ources, and in an
understanding for political and military history, the dramatic and
literary qualities of his work have ensured its popularity. Of it there
have been preserved the first ten books (to 293 B. C.), and books 21 to 45
(from 218 to 167 B. C.). A contemporary of Livy was the Greek writer
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote a work called _Roman Antiquities_,
which covered the history of Rome down to 265 B. C. The earlier part of
his work has also been preserved. In general he depended upon Varro and
Livy, and gives substantially the same view of early Roman history as the
latter.

What these later writers added to the meagre annalistic narrative
preserved in Diodorus is of little historical value, except in so far as
it shows what the Romans came to believe with regard to their own past.
The problem which faced the later Roman historians was the one which faces
writers of Roman history today, namely, to explain the origins and early
development of the Roman state. And their explanation does not deserve
more credence than a modern reconstruction simply because they were nearer
in point of time to the period in question, for they had no wealth of
historical materials which have since been lost, and they were not
animated by a desire to reach the truth at all costs nor guided by
rational principles of historical criticism. Accordingly we must regard as
mythical the traditional narrative of the founding of Rome and of the
regal period, and for the history of the republic to the time of the war
with Pyrrhus we should rely upon the list of eponymous magistrates, whose
variations indicate political crises, supplemented by the account in
Diodorus, with the admission that this itself is not infallible. All that
supplements or deviates from this we should frankly acknowledge to be of a
hypothetical nature. Therefore we should concede the impossibility of
giving a complete and adequate account of the history of these centuries
and refrain from doing ourselves what we criticize in the Roman
historians.

PART I

THE FORERUNNERS OF ROME IN ITALY

A HISTORY OF ROME TO 565 A. D.

CHAPTER I

THE GEOGRAPHY OF ITALY

Italy, ribbed by the Apennines, girdled by the Alps and the sea, juts out
like a "long pier-head" from Europe towards the northern coast of Africa.