The loyal and capable officer, Aulus Hirtius (who afterwards became consul, and was killed in battle before Mutina a year after Caesar's murder), did his best to supplement his master's narrative. He seems to have been a well-educated man, but without any particular literary capacity. It was uncertain, even to the careful research of Suetonius, whether the narrative of the campaigns in Egypt and Pontus, known as the _Bellum Alexandrinum_, was written by him or by another officer of Caesar's, Gaius Oppius. The books on the campaigns of Africa and Spain which follow are by different hands: the former evidently by some subaltern officer who took part in the war, and very interesting as showing the average level of intelligence and culture among Roman officers of the period; the latter by another author and in very inferior Latin, full of grammatical solecisms and popular idioms oddly mixed up with epic phrases from Ennius, who was still, it must be remembered, the great Latin school-book. It is these curious fragments of history which more than anything else help us to understand the rapid decay of Latin prose after the golden period. Under the later Republic the educated class and the governing class had, broadly speaking, been the same. The Civil wars, in effect, took administration away from their hands, transferring it to the new official class, of which these subalterns of Caesar's represent the type; and this change was confirmed by the Empire. The result was a sudden and long-continued divorce between political activity on the one hand and the profession of letters on the other. For a century after the establishment of the Empire the aristocracy, which had produced the great literature of the Republic, remained forcibly or sullenly silent; and the new hierarchy was still at the best only half educated. The professional man of letters was at first fostered and subsidised; but even before the death of Augustus State patronage of literature had fallen into abeyance, while the cultured classes fell more and more back on the use of Greek. The varying fortunes of this struggle between Greek and literary Latin as it had been formed under the Republic, belong to a later period: at present we must return to complete a general survey of the prose of the Ciceronian age. Historical writing at Rome, as we have seen, had hitherto been in the form either of annals or memoirs. The latter were, of course, rather materials for history than history itself, even when they were not excluded from Quintilian's famous definition of history[5] by being composed primarily as political pamphlets. The former had so far been attempted on too large a scale, and with insufficient equipment either of research or style, to attain any permanent merit. In the ten years after Caesar's death Latin history was raised to a higher level by the works of Sallust, the first scientific historian whom Italy had produced.