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All these a
Chronicle certainly nowhere presents truth without fiction, and it would be very foolish to quarrel with Naevius and Pictor because they have not acted otherwise than Hecataeus and Saxo Grammaticus; but the later attempts to build houses out of such castles in the air put even the most tried patience to a severe test No blank in tradition presents so wide a chasm, but that this system of smooth and downright invention will fill it up with playful facility.
The eclipses of the sun, the numbers of the census, family-registers, triumphs, are without hesitation carried back from the current year up to the year One; it stands duly recorded, in what year, month, and day king Romulus went up to heaven, and how king Servius Tullius triumphed over the Etruscans first on the 25th November 183, and again on the 25th May 187, In entire harmony with such details accordingly the vessel in which Aeneas had voyaged from Ilion to Latium was shown in the Roman docks, and even the identical sow, which had served as a guide to Aeneas, was preserved well pickled in the Roman temple of Vesta. With the lying disposition of a poet these chroniclers of rank combine all the tiresome exactness of a notary, and treat their great subject throughout with the dulness which necessarily results from the elimination at once of all poetical and all historical elements.
When we read, for instance, in Piso that Romulus avoided indulging in his cups when he had a sitting of the senate next day; or that Tarpeia betrayed the Capitol to the Sabines out of patriotism, with a view to deprive the enemy of their shields; we ca
The subordinate, more individual and ephemeral, species of historical literature - memoirs, letters, and speeches - were strongly represented also, at least as respects quantity. The first statesmen of Rome already recorded in person their experiences: such as Marcus Scaurus (consul in 639), Publius Rufus (consul in 649), Quintus Catulus (consul in 652), and even the regent Sulla; but none of these productions seem to have been of importance for literature otherwise than by the substance of their contents. The collection of letters of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, was remarkable partly for the classical purity of the language and the high spirit of the writer, partly as the first correspondence published in Rome, and as the first literary production of a Roman lady. The literature of speeches preserved at this period the stamp impressed on it by Cato; advocates' pleadings were not yet looked on as literary productions, and such speeches as were published were political pamphlets. During the revolutionary commotions this pamphlet-literature increased in extent and importance, and among the mass of ephemeral productions there were some which, like the Philippics of Demosthenes and the fugitive pieces of Courier, acquired a permanent place in literature from the important position of their authors or from their own weight. Such were the political speeches of Gaius Laelius and of Scipio Aemilianus, masterpieces of excellent Latin as of the noblest patriotism; such were the gushing speeches of Gaius Titius, from whose pungent pictures of the place and the time - his description of the senatorial juryman has been given already[31] - the national comedy borrowed various points; such above all were the numerous orations of Gaius Gracchus, whose fiery words preserved in a faithful mirror the impassioned earnestness, the aristocratic bearing, and the tragic destiny of that lofty nature.
In scientific literature the collection of juristic opinions by Marcus Brutus, which was published about the year 600, presents a remarkable attempt to transplant to Rome the method usual among the Greeks of handling professional subjects by means of dialogue, and to give to his treatise an artistic semi-dramatic form by a machinery of conversation in which the persons, time, and place were distinctly specified. But the later men of science, such as Stilo the philologist and Scaevola the jurist, laid aside this method, more poetical than practical, both in the sciences of general culture and in the special professional sciences. The increasing value of science as such, and the preponderance of a material interest in it at Rome, are clearly reflected in this rapid rejection of the fetters of artistic form. We have already spoken[32] in detail of the sciences of general liberal culture, grammar or rather philology, rhetoric and philosophy, in so far as these now became essential elements of the usual Roman training and thereby first began to be dissociated from the professional sciences properly so called.
In the field of letters Latin philology flourished vigorously, in close association with the philological treatment - long ago placed on a sure basis - of Greek literature. It was already mentioned that about the begi