SOURCE: Moses Hadas, "Pre-Ciceronian Prose," in A History of Latin Literature, Columbia University Press, 1952, pp. 58-68.

In the following excerpt, Hadas stresses the importance of Cato's contribution to Roman historiography. In his discussion of Cato's career, however, Hadas attributes "more than a touch of demagoguery " to the orator's political and literary style.

In history as well as oratory Cato is a pioneer. Various priestly and other chronicles must have been kept from the earliest organization of the state, but it was only when Rome entered the main stream of Mediterranean history in the Second Punic War that awareness of self and of other peoples provided impulse to historiography of the Greek type. It was natural, in the absence of Latin models and with knowledge of Greek general in the selected audience whom the aristocratic early historians addressed, that the first works of this category should be written in...