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Excerpt from A History of Roman Literature The greater part of the book is naturally taken up with the extant literary works and their authors; but I have devoted some space to the lives and works of authors whose writings are lost. This I have done, not because I believe that the reader should burden his memory with useless details, but partly in order that this book may be of use as a book of reference, and partly because the men tion of some of the lost works and their authors may im press upon the reader the fact that something is known of many writers whose works have survived, if at all, only in detached fragments. Not a few of these writers were im portant in their day, and exercised no little inuence upon the progress of literature. Of the whole mass of Roman literary production only a small part - though fortunately in great measure the best part - now exists, and it is only by remembering how much has been lost that the modern reader can appreciate the continuity of Roman literature. The literature of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries after Christ is treated less fully than that of the earlier times, but its importance to later European civilization has been so great that a summary treatment of it should be included even in a book of such limited scope as this. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.