<P> Livy wrote in a mixture of annual chronology and narrative, often interrupting a story to announce the elections of new consuls . Collins defines the "annalistic method" as "naming the public officers and recording the events of each succeeding year". It is an expansion of the fasti, the official public chronicles kept by the magistrates, which were a primary source for Roman historians . Those who seem to have been more influenced by the method have been termed annalists . </P> <P> The first and third decades (see below) of Livy's work are written so well that Livy has become a sine qua non of curricula in Golden Age Latin . Some have argued that subsequently the quality of his writing began to decline, and that he becomes repetitious and wordy . Of the 91st book Barthold Georg Niebuhr says "repetitions are here so frequent in the small compass of four pages and the prolixity so great, that we should hardly believe it to belong to Livy ..." Niebuhr accounts for the decline by supposing "the writer has grown old and become loquacious ...", going so far as to conjecture that the later books were lost because copyists refused to copy such low - quality work . </P> <P> A digression in Book 9, Sections 17--19, suggests that the Romans would have beaten Alexander the Great if he had lived longer and had turned west to attack the Romans, making this digression the oldest known alternate history . </P> <P> The first five books were published between 27 and 25 BC . The first date mentioned is the year Augustus received that title: twice in the first five books Livy uses it . For the second date, Livy lists the closings of the temple of Janus but omits that of 25 (it had not happened yet). </P>

Livy from the foundation of the city summary