Livy wrote this History of Rome, looking back from the age of Augustus on the city's first centuries. Book 3 continues after the Republic — Rome run by a senate and elected officials, not a king — has already beaten the last king and his Etruscan allies, given the poor tribunes with a veto, and turned back a banished aristocrat who marched enemy troops to the walls.

Rome names ten men, the decemvirs, to put the law on bronze so no priest can keep it in his head. The Twelve Tables go up in the Forum, the public square. Appius Claudius among the ten will not lay down office. He wants Verginia; her father kills her in the square rather than yield her to a tyrant's lictor, the attendant who carries the rods. The army walks out. The ten are broken. Cincinnatus is fetched from the plough, made dictator — an emergency sole commander — for a fortnight, then sent back to his field.