The situation had been wholly different during the century before the Gracchi. Then published source-books were just beginning to be made, and there were no convenient libraries of extensive histories. There may have been an anonymous digest of the priestly tablets before Fabius, but of this we are not sure. A complete edition was not made till the Gracchan period. An old code of sacred rules existed under the name of _Jus Papirianum_, and Sextus Aelius (consul in 198) had put out an edition of the Twelve Tables with a commentary and a list of the _legis actiones_. That was all. And yet senators were expected to know all the important documents that might be involved in senatorial debate. As Cicero[6] puts the matter in his _De Legibus_ (III, 41), “It is necessary for a senator to know the commonwealth—completely I mean—to know its military and financial resources, what allies, “friends,” and subjects it has, and the laws, terms, and treaties by which each attained to its position, and he must also know the parliamentary rules of the senate and the history of Rome.” To attain to such command of the archival material in the early days necessitated much first-hand study and doubtless the making of individual digests. We are reminded of the medieval law-men of Iceland who conducted the “thing” in the period when no written codes existed and when they were compelled to keep all the laws and precedents at the command of their memories. Such senatorial practice was a preparation for historical composition which was very different from that attained by the professional writers of a later period. To assume that Fabius did not know the source-material because Livy seldom refers to original documents is to misunderstand the diverse methods that obtained in each man’s day. Roman historians of course knew the worth of Fabius Pictor. Livy went to him to check up extravagant statements; Dionysius refers to his conciseness and accuracy; Cicero, whose historical material in the _De Republica_ and the _De Legibus_ was based upon Fabius, vouched for his lack of rhetorical adornment, and Polybius followed him closely in the story of early Rome, in the first ten and last two years of the First Punic War, and in the Roman sections of the period from 241 to the end of the Second Punic War. The most meticulous of historians, Polybius, criticized Fabius only on the score of patriotic bias when giving generalized judgments on recent events. Polybius was of course a foreigner who could readily detect the nationalistic flavor, and after observing the aberrations of history during the world war we can readily comprehend that Fabius may have failed in objectivity in writing of the wars in which he took an active part. But there is no reason for supposing that he did not set himself a high standard in recording the actual events of Roman history.