Pyrrhus down
to the Istrian war;(62) Cato narrated in the fourth and fifth books
of his historical work the wars from the first Punic war down to that
with Perseus, and in the two last books, which probably were planned
on a different and ampler scale, he related the events of the last
twenty years of his life. For the Pyrrhic war Ennius may have
employed Timaeus or other Greek authorities; but on the whole
the accounts given were based, partly on personal observation
or communications of eye-witnesses, partly on each other.

Speeches and Letters

Contemporaneously with historical literature, and in some sense as an
appendage to it, arose the literature of speeches and letters. This
in like manner was commenced by Cato; for the Romans possessed nothing
of an earlier age except some funeral orations, most of which probably
were only brought to light at a later period from family archives,
such as that which the veteran Quintus Fabius, the opponent of
Hannibal, delivered when an old man over his son who had died in his
prime. Cato on the other hand committed to writing in his old age
such of the numerous orations which he had delivered during his long
and active public career as were historically important, as a sort of
political memoirs, and published them partly in his historical work,
partly, it would seem, as independent supplements to it. There also
existed a collection of his letters.

History of Other Nations

With non-Roman history the Romans concerned themselves so far, that
a certain knowledge of it was deemed indispensable for the cultivated
Roman; even old Fabius is said to have been familiar not merely with
the Roman, but also with foreign, wars, and it is distinctly testified
that Cato diligently read Thucydides and the Greek historians in
general. But, if we leave out of view the collection of anecdotes and
maxims which Cato compiled for himself as the fruits of this reading,
no trace is discernible of any literary activity in this field.

Uncritical Treatment of History

These first essays in historical literature were all of them, as
a matter of course, pervaded by an easy, uncritical spirit; neither
authors nor readers readily took offence at inward or outward
inconsistencies. King Tarquinius the Second, although he was already
grown up at the time of his father's death and did not begin to reign
till thirty-nine years afterwards, is nevertheless still a young man
when he ascends the thron