Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the original language
They say that Marcus Cato's family came from Tusculum, but that before his military campaigns and his career in public life he lived and worked on ancestral land among the Sabines. Though his ancestors seem to have been altogether unknown, Cato himself praises his father Marcus as a good man and a good soldier, and says that his great-grandfather Cato won prizes for valor many times and, having lost five war-horses in battle, was reimbursed for them out of the public treasury on account of his manly courage.
Since the Romans were accustomed to call "new men" those who had no distinction from birth but were beginning to become known through their own efforts—as indeed they called Cato—he himself said that he was new with respect to office and reputation, but, through the deeds and virtues of his ancestors, very old indeed. He was not originally called Cato as his third name, but Priscus; it was later that he got the name Cato from his ability, for the Romans call a shrewd, experienced man "catus."
In appearance he was reddish and gray-eyed, as the man who wrote the little epigram indicates none too kindly: "Fiery-red, sharp-toothed, gray-eyed—not even in death does Persephone receive Porcius into Hades." His bodily condition, having been trained from the start by manual labor, disciplined diet, and military campaigns, was very serviceable, evenly composed for both strength and health.
As for speech—which is, as it were, a second body, and an instrument not only of the necessities of life but of the noble things too, for a man who does not intend to live meanly or inactively—he trained and equipped himself in it by pleading, on each occasion, for those in need in the surrounding villages and small towns; and first he was thought an eager pleader of cases, then also a capable orator, and from this those who dealt with him increasingly perceived in him a certain weight and seriousness of character requiring great affairs and a leading role in politics,
for, it seems, he did not merely keep himself clean of taking payment for his lawsuits and pleadings, but he did not even appear to prize very highly the reputation that came from such contests; rather he wished far more to win distinction in battles against the enemy and in campaigns, and while still a young man he had a body full of wounds received facing the foe.
For he himself says that he made his first campaign at seventeen years of age, at the time when Hannibal, in the flush of success, was setting Italy ablaze. In battle he showed himself quick with his hand, steady and firm on his feet, and bold in expression; toward the enemy he used threatening speech and a harsh tone of voice, rightly judging and teaching that such things often terrify opponents more than the sword does,
On the march he himself walked carrying his own arms, and a single attendant followed bearing the things needed for his daily fare; it is said that he never once grew irritable with this man or found fault when he set out breakfast or dinner, but himself took part in most of the preparing and helped get things ready, coming as he did from soldierly labors. He drank water on campaign, except that sometimes, burning with thirst, he would request a sour vinegar-drink, or, if his energy was flagging, would take a small amount of wine instead.
Near his fields lay the farmstead that had belonged to Manius Curius, who had celebrated three triumphs. Walking there continually and observing the smallness of the place and the plainness of the dwelling, he would form a notion of the man—that although he had risen to be Rome's foremost man, had conquered the fiercest of nations in war, and had driven Pyrrhus out of Italy, he himself dug this little plot and dwelt in this farmstead after three triumphs.
There the envoys of the Samnites found him sitting by the hearth boiling turnips, and offered him a great sum of gold; but he sent them away, saying that a man for whom such a dinner was enough had no need of gold, and that for himself it was finer to conquer those who had gold than to have it. Pondering these things, Cato would go away, and looking again at his own house, lands, servants, and manner of living, would redouble his own manual labor and cut back his extravagance.
When Fabius Maximus took the city of the Tarentines, Cato happened to be serving under him, being quite a young man still, and having made the acquaintance of a certain Nearchus, a guest-friend among the Pythagoreans, he was eager to take up his teachings. Hearing the man discourse on those doctrines which Plato too used—calling pleasure the greatest bait to evil, the body the soul's first misfortune, and holding that release and purification come especially by those reasonings which separate and remove the soul furthest from the affections of the body—he came to love still more the plain and simple life and self-control.
Otherwise he is said to have come late to Greek learning, and, having advanced quite far in years, to have taken Greek books into his hands and profited a little from Thucydides, but more from Demosthenes, for his rhetoric. Yet his own writings are fairly well adorned with Greek doctrines and histories, and many sayings translated word for word are set among his apophthegms and maxims.
There was a certain man, a patrician among the foremost of the Romans and powerful, one clever at perceiving virtue as it was sprouting and kindly disposed to nurture it and bring it forward into repute—Valerius Flaccus. This man had lands bordering those of Cato, and learning from his servants of Cato's manual labor and manner of living, and marveling as they related it—how early in the morning he went to the marketplace and stood by those in need of help, and how, returning to his farm,
if it was winter, he would put on a rough sleeveless tunic, and in summer would work stripped, sitting and eating the same bread together with his servants and drinking the same wine—and as they related many other instances of his fairness and moderation, and certain pointed sayings of his as well, Valerius had him invited to dinner.
After this, coming to know and observe his gentle and refined character—as of a plant needing cultivation and a more conspicuous place to grow—he urged him on and persuaded him to take up a public career at Rome. So Cato, coming down to the city, at once won for himself admirers and friends through his advocacy in the courts, and with Valerius adding him much honor and influence, he obtained first a military tribuneship, then served as quaestor.
After this, being now brilliant and conspicuous, he ran alongside Valerius himself for the greatest offices, becoming consul with him and afterward also censor. Among the older citizens he attached himself to Fabius Maximus, a man of the greatest fame and the greatest power, setting before himself above all the man's character and manner of life as the finest examples.
For this reason too, when Scipio the Great, then still young, was rising up against Fabius's power and seemed to be an object of his envy, Cato thought it no great matter to become his opponent; rather, being sent along with him as quaestor for the war in Africa, when he saw the man indulging in his customary extravagance and lavishing money on the armies without restraint, he spoke frankly to him,
saying that the expense itself was not the greatest issue, but that he was corrupting the soldiers' traditional frugality by turning what was left over from necessity toward pleasures and luxury. When Scipio replied that he had no need of so exacting a quaestor while sailing full-sail toward the war, for he owed the city an account of deeds, not of money,
Cato departed from Sicily, and joining with Fabius in outcry in the senate against the destruction of untold sums of money by Scipio and his youthful pastimes in wrestling-grounds and theaters, as though he were not commanding an army but holding festival, he brought it about that tribunes were dispatched to summon Scipio home to Rome, should the charges be confirmed.
