Imperfect as these materials must
necessarily have been under any circumstances, we must remember that
the city of Rome was twice captured; once by Porsenna, and a second
time by the Gauls, about a century and a half before Fabius was born.
On the latter occasion the city was burned to the ground, and the
capital saved only by the payment of an immense ransom. By such a
calamity it is manifest that the most valuable documents must have
been dispersed or destroyed, and the part that escaped thrown into
great disorder. The heroic songs might indeed have been preserved in
the memory of the public reciters; but there is little necessity for
proving that poetic historians would naturally mingle so much fiction
with truth, that few of their assertions could be deemed authentic.
The history of the four first centuries of the Roman state is
accordingly full of the greatest inconsistences and improbabilities;
so much so, that many respectable writers have rejected the whole as
unworthy of credit; but this is as great an excess in scepticism, as
the reception of the whole would be of credulity.
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