Cato the Censor

Roman administrator and orator

• Born: 234 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Tusculum, Latium (now in Italy)
• Died: 149 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Through his public example, the offices he served, and his writings, Cato advocated an ideal of a powerful, prosperous state populated with self-reliant, active citizens.

Early Life

Marcus Porcius Cato (KAY-toh) was born in Tusculum, about fifteen miles outside Rome. Little is known about his family except that his father, Marcus, and great-grandfather Cato were well-respected soldiers. The name Cato, meaning “accomplished,” was given to a novus homo (new man) who came to public attention by his own achievements rather than by connection to a distinguished family. Young Cato spent his youth on an estate in the Sabine territory, where he learned farming, viticulture, and other agricultural skills.

When Cato was seventeen, the Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy and defeated several Roman armies, inflicting huge losses. More than fifty thousand Romans died at the Battle of Cannae in 216 b.c.e. Cato enlisted soon after Cannae and served with distinction for more than a decade. He fought in major battles in Sicily and Italy, including the siege of Syracuse and the defeat of Hasdrubal (Hannibal’s brother) at Metaurus in 207. By the time Hannibal fled Italy and Carthage surrendered, around 201, Cato’s personality and career had been shaped. He had proved heroic and fearless in combat. He carried an implacable hatred for Carthage. He displayed leadership, being elected a military tribune responsible for the soldiers’ welfare in and out of battle.

Cato now entered public life and held a series of elective offices. In 204 he became quaestor, the official charged with watching over public expenditures. In this capacity he accompanied the army of Scipio Africanus in its attack on Carthaginian soil. In 199 Cato became a plebeian aedile, one who administered public buildings, streets, temples, and the marketplace. A year later, Cato was one of four praetors chosen; praetor was a more significant post that included the power to dispense justice and to command an army. Cato spent his praetorship as governor of Sardinia, where he gained a reputation for honest and frugal administration.

Important patrons as well as ordinary voters were attracted to Cato and readily supported his advancing career. The Greek historian Plutarch described Cato at this time as a man with a ruddy complexion, gray eyes, and unusual public speaking skills. Cato’s quick mind—his knack for striking analogies and turns of phrase—and fearless attitude made him a successful orator, valued as an ally and feared as an opponent.

Life’s Work

Cato’s election as consul in 195 began a period of forty-six years during which he exerted significant influence in both domestic politics and foreign affairs. Cato’s leadership coincided with a period of profound change in Roman manners at home and in Roman policies toward other world powers. By the time of Cato’s death, Rome had defeated its Imperial rivals, conquering Greece and Macedonia and destroying Carthage, burning the city to the ground. Military and political supremacy brought Rome economic supremacy, and great wealth poured into a country where simplicity and austerity were traditional. Wealth became the basis of a leisured culture that looked to Greece for social values—a culture more intellectual, aesthetic, and self-indulgent than traditional Rome. None of these changes occurred quickly or without dispute. Cato participated in the major controversies of the era, speculating on whether Rome could dominate other nations without exploiting them, whether Romans could maintain a work ethic amid unprecedented luxury, and whether Greek attitudes would supplant Roman ones.

Cato served as one of the two consuls appointed annually. Consuls were the senior Roman magistrates who executed the senate’s will in political and military affairs. Soon after he took office, Cato went to Spain to lead the effort to subdue several tribes in rebellion since 197. Drilling inexperienced troops rigorously, Cato prepared them so effectively that they routed a veteran Spanish force at Emporiae. Cato showed mercy to the survivors and successfully induced other rebel groups and cities to surrender. On his return to a triumph in Rome, Cato boasted that he had captured more towns than he had spent days in Spain. Soon afterward he married a senator’s daughter, a sign that a novus homo was now acceptable to the aristocracy.

Four years later, Cato went to Greece as military tribune with the army advancing against Antiochus, Rome’s chief threat in Greece and Hannibal’s protector. The army’s march was blocked at the pass of Thermopylae (where three centuries before, Spartan troops had held off invading Persians) until Cato led a cohort over rocks and crags to take the enemy rearguard by surprise. Cato claimed as much credit as Glabrio, the Roman commander, for the successful campaign. For years afterward, the two were political rivals.

In 189, Cato ran for the office of censor but was defeated. A censor ranked just below consul: He oversaw public morals, carried out the census, selected new members for the senate, expelled unfit senators, and conducted religious services. Previously, Cato had involved himself in important public debates about morality and ethics, such as the controversies surrounding the Oppian law and the Junian law. In the first, Cato argued for continuing a ban on ostentatious displays of wealth; in the second, he opposed repealing interest-rate limits. Already he was known as a champion of austerity and self-discipline in financial matters, both for the individual and for the state.

At the next election for censor in 184, Cato triumphed. Immediately he implemented the stern, rigorous platform on which he had campaigned. Though his program involved him in lawsuits for years to come, his supporters regarded his censorship as a landmark effort to reverse a perceived laxness in public standards. Cato and his cocensor expelled seven senators for unfitness, imposed a heavy tax on luxury goods, demolished private buildings encroaching on government property, fined those who neglected farms or vineyards, and renegotiated state contracts with private suppliers to reach better deals. Though contemporaries stressed the stringency of his actions, it is important to note that he executed his duties meticulously. He was careful to respect the letter as well as the spirit of the laws. For Cato, the primary goal was to see Rome thrive and prosper. Unlike many aristocratic Romans, Cato believed that public prosperity did not result from exploiting individuals—and he also believed that individuals ought not to thrive at public expense.

