These last consist of elegiac distichs so written that the first words of the hexameter are repeated or “echoed” at the end of the pentameter. Such verse has little relation to poetry, but shows that there was still an interest felt in the technique of metrical writing. That the study of the classic writers, especially of Virgil, was diligently cultivated, is shown by the existence of poems composed entirely of Virgilian lines and fragments of lines. A remarkable extant specimen of such work is the short tragedy _Medea_, probably written by Hosidius Geta, near the beginning of the third century. Several anonymous poems add little to our admiration for the poets of the third century, but the so-called _Disticha Catonis_ should be mentioned because they gained great and long-continued popularity. They are maxims of every-day wisdom expressed in distichs of two hexameters. Such maxims are: “Regard it as the first virtue to hold your tongue; he is nearest God who knows how to keep a wise silence”; or, “Be sure to tell many of another’s kindness, but keep silence about the kindnesses you have done to others.” These distichs were soon imitated, and similar maxims in one line—monostichs—were also written. They are hardly poetry, but have some interest because of their popular nature. [Sidenote: Pagan prose in the third century.] The prose of the third century possesses even less interest than the verse. The only historians worthy of the name—Dio Cassius and Herodian—wrote in Greek. Marius Maximus (about 165-230 A. D.) continued Suetonius’s lives of the emperors from Nerva to Heliogabalus, and about the middle of the century Ælius Julius Cordus wrote lives of the more obscure emperors. These works are lost, but, like those of several other writers of this period, were used by the authors of the so-called _Historia Augusta_, a collection of lives of the emperors from Hadrian to Numerianus (117-284 A. D.). These lives were written by six authors, four of whom, Ælius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, and Trebellius Pollio, wrote under Diocletian (284-305 A. D.), while the remaining two, Ælius Lampridius and Flavius Vopiscus, belong to the early part of the fourth century. They are all alike in the poverty of their style and their liking for petty personal details. The books on the _Prætorian Edict_ by Domitius Ulpianus, who was killed in 228 A. D., and by his younger contemporary, Julius Paulus, as well as other juristic works of the third century, were important contributions to the development of Roman law, and the attempt made by Cornelius Labeo in his lost work on the Roman religion to explain the pagan cult would probably, if it were preserved, be interesting as an attempt to defend the old religion against skepticism and Christianity. The extant parts of the work of Quintus Gargilius Martialis on agriculture, veterinary medicine, the use of healing herbs, and the like, show that