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Abstract. This article endeavours to establish a precise date and political context for Livy's composition of the preface to his monumental Ab Urbe Condita in the light of recent discoveries about Livy's chronology of composition and new polyvalent readings of his text. The paper concludes that the preface was probably written ca. early 32 BCE.
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Yet another study of the preface to Livy's Ab Urbe Condita after more than a century of learned exegesis and debate2 may seem hard to justify, but recent trends in Livian scholarship-including innovative polyvalent readings of the AUC and attempts to re-date its composition3-suggest that at least some revision has become necessary. Most of the standard talking-points surrounding the preface-its pessimistic tone, its literary antecedents, its relationship to the Augustan regime, and its seeming rhetorical paradoxes-will be revisited here with a view to resolving some of the more intractable problems that have plagued the text and its interpretation for over a century now.4
Several years ago, I argued in print that Livy actually began composing his monumental history of Rome slightly earlier than the canonical 27-25 BCE.5 Building on earlier revisionist studies by Syme, Bayet and Luce,6 I suggested that the forward-looking passages in Livy's first pentad (1.19.3 and 4.20.5-11, both of which mention the name Augustus) were-as Luce noted long ago7- later insertions to the first edition, and hence could no longer be legitimately used as evidence for a compositional terminus post quem of 27 BCE, when Octavian had his name changed to Augustus. I linked up this argument to another piece of evidence, hitherto overlooked, from Livy's first book (1.56.2), which looks ahead to the repairs on the Cloaca Maxima and Circus Maximus by Agrippa, in his capacity as aedile in 33 BCE (cf. Cass. Dio 49.43.1f.; Plin. HN 36.104; Str. 5.3.8 [235C]), in order to establish that Livy took up his stylus in 33 or 32 BCE. Livy was thus in no sense an 'Augustan' historian by motivation or orientation early on-nor perhaps at any point-in his writing career. He was, rather, a triumviral historian, deeply cynical and appalled at what was going on around him-if not more so than even Sallust, or Horace (Epod. 16).
Although scholarly consensus...