SOURCE: Gian Biagio Conte, "Cato," in Latin Literature: A History, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp. 85-91.

[Conte 's authoritative text on Latin literature, first published in Italian in 1987, provides a brief summary of Cato's life and work. He emphasizes the significance of the Origines, the De agricultura, and Cato's attitude to Greek culture, which Conte contends to have been less hostile than usually described.]

Life

Marcus Porcius Cato was born in 234 at Tusculum, near what is today Frascati, to a plebeian family of prosperous farmers. He fought in the war against Hannibal, and in 214 he was military tribune in Sicily. The aristocrat Lucius Valerius Flaccus aided him in his political career. In 204 Cato was quaestor, accompanying Scipio to Sicily and Africa, in 199 plebeian aedile, and in 198 praetor in charge of governing Sardinia. In 195 the homo novus Cato was consul with Valerius Flaccus. While in office he opposed revoking the lex Oppia, a sumptuary law that limited the expenditures particularly of women from wealthy families. Spain was assigned as his province, where he acted harshly towards the Spanish tribes and enhanced his own reputation for efficiency and frugality.

In 191 B.C., as military tribune with Valerius Flaccus under the command of the consul Acilius Glabrio, he fought at Thermopylae and carried out an important diplomatic mission at Athens and other Greek cities. From 190 onwards he was prosecutor in a series of political trials against members of the dominant faction of the Scipios. In 184 he was censor along with Valerius Flaccus. In that office he presented himself as the champion of the ancient Roman virtues against moral degeneration and against the spread of a tendency towards individualism that was influenced in part by Hellenistic culture. In addition, and in parallel to his polemic against the extravagance of private citizens, Cato glorified the wealth and power of the state, as must have been evident to all: as censor, he promoted a vast program of public construction. The censorship of Cato remained famous on account of the intransigence with which he performed his duties, giving vent to his moral rigor. Afterwards, too, his attitude won him many enemies, and he was often involved in trials, as accuser as well as defendant. In 181 he opposed the revoking of another sumptuary law, the lex Orchia, and in 169 supported the lex Voconia, which limited women's rights of inheritance. In 167 he opposed the war against Rhodes (fragments remain of his Oratio pro Rhodiensibus, which Cato himself had reported in his Origines): before the Third Punic War he, along with a part of the ruling class, may have been thinking of the possibility of a balance among the Mediterranean powers, and for this reason he may have opposed ending Rhodian independence and favored the independence of Macedon.

In 155 Cato spoke against the philosophers whom Athens had sent to Rome as ambassadors …, and he secured their expulsion. Probably his conservative nature caused him to fear that they, in particular Carneades, with his antilogies on justice, might lead educated Romans to entertain doubts about the validity of the traditional ethics. In 153, on a visit to Carthage, which after its defeat in the Second Punic War was beginning to flourish again, Cato became persuaded that Rome's survival depended on the destruction of its ancient rival. He therefore urged the Third Punic War, but, dying in 149, did not live to see the destruction of the enemy city.

Works

Speeches: Cicero knew more than 150 speeches of Cato. Today we know the titles and the circumstances of about 80 of them, about 20 of which go back to the year of his censorship. We also possess various fragments.

Origines, a historical work in seven books, written in old age; some fragments survive.

A treatise De Agri Cultura, which is preserved, the earliest Latin prose text that has come down to us entire; it consists of a preface and 170 short chapters.

Carmen de Moribus, probably a work in prose; the term carmen would seem to indicate rhythmic prose.

Apophthegmata, a collection of memorable sayings or anecdotes that went under Cato's name, some of which are cited by such authors as Cicero or Plutarch.

Sources

Plutarch's Life of Cato; Cornelius Nepos's Life of Cato; Cicero's Cato Maior de Senectute; sections of Livy, books 29, 32, 34, 36, 38-39, 43, and 45.

1. The Beginnings of Senatorial Historiography

Cato wrote the Origines in old age, thus starting historiography in Latin; he scorned and derided Roman annals in Greek, such as those of Aulus Postumius Albinus…. From its beginning, as we saw, Roman historical writing had felt the effects of being produced primarily by members of the senatorial elite, even though often not by the politically most eminent figures. The case of Cato, a politician of the first rank who wrote history, was fated to remain practically unique in Latin culture; autobiographical commentarii such as those of Sulla or Caesar are evidently different.

Its being produced by members of the ruling class, which sees in it a dignified way of filling its own otium, lends to the nascent Roman historiography a robust political engagement. In Cato's historical work much space is given to his own concerns over the rampant moral corruption and to his personal battles, waged in the name of public solidarity, against the emergence of notable figures with marked tendencies towards individualism and the cult of personality; some such individuals were found in the Scipionic circle, chief among them Africanus Maior. For this reason Cato allowed his political polemics a place in the Origines and reported his own speeches, for example, those in behalf of the Rhodians or against Sulpicius Galba; indeed, it has been thought, and it is not unlikely, that a part of Cato's historical work was a sort of self-celebration. Moreover, he tended to privilege contemporary history, to which he dedicated about half (three books out of seven) of a work that reached far back, to the very origins of Rome.

