genealogies in the laborious spirit of modern heraldry, fenced them
round with a ritual as intricate as their law, but never quite
cared enough about them to believe in them. So it was of no
account with them when the philosophers announced that Minerva was
merely memory. She had never been much else. Nor did they protest
when Lucretius dared to say of Ceres and of Liber that they were
only the corn of the field and the fruit of the vine. For they had
never mourned for the daughter of Demeter in the asphodel meadows
of Sicily, nor traversed the glades of Cithaeron with fawn-skin and
with spear.

This brief sketch of the condition of Roman thought will serve to
prepare us for the almost total want of scientific historical
criticism which we shall discern in their literature, and has,
besides, afforded fresh corroboration of the conditions essential
to the rise of this spirit, and of the modes of thought which it
reflects and in which it is always to be found. Roman historical
composition had its origin in the pontifical college of
ecclesiastical lawyers, and preserved to its close the uncritical
spirit which characterised its fountain-head. It possessed from
the outset a most voluminous collection of the materials of
history, which, however, produced merely antiquarians, not
historians. It is so hard to use facts, so easy to accumulate
them.

Wearied of the dull monotony of the pontifical annals, which dwelt
on little else but the rise and fall in provisions and the eclipses
of the sun, Cato wrote out a history with his own hand for the
instruction of his child, to which he gave the name of Origines,
and before his time some aristocratic families had written