Scipio, however, having shown in the preparation for the war that this was the road to victory, and having appeared pleasant to be with among friends in his leisure, yet nowhere lax through the affability of his manner of living when it came to serious and great matters, sailed off to the war.
Cato's power from his oratory had grown great, and many likened him to a Roman Demosthenes; yet it was his way of living that drew even greater talk and praise. For skill in speaking was already set before the young men as a common and eagerly pursued object of rivalry, but a man who held to the ancestral manual labor, embraced a plain dinner and a breakfast without cooked food, simple clothing, and a common man's dwelling, and admired not having superfluous things more than possessing them, was rare,
since by now the state, on account of its size, no longer kept its purity, but through mastering many affairs and mingling with many peoples was receiving customs and patterns of life of every kind. Naturally, then, people admired Cato, seeing others broken by hardships and softened by pleasures, while he was unconquered by both,
not merely in the years when he was youthful and eager for advancement, but even later, when gray-haired and old, after his consulship and triumph, persevering in his set course of training, like a victorious athlete, and keeping it even to the end. For he says his garments never cost above a hundred drachmas, and that even while serving as praetor and consul he drank the same wine his workmen did, and that he bought the relish for his dinner from the market at thirty asses—and this for the city's sake, so that his body might be strong for campaigns.
Having inherited a Babylonian cloak of embroidered work, he sold it at once; none of his farmhouses was plastered; he never bought a slave for more than fifteen hundred drachmas, since he preferred not delicate, good-looking slaves but tough, rugged laborers fit for work as stable-hands and cattle-tenders; and once these grew old as well, he thought they ought to be sold off rather than kept and fed with no return. In general he thought nothing superfluous was cheap, but that whatever a man has no need of, even if it sells for a penny, should be reckoned dear; and he thought it better to acquire things that are sown and grazed than things that are watered and swept.
These things some set down as pettiness in the man, while others accepted them as the restraint of one who drew himself in tightly for the correction and discipline of others. But that he dealt with his household slaves as though they were beasts of burden, casting them out and putting them up for sale once age had worn them down, I myself set down to an altogether harsh disposition, one that supposes there is no further bond between man and man than usefulness.
And yet we see that kindness occupies a broader territory than justice. For law and justice we are by nature fitted to exercise only toward human beings, but as regards acts of kindness and grace, sometimes it flows even down to dumb animals, as if from a rich spring of gentleness. Even the feeding of horses worn out by age, and the tending not merely of dogs as puppies but their care in old age, belong to a kindly character.
The Athenian people, when building the Hecatompedon, released to graze free and unyoked as many mules as they observed had borne the labors most steadfastly; and they say one of these came down of her own accord to the works and ran alongside and led the pack animals bringing up the wagons to the acropolis, as if urging them on and spurring them together—and this one they voted to feed at public expense until her death.
The graves of Cimon's mares, with which he won at Olympia three times, are near his own tomb; and dogs that became companions and familiars, many people have honored, and among them Xanthippus of old, who buried on the headland the dog that swam alongside his trireme to Salamis when the people abandoned the city—a place they call to this day the Dog's Mound.
For we ought not to treat living things as we do sandals or tools, throwing them away once broken and worn out by our use; but, if for no other reason, then for the sake of practicing kindness, we ought to accustom ourselves beforehand to be gentle and mild in these matters. I myself would not sell even a working ox on account of old age, much less an older man, removing him as if from his native land, from the region and manner of life he was bred to, for a few small coins—a man who would be as useless to those buying him as to those selling him.
Cato, as if boasting of these very practices, says that he left in Spain the horse he used on campaign while he was consul, so that the city would not be charged for its transport. Whether one ought to attribute such conduct to nobility of spirit or to small-mindedness, each may adopt whichever argument he finds convincing.
In his other self-restraint the man is astonishingly admirable: for instance, that as general he took for himself and those around him no more than three Attic medimni of wheat a month, and for the pack animals, less than three half-medimni of barley a day.
When he received Sardinia as his province, where the praetors before him had been in the habit of using public tents, beds, and clothing, and burdening the province with a large retinue and crowd of friends and with expenses and preparations for banquets, he made the difference in his frugality unbelievable. For he asked for no public expense whatsoever, but went about the cities himself on foot without a carriage, while a single public attendant followed him carrying his robe and a libation-cup for sacrifice.
Yet though in these matters he showed himself so easy and unassuming to those under his authority, he in turn maintained his dignity and weight, being inflexible in matters of justice and upright and straightforward in his commands concerning the imperial power, so that the rule of the Romans never became to them either more feared or more beloved.
Such, it appears, was also the character of the man's speech: it was at once graceful and formidable, pleasant and awe-inspiring, fond of jest yet severe, given to maxims yet combative — just as Plato says of Socrates, that he appeared to those who met him on the outside a simple, mocking, and insolent fellow, but within was full of earnestness and matters that could move to tears
those who listened, and could wring the heart. Hence I do not know what has come over those who say that Cato's speech most resembles that of Lysias. However, these matters those more capable of discerning the character of Roman speeches will judge; as for us, we shall write down a few of the things remembered of him, since we hold that the character of men is far more revealed by speech than by the face, as some suppose.
Once, when he intended to turn the Roman people away from an untimely impulse toward grain-distributions and doles, he began his speech thus: "It is a hard thing, citizens, to speak to a belly that has no ears." And denouncing extravagance, he said it was hard for a city to be safe when a single fish fetches a higher price than an ox does.
He said the Romans resembled sheep: for just as sheep will not obey one by one, but all together follow their leaders when herded, "so you too," he said, "whom individually you would not think worth consulting, once gathered together into one body are led by these men." And discoursing on the rule of women, he said, "All men rule their women, we rule all men, and our women rule us."
This saying, indeed, is borrowed from the maxims of Themistocles. For he, when his son through his mother kept giving him many orders, said, "Wife, the Athenians rule the Greeks, I rule the Athenians, you rule me, and our son rules you; so let him spare his power, by which, foolish as he is, he has the greatest power of all the Greeks."
