As archaeological discoveries at Rome are confirming much of the tradition which Mommsen and his successors rejected, it is becoming necessary for us to revise our conception of the methods of the early Roman historians. We now know that in its essentials the traditional picture of a large and prosperous Rome at the end of the regal period is correct.[1] We know something of its extensive walls, of its imposing temples, and of its far-reaching commerce. We are gaining no little respect for Livy’s conception of a strong Sabine element in Rome, of the participation of Latins and Etruscans in the revolutionary wars that ended the regal period, and of a temporary weakening of Rome in the early decades of the Republic, when the Latins gained their independent status and the Sabellic tribes threatened the existence of the Latin League. If Mommsen were writing today, he would certainly accept a large part of early political history, for he himself in his _Staatsrecht_ rehabilitated much of the constitutional history which he had previously excluded from his volumes. I do not mean that we are ever going to reinstate the embroidery of fictitious battle-scenes and long senatorial debates woven from family legends into the accounts of the early period. Livy himself, who has left us the best account of this picturesque tradition, warns the reader adequately when he explains why he has freely included legend in the first part of his work. But with the archaeological evidence before us, it is now possible to estimate what knowledge of the earlier Republican period was available to the annalists and to judge from this what use they made of their knowledge. We know, for example, that they had access to large collections of laws, senatus consulta, treaties, and priestly annals, and that they drew the correct inferences from the extensive remains of the city about them, a city which did not greatly change its ancient aspect until after the Second Punic War. The fact that in the attempt to synchronize the consular list with temple records which did not quite accord, they fell into a slight discrepancy of a few years in the chronology of the early period does not materially affect its value.