Haec finis Priami fatorum; hic exitus illum Sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum Regnatorem Asiae.--Aen. ii. 554-7. ] [Footnote 5: Horace, Sat. i. 10. 45.] [Footnote 6: 'He used from time to time to intrust all his secret thoughts to his books, as to trusty friends; it was to them only he turned in evil fortune or in good; and thus it is, that the whole life of the old poet lies before our eyes, as if it were portrayed on a votive picture.'--Sat. ii. 1. 30.] [Footnote 7: The parallel which Mr. Ruskin draws (Modern Painters, vol iii. p. 194), between an ancient Greek and 'a good, conscientious, but illiterate Scotch Presbyterian Border farmer of a century or two back,' becomes intelligible if we regard Hesiod as a normal type of the Greek mind.] CHAPTER II. VESTIGES OF EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY IN ROME AND ANCIENT ITALY. The Romans themselves traced the origin of their poetry, as of all their literary culture, to their contact with the mind of Greece. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes Intulit agresti Latio. The first productive literary impulse was communicated to the Roman mind by the Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who, in the year B.C. 240--one year after the end of the First Punic War--brought out, before a Roman audience, a drama translated or imitated from the Greek. From this time Roman poetry advanced along the various channels which the creative energy of Greek genius had formed.