r Aborigines who were immigrants from Greece, and the primitive-
Greeks or Pelasgians whose wanderings brought them to Italy.

The Earlier History

The current story led with some measure of connection, though the
connecting thread was but weak and loose through the regal period down
to the institution of the republic; but at that point legend dried up;
and it was not merely difficult but altogether impossible to form a
narrative, in any degree connected and readable, out of the lists of
magistrates and the scanty notices appended to them. The poets felt
this most. Naevius appears for that reason to have passed at once
from the regal period to the war regarding Sicily: Ennius, who in the
third of his eighteen books was still describing the regal period and
in the sixth had already reached the war with Pyrrhus, must have
treated the first two centuries of the republic merely in the most
general outline. How the annalists who wrote in Greek managed the
matter, we do not know. Cato adopted a peculiar course. He felt no
pleasure, as he himself says, "in relating what was set forth on the
tablet in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, how often wheat had been
dear, and when the sun or moon had been eclipsed;" and so he devoted
the second and third books of his historical work to accounts of the
origin of the other Italian communities and of their admission to the
Roman confederacy. He thus got rid of the fetters of chronicle, which
reports events year by year under the heading of the magistrates for
the time being; the statement in particular, that Cato's historical
work narrated events "sectionally," must refer to this feature of his
method. This attention bestowed on the other Italian communities,
which surprises us in a Roman work, had a bearing on the political
position of the author, who leaned throughout on the support of the
municipal Italy in his opposition to the doings of the capital; while
it furnished a sort of substitute for the missing history of Rome
from the expulsion of king Tarquinius down to the Pyrrhic war, by
presenting in its own way the main result of that history--the union
of Italy under the hegemony of Rome.

Contemporary History

Contemporary history, again, was treated in a connected and detailed
manner. Naevius described the first, and Fabius the second, war with
Carthage from their own knowledge; Ennius devoted at least thirteen
out of the eighteen books of his Annals to the epoch from