Ab urbe condita. Book XXII

Author / Creator

Livy, author

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Physical

Summary

"This book has its origins in the work done by Hornblower after 2015 for a monograph about Lycophron's Alexandra, Rome and the Hellenistic world,1 in which the period of and immediately after the H...

"This book has its origins in the work done by Hornblower after 2015 for a monograph about Lycophron's Alexandra, Rome and the Hellenistic world,1 in which the period of and immediately after the Hannibalic or Second Punic War featured extensively. At that time, he felt the absence of a good, large-scale, up-to-date set of commentary volumes on Livy's third decade, like the series of Oxford commentaries inaugurated by Robert Ogilvie in 1965 (books 1-5) and continued by Stephen Oakley (books 6-10; 1997-2005) and John Briscoe (books 31-45; 1973-2012).2 In 2017 Briscoe, whose Oxford Classical Text of books 21-25 had been published in the previous year, 3 accepted an invitation from Hornblower to collaborate with him on a commentary on book 22. The absence of commentaries mentioned above continues, and the present book is written on different lines, for a different publisher and for a series with particular and explicitly literary aims. We have tried to keep those aims in mind throughout, but the events narrated were historical (however rhetorically handled), and we have sought to do justice to matters of history as well as of literature. The balance of topics covered by the eleven sections of the Introduction aims to reflect this. There is no separate section on topography in the Introduction, but for Trasimene and Cannae in particular, see the introductory notes to 4.1-7.5 and 40.4-50.3 (on this style of reference see below). Hornblower re-visited both Trasimene and Cannae in June 2019. We believe that Lazenby 1978 was right in his locations for the two main battles, and have used his maps as the basis for our own (see further below). Of the ten books which Livy devoted to the Hannibalic War, book 22, the Trasimene and Cannae narrative, was the obvious choice. In the course of our writing, Stephen Oakley remarked to one of us that 'Livy is at his best when writing about Rome's defeats', and by that criterion alone, book 22 stands out within an exceptionally fine and polished decade. Of the other nine, only book 27 rivals it for dramatic power, but that book ends with a Roman victory: the battle of the Metaurus river (207 BC), which as Livy himself says,4 redressed the catastrophe of Cannae"--

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