Cicero dominates, in every sense, the prose of the late Republic. The Ciceronian corpus -- fifty-eight speeches, seven works on oratory, nearly twenty on philosophy, and the epistles -- crowds the works of Caesar, Sallust, and Varro into a small corner of the shelf. What is left of Varro, that is, for he was in fact the most voluminous of Latin writers, and his fifty-five titles and some five hundred separate books covered history, archaeology, linguistics, philosophy, education, and agriculture. His Disciplinae was the most important Latin encyclopaedia, from which derive the seven liberal arts of medieval education. The Imagines, biographies of distinguished Romans, was the first illustrated book in the world.

That Cicero has survived, while most of Varro is lost, is due above all to his incomparable mastery of the Latin language. Like Shakespeare in English, he could play on all the notes; passionate, persuasive, or humorous to suit the occasion in his speeches, lucid and easy in philosophy, graceful and familiar in the letters. He perfected Latin prose, and made it one of the world's great instruments of thought and expression. Ciceronian Latin was the chosen model of the Renaissance, and so came to have a far-reaching influence on modern European languages, especially Italian, English, and French. Molière's character who found that he had been talking prose all his life was in debt to Cicero -- as are we all, whether we know it or not.

The generation of Cicero saw the high noon of Roman oratory. In politics and at the bar great rewards awaited forceful and persuasive speech. Cicero is said to have made not less than $45,000 a year from his legal practice; his rival Hortensius was wealthier still. The study of oratory now took a leading place in Roman education. The old and honorable tradition of Roman eloquence, which went back to Appius Claudius Caecus, was brought into contact with the latest Hellenistic fashion. For the Greeks had turned rhetoric -- like everything else -- into a "science"; having established its principles and analyzed its effects, the great Greek schools of rhetoric at Pergamum, Athens, and Rhodes were equipped, for a fee, to teach its practice. Some of the leading Roman orators put themselves to school with Greek masters and did not disdain, even in their prime, to take refresher courses. Gesture, delivery, diction, the marshaling of arguments, the production of emotional effects, were carefully practiced. There was much argument over the merits of the rival "styles" of oratory, the Asiatic with its rich vocabulary, rhythmic prose, and highly charged emotionalism, the Attic with its easy lucidity and grace. An elaborate technical vocabulary came into use, as translators of Roman handbooks on oratory know to their cost. The form and performance of leading speakers were criticized by an audience as knowledgeable as that which now concerns itself with the doings of a great athlete. It is easy to understand the fascination of Roman politics for Cicero, the greatest orator of the day. To take a leading part in debates in the Senate, such as those on the conspiracy of Catiline, was not only to serve the state and to advance personal ambition, but to know the rewards of a virtuoso performing before an audience of connoisseurs. No wonder he was dismayed, in his later years, to find that men of his stamp were struggling "contra arma verbis" -- with words against arms -- and that, worse still, the generals also had their professional pride.

Caesar, the greatest of them, had a reputation as an orator second only to Cicero himself. None of his speeches survive, and he is known to us by the Commentaries -seven books on the Gallic wars, three on the wars against Pompey. Supplements to these histories, dealing with the campaigns in Egypt, Spain, and Africa, were written by his lieutenants and published after his death. It has been said earlier that Caesar wrote to justify himself, and the reader must be on guard against the apparent candor of the Attic style. But no student of Roman history -- and no serious student of military affairs -- can neglect the Commentaries. They allow us to see the Roman army in action through the eyes of its greatest commander. Like the sculptures on Trajan's Column, they give an invaluable psychological insight into the Roman conquest of barbarian people. There are two ways of reading Caesar -- fast, for the sake of the narrative -- slowly, as an analysis of the art of propaganda. A high British intelligence officer has told how useful he found his knowledge of Caesar in interpreting German communiqués in the Second World War. But it is a pity that he has been used to provide the first Latin reading of schoolboys, who find either method quite beyond them. They would do far better with the biographies of Cornelius Nepos (c. 100-c. 25 B.C.), of which those we have include nineteen lives of Greeks, one of a Persian, and two of Romans -- Cato and Atticus. He was a Gaul from Gallia Cisalpina, the friend of Catullus and Cicero, and seems to have written for a popular audience. Simple and unpretentious, his biographies are notable chiefly for their freedom from Roman nationalism and their interest in the great men of other nations.

Sallust ( 86-35 B.C.), of Amiternum in the Sabine country, is a much weightier author. His chief work was the Histories, dealing with the decade after Sulla, but this survives only in fragments. We must judge him by the Catiline and the Jugurtha -- the first historical monographs, it would seem, in Latin. A supporter of Caesar and a man of great wealth, Sallust settled down to write history after a career in which his morality, public and private, met with censure. His object was to uphold the views of the democratic party to which Caesar had belonged. In the account of the war against Jugurtha, he sets up Marius as a hero in contrast to the incompetent generals of the aristocracy. In the Catiline his purpose is more subtle. He has first to clear Caesar from the suspicion of sympathy with the conspiracy in its early stages, then to show him as taking the only sensible line among Catiline's opponents. It has been said that in Sallust we find an advance toward scientific history, but this claim can only be accepted with reserve. It is true that he used many sources (including Punic ones for Jugurtha), and that he was an ardent student of Thucydides, with an insight into political intrigue that he had no doubt gained for himself. But he is not scrupulous about dates or events, and he looks through the fixed frames of a "philosophy of history." History, for him, was determined by the characters of the leading men of action. In his hands it becomes a drama, but the characters are typed and do not evolve. From this it soon follows that the chief business of a historian is to produce a literary masterpiece. This was a view that had a dangerous fascination for the Romans, and Sallust had much influence on later writers, notably on Tacitus, a far greater historian than himself.

Greek influence was strong on the Latin writers of the late Republic. But they assimilated it and turned it to their own ends, often with results that far surpassed their models. In art things were different. Greek influence -- through classical Greece or Sicily, through Pergamum or Alexandria -was overwhelming, and almost swamped the native Italian style. Almost, but not quite; the native tradition of realistic portraiture survived, and the funeral monuments of the late Republic show us the Roman face in uncompromising, sometimes alarming, realism. In this respect Greek artists working in Rome had to come to terms with Roman taste. Otherwise the vogue was for all things Greek, as it has been at times in England for all things Italian. Greek sculpture, acquired by loot or purchase, adorned the public squares and temples and the great villas. Dealers set up in Rome and Campania and the great art centers of the Greek world, and an international art market very like that of modern times was established. An eloquent commentary on this is the famous treasure ship of Mahdia, discovered as a wreck off the Tunisian coast in 1907. It contained some sixty marble columns from the quarries of Attica, and a miscellaneous cargo of works in bronze and marble, some of them repaired antiques. It may have been a consignment to a Roman art dealer, or else purchased en bloc for some great villa. Underwater archaeology is now making such progress that more such discoveries may lie ahead.

The career of Pasiteles shows what Rome had to offer to an artist. A Greek from South Italy, but a Roman citizen, he is known to have been working in the city in 62 B.C. His reputation was built up on metalworking, especially silver mirrors, but he later turned to statuary. He also wrote a book in five volumes on famous works of art of the whole world -- the equivalent of the connoisseurs' guides of modern times. In art, then, the Republic was a province of the Hellenistic world, though a great and wealthy one. Not until the time of Augustus was there evolved a national art on Hellenistic models.