oldest annals do not mention it at all. In the same way, the poem of the Nibelungen cannot be chronologically placed any where, and Johannes Müller had to proceed very arbitrarily before he could fix upon any chronological position for it. Such poems have nothing to do with chronology. Valerius Poplicola is named in the battle at the Regillus, and this gave occasion to assign this place to the legend. It is more likely from other statements that the war happened ten years later than is generally taken for granted, shortly before the hostilities against the plebs began. This I conclude from the accounts of the numbering of the people; for, I do not wholly reject them, though at the same time I am far from maintaining that in their present form they are authentic:--they are certainly a representation of the increase and decrease of the numbers of the Roman citizens. He, who is the first author of that statement, even if it should not be very ancient, had formed a notion of Roman history, according to which in the times mentioned the number of the citizens rose from 110,000 to 150,000, and again fell to 110,000. If this increase or decrease had harmonized with the history in the annals, it might have been said that some fabulist had set forth his own views in these statistics. Yet such a man would from vanity never have spoken of a decrease of numbers; on the contrary, just in the times when in the census the numbers decrease, there are in the annals victories and acquisitions. I believe therefore that some account, older than the annals, was intended to show in a statistical outline, how Rome and Latium were by unequal wars reduced in population. That the numbers are correct, cannot be avouched; at all events the statement independent of the annals. I therefore ascribe the notice that Rome between the battle at the Regillus and the rising of the Plebes, and for a long time afterwards, was bereft of one-third of its inhabitants, to the fact that at that very period the war of Porsena took place, and the loss of territory occasioned by it. The decrease of population all but tallies with the diminution of the territory by one-third; and it does not quite agree, perhaps for the sole reason that the numbering included the plebeians only and not the patricians, perhaps also because part of the inhabitants of the lost districts emigrated and settled in Rome.