The irony of appeasing wealthy families
In order for Livy to have the permission to use the stories of wealthy families of his day, it's important that when the book is released to the public, that those families appear in the history in a way that is flattering. Therefore, Livy's history is biased in favor of the Romans who were there to read it. This goes against the heart of a history like Livy's but after all, this is essentially a political document.
The irony of Livy's sense of historical accuracy
One of the most confounding aspects of Livy's history is that it's so blatantly mythic. Does that mean that Romans of his day believed that the mythic origin stories were real? Or does it simply mean that they preferred myth to fact? If the second one is true, then that would be ironic, since Livy's history helped to establish the practice of academic history, which now prides itself on objectivity.
The irony of objectivity and subjectivity
Because the nature of history is essentially narrative, the stories, even though the entire purpose for their creation was to have an authoritative document, are actually subjective. So not only are these accounts mythic, but a lot of the narrative content is obviously skewed by point of view.
Again, this might not seem like a big deal, but since history was not conceived of the same way during Livy's time, there are a lot of things that we take for granted that Livy had to learn firsthand.
The irony of the timing of the history
In today's world, more people probably know Cain and Abel's story than know Romulus and Remus, but they're strikingly similar. One ironic aspect of this might be that Rome's story shares something mythic with the Judeo-Christian world, since Jesus Christ would be born within 50 years from Livy's publication, within the Roman Empire.
It's a little ironic that one of the most historically important and controversial events in the history of the world was done within only a few years from Rome's first serious attempt to have a written history. The timing is uncanny.
The Romulus and Remus irony
It's ironic that Rome's origin story involves feral demigods, because Rome is one of the most impressive institutions that ever existed, and they believed they came from the wild. Their forefathers were from the wilderness, so much so that they nursed at the breasts of wolves, so the story goes.
