Cato's great historical and antiquarian work, "The Origins," was a history of Italy and Rome from the earliest times to the latest events which occurred in his own lifetime. It was a work of great research and originality, but only brief fragments of it remain. In the "De Re Rustica," which has come down to us in form and substance as it was written, Cato maintains, in the introduction, the superiority of agriculture over other modes of gaining a livelihood. The work itself is a commonplace book of agriculture and domestic economy; its object is utility, not science: it serves the purpose of a farmer's and gardener's manual, a domestic medicine, herbal, and cookery book. Cato teaches his readers, for example, how to plant osier beds, to cultivate vegetables, to preserve the health of cattle, to pickle pork, and to make savory dishes.
Of the "Orations" of Cato, ninety titles are extant, together with numerous fragments. In style he despised art. He was too fearless and upright, too confident in the justness of his cause to be a rhetorician; he imitated no one, and no one was ever able to imitate him. Niebuhr pronounces him to be the only great man in his generation, and one of the greatest and most honorable characters in Roman history.
Varro (116-28 B.C.) was an agriculturist, a grammarian, a critic, a theologian, a historian, a philosopher, a satirist. Of his miscellaneous works considerable portions are extant, sufficient to display his erudition and acuteness, yet, in themselves, more curious than attractive.
Eloquence, though of a rude, unpolished kind, must have been, in the very earliest times, a characteristic of the Roman people. It is a plant indigenous to a free soil. As in modern times it has flourished especially in England and America, fostered by the unfettered freedom of debate, so it found a congenial home in free Greece and republican Rome. Oratory was, in Rome, the unwritten literature of active life, and recommended itself to a warlike and utilitarian people by its utility and its antagonistic spirit. Long before the art of the historian was sufficiently advanced to record a speech, the forum, the senate, the battlefield, and the threshold of the jurisconsult had been nurseries of Roman eloquence, or schools in which oratory attained a vigorous youth, and prepared for its subsequent maturity.