SOURCE: Elaine Fantham, "Ennius and Cato, Two Early Writers," in Roman Literary Culture, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 11.

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...