him to have been built in the same year. These alterations were
manifestly suggested by certain accounts that had reached Sicily
respecting Latin manners and customs, in conjunction with the critical
struggle which at the very time and place where Timaeus wrote was
preparing between the Romans and the Carthaginians. In the main,
however, the story cannot have been derived from Latium, but can only
have been the good-for-nothing invention of the old "gossip-monger"
himself. Timaeus had heard of the primitive temple of the household
gods in Lavinium; but the statement, that these were regarded by the
Lavinates as the Penates brought by the followers of Aeneas from
Ilion, is as certainly an addition of his own, as the ingenious
parallel between the Roman October horse and the Trojan horse, and the
exact inventory taken of the sacred objects of Lavinium--there were,
our worthy author affirms, heralds' staves of iron and copper, and an
earthen vase of Trojan manufacture! It is true that these same Penates
might not at all be seen by any one for centuries afterwards; but
Timaeus was one of the historians who upon no matter are so fully
informed as upon things unknowable. It is not without reason that
Polybius, who knew the man, advises that he should in no case be
trusted, and least of all where, as in this instance, he appeals to
documentary proofs. In fact the Sicilian rhetorician, who professed to
point out the grave of Thucydides in Italy, and who found no higher
praise for Alexander than that he had finished the conquest of Asia
sooner than Isocrates finished his "Panegyric," was exactly the man to
knead the naive fictions of the earlier time into that confused medley
on which the play of accident has conferred so singular a celebrity.

How far the Hellenic play of fable regarding Italian matters, as it
in the first instance arose in Sicily, gained admission during this
period even in Italy itself, cannot be ascertained with precision.
Those links of connection with the Odyssean cycle, which we
subsequently meet with in the legends of the foundation of Tusculum,
Praeneste, Antium, Ardea, and Cortona, must probably have been already
concocted at this period; and even the belief in the descent of the
Romans from Trojan men or Trojan women must have been established at
the close of this epoch in Rome, for the first demonstrable contact
between Rome and the Greek east is the intercession of the senate on
behalf of the "