But Cato was engaged in making head against corruptions more deeply-seated and more widely-prevalent than these. The pride of conquest, the infection of foreign manners, and the dissolution of national ideas and prejudices had made formidable inroads upon the narrow simplicity of the ancient Romans. Both the Etruscans and the Greeks were imbued with a more refined and artificial culture; and with their higher education and enhanced power of persuasion, both these peoples were now exerting a powerful influence upon the minds of their conquerors. Cato conceived it to be his special mission to resist this invasion. It was in the discharge of the censorship that his character as a maintainer of primitive discipline was most strongly exhibited, and hence that he derived the title 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 from their want of the prescribed means, or from notorious crimes or vices. The expulsion of the great imperator L. Quinctius Flamininus was a splendid example of. his rigid justice. He regulated with pedantic strictness the expenses of the table, and also of dress and personal ornament, especially of the women. He contended gallantly, but even more ineffectually, against bribery at the public elections; and though he gained little success in the crusades to which he thus religiously devoted himself, it may be allowed that the example of the great censor did actually raise and maintain a higher spirit of public morality among his contemporaries, aud gave encouragement and strength to many struggling consciences even in later generations.

From the date of his censorship (184) to his death in 149, Cato held no public office at home or abroad; but continued to the last to distinguish himself in the senate as the persistent opponent of the new ideas and the men who supported them. He was struck with horror, along with many other Romans of the graver stamp, at the licence of the Bacchanalian mysteries (181), which he attributed to the fatal influence of Grecian manners; and he vehemently urged the dismissal of the sophists who came as ambassadors from Athens. It was not till his eightieth year that he consented to learn even the rudiments of the Greek language. 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. It is hard to say, was the remark of Livy, whether he attacked them most or they him; for they too did not fail to retaliate, and when he was required to defend himself in his eighty-first year against a capital charge, he was heard to complain of having to plead his cause before men of other minds and of another generation. Almost his last public act was to urge his countrymen to the third Punic war and the destruction of Carthage. Rome, he constantly declared, could never be safe while so great a city lay so near her ,∙ aud he plucked, on one occasion, from under his robe the fresh figs which, he said, had been gathered but three days before on the coast which fronted the mouth of the Tiber, exclaiming again and again “Delenda est Carthago !”

The great principle of Cato’s life was to do everything by rule. With him 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. All his actions were measured, and every one assigned to its proper place and hour; he was a great economist of his time, and thereby enabled himself to get through a great variety of work, though it all lay within narrow limits. 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 deeper interest and indulge a warmer feeling in regard to his sons. It may be remarked, however, that among 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 in which Livy describes the character of Cato (Hist., xxxix. 40), there is no word of blame for the rigid discipline of his household.

During the course of his long and industrious life, Cato contributed to the formation of the Latin language by at leaat two important works, the treatise De Re Rustica, which is supposed to be at least substantially his own, and the Origines, of which last only fragments remain. The one is a miscellaneous collection of rules of good husbandry, conveying much curious information on the domestic habits of the Romans of his age, the other seems to have been a more methodical compilation of Roman history from the foundation of the city to his own time. The fragments which remain of it furnish us with information which is often interesting, but sometimes perplexing, and it is observed that Livy seems to have made no use of the work of which he could not have been ignorant. Of the numerous speeches of Cato but few passages have been preserved. His collection of Åpophthegmata — he was himself curt, caustic, and sententious in conversation—is wholly lost.

We possess the life of Cato as written by Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, and Aurelius Victor. Many particulars of his career and character are to be gathered from Livy and Cicero. (c. μ.)

