Few men have left a stronger memory than Marcus Porcius Cato, called Cato Maior or Cato Censor. This Roman statesman and writer was born in Tusculum (today Frascati) in 234 BC. Elected quaestor in 204, aedile in 199, Cato was praetor in 198, consul in 195 and censor in 149. He has remained, through history, a constant reference, til our current times, when books, using his name as a confidence token, regularly prosper and denounce politics, slackened behaviors and bad influences.

Who was Cato ? Everyone knows the very famous anecdotes reported by Plutarch, Livy, Cornelius Nepos or Cicero. In their works, we can discover Cato’s physical characteristics. He has never been sick, was a blue eyed redhead man.
We also find there the details of his career and the books he wrote, the only one having arrived to us being his ‘De agricultura’ (agriculture treaty).

Everybody agrees : Cato lived in a very austere way, at least at the beginning of his cursus. For, having inherited from his father of a small land in Sabines’ territory - known as being in Italy the most rugged people - he has to till his land himself, trying every day to lower his expenses and get the best profit of his property. He was in effect incited to follow the example of this neighbor house, poorer than his, which has been Manius Curius’one : Curius has celebrated three triumphs and kept cultivating his small real estate.

He was reinforced in this attitude by Pythagorician Nearchos, later on, when he served in Tarentum in the army, under Fabius Maximus.

This influence may surprise, for Cato is usually known to be as a great belittler of Greek things. But we would thus forget that he learned Greek with Ennius in Sardinia, when he was governor, and that his Demosthenes and Thucydide readings developed his oratorical skills. Cato then appears to us more as a pragmatist than as a doctrinaire : he instinctively knows how to pick up what is useful, wherever it is.

But as an austere man, he was already, unfortunately, a personified anachronism, in these times when Rome, because of the extent of its ruling, was beginning to suffer many foreign influences and nearly to sink in the general weakening that it would live two centuries later. Cato’s rules of life could not thus be ignored, and they gave the man a true reputation.

We less know that he was a model husband, quality that he put above of being a good senator, even if he minded not to sink into a sentimentalism that he considered as harmful : « A man in love lives in an alien body », he wrote. So he would not kiss his wife, except on Iuppiter’s thundering evenings. He was also a remarkable father, who wrote for his son the first Roman encyclopaedia, lost today.

But these virtues would not have made him so famous if Cato has not showed three other characteristics...

(to be continued)

L. Rutilius Minervalis