Claudius were those of his contemporary, Valerius Antias, which formed
the main groundwork for the earlier books of Livy, and were largely used
by him even for later periods, when more trustworthy authorities were
available. Other historians of this period, Sisenna and Macer, soon fell
into neglect--the former as too archaic, the latter as too diffuse and
rhetorical, for literary permanence.

Somewhat apart from the historical writers stand the antiquarians, who
wrote during this period in large numbers, and whose treatises filled the
library from which, in the age of Cicero, Varro compiled his monumental
works. As numerous probably were the writers of the school of Cato, on
husbandry, domestic economy, and other practical subjects, and the
grammarians and philologists, whose works formed two other large sections
in Varro's library. On all sides prose was full of life and growth; the
complete literary perfection of the age of Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust
might already be foreseen as within the grasp of the near future.

Latin poetry, meanwhile, hung in the balance. The first great wave of the
Greek impulse had exhausted itself in Ennius and the later tragedians.
Prose had so developed that the poetical form was no longer a necessity
for the expression of ideas, as it had been in the palmy days of Latin
tragedy. The poetry of the future must be, so to speak, poetry for its
own sake, until some new tradition were formed which should make certain
metrical forms once more the recognised and traditional vehicle for
certain kinds of literary expression. In the blank of poetry we may note
a translation of the _Iliad_ into hexameters by one Gnaeus Matius, and
the earliest known attempts at imitation of the forms of Greek lyrical
verse by an equally obscure Laevius Melissus, as dim premonitions of the
new growth which Latin poetry was feeling after; but neither these, nor
the literary tragedies which still were occasionally produced by a