But the manufacture of city-chronicles of course did not suspend its activity; it continued to supply its contributions both in prose and verse to the great library written by ennui for ennui, while the makers of the books, in part already freedmen, did not trouble themselves at all about research properly so called.

Such of these writings as are mentioned to us--not one of them is preserved--seem to have been not only of a wholly secondary character, but in great part even pervaded by interested falsification.

It is true that the chronicle of Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius (about 676 ?) was written in an old-fashioned but good style, and studied at least a commendable brevity in the representation of the fabulous period.
Gaius Licinius Macer (d.

as late praetor in 688), father of the poet Calvus,( 30) and a zealous democrat, laid claim more than any other chronicler to documentary research and criticism, but his -libri lintei- and other matters peculiar to him are in the highest degree suspicious, and an interpolation of the whole annals in the interest of democratic tendencies-- an interpolation of a very extensive kind, and which has passed over in part to the later annalists--is probably traceable to him.
Valerius Antias Lastly, Valerius Antias excelled all his predecessors in prolixity as well as in puerile story-telling.

The falsification of numbers was here systematically carried out down even to contemporary history, and the primitive history of Rome was elaborated once more from one form of insipidity to another; for instance the narrative of the way in which the wise Numa according to the instructions of the nymph Egeria caught the gods Faunus and Picus; with wine, and the beautiful conversation thereupon held by the same Numa with the god Jupiter, cannot be too urgently recommended to all worshippers of the so-called legendary history of Rome in order that, if possible, they may believe these things--of course, in substance.