titus Livius' story and directed my adolescent ire towards those poor ferns instead.

There aren't many blue flowers, I think. (My favorite color is blue. I used to like red too before... before I see too much of it, let's say. It's still beautiful in flowers though. Flowers are pure and innocent...) There's the cornflower though. In the fields between Varennes and Valmy the blue cornflowers and the red poppies bloom with the white chamomile:

Isn't it poignantly beautiful? Sublime, even. I must say, these meadows have been sufficiently watered with blood for many centuries to come. May they humbly accept simple rainwater from now on.

OOC note: I swear this was going to be simple and normal... but of course it led to researching the flowers that grow in Aisne, and reflecting on the Livy anecdote and why he might have used ferns instead even though poppies are in bloom then (were there none? or was it a choice?), and ended with melancholic ramblings on the bleuet (cornflower), which is the equivalent in France to the poppy in the Commonwealth, because I found this beautiful picture on this page, and saw what region this page was about, l'Argonne i.e. these flowers grow right in the region where so many died during so many wars... The symbolism was too powerful - flowers, dead soldiers, La Marseillaise, Saint-Just just took over the keyboard. He had to make it sad again. He can't help it.

ETA: So fate played a very funny trick on me. It turns out that the flowers that grow around his house... are roses. And it is SO like Saint-Just to hide it behind "oh you know, just simple flowers growing around my house" and not say the truth except I swear I wasn't doing that this time, because I didn't check the pictures of his house in a long time. I was just picturing field and trees in general, you know, until @aedesluminis points me to that post. And this is SO FUNNY because roses ARE actually MY favorite flower, I, the real breathing living person behind this RP blog. But I don't think they would be Saint-Just. They might seem too aristocratic to him (though there are wild roses - that's what they originally were). All of this is so funny to me right now... this really feels like fate played a trick on me. Or like he does possess me after all. Who knows.

[heartofstanding]

I'm four chapters into Dan Jones's new Henry V bio because I make bad life choices (otoh, this is a major new biography of my boy so I feel I have to read it and this is the first Dan Jones history book I've read).

Thoughts thus far below the cut:

Look, I appreciate that it's a generally favourable biography because the predominant pop history biography of Henry V is Ian Mortimer's excretable 1415 and Dan Jones is a bigger name so people will pick him up over Mortimer. Worst person you know just made a great point etc. etc.

This, however, confirms all my worst feelings about pop history and narrative history

I'm trying to be cool with it because obviously pop history has its place and purpose and Jones isn't writing academic history but it's almost painful.

Like. Stop. Tell me how you came to this conclusion. You haven't cited a source for it. Stop. I know this is more complicated. Stop. You cited a source but I don't think it supports your conclusion.

e.g. he talks about prayers being said to John Thwing of Bridlington for protection against the plague at Henry V's baptism, which, like, cool detail man but where are you pulling this from? Oh, you've got no endnote for it...

Constantly fighting the urge to write "citation needed" and "source???" every few sentences.

So far, I'm on the side of "I don't like the mostly present-tense, some-future tense narration."

I really don't need a description of how pretty and delicate the 16 year old girl is while she gives birth or the "she's frightened or she should be" line or the "vessels for dynasties" line.

He still hates Richard II but the one work on the Peasants Revolt he cites is Juliet Barker's and not his own. 💀

There is a legit a paragraph where you can tell he really wanted to write "Richard II had bitch resting face that made him look like he was constantly catching a whiff of poo" ("he typically wears a haughty resting expression intended to convey majesty, yet in truth he looks more like he has caught a faint bad smell".)

in another example of why I hate narrative history: Jones uncritically quotes the bit from Titus Livius's Vita Henrici Quinti where Richard prophetises how great Henry will be as king and it's like, mate, unpack that a bit. Mentally, if not on the page. Read Paul Strohm's England's Empty Throne. Jones also editorialises it by reading as "very flattering" or "terrifyingly passive aggressive" and I'm like. dude. you weren't there and it probably didn't happen.

the book has a red ribbon bookmark attached to the binding, it's very pretty and useful. My favourite part of the book.

[scientia-rex]

I bet a bunch of people who were pissy about me referencing Machiavelli (nobody got AS mad about Sun Tzu or Musashi, leading me to wonder if they've actually read those either--and I know nobody reads The Discourses on Rome by Titus Livius from Machiavelli, because it's such a more nuanced and interesting work and they keep going "The Prince was satire!" as if I've never encountered that idea in my life before, to which I say you can write a thing satirically and still have people take it seriously, see: The Colbert Report) also think they have no recourse when a political system isn't working for them outside of that system, which is why they're going "I won't vote" as their primary form of protest.

Look at the protests from hippies against the Vietnam war. They occupied buildings, sometimes for large chunks of time. Look at the AIDS die-ins. Look at the WTO protests. When the government isn't budging, sometimes you need to take to the streets, even in the face of violent suppression that has become exponentially more violent and better armed as the government seeks to make those kinds of protests impossible. They cannot suppress every single one of us. Tear down their houses with your hands. Stalk political figures until you obtain usable blackmail information. We all have talents that can be useful to the revolution, and the revolution will have to happen in parts and pieces, not all at once, because there are too many moving parts in society. (Or do you want the hospitals to lose power when you succeed in knocking out the grid?)

Don't limit yourself.