The harsh, narrow, intolerant nature of Cato is as remote as could well be from the scholarly or literary temper. Even his respectful biographer Plutarch bursts out with indignant protest against the thrifty advice to sell off slaves who had grown old in service. Indeed, most of Cato's sayings remind us of some canny old Scot, or—it may be politer to say—of a hard-headed Yankee farmer, living out the precepts of Poor Richard's philosophy.
"Grip the subject: words will follow," is his chief contribution to rhetoric. Another has, it must be confessed, more of Quintilian's flavor: "An orator, son Marcus, is a good man skilled in speaking." He is most at home however upon his farm, preaching such familiar economies as "Buy not what you need, but what you must have: what you do not need is dear at a penny." The nearest approach to wit is but a sarcastic consciousness of human weakness, like the maxim "Praise large farms, but till a small one"; the form of which, by the way, is strikingly like the advice given long before by a kindred spirit, the Ascræan farmer Hesiod:—
"Praise thou a little vessel, and store thy freight in a large one!"
Even the kindness of Cato has a bitter flavor peculiarly Roman. When the great Greek historian Polybius and his fellow exiles were finally permitted to return to their native land, Cato turned the scale toward mercy in the Senate with the haughty words, "As though we had nothing to do, we sit here discussing whether some old Greeks shall be carried to their graves here or in Achaia!" There was a touch of real humor, and perhaps of real culture too, in his retort when Polybius asked in addition for the restoration of civic honors held in Greece seventeen years agone. "Polybius," he said, with a smile, "wishes to venture again into the Cyclops's cave, because he forgot his cap and belt." A few touches like this permit us to like, as well as to admire, this grim and harsh pattern of old simplicity.
Whether "Cato learned Greek at eighty" as a grudging concession to the spirit of the age, or to obtain weapons from the foe's own armory wherewith to combat his influence, we need not argue. Indeed, it is nearly certain that any special study at that time could have been only a revival of "what he learned at Athens" many years earlier.
It is however a supreme touch of irony in Cato's fate, that he rendered, doubtless unconsciously, a greater service to Hellenistic culture in Rome than did even his illustrious younger contemporary Scipio Æmilianus, the patron of Terence and the generous friend of Polybius; for it was our Cato who brought in his train from Sardinia the gallant young soldier afterward known as the poet Ennius,—the creator of the Latin hexameter, of the artistic Roman epic, and in general the man who more than any other made Greek poetry, and even Greek philosophy, well known and respected among all educated Romans.
Cato is chiefly known to us through Plutarch, whose sketch shows the tolerance of that beloved writer toward the savage enemy of Hellenism. The charming central figure of Cicero's dialogue on 'Old Age' takes little save his name from the bitter, crabbed octogenarian, who was still adding to his vote on any and all subjects, "Moreover, Senators, Carthage must be wiped out." All the world admires stubborn courage, especially in a hopeless cause. We, the most radical and democratic of peoples, especially admire the despairing stand of a belated conservative. The peculiar virtues of the stock were repeated no less strikingly in the great-grandson, Cato of Utica, and make their name a synonym forevermore of unbending stoicism. The phrase applied by a later Roman poet to Cato of Utica may perhaps be quoted no less fittingly as the epitaph of his ancestor:—
"The gods preferred the victor's cause, but Cato the vanquished;"
for in spite of him, the Latin literature which has come down to us may be most truly characterized as "the bridge over which Hellenism reaches the modern world."