“Then Saturn took Ops to wife. Titan, his elder brother, wished to be king himself. Then their mother Vesta and their sisters Ceres and Ops induced Saturn not to yield the throne to Titan. Then Titan, who was not so handsome a man as Saturn, both on that account and because he saw that his mother and sisters were bent on having Saturn reign, allowed him so to do. He therefore secured an agreement with Saturn, that if the latter had any male offspring thereafter, he should not rear them. This he did for the purpose that the kingdom might revert to his own sons. Then a first son was born to Saturn, and they killed him. Then later twins were born, Jupiter and Juno. Then they openly showed Juno to Saturn, and hid Jove and gave him to Vesta to bring up, concealing him from Saturn. Likewise Ops bare Neptune unbeknownst to Saturn, and carefully hid him away.” This Ennian passage is even more simple and devoid of stylistic qualities than is the English of Wycliffe or Chaucer. The brief plodding sentences are clear enough; in fact there is a dry legalistic explicitness in phrases like _id ejus rei causa fecit uti_, and _deinde posterius_. But the whole rattles to pieces like a mosaic set in clay. It is in the main a string of coordinate clauses loosely hung on que, atque, ibi, tum, and without any appreciation of the differences that we attempt to convey by commas, semicolons and full stops. It has not even the normal feeling for periodic structure which the epitaphs of the time reveal. It is naïve, primitive prose, and the evidence that Ennius could drivel thus is indeed illuminating to the student of literature. A nation which could be satisfied with such a medium of expression had not been very verbose. During the next few decades, however, there was much legislation, and from the interesting Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus of 186 B.C. we have considerable fragments which prove that the ambiguities found in the Twelve Tables were being gradually removed and that there were enough shysters at Rome to compel legislators to evolve the intricate and all-inclusive “if-and-but style” which has ever since characterized legal expression. To this source the great prose of Rome owed very little except precision of diction. There was also not a little historical writing, chiefly however in Greek, for the use of statesmen who needed to know their precedents. But this type of prose, so far as we can judge from the fragments preserved and from Cicero’s adverse judgments,[9] made no appreciable advance upon the narrative manner of Ennius, illustrated above. Nor did such commonplace textbooks as Cato’s _De Agri Cultura_.