[Dubbing Cato "the perfect type of an old Roman, " Cruttwell proceeds, in the excerpt below, to attribute the character of genuinely Roman letters to Cato's style and values. Cruttwell also espouses the traditional view of Cato's motivation for writing: his hostility to Greek culture.]

The creator of Latin prose writing was CATO (234-149 B.C.). In almost every department he set the example, and his works, voluminous and varied, retained their reputation until the close of the classical period. He was the first thoroughly national author.

The character of the rigid censor is generally associated in our minds with the contempt of letters. In his stern but narrow patriotism, he looked with jealous eyes on all that might turn the citizens from a single-minded devotion to the State. Culture was connected in his mind with Greece, and her deleterious influence. The embassy of Diogenes, Critolaus, and Carneades, 155 B.C. had shown him to what uses culture might be turned. The eloquent harangue pronounced in favour of justice, and the equally eloquent harangue pronounced next day against it by the same speaker without a blush of shame, had set Cato's face like a flint in opposition to Greek learning. "I will tell you about those Greeks," he wrote in his old age to his son Marcus, "What I discovered by careful observation at Athens, and how far I deem it good to skim through their writings, for in no case should they be deeply studied. I will prove to you that they are one and all, a worthless and intractable set. Mark my words, for they are those of a prophet: whenever that nation shall give us its literature, it will corrupt everything."

With this settled conviction, thus emphatically expressed at a time when experience had shown the realization of his fears to be inevitable, and when he himself had so far bent as to study the literature he despised, the long and active public life of Cato is in complete harmony. He is the perfect type of an old Roman. Hard, shrewd, niggardly, and narrow minded, he was honest to the core, unsparing of himself as of others, scorning every kind of luxury, and of inflexible moral rectitude. He had no respect for birth, rank, fortune, or talent; his praise was bestowed solely on personal merit. He himself belonged to an ancient and honourable house [so he himself asserted; but they had not held any Roman magistracy.], and from it he inherited those harsh virtues which, while they enforced the reverence, put him in conflict with the spirit, of the age. No man could have set before himself a more uphill task than that which Cato struggled all his life vainly to achieve. To reconstruct the past is but one step more impossible than to stem the tide of the present. If Cato failed, a greater than Cato would not have succeeded. Influences were at work in Rome which individual genius was powerless to resist. The ascendancy of reason over force, though it were the noblest form that force has ever assumed, was step by step establishing itself; and no stronger proof of its victory could be found than that Cato, despite of himself, in his old age studied Greek. We may smile at the deep-rooted prejudice which confounded the pure glories of the old Greek intellect with the degraded puerilities of its unworthy heirs; but though Cato could not fathom the mind of Greece, he thoroughly understood the mind of Rome, and unavailing as his efforts were, they were based on an unerring comprehension of the true issues at stake. He saw that Greece was unmaking Rome; but he did not see that mankind required that Rome should be unmade. It is the glory of men like Scipio and Ennius, that their large-heartedness opened their eyes, and carried their vision beyond the horizon of the Roman world into that dimly-seen but ever expanding country in which all men are brethren. But if from the loftiest point of view their wide humanity obtains the palm, no less does Cato's pure patriotism shed undying radiance over his rugged form, throwing into relief its massive grandeur, and ennobling rather than hiding its deformities.

We have said that Cato's name is associated with the contempt of letters. This is no doubt the fact. Nevertheless, Cato was by far the most original writer that Rome ever produced. He is the one man on whose vigorous mind no outside influence had ever told. Brought up at his father's farm at Tusculum, he spent his boyhood amid the labours of the plough. Hard work and scant fare toughened his sinews, and service under Fabius in the Hannibalic war knit his frame into that iron strength of endurance, which, until his death, never betrayed one sign of weakness or fatigue. A saying of his is preserved—"Man's life is like iron; if you use it, it wears away, if not, the rust eats it. So, too, men are worn away by hard work; but if they do no work, rest and sloth do more injury than exercise." On this maxim his own life was formed. In the intervals of warfare, he did not relax himself in the pleasures of the city, but went home to his plough, and improved his small estate. Being soon well known for his shrewd wit and ready speech, he rose into eminence at the bar; and in due time obtained all the offices of state. In every position he made many enemies, but most notably in his capacity of censor. No man was oftener brought to trial. Forty-four times he spoke in his own defence, and every time he was acquitted. As Livy says, he wore his enemies out, partly by accusing them, but still more by the pertinacity with which he defended himself. Besides private causes, he spoke in many important public trials and on many great questions of state: Cicero had seen or heard of 150 orations by him; in one passage he implies that he had delivered as many as Lysias, i.e. 230. Even now we have traces, certainly of 80, and perhaps of 13 more. His military life, which had been a series of successes, was brought to a close 190 B.C., and from this time until his death, he appears as an able civil administrator, and a vehement opponent of lax manners. In the year of his censorship (184 B.C.) Plautus died. The tremendous vigour with which he wielded the powers of this post stirred up a swarm of enemies. His tongue became more bitter than ever….

