Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Since things worthy of memory have been written about these two men as well, the whole life of the one, set alongside the whole of the other, does not present an easily discernible difference, so obscured is it by many great similarities. But if we must take up the comparison point by point, treating each life like a poem or a painting, it is common to both that they advanced, from resources that did not exist, to a political career and reputation through virtue and ability.
Aristides appears to have become distinguished while attaching himself to popular leaders and generals at a time when Athens was not yet great and estates were still modest and level with one another; for the highest property class then was five hundred measures, the second three hundred, and the last, the third, two hundred.
Cato, by contrast, brought himself from a small town and a manner of living that seemed rustic, and let himself go, as it were, into the vast open sea of political life at Rome — no longer the business of leaders like the Curii, the Fabricii, and the Atilii, nor one that admitted to the speaker's platform, as rulers and popular leaders, poor men who worked with their own hands and came up from the plow and the spade, but one now accustomed to look toward great families, wealth, land-grants, and canvassing for office, and one that, through its own bulk and power, now looked down with contempt on those who aspired to rule.
Facing a Themistocles as one's rival was a very different matter from, a man neither brilliant by birth nor possessed of great means — they say his estate came to five talents, or even three, when he first took up politics — as to contend for first place against Scipios Africani, Servii Galbae, and Quintii Flaminini, with no base of support at all except a voice that spoke frankly on behalf of what was just.
Further, Aristides was tenth in command at Marathon, and again at Plataea, whereas Cato was elected consul as the second of many rivals, and elected censor as the second of seven, surpassing the most distinguished and foremost of the candidates who contended with him. And indeed Aristides was never first in any of his successes: Miltiades holds the credit for Marathon, Themistocles for Salamis, while at Plataea, according to Herodotus, the noblest triumph belongs to Pausanias,
while even for second place at Aristides' side stand rivals — Sophanes, Ameinias, Callimachus, and Cynegeirus, men who distinguished themselves brilliantly in those contests. Cato, on the other hand, not only held first place himself as consul, both in action and in counsel, in the war in Spain, but also, while serving as military tribune at Thermopylae under another man's consulship, won the glory of that victory, having thrown open great gates for the Romans against Antiochus and, while the king looked only ahead, placed the war at his back.
For that victory, plainly the work of Cato, drove Asia out of Greece and afterward provided Scipio a landing-place. Both men, then, proved unconquered in war; but in politics Aristides stumbled, being ostracized and brought down by factional opposition from Themistocles, whereas Cato, though the most powerful and greatest men in Rome were, one might almost say, all arrayed against him, and though he contended like an athlete right up to old age, kept himself standing throughout,
and though he was defendant in very many public trials and prosecutor in many others, he won most of the cases he brought and was acquitted in every case brought against him, having as the safeguard of his life and the effective instrument of it his eloquence — by which one might more justly credit the man's freedom from undeserved suffering than by ascribing it to fortune or to a guardian spirit. To this very quality great witness was borne also in the case of the philosopher Aristotle by Antipater, who wrote of him after his death that, besides his other qualities, the man possessed persuasiveness as well.
That a man acquires no more perfect virtue than the political is agreed; and most people reckon household management no small part of it — for a city, being a kind of aggregate and sum of households, grows strong in its public affairs when the private lives of its citizens flourish. This is why even Lycurgus, having banished silver,
and banished gold from Sparta, and set up for the Spartans, in place of coinage, iron ruined by fire, did not thereby release the citizens from household management, but rather, by stripping away the luxurious, festering, inflamed elements of wealth so that all might have abundance of what was necessary and useful — a thing no other lawgiver had provided for — feared having as a fellow-citizen, sharing in the community, the man without means, without hearth, and poor, more than he feared the rich and overgrown man.
Cato, then, appears to have been no worse a manager of a household than of a city: he himself increased his own estate and became a teacher of household management and farming to others, having composed much useful writing on these subjects. Aristides, by contrast, brought even his justice into disrepute through his poverty, as something that ruined households and made men beggars, and was of benefit to anyone sooner than to those who possessed anything.
And yet Hesiod has said much urging us toward justice together with household management, and has reviled idleness as the beginning of injustice; and Homer too has put it well: "Work was never dear to me, nor household-keeping, which rears splendid children; but oared ships were always dear to me, and wars, and polished spears and arrows" — speaking of men who alike neglect their households and provide for themselves out of injustice, since indeed,
just as the doctors say that oil is most beneficial to the body applied from outside, but most harmful taken in, so the just man is useful to others but careless of himself and his own; and it seems that Aristides' political character was maimed in just this way, if, as most say, he made no provision even for his little daughters' dowries or for his own burial.
