One might be inclined to take this Valerius for a _gentilis_ of the Maximi and Poplicolæ. He might have been so in the widest sense; but he did not belong to the gens of the patrician Valerii. In the war of Hannibal, one meets with a L. Valerius Antias, who probably was a citizen of Antium. From him our annalist may have descended. It is strange, that although Livy himself repeatedly acknowledges the untrustworthiness of Valerius Antias, there are nevertheless in his own first book some passages which he can only have taken from him. All these authors had still something old-fashioned in their manner, and stood in the same relation to the later ones as the German writers in the beginning of the eighteenth century did to those who came out at the time of the seven years’ war. Towards the end of the seventh century, after all these authors, who were very much of the same cast, there appeared C. Licinius Macer,--the father of the orator and poet Calvus, who flourished at the same period as Catullus, about the year 700,--a distinguished and original writer. His tribunate dates about 680, before Pompey’s first consulate. Of the character of his works, we may form a sufficient estimate from the quotations in Livy and Dionysius. He did what only two before him had done; he wrote history from documents, and may have retained much belonging to those times, which the later writers have left out, because it did not agree with the idea which they had formed, and with the generally received statements in the Fasti and elsewhere. Pliny frequently mentions him among his sources; and certainly the treaty of Porsena with the Romans, which we read in Pliny, was taken from him. In the introduction to the books _de Legibus_, Cicero speaks unfavourably of him; and he may have partly been justified in asserting that as an author he had by no means deserved the praise which is due to him as a critic. When we Germans praise Mascov[16] as the first who has written a history of Germany, we do not mean by it to assert that his work was a perfect history. Yet Cicero perhaps gave an unfavourable judgment for this reason also, that Macer and he belonged to different political parties; Macer having had a considerable share in the restoration of the tribunician power. The State had at that time lost its soundness, and was in that condition, in which people see the lesser evil to be on one of the two sides, very much as is now the case in France (1828). The loss of the history of Macer is very highly to be regretted. A speech in the fragments of Sallust’s History shows an accurate knowledge of the old constitution, which Sallust cannot be given credit for. He is quoted to the sixteenth book. How many books he has written is undecided: he may have begun from the earliest times, and he probably went on as far as his own.