Cato The Elder - Cato's Writings

Cato's Writings

Cato is famous not only as statesman or soldier, but also as author. He was a historian, the first Latin prose writer of any importance, and the first author of a history of Italy in Latin. Some have argued that if it were not for the impact of Cato's writing, Latin might have been supplanted by Greek as the literary language of Rome. He was also one of the very few early Latin authors who could claim Latin as a native language.

• His manual on running a farm (De Agri Cultura or "On Farming") is his only work that survives completely. It is a miscellaneous collection of rules of husbandry and management, including sidelights on country life in the 2nd century BC. Adopted by many as a textbook at a time when Romans were expanding their agricultural activities into larger scale and more specialized business ventures geared towards profitability, De Agri Cultura assumes a farm run and staffed by slaves. Cato advises on hiring gangs for the olive harvest, and was noted for his chilling advice on keeping slaves continually at work, on reducing rations for slaves when sick, and on selling slaves that are old or sickly. Intended for reading aloud and discussing with farm workers, De Agri Cultura was widely read and much quoted (sometimes inaccurately) by later Latin authors. The work also lists numerous recipes for pickles and simple cakes, many of which are collected in the book Roman Cookery.

• Probably Cato's most important work, Origines, in seven books, related the history of the Italian towns, with special attention to Rome, from their legendary or historical foundation to his own day. The text as a whole is lost, but substantial fragments survive in quotations by later authors.

• Under the Roman Empire a collection of about 150 political speeches by Cato existed. In these he pursued his political policies, fought verbal vendettas, and opposed what he saw as Rome's moral decline. Not even the titles of all of these speeches are now known, but fragments of some of them are preserved. The first to which we can give a date was On the Improper Election of the Aediles, delivered in 202 BC. The collection included several speeches from the year of his consulship, followed by a self-justifying retrospect On His Consulship and by numerous speeches delivered when he was Censor. It is not clear whether Cato allowed others to read and copy his written texts (in other words, whether he "published" the speeches) or whether their circulation in written form began after his death.

• On Soldiery was perhaps a practical manual comparable to On Farming.

• On the Law Relating to Priests and Augurs was a topic that would follow naturally from some of the sections of On Farming. Only one brief extract from this work is known.

• Praecepta ad Filium, "Maxims addressed to his son", from which the following extract survives:

In due course, my son Marcus, I shall explain what I found out in Athens about these Greeks, and demonstrate what advantage there may be in looking into their writings (while not taking them too seriously). They are a worthless and unruly tribe. Take this as a prophecy: when those folk give us their writings they will corrupt everything. All the more if they send their doctors here. They have sworn to kill all barbarians with medicine—and they charge a fee for doing it, in order to be trusted and to work more easily. They call us barbarians, too, of course, and Opici, a dirtier name than the rest. I have forbidden you to deal with doctors. —Quoted by Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 29.13–14.

• A history of Rome from which Cato taught his son to read.

• Carmen de moribus ("Poem on morality"), apparently in prose in spite of the title.

• A collection of Sayings, some of them translated from Greek.

The two surviving collections of proverbs known as Distichs of Cato and Monosticha Catonis, in hexameter verse, probably belong to the 4th century AD. They are not really by Cato.