Cato was the first historical writer of Rome to use his native tongue. His Origines, the work of his old age, was written with that thoroughly Roman conception of history which regarded actions and events solely as they affected the continuous and pro 'The best and fullest treatment of this matter is to be found in W. M. Lindsay, Early Latin Verse; for discussion of a rather im portant point in connection with the accentual element in Plautine verse, see Sonnenschein in Class. Rev. XX. (1906), p. 156, Eton, ibid., p. 31, Wallstedt, Studia Plautina (Lund, 1969).
gressive life of a State. It was an attempt, apparently somewhat in the style of the Greek logographi (q.v.), to record the early history of the Italian communities which Rome had conquered. Its loss is much to be deplored.
Terence, Lucilius, etc.—In Naevius, Plautus, Ennius and Cato are represented the contending forces which strove for ascendancy in determining what was to be the character of the new literature. The work, begun by them, was carried on by younger contempo raries and successors; by Statius Caecilius (c. 220-168), an In subrian Gaul, in comedy ; in tragedy by M. Pacuvius (c. 220-132), the nephew of Ennius, called by Cicero the greatest of Roman tragedians; and, in the following generation, by L. Accius (c. 170 86), who was more usually placed in this position. The impulse given to oratory by Cato, Ser. Sulpicius Galba and others, and along with it the development of prose composition, went on with increased momentum till the age of Cicero. But the interval between the death of Ennius (169) and the beginning of Cicero's career, while one of progressive advance in the appreciation of literary form and style, was much less distinguished by original force than the time immediately before and after the end of the second Punic War. The one complete survival of the generation after the death of Ennius, the comedy of P. Terentius Afer or Terence (c. 185-159), exemplifies the gain in literary accom plishment and the loss in literary freedom. Terence has nothing Roman or Italian except his pure and idiomatic Latinity. His Athenian elegance affords the strongest contrast to the Italian rudeness of Cato's De Re Rustica. What makes Terence an im portant witness of the culture of his time is that he wrote from the centre of the Scipionic circle, in which what was most humane and liberal in Roman statesmanship was combined with the ap preciation of what was most vital in the Greek thought and litera ture of the time. The comedies of Terence may therefore be held to give some indication of the tastes of Scipio, Laelius and their friends in their youth. The influence of Panaetius and Polybius
was more adapted to their maturity. But in the last years during which this circle kept together a new spirit of discontent, powerfully voiced by the Gracchi in politics and in oratory, arose and with it a new literary genre, satire. Roman satire, though in form a legitimate development of the indigenous dramatic satura through the written satura of Ennius and Pacuvius, is really a birth of this time, and its author was the youngest of those ad mitted into the intimacy of the Scipionic circle, C. Lucilius of Suessa Aurunca (c. 180-103). The loss of his works, which seem to have been full of originality and pungent criticism, is most regrettable. The years that intervened between his death and the beginning of the Ciceronian age are singularly barren in works of original value. But in one direction there was some novelty. The tragic writers had occasionally taken their subjects from Roman life (fabulae praetextae), and in comedy we find the cor responding togatae of Lucius Afranius and others.
Summary of the Period.—The general results of the last 5o years of the first period (130 to 8o) may be thus summed up. In poetry we have the satires of Lucilius, the tragedies of Accius and of a few successors among the Roman aristocracy; various annalistic poems intended to serve as continuations of the great poem of Ennius; minor poems of an epigrammatic and erotic character, unimportant anticipations of the Alexandrian tendency operative in the following period ; and works of criticism in trochaic tetrameters by Porcius Licinus and others, forming part of the critical and grammatical movement which almost from the first accompanied the creative movement in Latin literature.
The only extant prose work which may be assigned to the end of this period is the treatise on rhetoric known by the title Ad Herennium (c. 84) a work indicative of the attention bestowed on prose style and rhetorical studies during the last century of the republic, and which may be regarded as a precursor of the ora torical treatises of Cicero and Quintilian. But the great literary product of this period was oratory, developed indeed with the aid of these rhetorical studies, but itself the immediate outcome of practical needs. The speakers and writers of a later age looked back on Scipio and Laelius, the Gracchi and their contemporaries, L. Crassus and M. Antonius, as masters of their art.