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How useful are the ancient literary sources that purport to give us information about this period

...... Raaflaub disagrees with Cornells perspective, because Raaflaub believes that the annalists created a literary genre, which had a peculiar characters and scientific shortcomings that drastically reduce[d] its source value and disqualifie[d] most of its content for the task of reconstructing the history of archaic Rome. (Raaflaub, p.24). However, he feels that their positions are not as dissimilar as they initially appear. He agrees that the annalists passed on structural facts, but that they each, as individuals, put in a narrative superstructure of the facts. This leads Raaflaub to question how one can distinguish between the structural facts and the dramatization of those facts by the individual annalists. When one does so, Raaflaub believes that the structural facts actually provide very limited information about the first two centuries of Rome. (Raaflaub, p. 25). Therefore, Raaflaub believes that the historical reliability of the literary sources is questionable, and must be guided by clear methodological principles. (Raafluab, p.26)
Wiseman also disagrees with Cornells approach. Where Cornell suggests that, for a history, everything begins with tradition, Wiseman cautions, if everything depends on the tradition, we need to be very careful about identifying what exactly it is that the tradition offers. The dreadful, inescapable