Here, at 85 years of age, the man stands before us. We see the crisp, erect figure, bristling with aggressive vigour, the coarse, red hair, the keen, grey eyes, piercingly fixed on his opponent's face, and reading at a glance the knavery he sought to hide; we hear the rasping voice, launching its dry, cutting sarcasms one after another, each pointed with its sting of truth; and we can well believe that the dislike was intense, which could make an enemy provoke the terrible armoury of the old censor's eloquence.

As has been said, he so far relaxed the severity of his principles as to learn the Greek language and study the great writers. Nor could he help feeling attracted to minds like those of Thucydides and Demosthenes, in sagacity and earnestness so congenial to his own. Nevertheless, his originality is in nothing more conspicuously shown than in his method of treating history. He struck a line of inquiry in which he found no successor. The Origines, if it had remained, would undoubtedly have been a priceless storehouse of facts about the antiquities of Italy. Cato had an enlarged view of history. It was not his object to magnify Rome at the expense of the other Italian nationalities, but rather to show how she had become their greatest, because their truest, representative. The divisions of the work itself will show the importance he attached to an investigation of their early annals. We learn from Nepos that the first book comprised the regal period; the second and third were devoted to the origin and primitive history of each Italian state; the fourth and fifth embraced the Punic wars; the last two carried the history as far as the Praetorship of Servius Galba, Cato's bold accusation of whom he inserted in the body of the work. Nepos, echoing the superficial canons of his age, characterises the whole as showing industry and diligence, but no learning whatever. The early myths were somewhat indistinctly treated. His account of the Trojan immigration seems to have been the basis of that of Virgil, though the latter refashioned it in several points. His computation of dates, though apparently exact, betrays a mind indifferent to the importance of chronology. The fragments of the next two books are more copious. He tells us that Gaul, then as now, pursued with the greatest zeal military glory and eloquence in debate. His notice of the Ligurians is far from complimentary. "They are all deceitful, having lost every record of their real origin, and being illiterate, they invent false stories and have no recollection of the truth." He hazards a few etymologies, which, as usual among Roman writers, are quite unscientific. Graviscae is so called from its unhealthy climate (gravis aer), Praeneste from its conspicuous position on the mountains (quia montibus praestet). A few scattered remarks on the food in use among different tribes are all that remain of an interesting department which might have thrown much light on ethnological questions. In the fourth book, Cato expresses his disinclination to repeat the trivial details of the Pontifical tables, the fluctuations of the market, the eclipses of the sun and moon, &c. He narrates with enthusiasm the self-devotion of the tribune Caedicius, who in the first Punic war offered his life with that of 400 soldiers to engage the enemy's attention while the general was executing a necessary manœuvre. "The Laconian Leonides, who did the same thing at Thermopylae, has been rewarded by all Greece for his virtue and patriotism with all the emblems of the highest possible distinction—monuments, statues, epigrams, histories; his deed met with their warmest gratitude. But little praise has been given to our tribune in comparison with his merits, though he acted just as the Spartan did, and saved the fortunes of the State." As to the title Origines, it is possible, as Nepos suggests, that it arose from the first three books having been published separately. It certainly is not applicable to the entire treatise, which was a genuine history on the same scale as that of Thucydides, and no mere piece of antiquarian research. He adhered to truth in so far as he did not insert fictitious speeches; he conformed to Greek taste so far as to insert his own. One striking feature in the later books was his omission of names. No Roman worthy is named in them. The reason of this it is impossible to discover. Fear of giving offence would be the last motive to weigh with him. Dislike of the great aristocratic houses into whose hands the supreme power was steadily being concentrated, is a more probable cause; but it is hardly sufficient of itself. Perhaps the omission was a mere whim of the historian. Though this work obtained great and deserved renown, yet, like its author, it was praised rather than imitated. Livy scarcely ever uses it; and it is likely that, before the end of the first century A.D. the speeches were published separately, and were the only part at all generally read. Pliny, Gellius, and Servius, are the authors who seem most to have studied it; of these Pliny was most influenced by it. The Natural History, especially in its general discussions, strongly reminds us of Cato.

Of the talents of Cato as an orator something will be said in the next section. His miscellaneous writings, though none of them are historical, may be noticed here. Quintilian attests the many-sidedness of his genius: "M. Cato was at once a first-rate general, a philosopher, an orator, the founder of history, the most thorough master of law and agriculture." The work on agriculture we have the good fortune to possess; or rather a redaction of it, slightly modernized and incomplete, but nevertheless containing a large amount of really genuine matter. Nothing can be more characteristic than the opening sentences. We give a translation, following as closely as possible the form of the original: "It is at times worth while to gain wealth by commerce, were it not so perilous; or by usury, were it equally honourable. Our ancestors, however, held, and fixed by law, that a thief should be condemned to restore double, a usurer quadruple. We thus see how much worse they thought it for a citizen to be a moneylender than a thief. Again, when they praised a good man, they praised him as a good farmer, or a good husbandman. Men so praised were held to have received the highest praise. For myself, I think well of a merchant as a man of energy and studious of gain; but it is a career, as I have said, that leads to danger and ruin. But farming makes the bravest men, and the sturdiest soldiers, and of all sources of gain is the surest, the most natural, and the least invidious, and those who are busy with it have the fewest bad thoughts." The sententious and dogmatic style of this preamble cannot fail to strike the reader; but it is surpassed by many of the precepts which follow. Some of these contain pithy maxims of shrewd sense, e.g. "Patrem familias vendacem non emacem esse oportet." "Ita aedifices ne villa fundum quaerat, neve fundus villam." The Virgilian prescription, "Laudato ingentia rura: exiguam colito," is said to be drawn from Cato, though it does not exist in our copies. The treatment throughout is unmethodical. If left by the author in its present form it represents the daily jotting down of thoughts on the subject as they occurred to him.

