CATO, MARCUS PORCIUS (234-149 b.c.), Roman statesman, surnamed “The Censor,” Sapiens, Priscus, or Major (the Elder), to distinguish him from Cato of Utica, was born at Tusculum. He came of an ancient plebeian family, noted for some military services, but not ennobled by the discharge of the higher civil offices. He was bred, after the manner of his Latin forefathers, to agriculture, to which he devoted himself when not engaged in military service. But, having attracted the notice of L. Valerius Flaccus, he was brought to Rome, and became successively quaestor (204), aedile (199), praetor (198), and consul (195) with his old patron. During his term of office he vainly opposed the repeal of the lex Oppia, passed during the Second Punic War to restrict luxury and extravagance on the part of women. Meanwhile he served in Africa, and took part in the crowning campaign of Zama (202). He held a command in Sardinia, where he first showed his strict public morality, and again in Spain, which he reduced to subjection with great cruelty, and gained thereby the honour of a triumph (194). In the year 191 he acted as military tribune in the war against Antiochus III. of Syria, and played an important part in the battle of Thermopylae, which finally delivered Greece from the encroachments of the East. His reputation as a soldier was now established; henceforth he preferred to serve the state at home, scrutinizing the conduct of the candidates for public honours and of generals in the field. If he was not personally engaged in the prosecution of the Scipios (Africanus and Asiaticus) for corruption, it was his spirit that animated the attack upon them. Even Africanus, who refused to reply to the charge, saying only, “Romans, this is the day on which I conquered Hannibal,” and was absolved by acclamation, found it necessary to retire self-banished to his villa at Liternum. Cato’s enmity dated from the African campaign when he quarrelled with Scipio for his lavish distribution of the spoil amongst the troops, and his general luxury and extravagance.
Cato had, however, a more serious task to perform in opposing the spread of the new Hellenic culture which threatened to destroy the rugged simplicity of the conventional Roman type. He conceived it to be his special mission to resist this invasion. It was in the discharge of the censorship that this determination was most strongly exhibited, and hence that he derived the title (the Censor) by which he is most generally distinguished. He revised with unsparing severity the lists of senators and knights, ejecting from either order the men whom he judged unworthy of it, either on moral grounds or from their want of the prescribed means. The expulsion of L. Quinctius Flamininus for wanton cruelty was an example of his rigid justice. His regulations against luxury were very stringent. He imposed a heavy tax upon dress and personal adornment, especially of women, and upon young slaves purchased as favourites. In 181 he supported the lex Orchia (according to others, he first opposed its introduction, and subsequently its repeal), which prescribed a limit to the number of guests at an entertainment, and in 169 the lex Voconia, one of the provisions of which was intended to check the accumulation of an undue proportion of wealth in the hands of women. Amongst other things he repaired the aqueducts, cleansed the sewers, prevented private persons drawing off public water for their own use, ordered the demolition of houses which encroached on the public way, and built the first basilica in the forum near the curia. He raised the amount paid by the publican for the right of farming the taxes, and at the same time diminished the contract prices for the construction of public works.
From the date of his censorship (184) to his death in 149, Cato held no public office, but continued to distinguish himself in the senate as the persistent opponent of the new ideas. He was struck with horror, along with many other Romans of the graver stamp, at the licence of the Bacchanalian mysteries, which he attributed to the fatal influence of Greek manners; and he vehemently urged the dismissal of the philosophers (Carneades, Diogenes and Critolaus), who came as ambassadors from Athens, on account of the dangerous nature of the views expressed by them. He had a horror of physicians, who were chiefly Greeks. He procured the release of Polybius, the historian, and his fellow-prisoners, contemptuously asking whether the senate had nothing more important to do than discuss whether a few Greeks should die at Rome or in their own land. It was not till his eightieth year that he made his first acquaintance with Greek literature. Almost his last public act was to urge his countrymen to the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. In 157 he was one of the deputies sent to Carthage to arbitrate between the Carthaginians and Massinissa, king of Numidia. The mission was unsuccessful and the commissioners returned home. But Cato was so struck by the evidences of Carthaginian prosperity that he was convinced that the security of Rome depended on the annihilation of Carthage. From this time, in season and out of season, he kept repeating the cry: “Delenda est Carthago.”
To Cato the individual life was a continual discipline, and public life was the discipline of the many. He regarded the individual householder as the germ of the family, the family as the germ of the state. By strict economy of time he accomplished an immense amount of work; he exacted similar application from his dependents, and proved himself a hard husband, a strict father, a severe and cruel master. There was little difference apparently, in the esteem in which he held his wife and his slaves; his pride alone induced him to take a warmer interest in his sons. To the Romans themselves there was little in this behaviour which seemed worthy of censure; it was respected rather as a traditional example of the old Roman manners. In the remarkable passage (xxxix. 40) in which Livy describes the character of Cato, there is no word of blame for the rigid discipline of his household.
Cato perhaps deserves even more notice as a literary man than as a statesman or a soldier. He was the first Latin prose writer of any importance, and the first author of a history of Rome in Latin. His treatise on agriculture (De Agricultura, or De Re Rustica) is the only work by him that has been preserved; it is not agreed whether the work we possess is the original or a later revision. It contains a miscellaneous collection of rules of good husbandry, conveying much curious information on the domestic habits of the Romans of his age. His most important work, Origines, in seven books, related the history of Rome from its earliest foundations to his own day. It was so called from the second and third books, which described the rise of the different Italian towns. His speeches, of which as many as 150 were collected, were principally directed against the young free-thinking and loose-principled nobles of the day. He also wrote a set of maxims for the use of his son (Praecepta ad Filium), and some rules for everyday life in verse (Carmen de Moribus). The collection of proverbs in hexameter verse, extant under the name of Cato, probably belongs to the 4th century a.d. (See [Cato, Dionysius].)
