Still from that day, for centuries to come, the Romans had sterner business than the cultivation of the arts of peace. They had themselves and Italy to conquer; they had a still unshaped state to establish; they had their ambitions, growing as their power increased, to gratify; they had jealous neighbors in Greece, Africa, and Gaul to curb. In such rough, troubled soil as this, literature could not take root and flourish. They were not, it is true, without the beginnings of native literature. Their religious worship inspired rude hymns to their gods; their generals, coming home, inscribed the records of their victory in rough Saturnian verse on commemorative tablets; there were ballads at banquets, and dirges at funerals. Also the natural mimicry of the Italian peasantry had no doubt for ages indulged itself in uncouth performances of a dramatic nature, which developed later into those mimes and farces, the forerunners of native Roman comedy and the old Medley-Satura. Yet in these centuries Rome knew no letters worthy of the name save the laws on which she built her state; no arts save the arts of war. But in her course of Italian conquest, she had finally come into conflict with those Greek colonists who had long since been taking peaceful possession of Italy along the southeastern border. These Græco-Roman struggles in Italy, which arose in consequence, culminated in the fall of Tarentum, B. C. 272; and with this victory the conquest of the Italian peninsula was complete. This event meant much for the development of Italian literature; it meant new impulse and opportunity--the impulse of close and quickening contact with Greek thought, and the opportunity afforded by the internal calm consequent upon the completed subjugation of Italy. Joined with these two influences was a third which came with the end of the first Punic War, a generation afterward. Rome has now taken her first fateful step toward world empire; she has leaped across Sicily and set victorious foot in Africa; has successfully met her first great foreign enemy. The national pride and exaltation consequent upon this triumph gave favorable atmosphere and encouragement for those impulses which had already been stirred.