All these stories, which make murderous fathers into glorious heroes, able to put their country above their children, are legends. They all originate in the early or mid-Republic, those misty times many hundreds of years before any of our surviving sources were written. They all come from Livy, writing his glorious history to please Augustus, and Valerius Maximus, writing decontextualised anecdotes to please and guide Tiberius, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, also writing his history to please Augustus.
