How do the writings of Livy about model Roman citizens and their behavior shape later perceptions of early Republican virtue?

Livy's work, in addition to the writings of Augustus, Homer, and Virgil, stress the fact that it was moral virtues that made and would keep Rome great. Livy did not write from a political perspective..... he presents history in a personal way, which relied heavily on morality and tradition. He sees the Roman decline in the following way;

I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men and what the means, both in politics and war, by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded, I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch first the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.