Here, at 85 years of age, [19] the man stands before us. We see the crisp, erect figure, bristling with aggressive vigour, the coarse, red hair, the keen, grey eyes, piercingly fixed on his opponent's face, and reading at a glance the knavery he sought to hide; we hear the rasping voice, launching its dry, cutting sarcasms one after another, each pointed with its sting of truth; and we can well believe that the dislike was intense, which could make an enemy provoke the terrible armoury of the old censor's eloquence. As has been said, he so far relaxed the severity of his principles as to learn the Greek language and study the great writers. Nor could he help feeling attracted to minds like those of Thucydides and Demosthenes, in sagacity and earnestness so congenial to his own. Nevertheless, his originality is in nothing more conspicuously shown than in his method of treating history. He struck a line of inquiry in which he found no successor. The _Origines_, if it had remained, would undoubtedly have been a priceless storehouse of facts about the antiquities of Italy. Cato had an enlarged view of history. It was not his object to magnify Rome at the expense of the other Italian nationalities, but rather to show how she had become their greatest, because their truest, representative. The divisions of the work itself will show the importance he attached to an investigation of their early annals. We learn from Nepos that the first book comprised the regal period; the second and third were devoted to the origin and primitive history of each Italian state; [20] the fourth and fifth embraced the Punic wars; the last two carried the history as far as the Praetorship of Servius Galba, Cato's bold accusation of whom he inserted in the body of the work. Nepos, echoing the superficial canons of his age, characterises the whole as showing industry and diligence, but no learning whatever. The early myths were somewhat indistinctly treated. [21] His account of the Trojan immigration seems to have been the basis of that of Virgil, though the latter refashioned it in several points. [22] His computation of dates, though apparently exact, betrays a mind indifferent to the importance of chronology. The fragments of the next two books are more copious. He tells us that Gaul, then as now, pursued with the greatest zeal military glory and eloquence in debate. [23] His notice of the Ligurians is far from complimentary. "They are all deceitful, having lost every record of their real origin, and being illiterate, they invent false stories and have no recollection of the truth." [24] He hazards a few etymologies, which, as usual among Roman writers, are quite unscientific. Graviscae is so called from its unhealthy climate (_gravis aer_), Praeneste from its conspicuous position on the mountains (_quia montibus praestet_). A few scattered remarks on the food in use among different tribes are all that remain of an interesting department which