Livy
Article
Livy is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 30, 2023 and May 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “starting with a quote on how society is falling apart, then revealing it was from Livy writing in the first-century Roman Empire”; “introductory quote by Livy”; “This paper discusses some of the ancient Roman customs Livy might have been comparing favorably to the dissolute mores of his own era”. It most often appears alongside Rome, US, Abraham.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: June 30, 2023
- Last seen: May 15, 2025
Appears In
- Is There An Illusion Of Moral Decline?
- Open Thread 283
- Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
- Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
Related Pages
-
- Rome (2 shared issues)
-
- US (2 shared issues)
-
- Abraham (1 shared issues)
-
- Achilles (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX survey (1 shared issues)
-
- Adam Smith (1 shared issues)
-
- Africa (1 shared issues)
-
- Amazon (1 shared issues)
-
- America (1 shared issues)
-
- Ara Norenzayan (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I’m biased against the introduction, where they pull the old trick of starting with a quote on how society is falling apart, then revealing it was from Livy writing in the first-century Roman Empire. They expect us to be shocked, as if every essay on moral decline hasn’t used the same flourish since - well, since the first-century Roman Empire.
And this is part of why I find the introductory quote by Livy so annoying. What was morality to Livy? Respecting the lares and penates. Performing the ancestral rites. Chastity until marriage, then bearing strong children (Emperor Augustus’ famous law encouraged at least three). Martial valor and willingness to die pro patria. Commoners treating patricians with the respect due a noble class, and patricians treating commoners with noblesse oblige.
Inline links: famous law
This paper discusses some of the ancient Roman customs Livy might have been comparing favorably to the dissolute mores of his own era. They include a law that a husband could kill his wife if he caught her drinking - after all, drunkenness could lead to adultery. When Livy talked about moral decline, part of what he meant that the Romans of his day no longer had the stomach to do this. Was he wrong? Are we still equally likely to do that kind of thing today?
Inline links: This paper
So am I a pedant? The original paper is much less clear about this. It uses the phrase “moral decline” in the title, starts with a quote from Livy about moral decline, situates itself in the tradition of historians like Arthur Herman who talk about moral decline, and dunks on modern populists for believing in moral decline (saying it has disproven them). I think many of these people were using morality in the broader sense, and the paper is claiming to have refuted them while really only having refuted a weaker sense. So while I appreciate that the author knew what he was doing, I still think the paper as written implies that it’s proven something more exciting than it did.
The difference between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Babylon and Egypt on the other, was that Greeks and Romans had written down their stories for us. Their stories had become our story. History was a narrative. Each of its chapters had a beginning, middle and end. How else would you tell it? Now, as we go farther back, we have less and less writing to rely on. Even when we have writing, on papyrus or stone, it isn’t self-interpreting – it’s not history the way Herodotus and Livy tell us history, with the explicit goal of recounting the past. Earlier still the texts die out completely, and we are left with stones and bones. Our knowledge of this history has to come from science: from archeology, anthropology (in the hope of using present societies to learn about past societies), and now also the new science of historical population genetics. Joe Henrich has done more than most to teach us our history using these tools. His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative from the point of view of the unique human capacity for cumulative culture1.
Therefore, nothing can ever destroy society? Sorry, this is too Outside View, even for me (1, 2, 3). Every generation of Romans worried they were growing decadent and courting disaster. But eventually Rome did grow decadent and collapse. I’m not enough of a historian to know whether everyone was wrong until 476 AD and then they were right all at once - or whether each generation was right that they were slightly more decadent and less stable than the last, until finally the decline became unsustainable. But the guys in 475 saying “har har, we’ve read Livy, he thought his generation was decadent and about to collapse too” would have been in for a nasty surprise. So let’s at least consider taking this at face value.