Excepting Varro, who was born but ten years before him, no earlier Latin prose writer has left more than a name to us; and the one work by which Varro is at all known, the De Re Rustica, was written after Cicero's death.

Lucretius, whose language we regard as almost archaic, so unlike is it to that of Virgil or Horace, was born eight years after Cicero.

In a great degree Cicero formed the Latin language--or produced that manipulation of it which has made it so graceful in prose, and so powerful a vehicle of thought.

That which he took from any Latin writer he took from Terence.
And it was then, just then, that there arose in Rome that unpremeditated change in its form of government which resulted in the self-assumed dictatorship of Caesar, and the usurpation of the Empire by Augustus.

The old Rome had had kings.