Other narrative and historical poems were known by the name of 'Annales;' one in three Books, written by Accius, the tragic poet; another written by A. Furius of Antium, which extended to a greater length, as Macrobius (ii. 1. 34(438)) quotes from the tenth and the eleventh Books lines appropriated by Virgil,--one of many proofs of the manner in which the genius of Virgil, acting upon great reading, absorbed the thoughts and diction of his predecessors. The most important of the historical poems which continued the mistake of treating recent history in the form of a metrical chronicle appears to have been the Istrian War of Hostius, the grandfather of the Cynthia of Propertius, and alluded to by him in the line,
This poem was written early in the first century B.C., in three Books, and took up the treatment of Roman history where the Annals of Ennius ended.
In the earlier part of the Ciceronian Age, the decay of public spirit, and the strong tendency which had set in of advancing individual claims above the interest of the State, and of looking to individual leaders rather than to established institutions, gave a new direction to narrative verse. The passion for personal glory became the principal motive of those poems which treated of recent or contemporary history. Eminent families and individuals secured for themselves the services of poets, native or Greek. Even before this time, Accius, as we learn from Cicero(439), was closely associated with D. Brutus, and it seems not unlikely that the choice of the subject of one of his tragedies,--Brutus,--was made as a compliment to his friend and patron. The Luculli and Metelli retained the services of Archias, as their panegyrist,--a fact referred to by Cicero in one of his letters to Atticus, not without a slight touch of jealousy(440). Pompey was served in the same way by Theophanes of Mitylene. The patronage of the great to men of letters was thus by no means so disinterested as our first impressions might lead us to suppose. Cicero himself with his extraordinary literary activity wrote in his youth a poem on his townsman Marius, and failing to find any other Greek or Roman to undertake the task, composed a poem in three Books on his own Consulship(441), with a result not fortunate to his reputation either for modesty or good taste. In a letter to his brother Quintus, we find him encouraging him to the composition of a poem on the Invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar. The passage is worth attending to as indicating the materials out of which those poems which aimed at celebrating contemporary events were framed:--'What strange scenes, what opportunities for describing things and places, what customs, tribes, battles. What a theme too you have in your general himself(442)!' This passage may be compared with two passages in Horace, showing that the same kind of thing was expected from a poetical panegyrist under Augustus. The first of these is from Sat. ii. 1, lines 11 etc., where Trebatius advises Horace,