Cato said that the Roman people set value not only by their purple dyes but also by their pursuits. "For just as dyers," he said, "dye most that color which they see men delighting in, so the young learn and pursue eagerly whatever it is for which they see praise from you following."
He urged them, if it was by virtue and self-control that they had become great, to change nothing for the worse; but if by lack of self-control and by vice, to change for the better, for they had already become great enough from those causes. And of those who were eager to hold office again and again he said that, as if ignorant of the way, they always sought to travel with lictors, lest they go astray.
He rebuked the citizens for choosing the same men as magistrates repeatedly. "For you will seem," he said, "either to think that holding office is worth little, or that few are worthy of holding it." Of one of his enemies who seemed to live shamefully and without repute, he said, "His mother considers it a curse, not a prayer, to leave this man behind on the earth."
Gesturing toward a man who had disposed of the fields his forefathers had left him, land that ran along the coast, he pretended to marvel at him as stronger than the sea: "for what the sea," he said, "could scarcely wash away, this man has easily swallowed down." And when King Eumenes visited Rome and the Senate received him extravagantly and there was rivalry and eagerness among the leading men over him, Cato was clearly suspicious of him and on his guard against him,
and when someone said, "But surely he is a good man and a friend of Rome," he replied, "Granted, but by nature this creature, a king, is a flesh-eater." And he said that none of the kings accounted fortunate was worthy to stand beside such men as Epaminondas, Pericles, Themistocles, Manius Curius, or Hamilcar known as Barca.
He said his enemies envied him because he rose each day before dawn and, neglecting his own affairs, gave his time to the public business; and he said he would rather, having done well, be deprived of gratitude than fail, having done ill, to receive punishment; and he said he granted pardon to all who erred, except himself.
When the Romans chose three envoys out to Bithynia, one of them gout-ridden, another left with a hollowed-out skull after undergoing trepanation and excision, and the third seemed to be a fool, Cato mocked, saying that an embassy was being sent out by the Romans that had neither feet nor a head nor a heart.
When he was approached by Scipio on behalf of the exiles from Achaea, through Polybius, and there was much debate in the Senate, some granting them their return and others opposing it, Cato stood up and said, "As if we had nothing to do, we sit here the whole day debating about some little old Greek men — whether they should be carried to their graves by our undertakers or by those in Achaea."
When the return had been voted for the men, a few days later Polybius and his circle again attempted to enter the Senate, so that the exiles might recover the honors they had formerly held in Achaea, and they tried to sound out Cato's opinion; but he, smiling, said that Polybius, like Odysseus, wished to go back again into the Cyclops' cave, having forgotten there his cap and his belt.
He said that the prudent are helped by the foolish more than the foolish by the prudent: for the former guard against the errors of the latter, while the latter fail to imitate the successes of the former. He said that of the young he preferred those who blush to those who turn pale, and that he wanted no soldier who moved his hands while marching and his feet while fighting, or who snored louder than he shouted in the charge.
Rebuking a very fat man, he said, "How could such a body ever be useful to the city, when the whole space from throat down to groin is occupied by nothing but the stomach?" And when a certain pleasure-seeker wished to become his companion, he turned him away, remarking that sharing a life with someone whose tongue felt more than his heart did was impossible for him, and he added that a man in love lives with his soul in another's body.
He said he himself had repented three times in his whole life: once for having entrusted a secret to his wife, once for having gone by sea where he could have gone by land, and a third time for having remained a single day without having made his will. To an old man behaving wickedly he said, "Man, when old age already has many shameful things of its own, do not add to it the shame that comes from vice."
To a tribune who was under suspicion of poisoning and was introducing and forcing through a base law, he said, "Young man, I do not know which is worse — what you mix to drink, or what you write to enact." And to a man of dissolute and wicked life who heaped abuse on him, he replied, "The contest between you and me is unequal: for you hear abuse easily and speak it readily, whereas for me it is unpleasant to speak it and unaccustomed to hear it." Such, then, is the character of his recorded sayings.
Having been appointed consul together with his friend and intimate Valerius Flaccus, the province allotted to him was the one Romans term Hither Spain. There, as he brought some tribes to heel by force and drew others over through diplomacy, a large force of barbarians fell upon him, and there was danger that he might be shamefully driven out. He therefore called upon the neighboring Celtiberians for an alliance.
When they asked two hundred talents as pay for their aid, everyone else found it unbearable that Romans would consent to pay foreign tribesmen for their help, yet Cato replied that nothing about it was so dreadful: for if victory came, they would pay from the enemy's resources, not their own, while if they lost, there would be neither those who demanded payment nor those from whom it was demanded. He won this battle decisively, and everything else proceeded brilliantly for him as well.
Polybius indeed says that by his order the walls of the cities within the river Baetis were torn down in a single day, and these were very many and full of fighting men. Cato himself says he took more cities than the days he spent in Iberia — and this is no boast, if indeed they numbered four hundred in all.
To the soldiers, who had already profited much during the campaign, he further distributed a pound of silver apiece, saying it was better that many Romans should return home with silver than a few with gold. As for himself, he says that of the plunder nothing came to him beyond what he had drunk or eaten. "And I do not blame," he says, "those who seek to profit from these things, but as for myself, I would sooner rival the finest men in excellence than rival the wealthiest in riches, or the greediest in love of gain."
Not only did he keep himself, but also those about him, clean of all such gain. There were five servants with him on campaign. One of these, named Paccius, bought three boys from among the captives; and when Cato learned of it, before coming into his sight, the man hanged himself. Cato sold the boys and brought their price into the public treasury.
While he was still engaged in Iberia, Scipio the Great, an enemy of his eager to curb his run of success, and to take over the conduct of Iberian affairs, contrived to be appointed successor to that province. Hastening as quickly as he could, he put an end to Cato's command; but Cato, taking five cohorts of infantry and five hundred cavalry as an escort, subdued the nation of the Lacetani, and having recovered six hundred deserters, put them to death.
