As to the amount of historical matter contained in the Annals, it is impossible to pronounce with confidence. Their falsification through family and patrician pride is well known. But the earliest historians must have possessed sufficient insight to distinguish the obviously fabulous. We cannot suspect Cato of placing implicit faith in mythical accounts. He was no friend to the aristocratic families or their records, and took care to check them by the rival records of other Italian tribes. Sempronius Asellio, in a passage already alluded to (ap. Gell. v. 18), distinguishes the annalistic style as puerile (_fabulas pueris narrare_); the historian, he insists, should go beneath the surface, and understand what he relates. On comparing the early chronicles of Rome with those of St Bertin and St Denys of France, there appears no advantage in a historical point of view to be claimed by the latter; both contain many real events, though both seek to glorify the origin of the nation and its rulers by constant instances of divine or saintly intervention. CHAPTER X. THE HISTORY OF ORATORY BEFORE CICERO. As the spiritual life of a people is reflected in their poetry, so their living voice is heard in their oratory. Oratory is the child of freedom. Under the despotisms of the East it could have no existence; under every despotism it withers. The more truly free a nation is, the greater will its oratory be. In no country was there a grander field for the growth of oratorical genius than in Rome. The two countries that approach nearest to it in this respect are beyond doubt Athens and England. In both eloquence has attained its loftiest height, in the one of popular, in the other of patrician excellence. The eloquence of Demosthenes is popular in the noblest sense. It is addressed to a sovereign people who knew that they were sovereign. Neither to deliberative nor to executive did they for a moment delegate that supreme power which it delighted them to exercise. He that had a measure or a bill to propose had only to persuade them that it was good, and the measure passed, the bill became law. But the audience he addressed, though a popular, was by no means an ordinary one. It was fickle and capricious to a degree exceeding that of all other popular assemblies; it was critical, exacting, intellectual, in a still higher degree. No audience has been more swayed by passion; none has been less swayed by the pretence of it. Always accessible to flattery, Athens counts as her two greatest orators the two men who never stooped to flatter her. The regal tones of Pericles, the prophetic earnestness of Demosthenes, in the response which each met, bear witness to the greatness of those who heard them. Even Cleon owed his greatest triumphs to the plainness with which he inveighed against the people's faults. Intolerant of inelegance and bombast, the Athenians required not only graceful speech, but speech to the point.