Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
Contemporaneously with historical literature, and in some sense as an
appendage to it, arose the literature of speeches and letters. This
in like manner was commenced by Cato; for the Romans possessed nothing
of an earlier age except some funeral orations, most of which probably
were only brought to light at a later period from family archives,
such as that which the veteran Quintus Fabius, the opponent of
Hannibal, delivered when an old man over his son who had died in his
prime.
Cato on the other hand committed to writing in his old age
such of the numerous orations which he had delivered during his long
and active public career as were historically important, as a sort of
political memoirs, and published them partly in his historical work,
partly, it would seem, as independent supplements to it. There also
existed a collection of his letters.
