The old Roman language, as it existed previous to coming in contact with Greek influences, has almost entirely perished. It will be shown hereafter that only a few records of it remain; and the language of these fragments is very different from that of the classical period. Nor did the old language grow into the new like the Greek of two successive ages by a process of development, but it was remoulded by external and foreign influences. So different was the old Roman from classical Latin, that although the investigations of modern scholars have enabled us to decipher the fragments which remain, and to point out the analogies which exist between old and new forms, some of them were with difficulty intelligible to the cleverest and best educated of the Augustan age. The treaty which Rome made with Carthage in the first year of the Republic was engraved on brazen tablets, and preserved in the archives of the Capitol. Polybius had learning enough to translate it into Greek, but he tells us that the language of it was too archaic for the Romans of his day.[4] A wide gap separates this old Latin from the Latin of Ennius, whose style was formed by Greek taste; another not so wide is interposed between the age of Ennius and that of Plautus and Terence, both of whom wrote in the language of their adopted city, but confessedly copied Greek models; and, lastly, Cicero and the Augustan poets mark another age, to which from the preceding one, the only transition with which we are acquainted is the style of oratory of Caius Gracchus, which tradition informs us was free from ancient rudeness, although it had not acquired the smoothness and polish of Hortensius or Cicero.