t 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 consuls Publius Servilius and Lucius
Aebutius (according to the reckoning now current, 291), that
thenceforward a nail should be driven every hundredth year into the
wall of the Capitoline temple. Subsequently it was the state officials
who were learned in measuring and in writing, or in other words, the
pontifices, that kept an official record of the names of the annual
chief magistrates, and thus combined an annual, with the earlier
monthly, calendar. Both these calendars were afterwards comprehended
under the name of Fasti--which strictly belonged only to the