"Oakley raises all of the essential literary issues, historical problems, and textual cruxes in his book, and magisterially addresses every question, large or small. Scholars will rightly turn to him as they study the Samnite Wars. Oakley's essays on the literary and historical backgrounds of central passages will define Livy studies in these respective fields. He has distilled an enormous amount of modern scholarship to reach his concise, informative, and well-argued entries on the individual lemmata. Comparisons can no longer be made to R. M. Ogilvie's great A Commentary on Livy, Books 1-5 (1965). Oakley's work has now equaled and, with the publication of the final volume on book 10, will exceed Ogilvie's in importance (in the best sense).

Essential."--Choice.