CATO, Μ. Porcius (commonly distinguished from his great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, by the title of Uticensis, from the place of his death and the renown attending upon it),- furnishes a remarkable specimen of the effect of Hellenic training upon the hard and narrow but determined spirit of the old Latin race. While he inherited from his illustrious ancestor, and from the general discipline of his family through many generations, a sour and severe temper, a pedantic adherence to form and usage, aud an utter lack of sympathy with any temper or habits alien from his own, his feelings had been deepened, if not expanded, by the study of the Greek philosophy. As a devoted follower of the Stoic teaching he had attained to very lofty principles, and made them, with almost undeviating consistency, the rule of his life and conduct. He became a fanatic in the pursuit of holiness and pureness of living, in the highest sense in which such graces could be acquired by a pagan, with a view to himself and his own perfection only, but with no love of man and no faith in Providence. He waged a brave but hopeless war against the evil tendencies of his age; but he attached to himself no party, gave strength to no cause, effected no good in his generation, and at the last critical moment betrayed his trust to humanity by fleeing from immediate evil by an unreflecting suicide. But his aims were, for the times in which he lived, generous and noble, and his career well deserves to be studied by succeeding generations. It is only in a very slight outline that it can be here presented.

Cato was born in the year 95 b.c., and on the death of his parents was brought up in the house of his uncle, Livius Drusus, who was just then beginning to incite the Italians to claim a share in the Roman franchise and its privileges. This was the commencement of the intestine troubles of the Republic, and the whole of Cato’s after-life was passed amidst domestic dissensions and civil wars. In his early years he expressed with striking boldness his disgust at the cruelties of Sulla. The priesthood of Apollo, to which he early consecrated himself, commended him to a life of rigid observances, and gave a great impulse to his fervid imagination. He learned the principles of the Stoics under a Greek teacher named Antipater, but his oratory in the Forum represented only the harsh, vehement, and caustic type of his Roman countrymen. After fighting in the ranks against Spartacus he became a military tribune, 67 b.c., and served a campaign in Macedonia. On his return he obtained the quaestorship, and distinguished himself for his zeal and integrity in the management of the public accounts, which recommended him for a provincial appointment in Asia. Again he acquitted himself with marked disinterestedness, and conceived a disgust equal to that of his great ancestor at the corruption of the public men with whom ho came in contact. He saw, however, 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 Pompeius. When the favour of the nobles gained him the tribuneship he exerted himself to convict Murena, one of their chief men, of bribery. Cicero, more pliant than himself, defended the culprit and obtained his acquittal; but Cioero was glad to avail himself of the firmness and stern justice of his recent adversary, when he urged the execution of Catilina’s associates. By this time Cato had become a great power in the state. Though possessed of little wealth and no family influence, his character for unflinching resolution in the cause of the ancient free state rendered him a valuable instrument in the hands of the nobles, perplexed as they were by the open hostility of Caesar and the oppressive patronage of Pompeius and Crassus. They were the better disposed, perhaps, to make use of him from the oddity of his unpractical temper, which made it the easier for them occasionally to disclaim and repudiate his assistance. They did not, indeed, find him so complacent a dupe as Cicero, nor did they treat him more faithfully. They thrust him into the snare prepared for him by the triumvirs, and let him be sent on a mission of gross injustice towards the king of Cyprus, which his pedantic loyalty to the state forbade him to refuse. He continued to struggle against the combined powers of the triumvirs in the city, and became involved in scenes of violence and riot, while desperately resisting the superior force of their turbulent adherents. He succeeded, however, in obtaining the praetorship in 54, in which office he strenuously exerted himself in the hopeless and thankless task of suppressing bribery, in which all parties were equally interested. Resolved not to stoop to such practices himself, he failed to attain the consulship; and he had made up his mind to retire from the arena of civic ambition when the civil war broke out in 49.

