A Three-Layer Analysis (TLA) of Livy, History of Rome, Book 1
1. Question
Why is the role of a founder not to preserve order first, but to bring order into being?
2. Abstract
The role of a founder is not first to preserve order, but to bring order into being, because at the founding stage there is not yet a fully formed order to preserve.
A consolidator begins with an existing framework: law, institutions, status order, succession customs, and shared communal awareness. By contrast, a founder faces a condition in which population is scattered, origins are mixed, authority is unsettled, and even the question of who should command and who should obey has not yet been decided.
For this reason, the founder’s first task is not to maintain an existing order, but to create the first form through which disorder can be transformed into order. Book 1 of Livy shows, through Aeneas and Romulus, that the founder is the first designer who assembles law, authority, naming, marriage, ritual, deliberative institutions, and structures of reproduction.
3. Method
This study follows the three-layer structure of TLA.
In Layer 1, the events found in Livy, Book 1 are organized as facts, such as migration, treaty-making, marriage, naming, augury, city founding, legal formation, the founding of the Senate, and the acquisition of marriage ties.
In Layer 2, these facts are connected to structural categories such as the Founding Phase, Founder / King / Hero, Kingship, Divine Signs / Omens / Ritual Order, and Urban Community and Civic Integration.
This study also uses OS Organizational Design Theory and rereads the community as a system composed of an OS, which serves as the decision-making body, and an Execution Layer, which carries out action.
In OS Organizational Design Theory, the OS functions through A, IA, H, and V, and total system health is determined by the product of OS health and Execution Layer health. Therefore, this article examines the founder not as a manager of order, but as an OS designer who first activates community, authority, law, and structures of reproduction.
4. Layer1: Fact
What Layer 1 shows is that the main figures in Book 1 are presented not as inheritors of a completed order, but as creators of order.
In Chapter 1, Aeneas gains a place of settlement through treaty, marriage, and alliance with Latinus. Here, a political order is created for the first time between outsiders and natives, replacing war.
In Chapter 2, Aeneas gives a common name to the Aborigines and the Trojans and reorganizes both as Latins. This is not a simple change of label. It is an act that gives separate groups a common framework of rights and loyalty.
In Chapter 6, Romulus and Remus aim to found a new city, but no order yet exists to decide who should rule. For this reason, they try to establish a standard of legitimacy through augury. Here, we see that before order can be preserved, the standard by which order is judged must first be created.
In Chapter 7, after the death of Remus, Romulus becomes the sole ruler, and the city comes to be called by the founder’s name. Naming functions here as an act that fixes the central authority and origin of the community.
In Chapter 8, Romulus performs sacred rites, gathers the people, establishes law, arranges insignia of authority, and founds the Senate. Before this, he opens the asylum and gathers people from nearby tribes without distinction between free persons and slaves. This shows that the founder is not preserving a completed order. He is accepting mixed people and transforming them into law, authority, and deliberative institutions.
In Chapter 9, it is said that without women, prosperity would last only one generation. Marriage and the formation of the next generation thus become state-level issues. The founder must therefore establish not only present rule, but also a structure of reproduction through which the community can continue into the future.
5. Layer2: Order
In Layer 2, the role of the Founder / King / Hero is defined as supplying the activating force that converts disorder into order. This definition is decisive. The founder is not the guardian of already existing rules. The founder is the one who first activates the standards that all should follow, the boundary of who belongs inside the community, and the form by which authority becomes legitimate.
The purpose of the Founding Phase is to satisfy the minimum conditions needed for a community to exist. Its preconditions are crisis, migration, a founder, and followers. At this stage, survival and population growth take priority over purity. What is needed here is not the ability to apply order evenly in a consolidating stage, but the ability to assemble the first framework of community, population, legitimacy, succession, deliberative institutions, and reproduction.
The structure of Kingship supports the same point. In Layer 2, kingship is strongly necessary in the Founding Phase and is given the role of carrying out state creation, expansion, and order maintenance by the shortest route. But “order maintenance” here does not mean managing a completed institutional system. Rather, it means combining war, marriage, naming, ritual, law, the Senate, and symbols of authority in order to create the first “form” of the community. Kingship functions not as a gentle device of later consolidation, but as a device that initiates order.
Divine Signs / Omens / Ritual Order also show that the founder’s work is not simple management. Augury and ritual are not decorations that hide arbitrary rule. They are devices that provide a standard of legitimacy by connecting it to cosmic order when no accepted standard yet exists. The founder must create not only institutions, but also the reason why those institutions deserve obedience.
From the perspective of OS Organizational Design Theory, this is the activation of the OS itself. The founder must assemble, out of an undifferentiated condition, the starting point of recognition in A, the circuit of shared meaning in IA, the order of roles in H, and the standard of judgment in V. For this reason, the founder’s main task is not the preservation of order, but the establishment of the preconditions of order.
6. Layer3: Insight
From this, it follows that the role of a founder is not first to preserve order, but to bring order into being, because at the founding stage the very preconditions of order — community, authority, law, succession, and reproduction — have not yet been formed. The founder is precisely the one who must assemble them for the first time.
A consolidator begins with already existing law, status order, succession custom, and communal awareness. By contrast, the founder faces a disordered condition in which origins and interests are mixed, and even the question of who should command and who should obey remains unsettled. For this reason, the founder’s task is not the preservation of an existing order, but the creation of the first order.
Aeneas transformed the relation between outsiders and natives into political order through treaty, marriage, and naming. Romulus established standards of legitimacy through augury, named the city, performed sacred rites, arranged law, set symbols of authority, and founded the Senate. He also connected the mixed people gathered through the asylum to marriage, law, deliberative institutions, and structures of reproduction.
These are not acts that preserve a completed order. They are the first acts of design through which disorder is transformed into community. The founder is not the keeper of an already finished order. He is the initiator who makes community possible for the first time, the one who lights the first small flame of order. When that flame is handed down to the next generation, the community begins to take lasting form.
7. Implications for the Present
This point is also important for modern start-up companies, newly created divisions, and reorganizing organizations.
The role of a founder is not only to make people follow existing rules. Rather, it is to create role division, evaluation order, decision criteria, information channels, and execution units that do not yet exist. Founding organizations often stagnate when the founder behaves like a consolidator and tries to preserve an order that has not yet truly been formed.
The founder must also design not only present control, but structures that can continue into the next generation. If hiring, evaluation, role design, approval, and succession are not built, the energy of the founding stage will last for only one generation. Therefore, the basic task of the founder in modern organizations also lies not in protecting a completed order, but in creating an order that can be reproduced into the future. Roman founding history shows an early model of this.
8. Conclusion
The role of a founder is not first to preserve order, but to bring order into being. This is because at the founding stage there is not yet a completed order to preserve, and the very preconditions of community, authority, law, succession, and reproduction must first be assembled.
What Book 1 of Livy shows is that the founder is the first designer who transforms disorder into order, not by merely gathering people, but by connecting them to name, law, ritual, deliberative institutions, and future continuity.
For this reason, the founder’s primary task lies not in preserving order, but in initiating it.
9. Source Texts
Titus Livius, History of Rome, Book 1, translated by Satoshi Iwatani, Kyoto University Press, 2008
OS Organizational Design Theory R1.26