ken up into the history, and one of them, as
partly preserved by Aulus Gellius, furnishes the best example we have
of the straightforward unadorned oratory of early Rome. There is
reason to believe, even, that Cato left what we may fairly call an
encyclopaedia,--dedicated to, and compiled for, his son. At any rate,
he wrote largely--not to mention works already alluded to--on
eloquence, medicine, the military art, etc.

Yet it must be confessed that Cato illustrates, as strikingly as any
figure that could be selected, how little at home the true literary
artist would have found himself in early Latium, if a perverse fate
had made it possible for him to be born there, or to stray thither, at
all. Even his figure and face were repellent enough to stand between
Socrates and Samuel Johnson, as the most familiar ugly old men upon
the stage of the world's life.

"Porcius, fiery-haired, gray-eyed, and snarling at all
men,--"

says the unforgiving satirist, is unwelcome even when dead, to
Persephone in Hades! No authentic portrait-statue of him exists.
Indeed these Roman busts and figures, especially in the earlier time,
were the work of Greek artists, and the likelihood of his giving a
sitting to one of that race is exceedingly small.

The only work of Cato's which from its title might seem to have had a
poetic form was the 'Carmen de Moribus.' It seems to have been a
eulogy upon old Roman simplicity. Not only are the extant fragments in
prosaic prose, but the most famous of them declares, with evident
regret over his own gentler days of degeneracy: "Their custom was to
be dressed in public respectably, at home so much as was needful. They
paid more for horses than for cooks. The poet's art was in no honor.
_If a man was devoted to it_, or applied himself to conviviality, _he
was called a vagabond_!"

Indeed, Cato's activity in literature probably had for its chief end
and aim to resist the incoming tide of Greek philosophy and of
refinement generally; he is the very type of Horace's "laudator
temporis acti," "the eulogist of a bygone time": that crude heroic
time when Dentatus, hero of three triumphs, ate boiled turnips in his
chimney-corner, and had no use for Macedonian gold.

Whether there was any important mass of ballads or other purely
national Roman or Latin literature in that elder day has been much
debated. The general voice of scholars is against Niebuhr and
Macaulay. There is every indication that