When Scipio was indignant at this, Cato, mocking him, said that Rome would thus become greatest, when the illustrious and great did not yield the first prizes of virtue to the more obscure, and men of the people, such as he himself was, competed in virtue against those who excelled in birth and reputation. Nevertheless, when the Senate voted to alter or disturb nothing of what Cato had administered, Scipio's own governorship, which took away more from his own reputation than from Cato's, passed
in idleness and leisure to no purpose, while Cato, having celebrated his triumph, did not — as most of those who compete not for virtue but for reputation do, once they attain the highest honors and obtain the consulship and triumphs, thereafter arranging their lives for pleasure and leisure and withdrawing from public affairs — relax and abandon his virtue in this way; instead, like those first laying hold of a political career and thirsting for honor and reputation, he strained himself anew from another starting point and offered himself in the midst both to his friends and his fellow citizens, refusing neither advocacy in the courts nor military service.
He served as legate under Tiberius Sempronius when the latter was consul in charge of affairs around Thrace and the Ister, and helped him accomplish his task; and as military tribune under Manius Acilius he went out with him to Greece against Antiochus the Great, who had frightened the Romans as no one had since Hannibal. For having recovered nearly the whole of Asia which Seleucus Nicator had held, and having made subject many warlike barbarian nations, he was elated to engage the Romans as the only people still a match for him.
Having made a plausible pretext for the war — that he was liberating the Greeks, who needed no such thing, but were already free and autonomous by the favor of the Romans, having only recently been freed from Philip and the Macedonians — he crossed over with his forces, and at once Greece was in commotion and was aloft with hopes, being corrupted by royal agents through the demagogues,
So Manius sent envoys to the cities. Titus Flamininus kept most of the disaffected in check without disturbance and calmed them down, as is written in his own Life, but Cato won over the Corinthians and the people of Patrae, and also the Aegians.
He spent the longest time at Athens. There is a speech said to be his, which he delivered to the people in Greek, as though he admired the virtue of the ancient Athenians and had gladly come to view the city for its beauty and greatness; but this is not true — rather, he addressed the Athenians through an interpreter, though he was capable of speaking himself, because he held fast to his native customs and laughed at those who marveled at everything Greek.
At any rate, when Postumius Albinus wrote a history in Greek and asked for indulgence, Cato mocked him, saying that indulgence should be granted only if he had been compelled by a vote of the Amphictyons to undertake the task; and he says the Athenians marveled at the speed of his delivery and the sharpness of his phrasing — for what he himself (Cato) uttered briefly, the interpreter would report at length and through many words; and in general he thought that words came to the Greeks from the lips, but to the Romans from the heart.
When Antiochus had blocked the pass at Thermopylae with his camp, and, adding stockades and cross-walls to the natural defenses of the place, sat there thinking he had shut out the war, the Romans altogether despaired of forcing their way through frontally; but Cato, calling to mind that famous Persian circuit and encirclement, set out by night,
taking a portion of the army with him. When they had advanced upward, the guide, a captive, lost the way and wandered in trackless and precipitous places, working terrible discouragement and fear into the soldiers; seeing the danger, Cato ordered all the rest to stay still and wait,
while he himself, taking with him a certain Lucius Manlius, a man skilled at mountain-climbing, went forward with great toil and hazard in a moonless and deep night, among wild olives and crags whose jagged shapes caused many breaks and much obscurity of vision, until they came upon a path which, they thought, led down to the enemy's camp, and set up signals by certain conspicuous spear-shafts rising above Callidromus.
So turning back again they went and fetched the army, and advancing toward the signals they took hold of that path and set their course by it; but after going forward a little way it failed them, a ravine intervening. And again there was perplexity and fear, since they did not know or perceive that they had actually come close to the enemy. But day was already breaking, and someone seemed to hear a sound, and perhaps even to make out a Greek stockade and outpost beneath the cliff,
So Cato, halting the army there, ordered the men of Firmum to come to him apart from the others, men whom he always found trustworthy and eager. When they had run together and gathered closely about him, he said, "I need to take one of the enemy alive and learn from him who these outposts are, how many they number, what is the arrangement and order of the rest, and what preparation they have made to await us.
This deed must be done with the swiftness and boldness of a seizure — the same boldness with which lions, unarmed, confidently go after the more timid of beasts." When Cato had said this, the men of Firmum rushed forward at once, just as they were, ran down the hills upon the outposts, and falling upon them by surprise, threw the whole group into disorder and drove them apart in flight, and, seizing one man together with his arms, delivered him into Cato's hands.
Learning from this man that the rest of the force was posted in the pass with the king himself, while these guarding the passes were six hundred picked Aetolians, Cato, despising both their small number and their carelessness, at once led his men against them with trumpets and battle-cry, himself the first to draw his sword. When they saw the attackers bearing down from the cliffs, they fled to the great camp and filled everyone there with confusion.
Meanwhile Manius too was pressing from below against the cross-walls and attacking the pass with his whole force in a body; Antiochus, struck in the mouth by a stone that knocked out his teeth, in great pain turned his horse back, and no part of his army held its ground against the Romans,
but though the routes of flight were difficult and impassable, full of wandering paths, with deep marshes and sheer rocks awaiting those who fell or slipped, they poured out through the narrow pass into these very dangers, pushing one another in fear of the enemy's blows and steel, and so destroyed themselves. Cato, it seems, was always rather unsparing in his own praise, and did not shrink from outright boasting as the natural accompaniment of great deeds; he heaped a great deal of pomp upon these actions,
and says that those who saw him then pursuing and striking down the enemy came away thinking that Cato owed the people less than the people owed Cato, and that Manius the consul himself, still hot from the victory, embraced him, hot as he was, and for a long time greeted him and shouted for joy, saying that neither he himself nor the whole people could ever equal the repayment owed to Cato's services.
Immediately following the battle, Cato himself was dispatched to Rome to carry word of the action: he made a swift crossing to Brundisium, then covered the distance to Tarentum in a single day's driving, and after four further days on the road reached Rome from the coast on the fifth, being the very first to bring word of the victory. His arrival brought the city joy and public thanksgiving, and left the people convinced they could master every land and sea,
These, then, are pretty much the most notable of Cato's military actions; but in his political life it appears that he considered the business of prosecuting and exposing wrongdoers a matter deserving no small effort. He himself prosecuted many, assisted others who were prosecuting, and altogether arranged for men to bring prosecutions, as in the case against Scipio brought by Petillius and his associates.
