Excerpt from The Growth of RomeOur knowledge of the earlier history of Rome is unfortunately based on very inadequate evidence. It is not until the second century b.c. That we have in Polybius, the Greek statesman and exile, a historian writing on contemporary events further back we are dependent on secondhand historians, such as Livy, and on what we can derive from such documents as the list of consuls, the remains of the legal document known as the XII Tables, and such inferences as may be drawn from the evidence of language, from later institutions, civil and religious, and from the discoveries of the archaeologist in Rome and Italy. But the main outlines of the early history are fairly clear.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.