at the root both
of the bold attempt which Naevius made to attain by means of history a
Roman epos and a Roman drama, and of the creation of Latin prose by
Cato. It is true that the endeavour to replace the gods and heroes of
legend by the kings and consuls of Rome resembles the attempt of the
giants to storm heaven by means of mountains piled one above another:
without a world of gods there is no ancient epos and no ancient drama,
and poetry knows no substitutes. With greater moderation and good
sense Cato left poetry proper, as a thing irremediably lost, to the
party opposed to him; although his attempt to create a didactic poetry
in national measure after the model of the earlier Roman productions
--the Appian poem on Morals and the poem on Agriculture--remains
significant and deserving of respect, in point if not of success, at
least of intention. Prose afforded him a more favourable field, and
accordingly he applied the whole varied power and energy peculiar to
him to the creation of a prose literature in his native tongue. This
effort was all the more Roman and all the more deserving of respect,
that the public which he primarily addressed was the family circle,
and that in such an effort he stood almost alone in his time. Thus
arose his "Origines," his remarkable state-speeches, his treatises
on special branches of science. They are certainly pervaded by a
national spirit, and turn on national subjects; but they are far
from anti-Hellenic: in fact they originated essentially under Greek
influence, although in a different sense from that in which the
writings of the opposite party so originated. The idea and even the
title of his chief work were borrowed from the Greek "foundation-
histories" (--ktoeis--). The same is true of his oratorical
authorship; he ridiculed Isocrates, but he tried to learn from
Thucydides and Demosthenes. His encyclopaedia is essentially the
result of his study of Greek literature. Of all the undertakings
of that active and patriotic man none was more fruitful of results
and none more useful to his country than this literary activity,
little esteemed in comparison as it probably was by himself.
He found numerous and worthy successors in oratorical and scientific
authorship; and though his original historical treatise, which of its
kind may be compared with the Greek logography, was not followed by
any Herodotus or Thucydides, yet by and through him the principle
was established t