In two points the writer appears in an unfavourable light—in his love of gain, and in his brutal treatment of his slaves. With him farming is no mere amusement, nor again is it mere labour. It is primarily and throughout a means of making money, and indeed the only strictly honourable one. However, Cato so far relaxed the strictness of this theory that he became "an ardent speculator in slaves, buildings, artificial lakes, and pleasure-grounds, the mercantile spirit being too strong within him to rest satisfied with the modest returns of his estate." As regarded slaves, the law considered them as chattels, and he followed the law to the letter. If a slave grew old or sick he was to be sold. If the weather hindered work he was to take his sleep then, and work double time afterwards. "In order to prevent combinations among his slaves, their master assiduously sowed enmities and jealousies between them. He bought young slaves in their name, whom they were forced to train and sell for his benefit. When supping with his guests, if any dish was carelessly dressed, he rose from table, and with a leathern thong administered the requisite number of lashes with his own hand." So pitilessly severe was he, that a slave who had concluded a purchase without his leave, hung himself to avoid his master's wrath. These incidents, some told by Plutarch, others by Cato himself, show the inhuman side of Roman life, and make it less hard to understand their treatment of vanquished kings and generals. For the other sex Cato had little respect. Women, he says, should be kept at home, and no Chaldaean or soothsayer be allowed to see them. Women are always running after superstition. His directions about the steward's wife are as follows. They are addressed to the steward:—"Let her fear you. Take care that she is not luxurious. Let her see as little as possible of her neighbours or any other female friends; let her never invite them to your house; let her never go out to supper, nor be fond of taking walks. Let her never offer sacrifice; let her know that the master sacrifices for the whole family; let her be neat herself, and keep the country-house neat." Several sacrificial details are given in the treatise. We observe that they are all of the rustic order; the master alone is to attend the city ceremonial. Among the different industries recommended, we are struck by the absence of wheat cultivation. The vineyard and the pasture chiefly engage attention, though herbs and green produce are carefully treated. The reason is to be sought in the special nature of the treatise. It is not a general survey of agriculture, but merely a handbook of cultivation for a particular farm, that of Manlius or Mallius, and so probably unfit for wheat crops. Other subjects, as medicine, are touched on. But his prescriptions are confined to the rudest simples, to wholesome and restorative diet, and to incantations. These last have equal value assigned them with rational remedies. Whether Cato trusted them may well be doubted. He probably gave in such cases the popular charm-cure, simply from not having a better method of his own to propose.

Another series of treatises were those addressed to his son, in one of which, that on medicine, he charitably accuses the Greeks of an attempt to kill all barbarians by their treatment, and specially the Romans, whom they stigmatise by the insulting name of Opici. "I forbid you, once for all, to have any dealings with physicians." Owing to their temperate and active life, the Romans had for more than five hundred years existed without a physician within their walls. Cato's hostility to the profession, therefore, if not justifiable, was at least natural. He subjoins a list of simples by which he kept himself and his wife alive and in health to a green old age. And observing that there are countless signs of death, and none of health, he gives the chief marks by which a man apparently in health may be noted as unsound. In another treatise, on farming, also dedicated to his son, for whom he entertained a warm affection, and over whose education he sedulously watched, he says,—"Buy not what you want, but what you must have; what you don't want is dear at a farthing, and what you lack borrow from yourself." Such is the homely wisdom which gained for Cato the proud title of Sapiens, by which, says Cicero, he was familiarly known. Other original works, the product of his vast experience, were the treatise on eloquence, of which the pith is the following: "Rem tene: verba sequentur;" "Take care of the sense: the sounds will take care of themselves." We can well believe that this excellent maxim ruled his own conduct. The art of war formed the subject of another volume; in this, too, he had abundant and faithful experience. An attempt to investigate the principles of jurisprudence, which was carried out more fully by his son, and a short carmen de moribus or essay on conduct, completed the list of his paternal instructions. Why this was styled carmen is not known. Some think it was written in Saturnian verse, others that its concise and oracular formulas suggested the name, since carmen in old Latin is by no means confined to verse. It is from this that the account of the low estimation of poets in the early Republic is taken. Besides these regular treatises we hear of letters, and άποΦθέγμᾳ̑τᾳ̑ or pithy sayings, put together like those of Bacon from divers sources. In after times Cato's own apophthegms were collected for publication, and under the name of Catonis dicta, were much admired in the Middle Ages. We see that Cato's literary labours were encyclopædic….