Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/495

Chap. IX.] so far as they appeared on the public stage, fell into the hands of the lowest classes of the population, and especially into those of foreigners; and while at this period poetry still played altogether too trifling a part to attract foreign artists to the pursuit of it, the statement on the other hand, that in Rome the whole music, sacred and profane, was really Etruscan, may be regarded as already applicable to this period; so that the ancient Latin art of the flute, which was evidently at one time held in high esteem (P. 235), had supplanted by foreign music.

There is no mention of any poetical literature. Neither the masked plays nor the recitations of the stage can have had any definitely settled text; on the contrary, they were ordinarily improvised by the performer himself as circumstances required. Of works composed at this period posterity had nothing to show but a sort of Roman "Works and Days"—counsels of a farmer to his son, and the already-mentioned Pythagorean poems of Appius Claudius (P. 470), 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 (P. 469).

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.

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 Æbutius (according to the reckoning now