Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE PEN IN POLITICS
When Cato spoke in Latin at Athens in 191 B.C. (see above, p. 141) it struck
the listeners how much longer the interpreter seemed to take than Cato in
making a point; and Cato could have got by in Greek if he had chosen (Plut.
Cat. Maj. 12). It looks as though Cato was making a deliberate point here. By
using Latin in his own pithy way, Cato was asserting the new importance of the
language in international diplomacy, and implicitly rejecting the attitude and the
Greek rhetoric of a Flamininus.
4. HISTORY
The earliest prose-histories of Rome were written in Greek by Q. Fabius
Maximus and L. Cincius Alimentus, probably in the 190s B.C.; their aim will
have been to explain and publicize the history of their relatively obscure TT6AIS,
city, to the Hellenistic world at large. 1 Naevius and Ennius addressed a domestic
audience in verse with quite another aim (see pp. 59—76). The sources
theoretically available to them all included the annales kept by the Pontifex
Maximus, treaties (e.g. with Carthage, Polyb. 3.22.3), elogia, family records and
traditions, funeral laudations, the Greek historians Hellanicus, Hieronymus of
Cardia, Antigonus, Timaeus, Silenus, Chaerea, Sosylus, the chronographical
and geographical studies of Eratosthenes, and last but not least, personal
experience; for all of them played some part in the events which they describe.
Greek continued to be a medium for history right through the second century.
P. Cornelius Scipio (the adoptive father of Scipio Aemilianus, Cic. Brut. 77),
A. Postumius Albinus (whom Polybius called a windbag (32.29.1) and whom
Cato mocked for his apologizing in advance for any stylistic shortcomings in his
Greek, Gell. N.A. 11.8.2), C. Acilius (Liv. per. 53 ad ann. 142 B.C.), and
Rutilius Rufus (Ath. i68d) all wrote in this tradition. It was Cato who founded
Latin historiography as such with his Origines.
This was a work of his old age begun not earlier than 170 B.C. when he was
sixty-five (cf. fr. 49 Peter and Leo (1913) 291); its general character is summarized
in Cornelius Nepos' Life of Cato (24.3.4). The first book dealt with
the Greek Aborigines of Italy, Aeneas and his Trojans, Lavinium, Alba, the
foundation of Rome (752/1 B.C. in Cato's reckoning, fr. 17), and the reigns of
the kings. The second and third books described the origins, customs and
characters of Italian cities and peoples; it is only to the first three books that the
This would conveniently explain inpeirator, but it seems not to have been noticed that Polybius says
that the Commissioners for the Eastern Settlement (of whom Paullus was one) left Italy just as
Regillus' fleet was returning to Brundisium (21.24.16—17); Regillus hurried to Rome and triumphed
kat.feb. 189 B.C. (Livy 37.59), i.e. early in September. Either Paullus must have missed the boat, or in
fact the inscription belongs to September 190 B.C.: the fact that Paullus had suffered a heavy reverse
that year (Livy 37.46) is not incompatible with his also having won a victory in virtue of which he
had been hailed as imperator.
> See Badian (1966) ch. 1.
149
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008