This man, coming from a great house and possessing a genuine pride of spirit, trampled the accusations underfoot; and Cato, unable to have him condemned, let him go; but he joined with the accusers against Lucius, Scipio's brother, and had him condemned to pay a great sum of money to the public treasury, which, being unable to pay it and in danger of imprisonment, he barely escaped through the intervention of the tribunes.
It is said also that when a certain young man, whose father had died, had disgraced an enemy of his father and was walking through the marketplace after the trial, Cato met him, took his hand, and said that this is what one ought to offer as an offering to one's parents — not lambs or kids, but the tears and condemnations of their enemies. Yet Cato himself did not go through his political life unscathed, but wherever he gave his enemies any handle, he was constantly being brought to trial and endangered.
For it is said that he escaped conviction in nearly fifty trials, the final one coming at the age of eighty-six, on which occasion he also uttered the famous remark, that it is a hard thing for a man who has lived among one generation of men to have to defend himself before another. And this was not the end of his contests, for four more years passed and, at ninety years of age, he brought an accusation against Servius Galba.
For he ran the risk, like Nestor, of coming down to a third generation in his life and his activities. For having contended much in political life with Scipio the Great, as has been said, he carried the contest on into the time of the younger Scipio, who was Scipio's grandson by adoption, and son of Paulus, the conqueror of Perseus and the Macedonians.
A decade after holding the consulship, Cato became a candidate for the censorship. Now this office is in a manner the crown of all honors and, in a way, the completion of a public career, possessing great authority in other respects and also the power of examining conduct and manner of life. For they thought that neither marriage nor the raising of children nor daily habits nor banquets should be left unjudged and unexamined, each man free to follow his own desire and choice,
but believed far more that a man's character was to be discerned in these matters than in his public and political conduct; so they chose, as guardian, corrector, and chastiser to prevent anyone from turning aside for pleasure and departing from the ancestral and customary way of life, one man from among the so-called patricians together with one from the plebeians. Such officials were called censors, having the power to take away a man's horse and to expel from the senate one who lived licentiously and disorderly,
and these men also took the assessments of property and by their registers distinguished families and citizenships; the office holds other great powers besides. For this reason nearly all the most eminent and foremost of the senators came forward in opposition to Cato's candidacy. For envy vexed the nobles, who thought their high birth was being altogether insulted by men of originally undistinguished origin being raised to the highest honor and power,
while others, conscious in themselves of base practices and a departure from ancestral customs, feared the man's severity, which in office would be relentless and harsh. For this reason, joining together and preparing themselves, they brought forward seven rivals against Cato for the office, courting the multitude with pleasant hopes, as though it wanted to be governed gently and agreeably.
Cato, on the contrary, granting no leniency at all, but openly threatening the wicked from the rostrum and crying out that the city needed a great purging, urged the people, if they were wise, to choose not the most pleasant but the most vigorous of physicians — and that this man was himself, along with one of the patricians, Valerius Flaccus: for with him alone, he thought, could he do something worthwhile in cutting and cauterizing away luxury and softness as if it were a Hydra, whereas he saw each of the others governing badly on purpose, because they feared those who would govern well.
So truly great was the Roman people, in fact, and worthy of great popular leaders, that they were not frightened by the man's severity and weight, but, casting aside those agreeable candidates who seemed likely to do everything to win favor, chose Flaccus together with Cato — as if it were not a man asking for office, but one already ruling and giving orders, to whom they were listening.
So Cato placed at the head of the senate list his colleague and friend Lucius Valerius Flaccus, but expelled from the senate many others, and among them Lucius Quinctius, a man who had held the consulship seven years earlier — and, a distinction that mattered even more to his standing than that office, was brother to Titus Flamininus, conqueror of Philip.
The reason for his expulsion was this. Lucius had taken up a boy in the flower of youth as his favorite and always kept him close and took him along when he commanded, showing him honor and influence such as none of his foremost friends and intimates enjoyed. Now he happened to be governing a consular province; and at a certain banquet the boy, reclining beside him as usual, was working other flattery upon a man easily led when in wine, and said that he loved him so much that "even though gladiators were putting on a show back home that I had never seen before, I rushed away to be with you, though I longed to watch a man fall."
Lucius, returning the affection, said, "Well, for that reason at least, do not lie there grieving on my account, for I will cure it." And ordering one of the men condemned to death to be brought into the banquet, and the attendant with an axe to stand by, he again asked his beloved whether he wished to watch him being struck. When the boy said he wished it, he ordered the man's neck cut off.
Most writers give this version, and Cicero in fact has Cato himself tell it in his essay On Old Age; Livy, however, states that the man killed was a Gallic deserter, and that Lucius killed the man not through an attendant, but with his own hand, and that this too is written in a speech of Cato's.
So when Lucius had been expelled from the senate by Cato, his brother, taking it hard, appealed to the people and demanded that Cato state the reason for the expulsion. When Cato had spoken and related the story of the banquet, Lucius tried to deny it, but once Cato dared him to stake a formal bet on the truth of it, he retreated from the challenge.
At that time, then, he was judged deserving of what he suffered. But when there was a spectacle in the theater and he passed by the seats reserved for ex-consuls and sat himself down somewhere very far off, he stirred pity among the people, and they shouted and forced him to move back, correcting and remedying, as far as was possible, what had been done.
He also expelled from the senate another man, Manilius, who was expected to become consul, because he had kissed his own wife in broad daylight with his daughter looking on. Cato said that he himself never embraced his wife except when there was a great clap of thunder, and added jokingly that he counted himself blessed whenever Zeus thundered.
