Livy wrote this History of Rome. Book 39 continues the story in Italy and the East (Asia Minor is roughly Turkey) in the years after the wars with Carthage. Last time, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso beat the Galatians, Celtic raiders in Asia Minor, and came home to accusations that the war was greed dressed as security.

The Senate, Rome's council of leading men, now hunts a secret nighttime cult of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, through Italy as if it were an army. Informers, decrees, executions: the state polices worship and private life in one panic. Foreign cult, luxury, and the corruption of the young become one diagnosis of a postwar people. Cato's moral politics still walks the Forum. Elections still trade honor for empire's new stakes. Italy is no longer only a war camp; it is a society arguing what, under so much captured gold, a Roman still is.