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THE RANGE OF OLD LATIN PROSE
Flamininus, whose interest in Greek literature as such may even have been
exaggerated, he will have learnt the language as a young man in southern Italy.
A fragment of his Athenian speech, Antiochus epistulis bellum gerit, calamo et
atramento militat 'Antiochus wages war with letters, he rights with pen and
ink' (fr. 20 Malcovati), has been identified as an echo of a disparaging remark of
Demosthenes about Philip of Macedon, a clever ploy in a speech delivered
through an interpreter. 1 As Plutarch noted (Cat. Maj. 12), Cato could have
used Greek if he had wanted: he used Latin for a political reason (see p. 149).
Although Cato made a point of praising the collectivism of the good old res
publica (cf. e.g. frs. 18, 149, 206) and of ridiculing the adoption of Greek
customs (frs. 95, 115), he himself was an example of the drive and individualism
of Hellenistic uomo universale dedicated to the active life. The dictum from the
preface of the Origines quoted above (p. 139) is an adaptation of the first
sentence of Xenophon's Symposium. Xenophon was the kind of Greek that
Cato could admire as a man of action and as a writer: for he if anyone among
Greeks 'held to the subject and let the words follow' (see p. 143).
It may surprise the student of literature that the spectrum of prose-writing
described above did not include the novel, the short story, or belles lettres of any
kind. This would have seemed less strange to a Panaetius or a Polybius; for
Greeks as for Romans, what we would call fiction and expect to find in prose
was properly a lower part of poetry. At Rome this meant saturae (see pp.
156-71). Nor was there any prose philosophy, theology, or sociology. The
theory that Ennius' Euhemerus was a prose work, although widely accepted
today, is questionable on this and on more particular grounds (see pp. 157—8). In
the age of the Gracchi, Latin prose was a medium for facts, instruction, argumentation,
exhortation, persuasion, and propaganda, not merely for entertainment,
artistic experiment, or speculation, which, nevertheless, might have their
places as means to more serious ends.
Before we survey the prose of the second century more closely, three general
points must be made. Firstly, it is appropriate enough at almost any other stage
of Latin literature's development to adopt a strict approach by genre; but here if
we were to confine our attention to that which is in Latin and in prose, we should
seriously restrict and misrepresent the horizons of our subject. Latin prose of
the second century B.C. is even worse represented by fragments than poetry; in
historiography a quite false picture would emerge if we ignored the works of
Fabius Pictor, Aulus Albinus, and Polybius and others, all written in Greek
and belonging equally to the history of Hellenistic literature; in oratory, the
prologues of Plautus and Terence and the Greek diplomatic correspondence of,
for example, Flamininus are important evidence for the practice of the art of
persuasion in the earlier second century B.C., while the fragments of tragedy,
1 Fraenkel (1968) 130 compares fr. 20 with Dem. 4.30.
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