in this department, published partly in his collection of -saturae-, partly separately.  Among these were brief narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of his country; editions of the religious romance of Euhemerus,(53) of the poems dealing with natural philosophy circulating in the name of Epicharmus,(54) and of the gastronomies of Archestratus of Gela, a poet who treated of the higher cookery; as also a dialogue between Life and Death, fables of Aesop, a collection of moral maxims, parodies and epigrammatic trifles—­small matters, but indicative of the versatile powers as well as the neological didactic tendencies of the poet, who evidently allowed himself the freest range in this field, which the censorship did not reach.

Metrical Annals
Naevius

The attempts at a metrical treatment of the national annals lay claim to greater poetical and historical importance.  Here too it was Naevius who gave poetic form to so much of the legendary as well as of the contemporary history as admitted of connected narrative; and who, more especially, recorded in the half-prosaic Saturnian national metre the story of the first Punic war simply and distinctly, with a straightforward adherence to fact, without disdaining anything at all as unpoetical, and without at all, especially in the description of historical times, going in pursuit of poetical flights or embellishments—­maintaining throughout his narrative the present tense.(55) What we have already said of the national drama of the same poet, applies substantially to the work of which we are now speaking.  The epic, like the tragic, poetry of the Greeks lived and moved essentially in the heroic period; it was an altogether new and, at least in design, an enviably grand idea—­to light up the present with the lustre of poetry.  Although in point of execution the chronicle of Naevius may not have been much better than the rhyming chronicles of the middle ages, which are in various respects of kindred character, yet the poet was certainly justified in regarding this work of his with an altogether peculiar complacency.  It was no small achievement, in an age when there was absolutely no historical literature except official records, to have composed for his countrymen a connected account of the deeds of their own and the earlier time, and in addition to have placed before their eyes the noblest incidents of that history in a dramatic form.

Ennius

Ennius proposed to himself the very same task as Naevius; but the similarity of the subject only brings out into stronger relief the political and poetical contrast between the national and the anti-national poet.  Naevius sought out for the new subject a new form; Ennius fitted or forced it into the forms of the Hellenic epos.  The hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of the Homeridae, striving after plastic vividness of delineation, took the place of the homely historic narrative.  Wherever the