. Being thereby detained at Rome
longer than he intended, he was persuaded to give some public lectures, or
_akroaseis_, on grammar; and from these lectures, says Suetonius, dates
the study of grammar at Rome. This took place about 159 B. C., between the
second and third Punic wars, shortly after the death of Ennius, and two
years after the famous expulsion of the Greek rhetors and philosophers
(161). Four years later Carneades, likewise sent to Rome as ambassador,
was prohibited from lecturing by Cato. After these lectures of Crates,
grammatical and philological studies became extremely popular at Rome. We
hear of Lucius AElius Stilo,(93) who lectured on Latin as Crates had
lectured on Greek. Among his pupils were Varro, Lucilius, and Cicero.
Varro composed twenty-four books on the Latin language, four of which were
dedicated to Cicero. Cicero, himself, is quoted as an authority on
grammatical questions, though we know of no special work of his on
grammar. Lucilius devoted the ninth book of his satires to the reform of
spelling.(94) But nothing shows more clearly the wide interest which
grammatical studies had then excited in the foremost ranks of Roman
society than Caesar's work on Latin grammar. It was composed by him during
the Gallic war, and dedicated to Cicero, who might well be proud of the
compliment thus paid him by the great general and statesman. Most of these
works are lost to us, and we can judge of them only by means of casual
quotations. Thus we learn from a fragment of Caesar's work, _De analogia_,
that he was the inventor of the term _ablative_ in Latin. The word never
occurs before, and, of course, could not be borrowed, like the names of
the other cases, from Greek grammarians, as they admitted no ablative in
Greek. To think of Caesar fighting the barbarians of Gaul and Germany, and
watching from a distance the political complications at Rome, ready to
grasp the sceptre of the world, and at the same time carrying on his
philological and grammatical studies together with his secretary, the
Greek Didymus,(95) gives us a new view both of that extraordinary man, and
of the time in which he lived. After Caesar had triumphed, one of his
favorite plans was to found a Greek and Latin library at Rome, and he
offered the librarianship to the best scholar of the day, to Varro, though
Varro had fought against him on the side of Pompey.(96)

We have thus arrived at the time when, as we saw in an earlier part of
th