In the same part of the dialogue, entitled _Brutus_, Cicero asks what flower or light of eloquence is wanting to the _Origines_--"Quem florem, aut quod lumen eloquentiæ non habent?" But on Atticus considering the praise thus bestowed as excessive, he limits it, by adding, that nothing was required to complete the strokes of the author's pencil but a certain lively glow of colours, which had not been discovered in his age.--"Intelliges, nihil illius lineamentis, nisi eorum pigmentorum, quæ inventa nondum erant, florem et calorem defuisse(31)."
The pretended fragments of the _Origines_, published by the Dominican, Nanni, better known by the name of Annius Viterbiensis, and inserted in his _Antiquitates Variæ_, printed at Rome in 1498, are spurious, and the imposition was detected soon after their appearance. The few remains first collected by Riccobonus, and published at the end of his Treatise on History, (Basil, 1579,) are believed to be genuine. They have been enlarged by Ausonius Popma, and added by him, with notes, to the other writings of Cato, published at Leyden in 1590.
Any rudeness of style and language which appears either in the orations of Cato, or in his agricultural and historical works, cannot be attributed to total carelessness or neglect of the graces of composition, as he was the first person in Rome who treated of oratory as an art(32), in a tract entitled _De Oratore ad Filium_.