s
future achievements? Had he not reason to revile the Greeks, with
whom he had become acquainted in Rome and Athens, as an incorrigibly
wretched pack? This opposition to the culture of the age and the
Hellenism of the day was well warranted; but Cato was by no means
chargeable with an opposition to culture and to Hellenism in general.
On the contrary it is the highest merit of the national party, that
they comprehended very clearly the necessity of creating a Latin
literature and of bringing the stimulating influences of Hellenism
to bear on it; only their intention was, that Latin literature should
not be a mere copy taken from the Greek and intruded on the national
feelings of Rome, but should, while fertilized by Greek influences,
be developed in accordance with Italian nationality. With a genial
instinct, which attests not so much the sagacity of individuals as
the elevation of the epoch, they perceived that in the case of Rome,
owing to the total want of earlier poetical productiveness, history
furnished the only subject-matter for the development of an
intellectual life of their own. Rome was, what Greece was not, a
state; and the mighty consciousness of this truth lay 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