Livy spent years writing the History of Rome, from a village on the Tiber to a world power. This is Book 2 of that early story. Book 1 closed the age of kings: after Lucretia was raped and killed herself, Brutus drove out Tarquin Superbus, and Rome became a republic — a city run by a senate and elected officials, not a king.

The republic is barely a year old when Tarquin returns with Lars Porsenna, an Etruscan warlord from Clusium in Tuscany. Horatius holds the wooden Sublician Bridge until it falls behind him. Mucius Scaevola burns his own right hand in the enemy camp to prove a Roman will not flinch. Inside the walls, debt and hunger tear the orders apart. The poor secede to the Sacred Mount and win tribunes: officers whose persons are sacred, with a veto as their weapon against the consuls — the two men elected to run Rome for a year. Coriolanus, a banished aristocrat, leads Volscian armies to the gates until his mother turns him. Spurius Cassius dies on a charge of aiming at a crown. Veii and the hill peoples wait just beyond the fields.