The first book of the Origines was devoted to the founding of Rome, the second and third to the origins of the Italian cities. The title of the work properly applied only to these first three books. The fourth book told of the First Punic War, the fifth of the Second, the sixth and seventh of events down to the praetorship of Servius Sulpicius Galba, in 152 B.C. The proportions of the individual book grew as the work approached the present: the last two books covered a period of less than fifty years and were a detailed contemporary history.

In attempting to kill at birth the charismatic cult of the great personalities, Cato worked out a conception of Roman history that emphasized above all the gradual formation of the state and its institutions over the generations and the centuries, a conception that would be partially taken up by Cicero in the De Re Publica: the creation of the Roman state was seen as the collective work of the populus Romanus around the senatorial ruling class. Thus Cato, probably breaking with the traditional annals often composed by members of the noble families, did not give the names of commanders, neither Romans nor foreigners; Hannibal himself, as we see from a preserved fragment, was called dictator Carthaginiensium. The novus homo from Tusculum probably aimed at dimming the renown of the gentes in favor of the res publica. In their stead Cato seems to have brought into the light of history the names of rather obscure persons, heroes of less elevated rank, who precisely for this reason deserved to be hailed as symbols of the collective heroism of the Roman people; thus Cato dedicated a certain amount of space to the account of the valiant deeds of a certain Quintus Caedicius.

In other directions, the Origines showed a notable broadening of horizons. Perhaps the origins of the novus homo Cato outside the city helped give him a lively interest, shown in books 2 and 3, in the history of the Italian populations, emphasizing their contributions to the greatness of Rome and to the creation of the traditional ethical model. He boasted, for example, of the moral uprightness of his own people, the Sabines, and their parsimony, which were due in the first place to their alleged Spartan origins and strengthened by their strong relation to the land. But Cato also showed an almost ethnographic interest in foreign peoples, for instance, in certain customs of the African and Spanish peoples; the particulars that he furnished probably went back to direct observations, since in the course of his political and military career he had been in direct contact with these peoples.

2. The Treatise on Agriculture

The De Agri Cultura has no place for literary ornaments or for philosophical reflections on the farmer's life and fate of the sort found in a large number of the subsequent Latin treatises on agriculture; the work consists mostly of a series of precepts laid down in dry, schematic fashion, but sometimes very effectively. The tone of the sententious precepts must have been especially dear to Cato, since it shaped such works as the Praecepta ad Filium (on various subjects, but the title and structure are uncertain) and the Carmen de Moribus, a collection of lapidary sayings on moral subjects. For grasping the purpose and intended audience of the De Agri Cultura the proem is important, in which Cato shows that agriculture is more than anything an acquisitive activity; various social considerations make it preferable to others, for instance, to lending money at interest, which is immoral, or to trading by sea, which is too risky. Agriculture is more secure and more honorable; moreover, it is by farmwork that good citizens and good soldiers are formed.

The type of farm that Cato describes probably represents the passage from the small family holding to the much vaster estates that were based upon the concentration and intense exploitation of slaves, whom overseas conquests had begun to make available to the Romans in large numbers. Cato, the homo novus who had absorbed the aristocracy's values, strives to set the aristocracy's domination upon sturdier economic and ideological bases. In the period when farming by slaves was expanding, he demonstrates to the nobility and the sectors dominated by them how to find great profits in those landholdings that were the traditional inheritance of the ruling class, without needing to resort to more dynamic, but also more dangerous, forms of investment—which, to be sure, Cato did not eschew: we know of an involvement of his in maritime commerce. Remaining attached to the land, the ruling class remained attached also to the ethical-political values which formed the ideological foundation of their power.

The De Agri Cultura is a collection of general precepts on how the landowner should behave. In the role of pater familias he, in accordance with the patriarchal tradition, should be present on his own estate as much as possible, in order to supervise the punctual carrying out of all tasks. The style is spare and concise but enlivened by bits of rustic folk wisdom, which find ready expression in figurative proverbial formulations. The patina of archaism contributes to the effect: alliteration, homoeoteleuton, and repetition are found in abundance in the De Agri Cultura. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that one is dealing with a kindhearted, patriarchal agricultural civilization. The brutality of slave exploitation is manifest in several passages: Cato recommends selling, like scrap metal, a slave who is old or ill and thus incapable of work. It should also be kept in mind that in the De Agri Cultura farming is regarded as an enterprise conducted on a vast scale: the landowner ought to have huge storehouses in which to keep the produce while waiting for prices to rise, and he ought to buy as little as possible and sell as much as possible; that is, he ought to have the outlook of a producer, not a consumer. Hence one can infer the salient features of the Catonian ethic, which are the same ones that the late Republic would come to regard as making up the mos maiorum: virtues such as parsimonia, duritia, industrial, the disdain for riches, and resistance to the seductiveness of pleasure show how Catonian severity is not the practical wisdom of an ingenuous, uncorrupted peasant, but represents rather the ideological implication of a genuinely practical requirement: deriving economic advantage from farming, or rather increasing the productivity of the slave labor employed in it.

