occasion wine flowed as copiously for those
who had acquitted themselves well, as stripes fell to the lot of the
bungler--but all the urban magistrates were legally entitled to
inflict bodily chastisement and imprisonment on any actor at any
time and at any place. The necessary effect of this was that dancing,
music, and poetry, at least so far as they appeared on the public
stage, fell into the hands of the lowest classes of the Roman
burgesses, and especially into those of foreigners; and while at
this period poetry still played altogether too insignificant a part
to engage the attention of foreign artists, the statement on the other
hand, that in Rome all the music, sacred and profane, was essentially
Etruscan, and consequently the ancient Latin art of the flute,
which was evidently at one time held in high esteem,(8) had been
supplanted by foreign music, may be regarded as already applicable
to this period.

There is no mention of any poetical literature. Neither the masked
plays nor the recitations of the stage can have had in the proper
sense fixed texts; on the contrary, they were ordinarily improvised
by the performers themselves as circumstances required. Of works
composed at this period posterity could point to nothing but a sort
of Roman "Works and Days"--counsels of a farmer to his son,(9) and
the already-mentioned Pythagorean poems of Appius Claudius(10) the
first commencement of Roman poetry after the Hellenic type. Nothing
of the poems of this epoch has survived but one or two epitaphs
in Saturnian measure.(11)

Roman Historical Composition

Along with the rudiments of the Roman drama, the rudiments of Roman
historical composition belong to this period; both as regards the
contemporary recording of remarkable events, and as regards the
conventional settlement of the early history of the Roman community.

Registers of Magistrates

The writing of contemporary history was associated with the register
of the magistrates. The register reaching farthest back, which was
accessible to the later Roman inquirers and is still indirectly
accessible to us, seems to have been derived from the archives of the
temple of the Capitoline Jupiter; for it records the names of the
annual presidents of the community onward from the consul Marcus
Horatius, who consecrated that temple on the 13th Sept. in his year of
office, and it also notices the vow which was made on occasion of a
severe pestilence under the consu