historians; and though Polybius wrote the history of the first Punic War
anew from dissatisfaction with Pictor's prejudice and inaccuracy, he is
one of the chief authorities followed in the earlier decads of Livy. A
younger contemporary of Pictor, Lucius Cincius Alimentus, who commanded a
Roman army in the war against Hannibal, also used the Greek language in
his annals of his own life and times, and the same appears to be the case
with the memoirs of other soldiers and statesmen of the period. It is
only half a century later that we know certainly of historians who wrote
in Latin. The earliest of them, Lucius Cassius Hemina, composed his
annals in the period between the death of Terence and the revolution of
the Gracchi; a more distinguished successor, Lucius Calpurnius Piso
Frugi, is better known as one of the leading opponents of the revolution
(he was consul in the year of the tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus) than
as the author of annals which were certainly written with candour and
simplicity, and in a style where the epithets "artless and elegant," used
of them by Aulus Gellius, need not be inconsistent with the more
disparaging word "meagre," with which they are dismissed by Cicero.
History might be written in Greek--as, indeed, throughout the Republican
and Imperial times it continued to be--by any Roman who was sufficiently
conversant with that language, in which models for every style of
historical composition were ready to his hand. In the province of
jurisprudence it was different. Here the Latin race owed nothing to any
foreign influence or example; and the development of Roman law pursued a
straightforward and uninterrupted course far beyond the limits of the
classical period, and after Rome itself had ceased to be the seat even of
a divided empire. The earliest juristic writings, consisting of
commentaries on collections of the semi-religious enactments in which
positive law began, are attributed to the period of the Samnite Wars,
long before Rome had become a great Mediterranean power. About 200 B.C.
two brothers, Publius and Sextus Aelius, both citizens of consular and