TRAGEDY.--As for what there was of tragedy, it was destined to be yet shorter-lived than comedy, but it was evidently very brilliant and it is regrettable that it has not been preserved. Livius Andronicus and Nasvius wrote tragedies, but the three greatest tragedians were Ennius, his nephew Pacuvius, and Attius. Ennius imitated Euripides, Pacuvius Sophocles, and Attius Aeschylus. All three soared to the grand, the majestic, and the sublime; all seem to have been very sententious and replete with maxims; but it is needful to be cautious: these authors are known to us only by the citations made by grammarians, and grammarians who, having naturally cited phrases rather than fragments of dialogue, make it possible that these authors appear to us sententious when they were in reality not abnormally so. PROSE LITERATURE.--Prose literature at Rome appeared almost at the same time as the poetic. Cicero has given us the names of great orators, contemporaries of Ennius, and there were historians and didacticians in prose of the same period. The elder Cato, the great censor, was an historian; he wrote a work, _The Origins_, which seems to have been the history not only of Rome but of all Italy since the foundation of Rome; he was didactic; he wrote a _De Re Rustica_ (On Rural Life) which has come down to us and is infinitely valuable as showing the simplicity, the hardness, and the avarice of the old Roman proprietors, all qualities which Cato thoroughly well knew they possessed. THE AGE OF CAESAR.--The age of Caesar was a great literary epoch. Before all and almost over all was Caesar himself: great orator, letter-writer, grammarian, and historian. His _Commentaries_, that is, his memoirs, history of his campaigns, are admirable in their conciseness and precision of rapid and running narrative. Apart from him, Cornelius Nepos made a very clear abridgment, characterised by marked sobriety, of universal history under the title of _Chronica_. Varro, a kind of encyclopaedist, wrote a _De Re Rustica_, also a work on the Latin language, _Menippic Satires_--satires it is true, but mixtures of prose and verse--and a work on _Roman Life_, as well as a crowd of small books dealing with every possible subject. Cicero told him, "You have taught us all things human and divine." He possessed immense erudition and a violent mind not without charm. He can be imagined as a sage of our own sixteenth century.