the simple signs for the double consonants that had hitherto been
usual, the more accurate Greek double writing. Of Naevius and
Plautus, it is true, nothing of the kind is known; the popular
poets in Rome must have treated orthography and etymology with
the indifference which is usual with poets.

Rhetoric and Philosophy

The Romans of this epoch still remained strangers to rhetoric and
philosophy. The speech in their case lay too decidedly at the very
heart of public life to be accessible to the handling of the foreign
schoolmaster; the genuine orator Cato poured forth all the vials of
his indignant ridicule over the silly Isocratean fashion of ever
learning, and yet never being able, to speak. The Greek philosophy,
although it acquired a certain influence over the Romans through the
medium of didactic and especially of tragic poetry, was nevertheless
viewed with an apprehension compounded of boorish ignorance and of
instinctive misgiving. Cato bluntly called Socrates a talker and a
revolutionist, who was justly put to death as an offender against the
faith and the laws of his country; and the opinion, which even Romans
addicted to philosophy entertained regarding it, may well be expressed
in the words of Ennius:

-Philosophari est mihi necesse, at paucis, nam omnino haut placet.
Degustandum ex ea, non in eam ingurgitandum censeo.-

Nevertheless the poem on Morals and the instructions in Oratory, which
were found among the writings of Cato, may be regarded as the Roman
quintessence or, if the expression be preferred, the Roman -caput
mortuum- of Greek philosophy and rhetoric. The immediate sources
whence Cato drew were, in the case of the poem on Morals, presumably
the Pythagorean writings on morals (along with, as a matter of course,
due commendation of the simple ancestral habits), and, in the case of
the book on Oratory, the speeches in Thucydides and more especially
the orations of Demosthenes, all of which Cato zealously studied.
Of the spirit of these manuals we may form some idea from the golden
oratorical rule, oftener quoted than followed by posterity, "to think
of the matter and leave the words to follow from it."(68)

Medicine

Similar manuals of a general elementary character were composed by
Cato on the Art of Healing, the Science of War, Agriculture, and
Jurisprudence--all of which studies were likewise more or less under
Greek influence. Physics and mathematics were not much studied in
Rome