k written in Latin and the first
important prose work in Roman literature.(57)

All these works, while not coming up to the Greek conception of
history,(58) were, as contrasted with the mere detached notices of
the book of Annals, systematic histories with a connected narrative
and a more or less regular structure. They all, so far as we can see,
embraced the national history from the building of Rome down to the
time of the writer, although in point of title the work of Naevius
related only to the first war with Carthage, and that of Cato only
to the very early history. They were thus naturally divided into
the three sections of the legendary period, of earlier, and of
contemporary, history.

History of the Origin of Rome

In the legendary period the history of the origin of the city of Rome
was set forth with great minuteness; and in its case the peculiar
difficulty had to be surmounted, that there were, as we have already
shown,(59) two wholly irreconcileable versions of it in circulation:
the national version, which, in its leading outlines at least, was
probably already embodied in the book of Annals, and the Greek
version of Timaeus, which cannot have remained unknown to these Roman
chroniclers. The object of the former was to connect Rome with
Alba, that of the latter to connect Rome with Troy; in the former
accordingly the city was built by Romulus son of the Alban king,
in the latter by the Trojan prince Aeneas. To the present epoch,
probably either to Naevius or to Pictor, belongs the amalgamation of
the two stories. The Alban prince Romulus remains the founder of
Rome, but becomes at the same time the grandson of Aeneas; Aeneas does
not found Rome, but is represented as bringing the Roman Penates to
Italy and building Lavinium as their shrine, while his son Ascanius
founds Alba Longa, the mother-city of Rome and the ancient metropolis
of Latium. All this was a sorry and unskilful patchwork. The view
that the original Penates of Rome were preserved not, as had hitherto
been believed, in their temple in the Roman Forum, but in the shrine
at Lavinium, could not but be offensive to the Romans; and the Greek
fiction was a still worse expedient, inasmuch as under it the gods
only bestowed on the grandson what they had adjudged to the grandsire.
But the redaction served its object: without exactly denying the
national origin of Rome, it yet deferred to the Hellenizing tendency,
and legalized in some degre