1. Date and Circumstances of Composition.
The date at which the Cato Maior was written can be determined with almost perfect exactness. A mention in Cicero's work entitled De Divinatione[[6]] shows that the Cato Maior preceded that work by a short time. The De Divinatione was written after the assassination of Caesar, that is, after the 15th of March in the year 44.[[7]] Again, the Cato Maior is mentioned as a recent work in three letters addressed by Cicero to Atticus.[[8]] The earliest of these letters was written on or about the 12th of May, 44.[[9]] We shall hardly err, therefore, if we assume that Cicero composed the Cato Maior in April of the year 44.[[10]] This agrees also with slight indications in the work itself. In the dedicatory introduction Cicero speaks of troubles weighing heavily on himself and Atticus.[[11]] Any one who reads the letters to Atticus despatched in April, 44, will have little doubt that the troubles hinted at are the apprehensions as to the course of Antonius, from whom Cicero had personally something to fear. Atticus was using all the influence he could bring to bear on Antonius in order to secure Cicero's safety;
hence Cicero's care to avoid in the dedication all but the vaguest possible allusions to politics. Had that introduction been written before Caesar's death, we should have had plain allusions (as in the prooemia of the Academica, the De Finibus, the Tusculan Disputations, and the De Natura Deorum) to Caesar's dictatorship.[[12]]
The time was one of desperate gloom for Cicero. The downfall of the old constitution had overwhelmed him with sorrow, and his brief outburst of joy over Caesar's death had been quickly succeeded by disgust and alarm at the proceedings of Antonius. The deep wound caused by his daughter's death[[13]] was still unhealed. It is easy to catch in the Cato Maior some echoes of his grief for her. When it is said that of all Cato's titles to admiration none is higher than the fortitude he showed in bearing the death of his son,[[14]] the writer is thinking of the struggle he himself had been waging against a like sorrow for more than a year past; and when Cato expresses his firm conviction that he will meet his child beyond the grave,[[15]] we can see Cicero's own yearning for reunion with his deeply loved Tullia.
2. Greek Sources.
All Cicero's philosophical and rhetorical writings were confessedly founded more or less on Greek originals.[[16]] The stores from which he principally drew in writing the Cato Maior are clearly indicated in several parts of the work. Passages from Xenophon's Oeconomicus are translated in Chapters 17 and 22. In Chapters 2 and 3 there is a close imitation of the conversation between Socrates and Cephalus at the beginning of Plato's Republic, while in Chapter 21 is reproduced one of the most
striking portions of the Phaedo, 72 E-73 B, 78-80.[[17]] The view of the divine origin and destiny of the human soul contained in the passage from the Phaedo is rendered by Cicero in many of his works,[[18]] and was held by him with quite a religious fervor and sincerity.
Besides these instances of special indebtedness Cicero, in composing the Cato Maior, was no doubt under obligations of a more general kind to the Greeks. The form of the dialogue is Greek, and Aristotelian rather than Platonic.[[19]] But further, it is highly probable that Cicero owed to some particular Greek dialogue on Old Age the general outline of the arguments he there brings forward. Many of the Greek illustrative allusions may have had the same origin, though in many cases Roman illustrations must have been substituted for Greek. Whether the dialogue by Aristo Cius, cursorily mentioned in the Cato Maior,[[20]] was at all used by Cicero or not it is impossible to determine.[[21]]
3. Purpose.
The Cato Maior is a popular essay in Ethics, applying the principles of philosophy to the alleviation of one of life's chief burdens, old age. In ancient times, when philosophy formed the real and only religion of the educated class, themes like this were deemed to afford a worthy employment for the pens even of the greatest philosophers. Such essays formed the only substitute the ancients had for our Sermons. There can be no doubt of Cicero's sincerity when he says that the arguments he sets