One ought to take care not to consider the Romans previous to the time when they learned from the Greeks as barbarians. A people which in the age of the kings built those wonderful sewers; which a hundred years before the Punic wars produced the she-wolf of the Capitol; which possessed a painter like C. Fabius Pictor; which made a sarcophagus like that of Scipio Barbatus, takes certainly a high stand in mental cultivation. And such we must deem their written literature to have been, not composed in Greek forms, but endowed with beauties peculiarly its own. The grammarians knew still the moral maxims of Appius Claudius Cæcus, Cicero still read a speech of the same person against Pyrrhus. Where such writings were kept, many others also must have still existed. The earliest work which we know of as a contemporary history is the first Punic war of Cn. Nævius, who had himself served in that contest. If concerning this greatest of all ancient wars, we had more positive accounts, such as we possess of the second Punic war, it would be better appreciated. That Nævius wrote this war in the Saturnian rhythm, that he wrote it as a poem, is characteristic of the age, a proof that ancient history was at that time familiar to the Romans in a poetical form. So it was in the oldest historical literature of the Germans with the feud of the bishops by Gotfrid Hagen, and with the poetical history of the conquest of Livonia by the Teutonic knights (which is as yet unprinted); for before the thirteenth century at least no history was written in German prose. The year in which Nævius first brought out a play on the stage is undecided. It was somewhere about the year 520; two passages in Gellius concerning it are contradictory.[6] Whether that piece, however, was the first that he had written, or whether he composed his great work yet earlier, is not mentioned by any one. Nævius was a Campanian, and it may safely be presumed that at Capua there was already a greater movement in literature than there was in Rome at the same time. The poem consisted of seven books. According to Suetonius, it was originally written _continente sermone_, but was divided by C. Octavius Lampadius into books, and probably also into single verses. This poem, to judge from the fragments still extant of it, was by no means deficient in poetical merit. Perhaps Servius had not read Nævius at all; he only seems to have known from older commentators that Virgil had borrowed from him the argument of his first book. Nævius treated in it of the destruction of Troy, of Dido, and Æneas. It is very natural to surmise that he also derived already the rivalry between Rome and Carthage from the faithlessness of Æneas.[7] Yet it was hardly an elaborate Roman history. It is known that Nævius by some libellous verses against the Metelli was brought into great troubles, and that he is said to have been thrown into prison. But it is enigmatical how a Roman citizen