Latin War - The Sources

The Sources

The most comprehensive source on the Latin War is the Roman historian Livy (59 BC – AD 17) who narrates the war in the Eight book of his history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita. Two other substantial narratives have also survived, a fragment from the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BC–after 7 BC), a Greek contemporary of Livy, and a summary by the 12th century Byzantine chronicler John Zonaras based on the Roman history of Cassius Dio (AD 150 – 235). Modern historians consider the ancient accounts of the Latin War to be a mixture of fact and fiction. All the surviving authors lived long after the Latin War and relied on the works of earlier writers. Several of the historians used by Livy experienced the Social War (91–88 BC) between Rome and her Italian allies and seems to have interpreted the Latin War in the terms of that war, and this has introduced anachronistic elements into the historical record.