to the highest point which it reached in antiquity. In the year 404 B.C. Athens fell into the power of Lysander; in the same year the last war was commenced with Veii. When Rome was in the hands of the Gauls, 390 B.C., Greece was convulsed with that Corinthian war which directed the weapons of the Greeks away from the decaying Persian empire against their own hearts; and while in Rome the few miserable annals and historical monuments were consumed by the flames, there appeared in Greece the historical writings of Xenophon. It is necessary to keep in mind the contemporary events of Rome and Greece in order rightly to understand the political and intellectual influence exercised by the two foremost nations of antiquity upon each other.

CHAP.

XIX.

THIRD BOOK.

THE CONQUEST OF ITALY.

289

CHAPTER I.

FOREIGN HISTORY FROM THE BURNING OF ROME BY THE GAULS TO THE BEGINNING OF THE SAMNITE WARS. 390-343 B.C.

CHAP.

I.

390-343

B.C.

Character

years im

the

invasion.

If the obscurity of the older Roman history, as some have supposed, were to be explained entirely or even chiefly by the fact that the annals then existing were all destroyed in the Gallic conflagration, we might hope that from this time forward the character of the narrative would be of the hisessentially different. It is true, we should even yet hardly tory for the expect a full, comprehensive, and connected account of the mediately principal events; but we should at least be justified in following hoping that the information, however bare, jejune, and in- Gallic complete, would be in the main trustworthy; that there would no longer be great uncertainty about times and places; that the same transactions would no longer be related several times over; that we should find no more imaginary battles, conquests, and triumphs; and that accounts contradicting each other, or accompanied with vagueness, obscurity, inconsistency, and palpable errorsabove all, that miracles and boundless exaggerations, would no longer disfigure the annals of Rome. But such a change for the better is not perceptible at this period. On the contrary, the mists of antiquity begin, it would seem, to thicken again. The accounts referring to Camillus contain more especially so much exaggeration and fiction that we are rarely conscious of treading on firmer historical ground after the Gallic conflagration, and we cannot avoid the conclusion that, even for some time after that disaster, little was done in Rome to pre