Lucius, the brother of Scipio, also brought upon Cato a certain charge that provoked ill will, being a man who had celebrated a triumph and had his horse taken from him; for it seemed that Cato had done this as if insulting Africanus Scipio, now dead. But most people were vexed above all by his cutting back of extravagance, which — since the majority were already sickened and corrupted by it — it was impossible to abolish outright; instead he went about it obliquely, compelling, in the matter of clothing,
carriages, women's ornaments, and household furnishings, whenever the value of any single item exceeded fifteen hundred drachmas, that its worth be assessed at ten times that amount, wishing that from the greater assessments their taxes too should be greater; and he added a surcharge of three bronze coins on top of the thousand, so that, weighed down by the added burdens and seeing the plain and frugal paying less into the public treasury for the same wealth, they might give up such extravagance.
So there were those who found him harsh — those who accepted the tax burden in order to keep their luxuries — and equally harsh, by contrast, were those who abandoned their luxuries rather than pay the tax; most people, after all, reckon it a loss of wealth simply to be kept from showing it off, since ostentation lies in superfluous things, not in necessary ones. This is indeed the very thing the philosopher Ariston is said to have marveled at most — that people consider those who possess superfluous things happier than those who have an abundance of what is necessary and useful.
It was Scopas of Thessaly who, when a friend of his requested something of this sort — something not particularly useful to him — and the man explained that his request concerned none of the necessary and useful things, replied, "And yet it is in these very things — the useless and superfluous — that I am prosperous and rich." Thus the zeal for wealth, being bound to no natural passion, is an intrusion arising from the vulgar opinion of outsiders.
Nevertheless, caring least of all for those who found fault with him, Cato pressed on even more, cutting off the channels by which people had been diverting water meant for public use into their own homes and gardens, overturning and tearing down whatever private buildings encroached on public ground, driving down the wages paid for public contracts, and forcing the tax-farms up to the highest prices at auction — from all of which much hatred gathered against him,
and the men around Titus, banding together against him, annulled in the senate the leases and contracts for sacred and public works that had been made, on the grounds that they had been made unprofitably, and they stirred up the most daring among the tribunes to haul Cato before the assembly and impose on him a fine of two talents. They also opposed strenuously the construction of the basilica which he built with public funds beneath the senate-house, next to the forum, and which was named the Basilica Porcia.
Yet it appears that the people received his censorship with wonder, for when a statue of him was erected inside the temple of Health, they inscribed on it — not his generalships nor his triumph — but, as one might paraphrase the inscription, "that when the Roman commonwealth was leaning and inclining toward the worse, he, becoming censor, restored it again to uprightness through good guidance, sound discipline, and instruction."
And yet he himself had earlier mocked those who were fond of such things, saying they did not realize they were priding themselves on the works of bronzesmiths and painters, while the citizens carried about the finest images of him in their own souls. And to those who marveled that, though many undistinguished men had statues, he had none, he said, "I would rather people ask why there is no statue of me than why there is one."
In sum, he did not think the good citizen ought to submit even to being praised, unless it proved useful to the common good. And yet of all men he praised himself the most — he who says that those who err in some matter of life and are then refuted say that they do not deserve blame, for they are no Catos; and that those who attempt, clumsily, to imitate some of his practices are called left-handed Catos.
He says that in the most perilous moments the senate turned to him as to a helmsman on a voyage, and that quite often, in his absence, they would put off matters most deserving of urgency — facts that are attested of him by others as well; for he held great standing in the city, both through his manner of life and through his eloquence and through his old age.
He proved himself a good father too, and a good husband to his wife, and a financier not to be despised, one who treated the management of his household as no small or trivial side matter. Hence I think it right to go through, as far as is fitting, these matters too: he married a wife of nobler birth rather than of greater wealth, holding that while both kinds of women alike have a certain weight and pride, the well-born, being more ashamed of disgrace, are more obedient to their husbands in what is honorable.
He was fond of saying that whoever strikes his wife or child lays hands on the most sacred of things, and he set it down as a greater praise to be a good husband than to be a great senator; indeed he said there was nothing else he admired in Socrates of old except that, though he had a difficult wife and dull-witted children, he bore them with equanimity and gentleness throughout his life. As for himself, once his son was born, there was no task so urgent — unless it were some public business — as to keep him from being present while his wife bathed and swaddled the infant.
For she herself nursed him with her own milk, and often too she put to her breast the little children of the slaves, thereby cultivating in them, through being raised together, goodwill toward her son. And when the boy began to understand things, Cato himself took him in hand and taught him his letters, even though he owned a cultivated slave, a schoolmaster named Chilon, who taught many boys.
He did not think it fitting, as he himself says, that his son ought to be rebuked by a slave, or have an ear yanked for being slow to learn, nor that he should owe gratitude to a slave for so great a thing as education; instead he himself was the boy's grammar teacher, he himself his teacher of law, he himself his trainer in gymnastics — not only teaching his son to throw the javelin, to fight in arms, and to ride, but also to box with his fists, to endure heat and cold, and to force his way, swimming, through the swirling and rough parts of the river.
And he says he wrote out the histories himself, with his own hand, in large letters, so that his son might have at home the means to gain benefit toward acquaintance with the deeds of the ancients and of his fathers; and that he was no less careful to guard against shameful words in his son's presence than in the presence of the sacred virgins whom they call the Vestals, and that he never bathed together with him. And this seems to be a custom common among the Romans; for fathers-in-law took care not to bathe together with sons-in-law, being ashamed of exposure and nakedness.
Then, however, having learned from the Greeks the practice of stripping naked, the Romans in turn filled the Greeks with the reproach of doing this even in the company of women. So fine a work of virtue was Cato molding and fashioning in his son that, since the boy's eagerness was beyond reproach and his soul, thanks to his good nature, was obedient, but his body appeared too soft for hard labor, Cato relaxed a little the excessive strictness and severity of his regimen; and the boy,
even so constituted, proved himself a brave man in his campaigns, and fought brilliantly in the battle against Perseus, under the command of Paulus. Then, when his sword was knocked from his hand by a blow, or slipped from it because his hand was wet, he was distressed and turned to some of his companions, and taking them with him charged again into the enemy. After a great struggle and with great force he cleared the ground and, with much difficulty, found the sword lying among a mass of arms and the bodies of the dead, friend and enemy heaped together.
For this, Paulus the general admired the young man, and a letter of Cato's own is preserved, written to his son, extravagantly praising his zeal and eagerness concerning the sword. Later the young man also married Tertia, daughter of Paulus and sister of Scipio, mingling now with so great a family no less on his own account than his father's. So Cato's care for his son reached a fitting end.