Authorities.—There are lives of Cato by Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch and Aurelius Victor, and many particulars of his career and character are to be gathered from Livy and Cicero. See also F.D. Gerlach, Marcus Porcius Cato der Censor (Basel, 1869); G. Kurth, Caton l’ancien (Bruges, 1872); J. Cortese, De M. Porcii Catonis vita, operibus, et lingua (Turin, 1883); F. Marcucci, Studio critico sulle Opere di Catone il Maggiore (1902). The best edition of the De Agricultura is by H. Keil (1884-1891), of the fragments of the Origines by H. Peter (1883) in Historicorum Romanorum Fragmenta, of the fragments generally by H. Jordan (1860); see also J. Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin (1874); M. Schanz, Geschichte der römischen Litteratur (1898); article in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mommsen, Hist. of Rome (Eng. trans.), bk. iii. ch. xi and xiv.; Warde Fowler, Social Life at Rome (1909).
CATO, MARCUS PORCIUS (95-46 b.c.), Roman philosopher, called Uticensis to distinguish him from his great-grandfather, “the Censor.” On the death of his parents he was brought up in the house of his uncle, M. Livius Drusus. After fighting with distinction in the ranks against Spartacus (72 b.c.), he became a military tribune (67), and served a campaign in Macedonia, but he never had any enthusiasm for the military profession. On his return he became quaestor, and showed so much zeal and integrity in the management of the public accounts that he obtained a provincial appointment in Asia, where he strengthened his reputation. Though filled with disgust at the corruption of the public men with whom he came in contact, he saw much to admire in the discipline which Lucullus had enforced in his own eastern command, and he supported his claims to a triumph, while he opposed the inordinate pretensions of Pompey. When the favour of the nobles gained him the tribuneship, he exerted himself unsuccessfully to convict L. Licinius Murena (2), one of their chief men, of bribery. Cicero, who defended Murena, was glad to have Cato’s aid when he urged the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators. Cato’s vote on this matter drew upon him the bitter resentment of Julius Caesar, who did his utmost to save them.
Cato had now become a great power in the state. Though possessed of little wealth and no family influence, his unflinching resolution in the cause of the ancient free state rendered him a valuable instrument in the hands of the nobles. He vainly opposed Caesar’s candidature for the consulship in 59, and his attempt, in conjunction with Bibulus, to prevent the passing of Caesar’s proposed agrarian law for distributing lands amongst the Asiatic veterans, proved unsuccessful. Nevertheless, although his efforts were ineffectual, he was still an obstacle of sufficient importance for the triumvirs to desire to get rid of him. At the instigation of Caesar he was sent to Cyprus (58) with a mission to depose its king, Ptolemy (brother of Ptolemy Auletes), and annex the island. On his return two years later he continued to struggle against the combined powers of the triumvirs in the city, and became involved in scenes of violence and riot. He succeeded in obtaining the praetorship in 54, and strenuously exerted himself in the hopeless and thankless task of suppressing bribery, in which all parties were equally interested. He failed to attain the consulship, and had made up his mind to retire from the arena of civic ambition when the civil war broke out in 49. Feeling that the sole chance for the free state lay in conceding an actual supremacy to Pompey, whom he had formerly vigorously opposed, he did not scruple to support the unjust measures of the nobles against Caesar. At the outset of the war he was entrusted with the defence of Sicily, but finding it impossible to resist the superior forces of C. Scribonius Curio, who had landed on the island, he joined Pompey at Dyrrhachium. When his chief followed Caesar to Thessaly he was left behind in charge of the camp, and thus was not present at the battle of Pharsalus. After the battle, when Pompey abandoned his party, he separated himself from the main body of the republicans, and conducted a small remnant of their forces into Africa. After his famous march through the Libyan deserts, he shut himself up in Utica, and even after the decisive defeat at Thapsus (46), in spite of the wishes of his followers, he determined to keep the gates closed till he had sent off his adherents by sea. While the embarkation was in progress he continued calm and dignified; when the last of the transports had left the port he cheerfully dismissed his attendants, and soon afterwards stabbed himself.
He had been reading, we are told, in his last moments Plato’s dialogue on the immortality of the soul, but his own philosophy had taught him to act upon a narrow sense of immediate duty without regard to the future. He conceived that he was placed in the world to play an active part, and when disabled from carrying out his principles, to retire gravely from it. He had lived for the free state, and it now seemed his duty to perish with it. In politics he was a typical doctrinaire, abhorring compromise and obstinately blind to the fact that his national ideal was a hopeless anachronism. From the circumstances of his life and of his death, he has come to be regarded as one of the most distinguished of Roman philosophers, but he composed no works, and bequeathed to posterity no other instruction than that of his example. The only composition by him which we possess is a letter to Cicero (Ad Fam. xv. 5), a polite refusal of the orator’s request that he would endeavour to procure him the honour of a triumph. The school of the Stoics, which took a leading part in the history of Rome under the earlier emperors, looked to him as its saint and patron. It continued to wage war against the empire, hardly less openly than Cato himself had done, for two centuries, till at last it became actually seated on the imperial throne in the person of Marcus Aurelius. Immediately after his death Cato’s character became the subject of discussion; Cicero’s panegyric Cato was answered by Caesar in his Anticato. Brutus, dissatisfied with Cicero’s work, produced another on the same subject; in Lucan Cato is represented as a model of virtue and disinterestedness.