Cato had now persuaded himself that the sole chance for the free state lay in conceding an actual supremacy to Pompeius. Accordingly he did not scruple to support the unjust measures of the nobles against Caesar, which gave too fair a colour to the invasion of Italy. Cato was, indeed, little prepared for his commander’s flight across the Adriatic, and the surrender of the city, the government, and therewith the ostensible right, to the victorious rebel. Though he followed Pompeius to Epirus he found little satisfaction in his camp, where the fugitives were loudly threatening a bloody vengeance on their enemies. He excused himself from accompanying the forces of the Senate into Thessaly, by which he escaped being present at the battle of Pharsalia. After that great disaster, when his chief had abandoned his party and provided only for himself, he too felt at liberty to separate himself from the main body of the republicans, and conducted a small remnant of their forces into Africa. His march through the deserts of Libya gained him immortal glory. The struggle between the senate and Caesar was renewed in the African province. Cato shut himself up in Utica, and prepared to defend it as the most important post for communication with Italy. The battle of Thapsus, and the total rout of the senatorial forces, now threw upon him the whole weight of maintaining a cause which had become evidently desperate. The people of the place were anxious to make terms with the victor; but he would not trust the Roman citizens and soldiers to the clemency of the heir of Marius. Hitherto the civil wars of Rome had been continually marked by bloody retaliation; even if Caesar himself were disposed to mercy he might not be able to restrain the violence of his allies; and it was rumoured that terrible execution had been inflicted upon the captives of the last battle. Accordingly Cato determined to keep the gates closed till he had sent his adherents off by sea. While the embarkation was in progress his own demeanour continued calm and dignified. He supped familiarly with his friends, discoursing with them, as was his wont, on philosophical topics. On being informed that the last of the transports had left the port he cheerfully dismissed his attendants, and soon afterwards stabbed himself on his couch. Assistance was promptly offered, but he refused to avail himself of it, and so perished, much, it may be said, to his own fame, but with little advantage to his country (46 b.c.)

Cato had been reading, we are told, in his last moments Plato’s dialogue on The Immortality of the Soul, but it is not likely that the Stoic, with his keen and rigid logic, put much faith in the vague aspirations of the idealist of Academus. His own philosophy had taught him to act upon a narrow sense of immediate duty without regard to future contingencies. He conceived that he was placed in the world to play an active part, marked out by circumstances, 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. Caesar had slain the commonwealth; it never occurred to him that Caesar himself was mortal, and that the commonwealth might live again. Had he condescended to ask his life, the conquerors would have been proud to grant it; in two years more he might have been the survivor, for he was hardly yet fifty years of age, and might have formed a rallying point for the few devoted spirits, though few indeed they were, who really cared for freedom. Cato has left perhaps, from the circumstances of his life and of his death, the most marked name in the history of Roman philosophy, but he was a student, possibly a dreamer only, composed no works, and bequeathed to posterity no other instruction than that of his example. The memory of his career proved indeed fruitful. 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, for two centuries, till at last it became actually seated on the imperial throne in the person of Marcus Aurelius, (c. Μ.)

CATO, Dionysius, a name concerning which it is doubtful whether it be the name of the author, or merely part of the title, of the Dionysii Catonis Disticha de Moribus ad Filium, a small work, consisting of moral apophthegms, chiefly in hexameters. The name usually given is simply Cato, but Dionysius is added on the authority of a MS. declared by Scaliger to be of great antiquity. Other titles by which the book is known are Cato Moralissimus and Cato, Carmen de Moribus. The latter is also the title of a work by the famous Μ. Cato the elder; but extracts given from this by Aulus Gellius prove that it was in prose. The authorship of the Disticha has been ascribed to a large number of persons, including Seneca and Boetius, but in truth we know nothing of the writer, or of the exact time when it was written. The style is generally pure, and the existence of occasional corruptions argues little against its antiquity, since interpolations have certainly been made, and not improbably emendations attempted. The first mention of the work which we find is in a letter addressed to Valentinian; it is also referred to by Isidorus and Alcuin, and frequently by Chaucer. It appears to have had considerable reputation in the Middle Ages; and at the revival of learning it was studied and highly praised by such men as Scaliger and Erasmus. There have been numerous editions, in MS. and print, of which the best is that of Arntzenius, Amsterdam, 1754. In 1483 a translation was issued from Caxton’s press at Westminster.