He acquired many household slaves, buying above all the young among the captives, who were still able to be raised and trained like puppies or colts. None of these ever entered another household, unless sent there by Cato himself or by his wife. And whoever was asked what Cato was doing would answer nothing except that he did not know.
A slave had to be either doing some necessary task about the house or sleeping, and Cato was very fond of those who slept, holding that sleepers were gentler than those awake, and that men who had had their fill of sleep were better suited for any task than those still in need of it. And believing that slaves committed their worst misdeeds for the sake of sexual desire, he arranged that they might consort with the female slaves for a fixed sum of money, but that none should go near any other woman.
In the beginning, then, while he was still poor and on campaign, he was hard to please in nothing concerning his diet, but declared it most shameful to quarrel with a servant over one's belly. Later, however, as his fortunes increased and he gave dinners for friends and fellow magistrates, he would punish immediately after dinner, with a strap, those who had served or prepared anything carelessly.
He always contrived to keep some strife and disagreement among his slaves, suspecting and fearing their unity. Those who seemed to have done something deserving death he had judged before all the household slaves, and put to death if condemned.
Applying himself with greater intensity to money-making, he considered farming rather a pastime than a source of income, and instead put his capital into secure and stable ventures, acquiring fishponds, hot springs, land given over to fullers, pitch-works, and land with natural pastures and woods — from which much money came to him, of a kind that, as he himself says, could not even be harmed by Zeus.
He also engaged in the most maligned kind of lending, maritime loans, in this manner: he ordered the borrowers to gather many partners together, and once there were fifty of them and as many ships, he himself held one share through his freedman Quintio, who did business with the borrowers and sailed along with them. Thus the risk was not spread over the whole, but only over a small portion, for great profits.
He also gave money to any of his slaves who desired it, so that they might purchase boys, then, after training and teaching them at Cato's expense, sell them again after a year. Cato kept back many of them too, reckoning against the price the highest bidder offered.
In urging his son toward such pursuits he says it is the mark not of a man but of a widowed woman to diminish one's estate. But this remark of Cato's goes further still in its vehemence — that he dared to call admirable and godlike, as high praise, the man who leaves behind, in his accounts, more than he received.
Now when he was already an old man, ambassadors came to Rome from Athens — among them Carneades of the Academy and Diogenes, the Stoic philosopher — to beg release from a certain judgment against the Athenian people, which had been rendered against them in their absence, the Oropians having brought suit and the Sicyonians having voted the fine, amounting to five hundred talents.
At once the most bookish of the young men rushed to these men and kept company with them, listening and marveling at them, and above all at the charm of Carneades, whose power was greatest and whose reputation, not falling short of that power, took hold of large and cultivated audiences, filling the city, as though with a torrent, with its resounding fame.
And a report spread that a Greek man, wondrous to the point of astonishment, was charming and mastering everything, and had cast a terrible passion into the young men, under whose influence they abandoned their other pleasures and pastimes and grew enthusiastic about philosophy. This pleased the rest of the Romans, who were glad to see their young men taking a share of Greek education and associating with admired men,
Cato, however, was from the very start displeased at this zeal for such speeches flowing into the city, fearing that the young men, turning their love of honor in that direction, would come to prize a reputation for speaking more than one won through deeds and campaigns. And when the fame of the philosophers advanced in the city, and a distinguished man, Gaius Acilius, eagerly took it upon himself, at their request, to interpret their first speeches before the senate, Cato resolved, under a decent pretext, to banish all the philosophers from the city,
and coming before the senate he found fault with the magistrates for allowing an embassy of men to sit idle for so long a time — men who could easily persuade anyone of anything they wished. He said they ought as quickly as possible to reach some decision and vote concerning the embassy, so that these men might turn back to their schools and converse with the children of the Greeks, while the young men of Rome would go back to listening to the laws and the magistrates as before.
He did this not, as some suppose, out of resentment toward Carneades in particular, but because he was altogether hostile to philosophy, and out of rivalry disparaged the whole Greek Muse and culture — he who even said that Socrates was a chatterer and a violent man, who, insofar as he was able, attempted in his own way to play the tyrant over his fatherland, dissolving its customs and dragging and shifting the citizens toward opinions contrary to the laws.
Mocking the school of Isocrates, he says that his students grow old there, as though they were going to practice their arts and plead cases before Minos in Hades. And in trying to turn his son against Greek things, he used a voice bolder than his age warranted, as though prophesying and foretelling like an oracle that the Romans would ruin their state once they were filled up with Greek letters.
But time has shown this ill-omened saying of his to be empty, for during the very period in which the city rose to its greatest power, it also took to Greek learning and every kind of culture as its own. Cato was not only hostile to the Greeks who practiced philosophy, but also held the doctors practicing in Rome in suspicion. And he had heard, it seems, the saying of Hippocrates — which he uttered when the Great King summoned him with the offer of many talents — that he would never hire himself out to foreigners hostile to the Greek nation; Cato used to say that this was a common oath among all doctors,
and he urged his son to be on guard against all of them, saying that he himself had a written memorandum, and that in accordance with it he treated and dieted the sick in his own household, never keeping anyone fasting, but feeding them on vegetables or bits of the flesh of duck or pigeon or hare — for this, he said, was light and suitable for the weak, except that those who ate it were apt to have many dreams. By using such treatment and diet he himself kept in good health, and kept his household in good health as well.
And in this regard he does not appear to have escaped without penalty, since death deprived him of both his wife and his son. He himself, being firmly built in body for vigor and strength, held out for a very long time, so that even in extreme old age he consorted with a woman and made a marriage unsuited to his years, for the following reason. After the loss of his wife, he gave his son in marriage to the daughter of Paulus, sister of Scipio, while he himself, being a widower, made use of a slave girl who came to him in secret;
now the household was small and the young bride was aware of the matter, and once, when the girl seemed to slip past the bedchamber rather too boldly, the young man said nothing, but looked at her somewhat more bitterly and, disconcerted, did not escape the notice of the old man. When Cato learned that the matter displeased them, he brought no accusation and made no complaint, but went down, as was his custom, to the forum with his friends, and calling out in a loud voice to a certain Salonius, one of his former clerks who was present and escorting him, asked whether he had already joined his little daughter to a husband.