3. Cato's Political-Cultural Battle

Cato's oratorical style, as far as we can gather from the fragments of his speeches, was lively and full of movement, certainly much less reserved and archaizing than the style of the treatise on agriculture. A famous maxim, transmitted as part of the Praecepta ad Filium, seems to express concisely Cato's notions about rhetoric: rem tene, verba sequentur ("have the contents clear, and the words will come of themselves"), an ostentatious rejection of ars, the Greek rhetorical techne, which is also attested in several anecdotes about the Censor. This rejection of stylistic elaboration needs to be interpreted in the light of Cato's unceasing polemic against the penetration of Greek morals and culture, in their various forms, at Rome. In fact Cato was not so ignorant of Greek literature as he is made out to have been by the traditional account, according to which only in advanced age did he approach the study of that language. The De Agri Cultura avails itself frequently of Greek agricultural science; the influence of the Greek historian Timaeus upon the Origines can perhaps be felt; and even in the speeches Greek rhetorical technique is not so much absent as cleverly concealed, so as to give the audience the impression of lively immediacy and not the scent of midnight oil.

Personally imbued with Greek culture, Cato fought not so much that culture itself as certain of its enlightened features, in particular its criticism of traditional social values and relations, which had been the inheritance of sophistic thought. The enlightened elements of Greek culture may have been for Cato a corrosive agent working upon the ethical-political basis of the Republic and the aristocratic regime. These concerns probably explain the successive expulsions of Greek philosophers and intellectuals from Rome, beginning perhaps in 173. At the same time there was the risk that imitating certain Hellenizing customs could endanger the unity and internal cohesion of the aristocracy by elevating the status of charismatic personalities above the others. From this point of view one can understand Cato's battle in favor of the sumptuary laws, which limited consumption by the wealthy aristocrats and also the pomp and ostentation on the part of individual families. Moreover, by trying to prevent inherited family wealth from being dissipated in such displays of status, the sumptuary laws were also concerned to prevent excessive economic imbalances within the ruling class, which were dangerous since they could undermine its stability.

In his literary work Cato probably aimed at creating a culture that could maintain firm roots in the Roman tradition but also accept Greek contributions, yet without openly propagandizing on their behalf. We know that Cato, who had fought Scipio Africanus, was on good terms with him; this notice is nearly a presage of the destiny of Latin culture. Through the intellectuals of Aemilianus's circle Greek culture, penetrating into Rome, would henceforth go beyond the bounds that the Roman aristocracy wanted to set for it. It would allow a little rationalism to enter, perhaps more than Cato would have tolerated, but still it would stay within the limits of political-social conservatism. It would lead to a new synthesis of the mos maiorum with the mitigated forces of enlightenment, which in its turn would become the basis of Cicero's ethical and political thought.

4. Literary Success

Cato the Censor: the name freezes him in his function as censor and declares his transformation from a person into a symbol, a symbol of the rigid custodian of tradition and conservatism. And as a figure who summarizes in himself the fundamental virtues of the Rome of the past—austerity, parsimony, devotion to work, moral rigor—he was idealized by Cicero in the De Re Publica and then especially in the famous dialogue Cato Maior de Senectute. Cicero, however, attempting to restore unity to the ideological contrasts of the past, mitigated the harsher aspects of his character and the more intransigent features of his aversion to the phil-Hellenic nobility.

The figure of Cato would be honored with various biographies, those of Cornelius Nepos (age of Caesar) and Plutarch (first-second centuries A.D.) and the one contained in the anonymous work De Viris Illustribus (fourth century A.D.).

Livy appreciated his gifts but did not refrain from criticizing the intransigent uprightness of a man who seemed to him "a ferocious mastiff set upon the nobility." The highest estimation of his qualities as a writer came from the archaizers of the second century, Gellius, Fronto, and the emperor Hadrian, the last two putting him ahead of Cicero himself. But after the fourth century the firsthand knowledge of his works beings to disappear (a collection of moral maxims in verse circulated under his name, the socalled Disticha or Dicta Catonis). Only the De Agri Cultura would survive in its entirety, on account of its technical nature and utility.