interesting by means of fictitious details and thereby
makes it insipid and untrue; and it will no longer excite surprise
that we meet with the same Sisenna also as translator of Greek
fashionable romances.(29)

Annals of the City

That the prospect should be still more lamentable in the field
of the general annals of the city and even of the world, was implied
in the nature of the case. The increasing activity of antiquarian
research induced the expectation that the current narrative
would be rectified from documents and other trustworthy sources;
but this hope was not fulfilled. The more and the deeper men
investigated, the more clearly it became apparent what a task it was
to write a critical history of Rome. The difficulties even,
which opposed themselves to investigation and narration, were immense;
but the most dangerous obstacles were not those of a literary kind.
The conventional early history of Rome, as it had now been narrated
and believed for at least ten generations; was most intimately mixed up
with the civil life of the nation; and yet in any thorough
and honest inquiry not only had details to be modified here and there,
but the whole building had to be overturned as much as
the Franconian primitive history of king Pharamund or the British
of king Arthur. An inquirer of conservative views, such as was Varro
for instance, could have no wish to put his hand to such a work;
and if a daring freethinker had undertaken it, an outcry
would have been raised by all good citizens against this worst
of all revolutionaries, who was preparing to deprive the constitutional
party even of their past Thus philological and antiquarian research
deterred from the writing of history rather than conduced towards it.
Varro and the more sagacious men in general evidently gave up
the task of annals as hopeless; at the most they arranged,
as did Titus Pomponius Atticus, the official and gentile lists
in unpretending tabular shape--a work by which the synchronistic
Graeco-Roman chronology was finally brought into the shape in which
it was conventionally fixed for posterity. But the manufacture
of city-chronicles of course did not suspend its activity;
it continued to supply its contributions both in prose and verse
to the great library written by ennui for ennui, while the makers
of the books, in part already freedmen, did not trouble themselves
at all about research properly so called. Such of these writings
as are menti