From the earliest times of the republic, history records the wonderful effects which Junius Brutus, Publicola, and Appius Claudius, produced by their harangues, in allaying seditions, and thwarting pernicious counsels. Dionysius of Halicarnassus gives us a formal speech, which Romulus, by direction of his grandfather, made to the people after the building of the city, on the subject of the government to be established(228). There are also long orations of Servius Tullius; and great part of the Antiquities of Dionysius is occupied with senatorial debates during the early ages of the republic. But though the orations of these fathers of Roman eloquence were doubtless delivered with order, gravity, and judgment, and may have possessed a masculine vigour, well calculated to animate the courage of the soldier, and protect the interests of the state, we must not form our opinion of them from the long speeches in Dionysius and Livy, or suppose that they were adorned with any of that rhetoric art with which they have been invested by these historians. A nation of outlaws, destined from their cradle to the profession of arms,—taught only to hurl the spear or javelin, and inure their bodies to other martial exercises,—with souls breathing only conquest,—and regarded as the enemies of every state till they had become its masters, could have possessed but few topics of illustration or embellishment, and were not likely to cultivate any species of rhetorical refinement. To convince by solid arguments when their cause was good, and to fill their fellow-citizens with passions corresponding to those with which they were themselves animated, would be the great objects of an eloquence supplied by nature and unimproved by study. Quintilian accordingly informs us, that though there appeared in the ancient orations some traces of original genius, and much force of argument, they bore, in their rugged and unpolished periods, the signs of the times in which they were delivered. With exception of the speech of Appius Claudius to oppose a peace with Pyrrhus, there are no harangues mentioned by the Latin critics or historians as possessing any charms of oratory, previously to the time of Cornelius Cethegus, who flourished during the second Punic war, and was Consul about the year 550. Cethegus was particularly distinguished for his admirable sweetness of elocution and powers of persuasion, whence he is thus characterized by Ennius, a contemporary poet, in the 9th book of his _Annals_: “Additur orator Cornelius suaviloquenti Ore Cethegus Marcus, Tuditano collega; Flos delibatus populi, suadæque medulla.”