Certain individuals resented Cato’s stern censorship and became enemies. Before his death he fought at least forty-four indictments and suits filed against him; none is recorded as successful. Each accusation became an occasion for Cato to display his well-honed oratorical skills, thereby leaving a rich rhetorical legacy for later generations. Cato took the unusual and self-confident step of publishing his speeches.

Though never elected censor again, Cato used his position in the senate to defend high standards and accountability for public officials. He prosecuted a provincial governor in 171 for manipulating corn prices; twenty years later, while in his eighties, Cato spoke against a special envoy and another governor who used their posts for profit. In 169, Cato led the supporters of the Voconian law to keep inheritances concentrated rather than wastefully fragmented. In the same year, he argued against a triumph for a general whose troops complained of cruel treatment. In 153, Cato supported a proposal to prevent a consul from serving a second term, lest a man find public office too profitable to do without.

Cato exercised leadership in the senate through his oratory and among the educated class through his writings. Some scholars call Cato the father of Latin prose literature because of the volume and influence of his writing. The major works, which exist only in fragments (except for the treatise on agriculture), are Ad filium, a compendium of precepts on practical issues written for his son; De re militari, a manual of military training; De agricultura (c. 160 b.c.e.; On Agriculture, 1913), a how-to guide for managing a prosperous farm; and Origines (168-149 b.c.e.), a seven-book history of Rome. They are didactic works, displaying common sense rather than imagination. They suggest, however, that Cato possessed a reflective side to complement his pragmatic side: He addressed what to do and why it was worth doing. His literary works embody the moral vision of his censorship and his oratory: Knowledgeable, self-reliant individuals best lead the austere, just state.

In foreign policy, Cato seems to have advocated the restrained display of Rome’s unchallenged military power. After victory in the Third Macedonian War (172-167), Cato sided with those eager to see Macedonia a free ally rather than a subjugated client state. He consistently argued that smaller competitor nations and reluctant allies be treated leniently.

The one exception to Cato’s usual moderation made him legendary. All of his life, Cato feared the resurgence of Carthage. Leading a senatorial delegation to Africa in 152, he saw signs there of economic and military recovery. Henceforward, Cato argued that Rome must destroy the ancient rival before it grew powerful. Carthago delenda est (“Carthage must be destroyed”) became the injunction repeatedly brought to the senate. War broke out in 149; Carthage was razed in 146. Cato died soon after the declaration of war, relieved that, this time, war’s devastation would occur on enemy soil.

Significance

Because Cato the Censor’s insistence that Carthage be destroyed dominated his last years, it has often been seen as the climactic event of his career. Without a doubt Cato was influential in securing war, and without a doubt that war changed the course of Roman history by extending Rome’s dominion into northern Africa. Remembering Cato as a spokesman of steely, merciless national self-interest was easy for subsequent generations. It was—and is—too narrow an estimate of the man.

Cato’s memorable reign as censor was also easy to recall, so easy that it gave the name by which history calls him. Rome reigned supreme for nearly six hundred years after Cato’s death. Its life span as a great state encompassed extensive conquest, civil war, the transition from Republic to Empire, the acquisition of incalculable wealth, and profound social change. In times of crisis, many citizens remembered Cato. He was an emblem of personal self-control and public austerity. He knew the difference between public good and private welfare, between national prosperity and enervating materialism, between commonsensical good and rationalized failings. In subsequent neoclassical periods—Italy in the sixteenth century, England in the late seventeenth century, France and the United States in the late eighteenth century—Cato the Censor was a model of political leadership. He represented the highest civic virtue, the leader who rallied citizens by example and by eloquence to identify the public good with wise, orderly, and restrained government.

As dramatic as Cato’s censorship was in combating obvious abuses, his time in office was one brief episode in a career. One must remember his lifetime of service to a civic ideal. He was not like the Old Testament prophets, men who lived obscurely until some crisis called them from obscurity to lead their people from darkness into light. His was not a lonely voice crying in the wilderness. He provided constant leadership in articulating a vision of the good state that, for the span of his life, most Romans held in common.

Bibliography

Astin, Alan E. Cato the Censor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. This study analyzes Cato as soldier, politician, orator, and writer. Astin admires his subject’s rugged individualism and active public service. Astin disputes the image of Cato as a puritanical traditionalist and asserts that he is important for much more than his final act of destroying Carthage.

Livy, Titus. The History of Rome from Its Foundations. Translated by Audrey de Sélincourt. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. The section of Livy’s landmark history called “Rome and the Mediterranean” describes Rome’s competition with Macedonia after the Second Punic War with Carthage. It covers the period from 210 to 167, during which Cato was consul, censor, and senator. Working from Cato’s own writings, now lost, Livy presents vivid accounts of Cato’s campaign in Spain, his support for the Oppian law, and his term as censor.

Plutarch. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Translated by John Dryden. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Writing as a moralist, rather than a biographer, Plutarch analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Cato’s character. The moralist praises Cato for old-fashioned virtues of temperance, public service, and frank speaking but faults him for avariciousness. By selling aging slaves and urging others to farm for profit, Plutarch charges, Cato dehumanized the social fabric he tried to save.

Scullard, H. H. Roman Politics, 220-150 B.C. 1951. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. This scholarly study documents the competition for political power between the son of an aristocratic family, such as Scipio Africanus, and the novus homo, such as Cato. Scullard provides detailed information about Cato’s duties as censor, consul, and senator. He makes clear who supported Cato’s policies, who opposed them, and why contemporaries took one side or the other.