literature that these distinguished foreigners found an asylum in the households of noble Romans, notwithstanding the severity with which the law treated prisoners of war. Fashionable conversation, moreover, was interlarded with Greek phrases, and, in some houses, Greek was habitually spoken. Even so late as the times of Cicero,[296] Greek literature was read and studied in almost every part of the civilized world, while the works of Latin writers were only known within the circumscribed limits of Italy. Q. FABIUS PICTOR. The most ancient prose writer of Roman history was Q. Fabius Pictor, the contemporary of Nævius. He belonged to that branch of the noble house of the Fabii, which derived its distinguishing appellation from the eminence of its founder as a painter. The temple of Salus, which he painted, was dedicated B. C. 302, by the dictator, C. Junius Bubulcus; and this oldest known specimen of Roman fine art remained until the conflagration of the temple in the reign of Claudius. It must, therefore, have been subjected to the criticisms of an age capable of forming a correct judgment respecting its merits; and it appears from the testimony of antiquity to have possessed the two essentials of accurate drawing and truthful colouring, and to have been free from the fault of conventional treatment.[297] The Fabii were an intellectual family as well as a distinguished one: perhaps the numerous records of their exploits which exist were, in some degree, owing to their learning. The grandson of the eminent artist was Fabius Pictor the historian. Livy[298] continually refers to him, and throughout his narrative of the Hannibalian war, he professes implicit confidence in him on the grounds of his being a contemporary historian,[299] (_æqualem temporibus hujusce belli_;) he is likewise the authority on whom the greatest reliance was placed by Dion Cassius and Appian. Nor did the accurate and faithful Polybius consider him otherwise than trustworthy upon the whole, although he accuses him of partiality towards his countrymen.[300] Niebuhr[301] attributes to Fabius Pictor the accurate knowledge of constitutional history displayed by Dion Cassius, and acknowledges how deeply we are indebted to him for the information which we possess concerning the changes which took place in the Roman constitution. It is to his care that we owe the faithfulness of Dion, whilst Dionysius and Livy too often lead us astray. It constitutes some justification of his partiality as an historian, that Philinus of Agrigentum had also written a history of the first Punic war in a spirit hostile to Rome, and that this provoked Pictor to a defence of his country’s honour. His work was written in Greek, and its principal subject was a history of the first and second Punic wars, especially that against Hannibal. It has been held by some, on the authority of a passage in the “De Oratore” of Cicero,[302] that