In its perfection, which it attained during the first century B.C., Latin was characterized by energy, dignity, and precision, its power and gravity compensating for the lack of “Attic grace.” According to its system of grammar, six cases and two numbers were distinguished; nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, were declined; and verbs were varied in form through the tenses and moods of two voices. Thus the Latin had one more case-form than the Greek, but lacked the dual number and middle voice of Greek and Sanscrit. The Latin alphabet, consisting originally of twenty-one letters, was borrowed from the Greeks through a Dorian colony at Cumæ. Its resemblance to the Greek may be seen by turning to page 87. The character X. of the Roman system of notation is ascribed to the Etruscans. =Ancient Latin Relics.=—During the five centuries that followed the founding of Rome, the literary history of the city is all but a blank. Curious specimens of its antique tongue are preserved in fragments of laws and a few inscriptions; but the songs of the first Latin bards are lost forever. The legends of Romulus, the seizure of the Sabine women, the stories of Lucretia and Virginia, of Coriolanus and Horatius,—these, with many similar traditions, were doubtless the subjects of irregular ballads and heroic poems. The rough simple verse in which they appeared was called _Saturnian_;[40] it is supposed to have been adopted from the Etruscan poets, and charmed the ears of the Romans until they listened to the more tuneful measures of the Greeks. The time-honored Saturnian verses were then thrust aside, with the old lays that told the proud conquerors of Italy of their humble origin and early struggles. This ballad-poetry may never have been written; sung from generation to generation, it was kept alive to grace in after-days the epic of Ennius and the pages of the historian Livy. The oldest existing Latin poetry is inscribed on a tablet exhumed at Rome in 1778. It is a chant of the _Arval Brothers_, an association of priests founded under the Roman kings, and consists of an invocation to Mars, the god of war, to avert pestilence. Almost as venerable is a fragment from a _Salian Hymn_, sung by the Salian (_dancing_) priests in honor of Ja’nus. (_See Prof. Allen’s “Remnants of Early Latin.”_) Extracts from the Laws of the Twelve Tables (450 B.C.), which were destroyed in the early wars, have been collected from the works of later writers. The old Latin, however, is very obscure; so much did the language afterward change that in the golden age the Salian poems were enigmas to the Romans themselves. There are also traces of an ancient Umbrian literature, which has perished.