The Tears of Marcellus: History of a Literary Motif in Livy

Abstract

In a recent article Christina Kraus shows how Livy, in the first decade, creates an overlap between the text that he is writing and the subject he is writing about: the city of Rome.1 ‘Like the city it describes and constitutes, then, theAb urbe conditais a growing physical object through which the writer and the reader move together’ she observes. As a result the foundation and fall of the city, the two most dynamic moments of this space-entity, create parallel junctures both in the development of the city and in the development of the text. Kraus offers an apposite example. In book 5 ofAb urbecondita, Rome comes close to disaster not once but twice. Theexordiumof book 6, the beginning of the new pentad, refounds both the city and its history, creating a perfect analogy between the text and the city. Most importantly, by means of assimilation to other cities that have endured a similar fate, Livy is able to shape further the significance of the event. By construing the near fall of Rome in book 5 through the filter of the fall of Troy, Rome at the end of the first pentad symbolically moves beyond its Trojan past and refounds itself for good.

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