A metrical chronicle, which chiefly related the events of the first Punic war, was another, and probably the last work of Nævius, since Cicero says, that in writing it he filled up the leisure of his latter days with wonderful complacency and satisfaction(137). It was originally undivided; but, after his death, was separated into seven books(138).—Although the first Punic war was the principal subject, as appears from its announcement, “Qui terräi Latiäi hemones tuserunt Vires fraudesque Poinicas fabor;” yet it also afforded a rapid sketch of the preceding incidents of Roman history. It commenced with the flight of Æneas from Carthage, in a ship built by Mercury(139); and the early wars of the Romans were detailed in the first and second books. To judge by the fragments which remain, the whole work appears to have been full of mythological machinery. Macrobius informs us, that some lines of this production described the Romans tost by a tempest, and represented Venus complaining of the hardships which they suffered to Jupiter, who consoles her by a prospect of their future glory—a passage which probably suggested those verses in the first book of the Æneid, where Venus, in like manner, complains to Jupiter of the danger experienced by her son in a storm, and the god consoles her by assurances of his ultimate prosperity(140). Cicero mentions, that Ennius, too, though he classes Nævius among the fauns and rustic bards, had borrowed, or, if he refused to acknowledge his obligations, had pilfered, many ornaments from his predecessor(141). In the same passage, Cicero, while he admits that Ennius was the more elegant and correct writer, bears testimony to the merit of the older bard, and declares, that the Punic war of this antiquated poet afforded him a pleasure as exquisite as the finest statue that was ever formed by Myron. To judge, however, from the lines which remain, though in general too much broken to enable us even to divine their meaning, the style of Nævius in this work was more rugged and remote from modern Latin than that of his own plays and satires, or the dramas of Livius Andronicus. The whole, too, is written in the rough, unmodulated, Saturnian verse—a sort of irregular iambics, said to have been originally employed by Faunus and the prophets, who delivered their oracles in this measure. To such rude and unpolished verses Ennius alludes in a fragment of his Annals, while explaining his reasons for not treating of the first Punic war— —— “Scripsere alii rem Versibus, quos olim Fauni, vatesque canebant; Cum neque Musarum scopulos quisquam superarat, Nec dicti studiosus erat.”