When the man replied that he had made no such arrangement and would take no step in the matter without seeking his advice beforehand, Cato said, "Well, I have found you a suitable son-in-law, unless indeed his age is objected to — for in other respects he is beyond reproach, but he is quite an old man." When Salonius told him to attend to it and give the girl to whomever he preferred, since he was Cato's client and needed his patronage, Cato, without any delay, said that he himself was asking for the girl for himself.
At first, as one might expect, the proposal astonished the man, who considered Cato far removed from marriage, and himself far removed from a household of consular rank and triumphal connections; but once he saw that Cato meant the proposal seriously, he welcomed it with pleasure, and the two went down to the forum at once and settled the betrothal. While the marriage was being arranged, Cato's son gathered his intimate friends and asked his father whether he was bringing in a stepmother because he found some fault with him or felt aggrieved by him.
Cato cried out, "Hush, my boy," he said; "everything about you is admirable to me, and nothing to be blamed. I desire to leave behind more children like you for myself, and more citizens like you for the fatherland." They say Peisistratus, the tyrant of the Athenians, had made this same reply earlier, when he married, in his sons' adulthood, the Argive woman Timonassa, by whom they say he had Iophon and Thessalus. To Cato, once married, a son was born,
to whom he gave the surname Salonius, after his mother. The elder son died while serving as praetor, and Cato often mentions him in his books as a man who had turned out good; he is said to have borne the misfortune calmly and philosophically, and to have become no less keen because of it in public affairs. For he was not,
as Lucius Lucullus later was, and Metellus Pius, worn out by old age with regard to public life, considering political office a burden; nor did he, as Scipio Africanus had earlier done, turn away from the people because of the envy that had opposed his glory, and make inactivity, through a change of course, the goal of the rest of his life; but,
just as someone persuaded Dionysius to consider tyranny the finest shroud to be buried in, so Cato made political life the finest way to grow old in, and when he had leisure he took his rest and amusement in composing books and in farming.
He composed, then, speeches of every kind and histories; and he devoted himself to farming even while still young, out of necessity — for he says he made use of only two sources of income, farming and thrift — but in his later years the things done on his estate provided him with recreation and a subject for study, and he has even composed a book on agriculture, in which he wrote about the preparation of cakes and the preservation of fruit as well, striving in everything to be exceptional and distinctive.
His dinner in the country was also more generous, for he would each time invite his neighbors and acquaintances from round about and pass the time cheerfully with them, being pleasant and sought-after company not only for those of his own age, but for the young as well, since he had experience of many affairs and had met with many writings and speeches worth hearing.
He considered the table one of the chief means of making friends, and much favorable talk of good and noble citizens was brought in there, and much silence maintained about the worthless and wicked, since Cato allowed neither blame nor praise of them any admission to his gathering.
The last of his political actions is thought to have been the destruction of Carthage — though it was the younger Scipio who in deed brought it to completion, it was above all through Cato's counsel and judgment that the war was taken up, for the following reason. Cato was dispatched to the Carthaginians and to Massinissa the Numidian, since the two peoples were at odds, in order to examine what lay behind their quarrel — Massinissa, for his part, had stood as an ally of Rome ever since early days, while the Carthaginians had only entered a treaty of alliance after being defeated by Scipio, diminished alike in strength and by a crushing tribute of money.
Finding the city not, as the Romans supposed, brought low and reduced to a poor condition, but on the contrary flourishing with a great population of fighting age, teeming with great wealth, full of arms of every kind and of preparation for war, and thinking small of none of this, he judged that the affairs of the Numidians and Massinissa were not the right season for the Romans to concern themselves with and manage, but that unless they seized in advance a city that had grown hostile and sullen with distrust in the past, they would once again be in equal danger.
Returning quickly, then, he taught the senate that the earlier defeats and misfortunes of the Carthaginians had drained off not so much their power as their folly, and that they were likely to make them not weaker but more experienced in war, and that already their contests with the Numidians were serving to stir up in advance their struggles against the Romans, while peace and treaty were, in name only, laid over the war by their delay, which was merely waiting for its opportunity.
In addition to this, they say that Cato deliberately let fall some Libyan figs in the senate, having gathered up his toga to do so; and then, when the senators marveled at their size and beauty, he said that the country which bore such fruit was only three days' sail from Rome. And this next thing was already more forceful still: on every matter whatsoever about which he was declaring his opinion, he would add these words: "And it is also my opinion that Carthage must not exist." Publius Scipio, called Nasica, on the contrary, always continued to say and declare, "It is my opinion that Carthage must exist."
For, it seems, seeing the people already committing many offenses out of insolence, and hard for the senate to restrain because of their good fortune and pride, and the whole city being dragged by force wherever its impulses tended under the sway of its power, he wanted this fear to serve, at the very least, as a curb restraining the recklessness of the crowd, a check upon it, believing that the Carthaginians had too little strength to overcome the Romans, but too much to be safely despised.
To Cato, on the other hand, this very thing seemed dangerous — that a city always great, and now moreover sobered and chastened by misfortunes, should hang threateningly over a people reveling in excess and often stumbling because of the license it enjoyed, and that the fears from outside should not be entirely removed from their empire, leaving them no reference points against their own faults at home.
In this way, it is said, Cato brought about the third and final war against the Carthaginians; but he died once they had begun to fight, having prophesied concerning the man who was destined to bring an end to the war — a man who was then a young man, serving as military tribune, and was already displaying works of judgment and daring in the contests. When these reports were brought to Rome and Cato heard of them, they say he said, "He alone has understanding; the rest flit about as shadows."
This pronouncement Scipio soon confirmed through his deeds. Cato left behind as his line one son by the wife he married later, to whom, as we said, the surname Salonius was given, and one grandson by the son who had died. Salonius died while serving as praetor, and his son Marcus attained the consulship. This man was the grandfather of Cato the philosopher, a man most distinguished among his contemporaries for virtue and reputation.