Cicero’s is not the best-known version of the foundation story. The one that underlies most modern accounts goes back in its essentials to Livy. For a writer whose work is still so important to our understanding of early Rome, surprisingly little is known about ‘Livy the man’: he came from Patavium (Padua), in the north of Italy, began writing his compendium of Roman history in the 20s BCE and was on close enough terms with the Roman imperial family to have encouraged the future emperor Claudius to take up history writing. Inevitably,
