Read the following passage and answer the questions given after it.

The regal period (753–509 BC) and the early republic (509–280 BC) are the most poorly documented periods of Roman history because historical accounts of Rome were not written until much later. Greek historians did not take serious notice of Rome until the Pyrrhic War (280–275 BC), when Rome was completing its conquest of Italy and was fighting against the Greek city of Tarentum in southern Italy. Rome’s first native historian, a senator named Quintus Fabius Pictor, lived and wrote even later, during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC). Thus historical writing at Rome did not begin until after Rome had completed its conquest of Italy, had emerged as a major power of the ancient world, and was engaged in a titanic struggle with Carthage for control of the western Mediterranean. Fabius Pictor’s history, which began with the city’s mythical Trojan ancestry and narrated events up to his own day, established the form of subsequent histories of Rome. During the last 200 years BC, 16 other Romans wrote similarly inclusive narratives. All these works are now collectively termed “the Roman annalistic tradition” because many of them attempted to give a year-by-year (or annalistic) account of Roman affairs for the republic.

Although none of these histories are fully preserved, the first 10 books of Livy, one of Rome’s greatest historians, are extant and cover Roman affairs from earliest times to the year 293 BC (extant are also Books 21 to 45 treating the events from 218 BC to 167 BC). Since Livy wrote during the reign of the emperor Augustus (27 BC–AD 14), he was separated by 200 years from Fabius Pictor, who, in turn, had lived long after many of the events his history described. Thus, in writing about early Rome, ancient historians were confronted with great difficulties in ascertaining the truth. They possessed a list of annual magistrates from the beginning of the republic onward (the consular fasti), which formed the chronological framework of their accounts. Religious records and the texts of some laws and treaties provided a bare outline of major events. Ancient historians fleshed out this meagre factual material with both native and Greek folklore. Consequently, over time, historical facts about early Rome often suffered from patriotic or face-saving reinterpretations involving exaggeration of the truth, suppression of embarrassing facts, and invention.