Another work was the _Saturae_, written in various metres, but chiefly in the trochaic tetrameter. He thus became the inventor of a new form of literature; and, if in his hands the _satura_ was rude and indeterminate in its scope, it became a vehicle by which to address a reading public on matters of the day, or on the materials of his wide reading, in a style not far removed from the language of common life. His greatest work, which made the Romans regard him as the father of their literature, was his epic poem, in eighteen books, the _Annales_, in which the record of the whole career of Rome was unrolled with idealizing enthusiasm and realistic detail. The idea which inspired Ennius was ultimately realized in both the national epic of Virgil and the national history of Livy. And the metrical vehicle which he conceived as the only one adequate to his great theme was a rude experiment, which was ultimately developed into the stately Virgilian hexameter. Even as a grammarian he performed an important service to the literary language of Rome, by fixing its prosody and arresting the tendency to decay in its final syllables. Although of his writings only fragments remain, these fragments are enough, along with what we know of him from ancient testimony, to justify us in regarding him as the most important among the makers of Latin literature before the age of Cicero.
There is still one other name belonging partly to this, partly to the next generation, to be added to those of the men of original force of mind and character who created Latin literature, that of M. Porcius Cato the Censor (234-149), the younger contemporary of Ennius, whom he brought to Rome. More than Naevius and Plautus he represented the pure native element in that literature, the mind and character of Latium, the plebeian pugnacity, which was one of the great forces in the Roman state. His lack of imagination and his narrow patriotism made him the natural leader of the reaction against the new Hellenic culture. He strove to make literature ancillary to politics and to objects of practical utility, and thus started prose literature on the chief lines that it afterwards followed. Through his industry and vigorous understanding he gave a great impulse to the creation of Roman oratory, history and systematic didactic writing. He was one of the first to publish his speeches and thus to bring them into the domain of literature. Cicero, who speaks of 150 of these speeches as extant in his day, praises them for their acuteness, their wit, their conciseness. He speaks with emphasis of the impressiveness of Cato's eulogy and the satiric bitterness of his invective.