Ab Urbe Condita (The History of Rome), Books 21 to 30

Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, The History of Rome, Books 21 to 30, covering the Second Punic War, is the Roman historian's own primary narrative account, written more than a century and a half after the events it describes, and includes in Books 22 and 29 the Sibylline consultations, the ritual burials in the Forum Boarium, and the state's formal reception of the cult of the Magna Mater at Rome. Its strength is that it is the fullest surviving ancient narrative of these episodes, preserving religious and ritual detail no other surviving source records in comparable depth. Its limit is exactly its distance from events: Livy wrote generations after the Second Punic War, working from earlier sources now largely lost to us, shaping his account with his own moral and patriotic aims, so a claim resting on Livy's specific religious detail should be read as Rome's own later narrative of these events rather than a contemporary record of them.