ancient epos and no ancient drama, and poetry knows no substitutes.  With greater moderation and good sense Cato left poetry proper, as a thing irremediably lost, to the party opposed to him; although his attempt to create a didactic poetry in national measure after the model of the earlier Roman productions —­the Appian poem on Morals and the poem on Agriculture—­remains significant and deserving of respect, in point if not of success, at least of intention.  Prose afforded him a more favourable field, and accordingly he applied the whole varied power and energy peculiar to him to the creation of a prose literature in his native tongue.  This effort was all the more Roman and all the more deserving of respect, that the public which he primarily addressed was the family circle, and that in such an effort he stood almost alone in his time.  Thus arose his “Origines,” his remarkable state-speeches, his treatises on special branches of science.  They are certainly pervaded by a national spirit, and turn on national subjects; but they are far from anti-Hellenic:  in fact they originated essentially under Greek influence, although in a different sense from that in which the writings of the opposite party so originated.  The idea and even the title of his chief work were borrowed from the Greek “foundation-histories” (—­ktoeis—­).  The same is true of his oratorical authorship; he ridiculed Isocrates, but he tried to learn from Thucydides and Demosthenes.  His encyclopaedia is essentially the result of his study of Greek literature.  Of all the undertakings of that active and patriotic man none was more fruitful of results and none more useful to his country than this literary activity, little esteemed in comparison as it probably was by himself.  He found numerous and worthy successors in oratorical and scientific authorship; and though his original historical treatise, which of its kind may be compared with the Greek logography, was not followed by any Herodotus or Thucydides, yet by and through him the principle was established that literary occupation in connection with the useful sciences as well as with history was not merely becoming but honourable in a Roman.

Architecture

Let us glance, in conclusion, at the state of the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting.  So far as concerns the former, the traces of incipient luxury were less observable in public than in private buildings.  It was not till towards the close of this period, and especially from the time of the censorship of Cato (570), that the Romans began in the case of the former to have respect to the convenience as well as to the bare wants of the public; to line with stone the basins (-lacus-) supplied from the aqueducts, (570); to erect colonnades (575, 580); and above all to transfer to Rome the Attic halls for courts and business—­the -basilicae- as they were called.  The first of these buildings, somewhat corresponding to our modern bazaars—­the