and the Romans, being a national and ambitious people, would be more gratified by the jejune relation of their own exploits, than by the _speciosa miracula_ of the most sublime or romantic invention. The Annals of Ennius were partly founded on those ancient traditions and old heroic ballads, which Cicero, on the authority of Cato’s _Origines_, mentions as having been sung at feasts by the guests, many centuries before the age of Cato, in praise of the heroes of Rome(182). Niebuhr has attempted to show, that all the memorable events of Roman history had been versified in ballads, or metrical chronicles, in the Saturnian measure, before the time of Ennius; who, according to him, merely expressed in the Greek hexameter, what his predecessors had delivered in a ruder strain, and then maliciously depreciated these ancient compositions, in order that he himself might be considered as the founder of Roman poetry(183). The devotion of the Decii, and death of the Fabian family,—the stories of Scævola, Cocles, and Coriolanus,—Niebuhr believes to have been the subjects of romantic ballads. Even Fabius Pictor, according to this author, followed one of these old legends in his narrative concerning Mars and the Wolf, and his whole history of Romulus. Livy, too, in his account of the death of Lucretia, has actually transcribed from one of these productions; since what Sextus says, on entering the chamber of Lucretia, is nearly in the Saturnian measure:— “Tace, Lucretia, inquit, Sextus Tarquinius sum, Ferrum in manu est, moriere si emiseris vocem(184).”