Hence Cato's house, down to the fourth generation, furnished Rome with praetors and consuls, since his grandsons, and their children after them, held the highest offices; whereas of Aristides, the foremost man among the Greeks, the great and helpless poverty of his line cast some of his descendants down to the beggar's platter, and forced others, through want, to hold out their hands for the public dole, and afforded none of them anything splendid, or anything worthy of that man's own way of thinking.
Or is this the very first point in dispute? For poverty is nowhere shameful in itself, but only where it is a sign of idleness, intemperance, extravagance, or thoughtlessness; whereas attending a man who is prudent, hardworking, just, brave, and devoted to the public good along with every other virtue, it is a mark of greatness and loftiness of soul.
For it is not possible to do great things while fretting over small ones, nor to help many who are in need while being oneself in need of many things. The great resource for a political career is not wealth but self-sufficiency, which, because it requires nothing superfluous for itself privately, leads to no distraction away from public business — for god alone is simply without need, but of human virtue, that which reduces its needs to the least is the most perfect and most divine.
For just as a body well-tempered for good health needs neither excess clothing nor excess food, so too a life and a household in good health are managed with whatever comes to hand. One's possessions must be proportioned to one's need: the man who gathers much but uses little is not self-sufficient, but is either, if he has no need of it, foolish, laying up things he has no craving for, or else, supposing he does crave them, a wretch, curtailing his own enjoyment through stinginess. Indeed I would gladly ask Cato himself this: if wealth is meant to be enjoyed,
why do you take pride, though you possess much, in being satisfied with little? But if it is a splendid thing, as indeed it is, to eat whatever bread comes to hand and to drink the wine that laborers and servants drink, and to have no need of purple or of a plastered house, then Aristides, Epaminondas, Manius Curius, and Gaius Fabricius were none of them wanting in what was fitting, in letting go the acquisition of things whose use they themselves rejected.
For it was not necessary for a man who had made turnips his most pleasant relish and boiled them himself, while his wife kneaded the barley-meal beside him, to prattle and write so much about a penny, or about the quickest trade by which a man might become rich — for frugality and self-sufficiency are a great thing, because they free one at once from desire and from anxious care over what is superfluous,
and this is why they say Aristides said, at the trial of Callias, that poverty is fitting to be ashamed of for those who are poor against their will, but that for those who, like himself, are poor by choice, it is fitting to take pride in it. For it is absurd to think Aristides' poverty a mark of idleness, when it lay open to him, though he had done nothing shameful, to grow wealthy simply by plundering one foreign soldier or looting one tent. So much, then, for these matters.
As for their commands: Cato's added nothing great even to great affairs, whereas among Aristides' commands are found the finest, most brilliant, and foremost of Greek achievements — Marathon, Salamis, Plataea. And surely it is not fitting to set Antiochus beside Xerxes, nor the walls stripped from the Spanish towns beside the tens of thousands who fell, so many on land and so many at sea;
in these Aristides was inferior to none in deed, but of glory and crowns, just as of wealth and money, he yielded to those who needed them more, because he surpassed them in all these things as well. I do not blame Cato for always magnifying himself and setting himself first of all — although he says, in one of his speeches, that praising oneself is as absurd as reviling oneself — but the man who needs not even others to do this for him seems to me more complete in virtue than the one who often praises himself.
For freedom from ambition is no small resource toward gentleness in political life, whereas ambition, on the contrary, is a harsh thing and most productive of envy; of this Aristides was entirely free, while Cato had a very full share of it. Aristides, at any rate, cooperating with Themistocles in the greatest matters and in a certain sense standing guard over his generalship, set Athens upright,
whereas Cato, working against Scipio, very nearly overturned and ruined his campaign against the Carthaginians, in which Scipio brought down the unconquered Hannibal, and in the end, ever contriving fresh suspicions and slanders, drove the man himself out of the city and wrapped his brother in a most shameful conviction for theft.
That self-restraint, then, which Cato has adorned with very many and very fine praises, Aristides kept truly untouched and pure, whereas Cato's own marriage, unworthy of his standing and unfitting for his years alike, cast no small or trivial reproach upon this very virtue. For an old man of such an age to marry, while his own son was already grown and his son's wife a young bride, taking the daughter of an attendant, a man who served the state for pay, as his father-in-law, was nowhere an honorable thing; and whether he did it for pleasure, or in anger, striking back at his son on account of his mistress, both the deed and the excuse carry shame. And the argument
which he himself used in mockingly answering the young man was not true; for if he wished to father good children in the same way, he ought to have made a noble marriage from the start, after due consideration, rather than being content, so long as it went unnoticed, to share a bed secretly with a woman not his wife, and then, once he was found out, to make his father-in-law the man he could most easily persuade, not the man to whom he would be allied to best advantage.