As I feared the original is not as good as the later summaries. Most of the work is familiar since I have read later authors who used Livy as a source. The original work suffers from translation. I would recommend Gibbon's retelling of Livy in "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". His prose is much less convoluted and he skips the dull parts. ( )

Scholars now say it's legendary, but these are the stories every Roman knew --and every educated European or American until lately ( )

These are the traditional stories everyone should know-- Horatius
at the bridge, the rape of Lucretia etc. They may not be true, but
they are important background for the culture. ( )

Livy's classic Roman history. ( )

The first five books of Livy's history of Rome provide a good overview of the city's (later to be an empire's) early days. As the introduction warns, Livy's history is rather moralistic in tone, but that does not prevent it from being informative. Livy shows the transformation of the city from a kingdom to a republic, and also highlights the tension between the patricians and the plebs.

I have the Barnes and Noble edition of this work. It was fairly easy to read, alhtough I have two complaints. The first is the lack of maps. It would have been helpful to follow the battles if one knew where they were occuring with respect to Rome. The second was the use of endnotes. As a general rule, I much prefer footnotes when reading to minimize amount of page turning necessary. Hovever, I would imagine that endnotes are cheaper, and the volume was relatively inexpensive. ( )