the times, when the persons above-mentioned were consuls; though Varro, a
most accurate investigator of historical truth, thinks there is a mistake
in this, and fixes the death of Naevius something later. For Plautus died
in the consulship of P. Claudius and L. Porcius, twenty years after the
consulship of the persons we have been speaking of, and when Cato was
Censor. Cato, therefore, must have been younger than Cethegus, for he was
consul nine years after him: but we always consider him as a person of the
remotest antiquity, though he died in the consulship of Lucius Marcius and
M. Manilius, and but eighty-three years before my own promotion to the
same office. He is certainly, however, the most ancient Orator we have,
whose writings may claim our attention; unless any one is pleased with the
above-mentioned speech of Appius, on the peace with Pyrrhus, or with a set
of panegyrics on the dead, which, I own, are still extant. For it was
customary in most families of note to preserve their images, their
trophies of honour, and their memoirs, either to adorn a funeral when any
of the family deceased, or to perpetuate the fame of their ancestors, or
prove their own nobility. But the truth of History has been much corrupted
by these laudatory essays; for many circumstances were recorded in them
which never existed; such as false triumphs, a pretended succession of
consulships, and false alliances and elevations, when men of inferior rank
were confounded with a noble family of the same name: as if I myself
should pretend that I am descended from M. Tullius, who was a Patrician,
and shared the consulship with Servius Sulpicius, about ten years after
the expulsion of the kings.

"But the real speeches of Cato are almost as numerous as those of Lysias
the Athenian; a great number of whose are still extant. For Lysias was
certainly an Athenian; because he not only died but received his birth at
Athens, and served all the offices of the city; though Timaesus, as if he
acted by the Licinian or the Mucian law, remands him back to Syracuse.