As we have said, it was public speech that moulded prose style at Rome, as in England. Among the first to make a marked impression was Cato, whose great activity on the platform begins about the year of the decree _de Bacchanalibus_. Nothing could be more innocent of form than Cato’s _De Agri Cultura_. This however, is by no means true of his speeches, several pages of which survive in the typical paragraphs quoted by later writers. Cato had not taken any course in the art of eloquence, he had not studied the Greeks to the point of appreciating stylistic qualities, and there was no literary Latin prose published for him to study, but he had, as a member of the senate, heard many elaborate arguments advanced by the foremost statesmen of his day on such weighty questions as the peace with Carthage, the proposed expedition into Macedonia in aid of the Greek democracies, the terms of peace with Philip, and the proposed war with Antiochus the Great. There can be no doubt that these debates brought out many of the characteristic qualities of Latin style. The men who argued these questions had to think soundly and to form their arguments as clearly, as definitely, as incisively, and as persuasively as they knew how. When scholastic students of style attribute Greek learning to Cato[10] because he stops to make definitions, balance arguments, and employ logical enthymemes, they astound us by their naïvete. One might as well say that Confucius, Hesiod, and Isaiah had studied Demosthenes. Indeed I doubt not the Aurignacian mother defined words for her children and that the lord of the cave had often tried to argue his wife into silence by conclusions _ex contrario_.