Livy
Ab Urbe Condita 34 - repealing the Oppian Law
Ab urbe condita · Written under Augustus, about 27-25 BCE; the events are of 195 BCE.
In 195 BCE the women of Rome block the streets to demand repeal of a law capping how much gold a woman may own and what she may wear. Cato argues that giving way ends the republic. He loses. The fullest ancient argument about women, property and public luxury.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Cyrus Edmonds, in Bohn's Classical Library - a 'literal' translation in the Bohn house style, which meant close to the Latin and unafraid of a long sentence. Perseus' own metadata is inconsistent about him, naming 'Cyrus Evans' as editor and 'Cyrus Edmonds' in the statement of responsibility; Edmonds is the translator. His English is mid-Victorian and keeps Livy's periodic structure, so the speeches still read as speeches. He renders Roman legal and economic terms fairly literally rather than finding English equivalents, which helps here: the reader meets the machinery rather than a paraphrase of it.