" Cato put out of the Senate also, one Manilius, who was in great towardness to have been made
Consul the next year following, only because he kissed his wife too lovingly in the day time,
and before his daughter: and reproving him for it, he told him, his wife never kissed him, but
when it thundered." *
When he was in power, he put down luxury and feasting. He made his wife suckle not only her
own children, but also those of his slaves, in order that, having been nourished by the same
milk, they might love his children. When his slaves were too old to work, he sold them
remorselessly. He insisted that his slaves should always be either working or sleeping. He
encouraged his slaves to quarrel with each other, for "he could not abide that they should be
friends." When a slave had committed a grave fault, he would call in his other slaves, and
induce them to condemn the delinquent to death; he would then carry out the sentence with his
own hands in the presence of the survivors.
The contrast between Cato and Carneades was very complete: the one brutal through a morality
that was too strict and too traditional, the other ignoble through a morality that was too lax and
too much infected with the social dissolution of the Hellenistic world.
" Marcus Cato, even from the beginning that young men began to study the Greek tongue, and
that it grew in estimation in Rome, did dislike of it: fearing lest the youth of Rome that were
desirous of learning and eloquence, would utterly give over the honour and glory of arms....
So he openly found fault one day in the Senate, that the Ambassadors were long there, and had
no dispatch: considering also they were cunning men, and could easily persuade what they
would. And if there were no other respect, this only might persuade them to determine some
answer for them, and to send them home again to their schools, to teach their children of
Greece, and to let alone the children of Rome, that they might learn to obey the laws and the
Senate, as they had done before. Now he spake thus to the Senate, not of any private ill will or
malice he bare to Carneades, as some men thought: but because he generally hated philosophy."
â€
The Athenians, in Cato's view, were a lesser breed without the law; it did not matter if they
were degraded by the shallow sophistics of intellectuals, but the Roman youth must be kept
puritanical, im-
* North's Plutarch, Lives, Marcus Cato.â
€
Ib.