This Greek invasion, in literature, philosophy, religion, science, and art, this revolution in manners, morals, and blood, filled old-fashioned Romans with disgust and dread. Out on a Sabine farm a retired senator, Valerius Flaccus, fretted over the decay of the Roman character, the corruption of politics, the replacement of the mos maiorum with Greek ideas and ways. He was too old to fight the tide himself. But on a near-by homestead, just outside Reate, was a young plebeian peasant who showed all the old Roman qualities, loved the soil, worked hard, saved carefully, lived with conservative simplicity, and yet talked as brilliantly as a radical. He bore the names Marcus Porcius Cato: Porcius because his family had for generations raised pigs; Cato because they had been shrewd. Flaccus encouraged him to study law; Cato did, and won his neighbors’ cases in the local courts. Flaccus advised him to go to Rome; Cato went, and by the age of thirty obtained the quaestorship (204). By 199 he was aedile, by 198 praetor, by 195 consul; in 191 tribune, in 184 censor. Meanwhile he served twenty-six years in the army as a fearless soldier and an able and ruthless general. He considered discipline the mother of character and freedom; he despised a soldier “who plied his hands in marching and his feet in fighting, and whose snore was louder than his battle cry”; but he won the respect of his troops by marching beside them on foot, giving each of them a pound of silver from the spoils, and keeping nothing for himself.41
In the intervals of peace he denounced rhetors and rhetoric, and became the most powerful orator of his time. The Romans listened in reluctant fascination, for no one had ever spoken to them with such obvious honesty and stinging wit; the lash of his tongue might fall upon any man present, but it was pleasant to see it descend upon one’s neighbor. Cato fought corruption recklessly, and seldom let the sun set without having made new enemies. Few loved him, for his scar-covered face and wild red hair disconcerted them, his big teeth threatened them, his asceticism shamed them, his industry left them lagging, his green eyes looked through their words into their selfishness. Forty-four times his patrician enemies tried to destroy him by public indictments; forty-four times he was saved by the votes of farmers who, like him, resented venality and luxury.42 When their votes made him censor, all Rome shuddered. He carried out the threats with which he had won the campaign; laid heavy taxes upon luxuries, fined a senator for extravagance, and excluded from the Senate six members in whose record he found malfeasance. He expelled Manilius for kissing his wife in public; as for himself, he said, he never embraced his wife except when it thundered—though he was glad when it thundered. He completed the drainage system of the city, cut the pipes that had clandestinely tapped water from the public aqueducts or conduits, compelled owners to demolish the illegal projections of their buildings upon or over the public right of way, forced down the price paid by the state for public works, and frightened the tax collectors into remitting a larger share of their receipts to the Treasury.43 After five years of heroic opposition to the nature of man, he retired from office, made successful investments, manned his now vast farm with slaves, lent money at usurious rates, bought slaves cheap and—after training them in some skill—sold them dear, and became so rich that he could afford to write books—an occupation he despised.
Cato was the first great writer of Latin prose. He began by publishing his own speeches. Then he issued a manual of oratory, demanded a rugged Roman style instead of the Isocratean smoothness of the rhetors, and set a theme for Quintilian by defining the orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus44—“a good man skilled in speaking” (but was there ever union so rare?). He put his farming experiences to use by composing a treatise De agri cultura—the only work of Cato, and the oldest literary Latin, that time has saved. It is written in a simple and vigorous style, pithily compact; Cato wastes no words, and seldom condescends to a conjunction. He gives detailed advice on buying and selling slaves (old ones should be sold before they become a loss), on renting land to share-croppers, on viticulture and aboriculture, on domestic management and industries, on making cement and cooking dainties, on curing constipation and diarrhea, on healing snakebite with the dung of swine, and offering sacrifice to the gods. Asking himself what is the wisest use of agricultural land, he answers, “Profitable cattle raising.” The next best? “Moderately profitable cattle raising.” The third best? “Very unprofitable cattle raising.” The fourth? “To plow the land.” This was the argument that gave the latifundia to Italy.
The most important of his books was probably the lost Origines, a brave attempt to deal with the antiquities, ethnology, institutions, and history of Italy from the beginnings to the very year of Cato’s death. Nearly all that we know of it is that, to spite the aristocracy through its touted ancestors, the author named no generals in it, but lauded by name an elephant that had fought well against Pyrrhus.45 Cato designed this work, and his essays on oratory, agriculture, sanitation, military science, and law, to form an encyclopedia for the education of his son. By writing in Latin he hoped to displace the Greek textbooks that were in his judgment warping the minds of Roman youth. Though he himself studied Greek, he seems to have been sincere in his conviction that an education in Greek literature and philosophy would so rapidly dissolve the religious beliefs of young Romans that their moral life would be left defenseless against the instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex. His condemnation, like Nietzsche’s, took in Socrates; that prattling old midwife, Cato thought, had been rightly poisoned for undermining the morals and laws of Athens.46 Even Greek physicians irked him; he preferred the old household remedies, and distrusted the ever-ready surgeons.
The Greeks [he wrote to his son] are an intractable and iniquitous race. You may take my word for it that when this people bestows its literature upon Rome it will ruin everything. . . . And all the sooner if it sends us its physicians. They have conspired among themselves to murder all “barbarians.” … I forbid you to have anything to do with physicians.47
Having these ideas, he was a natural antagonist of the Scipionic circle, which thought the spread of Greek literature in Rome a necessary ferment in lifting Latin letters and the Roman mind to a fuller growth. Cato lent his aid to the prosecution of Africanus and his brother; the laws against embezzlement should be no respecters of persons. Toward foreign states, with one exception, he advocated a policy of justice and nonintervention. Despising Greeks, he respected Greece; and when the imperialistic plunderers in the Senate were for waging war upon rich Rhodes, he madea decisive speech in favor of conciliation. The exception, as all the world knows, was Carthage. Sent there on an official mission in 175, he had been shocked by the rapid recovery of the city from the effects of the Hannibalic war, the fruitful orchards and vineyards, the wealth that poured in from revived commerce, the arms that mounted in the arsenals. On his return he held up before the Senate a bundle of fresh figs that he had plucked in Carthage three days before, as an ominous symbol of her prosperity and her nearness to Rome; and he predicted that if Carthage were left unchecked, she would soon be rich and strong enough to renew the struggle for the mastery of the Mediterranean. From that day, with characteristic pertinacity, he ended all his speeches in the Senate, on whatever subject, with his dour conviction: Ceterum censeo delendam esse Carthaginem—“Besides, I think that Carthage must be destroyed.” The imperialists in the Senate agreed with him, not so much because they coveted Carthage’s trade, as because they saw in the well-irrigated fields of north Africa a new investment for their money, new latifundia to be tilled by new slaves. They awaited eagerly a pretext for the Third Punic War.