[In the following excerpt, Fantham sketches Cato 's literary influence, presenting it in relation to the poet Ennius.]

Rome's earliest literary culture can be exemplified in the intersecting careers of two famous men, born within five years of each other, Q. Ennius (239-169) and M. Porcius Cato (234(?)-149). Between them they wrote in every known genre of Latin prose and verse, and their long lives—Ennius reached seventy and Cato either eighty-five or ninety—witnessed the full expansion of Roman imperial conquest and both public and private wealth. Cato was born into a family of Sabine landowners and owed his early career to the patronage of a noble family. He met Ennius when he was returning from his quaestorship (he would be about thirty years old) and brought the poet back to Rome.¹ While the Calabrian Ennius was trilingual, in Greek, Oscan, and Latin, and a professional poet, the Sabine Cato is said to have learned Greek late in life (but "late" might only mean after the age of formal education), and turned to writing only after he had carried his political career to the summit of the censorship.

Ennius, who affirmed his artistic standards by claiming the Greek title of poeta or "maker," wrote successful tragedies and less successful comedies, but achieved his lasting fame for his national epic of Rome, the Annales or "Chronicles." This was originally intended to cover Rome's history from Romulus to the defeat of Hannibal, but was continued by the poet into the wars of his own maturity. He is known to have written not only the public poetry of the drama but the lesser genres of fashionable epigram and a didactic poem on gastronomy adapted from the work of a Sicilian Greek, Archestratus of Gela. He wrote a kind of verse called satura on miscellaneous topics, without the social criticism or invective of Lucilian or Horatian satire; he is even credited with adapting into Latin prose the debunking history of the Olympian gods by Euhemerus, but evidence for this sophisticated product is insecure. In later life Ennius found other patrons, the Scipios (both Africanus and Nasica) and Fulvius Nobilior, the conqueror of Aetolia, whose son bestowed Roman citizenship on the poet.² This was a man who gave learned readings and interpretations of poetry, who lived in his own house on intimate terms with the Cornelii Scipiones, and received a statue in their family monument.

The other, complementary, side of Roman literature was developed by his former patron, Cato, who after Ennius's death composed the first history of Rome and Italy in Latin. Cato included in his history some of his own political speeches on major foreign and domestic issues, and left behind him separate texts of some 150 published speeches of every kind.³ He even composed a manual of agriculture for his own class and an encyclopedia written in large letters for the education of his son. Each of the works I have mentioned might be said to have a different audience, according to its genre, but in their persons these two extraordinary men provided Rome with the full range of literature, omitting only philosophy and prose fiction.

Notes

¹ Nepos's Life of Cato (1.4) makes Cato bring Ennius from Africa: but Silius Italicus (12.390) more plausibly has Ennius fighting in Sardinia where we know Cato served as quaestor.

² It was always easier for a Roman master to convert his slave into a citizen by emancipation, than for a patron of a foreign national to bestow citizenship upon him. This seems to have been a privilege limited to military commanders, who could give citizenship to individuals or units as a reward for active service.

³ The evidence comes from Cic. Brut. 65, but Cicero makes it clear that he had personally sought out these texts. It is not to be thought that they were commonly available….