At the close of the third century before our era native epic poetry began under the influence naturally of the Homeric epics. Naevius, who flourished during the Second Punic War, wrote a narrative poem, the Bellum Punicum, in the native Saturnian measure—a poem which enjoyed great success and continued to be read in Horace’s day. In it he popularized among the Romans a simple form of the legend of Rome’s connection with Troy, which is familiar to us from Virgil and Livy. His successor in this field was Ennius, who died in 169 B.C. He boldly adopted the Greek hexameter for his poetic history of Rome, the Annales, and moulded the Latin language to this measure so successfully that thereafter this remained the metre for the Roman epic. From Naevius and Ennius through Virgil to the end of the fourth Christian century, when Claudian closed the long line of classical Latin poets, every one drew his form, his imagery, and many of his incidents from the Greek epics. The splendid results of the Second Punic War, made the more glorious by the long years of doubt and disaster, stirred the Romans to a desire to record their national history in prose form. But the only prose which had been developed for this purpose was Greek; therefore the Roman historians wrote in that language for half a century until Cato the Censor set the fashion of writing in Latin prose. So we might go on and point out how in oratory, lyric poetry, elegy, and in almost every other form of literature the Greeks were the direct models for the Romans, as in a way they have been for the literatures of all peoples since. Furthermore in poetry, history, and indeed in all classes of literature, Greek myths and legends were adopted or worked over to fit new conditions, tales and genealogies invented on Greek models, and everywhere the Greek gods were given Latin names and adapted to their new environment. The disastrous result for the indigenous religion is self-evident.