Ducky

Do you have any thoughts on it and/or translation recommendations?

Thank youuuuuu ily miss your post-it arts but still take your time no worries 😘😘😘😘😘😘

I hope i didnt ask this already

Hey! :D

Livy is a heavily biased source on Roman history, but he’s also a very interesting primary/contemporary source. He was friends and and allies with Augustus and his family, and, like a lot of writers who were supported by Augustus (or at least weren’t killed by him during his reign), do a lot of work to justify Augustus’ rule as emperor through their work. You can see it to varying degrees in Horace, Ovid, and Vergil too. Still, I think he’s really useful for understanding what elites wanted their history to be, elite Roman values, and elite worldviews going into Rome’s imperial age. I even used Book 1 of his Ab Urbe Conditia for my first undergraduate research project, lol!

As for translation recommendations, that depends what you want. The Penguin and Oxford publishing house copies are the gold standard, and are more likely to have additional notes. Common bookstore copies often don’t include a commentary (which provides extra info on the translation choices and cultural context), and don’t really feature the translator as a result. If you’re fine without commentary, I’d consider online translations as well. They tend to be slightly older, but they’re free, they’re great, and they’re on websites with more translated Latin texts too. Project Gutenberg and ToposText are pretty good for this, and Perseus has the Latin with vocabulary of you want the original language. Poetry In Translation doesn’t have him, but has most other Latin and Greek texts.

Most Greek/Roman writers are biased in some way, so don’t let that discourage you. If you’re interested in other primary sources on Roman history, Caesar, Terence, Tacitus, Polybius, Sallust Suetonius, and even Cato the Elder and Cocero are all great (and have easily accessible online translations!)

Finally, thank you for the love for my sticky note art! I really want to get back to it soon.

This year has taken a lot out of me. But there’s hope! I’ll be mostly free when I send my thesis paper for publication and finish up with my upcoming conference, and the first thing I plan to do it draw. I’ve missed posting art!