Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/208



must now return for a while to that earlier age of popular stir and uprising, the ultimate results of which we have just been noting at Athens. Great as is the obscurity of this period in Greece, it is even greater in Italy. Of the early history of other cities besides Rome we have hardly a trace. The early Roman Republic has indeed what is called a history, but it is one which crumbles away at the first touch of scientific criticism. In the corresponding period of Greek history the poems of Solon and Theognis afford us here and there a solid footing of fact. But in the early Roman Republic literature was unknown; such meagre records as were made after the art of writing came in, — records of the priestly colleges, or official records preserved by noble families, — were probably all destroyed when the city was captured by the Gauls in 390 B.C. The earliest annalists wrote more than a century later than this catastrophe, and what they put together must