Looking for good scholarly books and academic papers on Livy and the Second Punic War

by cabinboy752

Hey all,

I’m writing a short, 2,000 word paper on Livy and the Second Punic War (i.e. Livy’s account of the Second Punic War). Could y’all list important scholarly books and articles on this subject? I’ll develop my specific thesis as I dig into these. By important I don’t necessarily mean particularly famous- simply ones you have found insightful and helpful.

Thanks!

XenophonTheAthenian

Forgive me for not really providing what you're asking for, but I don't think this is an especially productive way to go about finding a topic for a project. Livy has one of the most extensive bibliographies of any classical author, and I think I can state with a fair degree of surety that he's the single most discussed Roman historian of all time. Going through every piece of scholarship ever written about him, even going through stuff that was written only recently, isn't going to be especially enlightening. It might be one thing for a dissertation focused on Livy, but for an 8-page paper it's rather a different story. Generally when ancient historians start a project we, like classicists, begin by identifying some problem in the texts, not the other way around. For example one might look at differences in the description of a particular event in Livy and Polybius (although such things have been done to death at this point) or examine how Livy's descriptions of two different events might inform how we're supposed to read them. Mining through everything that's ever been written about the Roman world's most prolific historian is just going to muddle everything further and provide lots of unnecessary or irrelevant material, and searching through the scholarship for some hole to fill isn't really very productive. If you're looking for insight into some problem in Livy's text then the best place to start is the text