I'm reading Livy's Early History of Rome (Books I - V) from Penguin Classics. There have been a few passages which refer to "God". It's odd because it's both capitalized and used in the singular without surrounding context that would imply reference to a specific god. It reads like the way Christians refer to god.
Is this just a failure of translation or something else?
If you can give me a chapter and section number (or failing that, just describe the scene you are reading, I might be able to find it) I can give you a more definite answer. Absent that, I can say that in certain contexts a translation of capital-G God is perfectly reasonable. In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey the gods are presented as quarrelsome and basically "big humans", but this was contested very early in Greek thought. Hesiod for example contains a blend of the mythological stories of the gods with a depiction of Zeus that is quite reminiscent of that of God in the Hebrew Bible (this creates some really weird dissonance, particularly the scene where he is tricked by Prometheus but knows he is being tricked because he is omniscient). Xenophanes, a poet who lived just prior to the Greco-Persian Wars, for his own part mocked and declared blasphemous the traditional mythological accounts of the gods, as they did not fit his virtuous understanding. This critique only increased as time went on, and the hyper-educated elite of Livy's days often espoused a complex and highly philosophical vision of the divine that left no room for seemingly silly mythological stories.
which edition are you reading?
Furthermore, I read the version by Rev. Canon Roberts., and to my knowledge there is no occurrence of capital g God. Since proving a negative is harder; can you provide a specific occurance?
Probably just a feature of the translator. The translator for this edition (a Reverend, coincidentally) makes no mention of "God," but a lot of references to "gods."
[book 3] (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0026%3Abook%3D3)
[book 4] (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0026%3Abook%3D4)
[book 5] (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0026%3Abook%3D5)