The judicious and candid reader will not fail to observe that this report swarms with all sorts of impossibilities. Such are the statement of the Antiates waging war after the surrender of 377 (Liv. vi. 33); the independent campaign of the Latins against the Paeligni, in distinct contradiction to the stipulations of the treaties between Rome and Latium; the unprecedented march of the Roman army through the Marsian and Samnite territory to Capua, while all Latium was in arms against Rome; to say nothing of the equally confused and sentimental account of the military insurrection of 412, and the story of its forced leader, the lame Titus Quinctius, the Roman Gotz von Berlichingen.  Still more suspicious perhaps, are the repetitions. Such is the story of the military tribune Publius Decius modelled on the courageous deed of Marcus Calpurnius Flamma, or whatever he was called, in the first Punic war; such is the recurrence of the conquest of Privernum by Gaius Plautius in the year 425, which second conquest alone is registered in the triumphal Fasti; such is the self-immolation of Publius Decius, repeated, as is well known, in the case of his son in 459. Throughout this section the whole representation betrays a different period and a different hand from the other more credible accounts of the annals.  The narrative is full of detailed pictures of battles; of inwoven anecdotes, such as that of the praetor of Setia, who breaks his neck on the steps of the senate-house because he had been audacious enough to solicit the consulship, and the various anecdotes concocted out of the surname of Titus Manlius; and of prolix and in part suspicious archaeological digressions. In this class we include the history of the legion - of which the notice, most probably apocryphal, in Liv. i. 52, regarding the maniples of Romans and Latins intermingled formed by the second Tarquin, is evidently a second fragment, the erroneous view given of the treaty between Capua and Rome (see my Rom. Munzwesen, p. 334, n. 122); the formularies of self-devotion, the Campanian denarius, the Laurentine alliance, and the bina jugera in the assignation (p. 450, note). Under such circumstances it appears a fact of great weight that Diodorus, who follows other and often older accounts, knows absolutely nothing of any of these events except the last battle at Trifanum; a battle in fact that ill accords with the rest of the narrative, which, in accordance with the rules of poetical justice, ought to have concluded with the death of Decius.

21. II. V. Isolation of the Later Latin Cities as Respected Private Rights.

22. II. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League.

23. II. IV. South Etruria Roman.

1. It may not be superfluous to mention that our knowledge Archidamus and Alexander is derived from Greek annals, and that the synchronism between these and the Roman is in reference to the present epoch only approximately established. We must beware, therefore, of pursuing too far into detail the unmistakable general connection between the events in the west and those in the east of Italy.

2. These were not the inhabitants of Satricum near Antium (II. V. League with The Hernici), but those of another Volscian town constituted at that time as a Roman burgess-community without right of voting, near Arpinum.

3. That a formal armistice for two years subsisted between the Romans and Samnites in 436-437 is more than improbable.

4. The operations in the campaign of 537, and still more plainly the formation of the highway from Arretium to Bononia in 567, show that the road from Rome to Arretium had already been rendered serviceable before that time. But it cannot at that period have been a Roman military road, because, judging from its later appellation of the "Cassian way," it cannot have been constructed as a via consularis earlier than 583; for no Cassian appears in the lists of Roman consuls and censors between Spurius Cassius, consul in 252, 261, and 268 - who of course is out of the question - and Gaius Cassius Longinus, consul in 583.

1. The story that the Romans also sent envoys to Alexander at Babylon on the testimony of Clitarchus (Plin. Hist. Nat. iii. 5, 57), from whom the other authorities who mention this fact (Aristus and Asclepiades, ap. Arrian, vii. 15, 5; Memnon, c. 25) doubtless derived it. Clitarchus certainly was contemporary with these events; nevertheless, his Life of Alexander was decidedly a historical romance rather than a history; and, looking to the silence of the trustworthy biographers (Arrian, l. c.; Liv. ix. 18) and the utterly romantic details of the account - which represents the Romans, for instance, as delivering to Alexander a chaplet of gold, and the latter as prophesying the future greatness of Rome - we cannot but set down this story as one of the many embellishments which Clitarchus introduced into the history.

2. II. VI. Last Struggles of Samnium.

3. Near the modern Anglona; not to be confounded with the better known town of the same name in the district of Cosenza.

4. These numbers appear credible. The Roman account assigns, probably in dead and wounded, 15,000 to each side; a later one even specifies 5000 as dead on the Roman, and 20,000 on the Greek side. These accounts may be mentioned here for the purpose of exhibiting, in one of the few instances where it is possible to check the statement, the untrustworthiness - almost without exception - of the reports of numbers, which are swelled by the unscrupulous invention of the annalists with avalanche-like rapidity.

5. The later Romans, and the moderns following them, give a version of the league, as if the Romans had designedly avoided accepting the Carthaginian help in Italy. This would have been irrational, and the facts pronounce against it. The circumstance that Mago did not land at Ostia is to be explained not by any such foresight, but simply by the fact that Latium was not at all threatened by Pyrrhus and so did not need Carthaginian aid; and the Carthaginians certainly fought for Rome in front of Rhegium.

6. II. IV. Victories of Salamis and Himera, and Their Effects.

7. II. IV. Fruitlessness of the Celtic Victory.

8. The grounds for assigning the document given in Polybius (iii. 22) not to 245, but to 406, are set forth in my Rom. Chronologie, p. 320 f. [translated in the Appendix to this volume].

9. II. V. Domination of the Romans; Exasperation of the Latins.

10. II. VII. Breach between Rome and Tarentum.

11. II. V. Colonization of the Volsci.

12. II. V. Colonization of the Volsci.

13. II.  VI. New Fortresses in Apulia and Campania.

14. II. VI. Last Struggles of Samnium.

15. II. VII. Construction of New Fortresses and Roads.