Cato the Elder, their famous descendant, at the beginning of his career in Rome, was regarded as a novus homo (new man), and the feeling of his unsatisfactory position, working along with the belief of his inherent superiority, aggravated and drove his ambition.

His ancestors for three generations had been named Marcus Porcius, and it was said by Plutarch that at first he was known by the additional cognomen Priscus, but was afterwards called Cato—a word (from Latin catus) indicating 'common sense that is the result of natural wisdom combined with experience'.

Near this land was a small hut owned by Manius Curius Dentatus, whose military feats and rigidly simple character were remembered and admired in the neighborhood.

In the area surrounding Cato's Sabine farm were the lands of Lucius Valerius Flaccus, a young nobleman of significant influence and high patrician family.

They were popular by acts of generosity and charming manners, and they collected material wealth from their clients and followers, as well as intellectual prowess provided by their education, taste in the fine arts, and knowledge of literature.

Nonetheless, the less fortunate nobles, envious of this exclusive oligarchy and critical of the decadence and luxury, formed a party with a more conservative and ascetic ideology.

Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Scipio Africanus and his family, and Titus Quinctius Flamininus may be taken as representative of the new culture; Cato's friends, Fabius and Flaccus, were the leading men in the faction defending the old plainness.

In 205 BC, Cato was appointed quaestor, and in the next year (204) he entered upon the duties of his place of work, following Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major to Sicily.

When Scipio, after much opposition, obtained from the Senate permission to transport armed forces from Sicily to Africa, Cato and Gaius Laelius were appointed to escort the baggage ships.

[15] Cato left his place of duty after the dispute with Scipio about the latter's alleged extravagance, and returning to Rome, condemned the uneconomical activities of his general to the senate.

Livy says nothing of Cato's interference in this matter, but mentions the bitterness with which Fabius blamed Scipio for corrupting military discipline and for having illegally left his province to take the town of Locri.

[18] In 199 BC Cato was elected aedile, and with his colleague Helvius, restored the Plebeian Games, and gave upon that occasion a banquet in honour of Jupiter.

He reduced official operating costs, walked his trips with a single assistant, and placed his own frugality in contrast with the opulence of provincial magistrates.

In 215, at the height of the Second Punic War and at the request of the tribune of the plebs Gaius Oppius, the Oppian Law (Lex Oppia), intended to restrict the luxury and extravagance of women in order to save money for the public treasury, was passed.

The law specified that no woman could own more than half an ounce of gold, nor wear a garment of several colours, nor drive a carriage with horses closer than a mile to the city, except to attend public celebrations of religious rites.

The details of the campaign, as related by Livy,[23] and illustrated by incidental anecdotes by Plutarch, are full of horror and they make clear that Cato reduced Hispania Citerior to subjection with great speed and little mercy.

We read of multitudes who put themselves to death because of the dishonour after they had been stripped of all their arms, of extensive massacres of surrendered troops, and the frequent harsh plunders.

In the course of the year 194 BC, he returned to Rome and was rewarded with the honour of a Roman triumph, at which he exhibited an extraordinary quantity of captured brass, silver, and gold, both coin and ingots.

In 191, he, along with his old associate Lucius Valerius Flaccus, were appointed as lieutenant-generals (legatus) under the consul Manius Acilius Glabrio, who had been dispatched to Greece to oppose the invasion of Antiochus III the Great, King of the Seleucid Empire.

By a daring and difficult advance, he surprised and defeated a body of the enemy's Aetolian auxiliaries, who were posted upon the Callidromus, the highest peak of the range of Mount Oeta.

[31] Then, coming to the aid of forces under Flaccus's command, he began a sudden descent from the hills above the royal camp, and the panic caused by this unexpected movement promptly turned the day in favor of the Romans, and signaled the end of the Seleucid invasion of Greece.

[33] During the campaign in Greece under Glabrio, Plutarch's account (albeit rejected by historian Wilhelm Drumann) suggests that before the Battle of Thermopylae, Cato was chosen to prevent Corinth, Patrae, and Aegium from siding with Antiochus.

[35] His reputation as a soldier was now established; henceforth he preferred to serve the state at home, scrutinizing the conduct of the candidates for public honours and of generals in the field.

Cato's enmity dated from the African campaign when he quarreled with Scipio for his lavish distribution of the spoil among the troops, and his general luxury and extravagance.

He revised with unsparing severity the lists of senators and knights, ejecting from either order the men whom he judged unworthy of membership, either on moral grounds or on the basis of their lack of the prescribed means.

Some accounts state that the basilica was burned by the conflagration of Publius Clodius Pulcher's funeral pyre after his death in 52 BC, and was probably never rebuilt.

He was struck with horror, along with many other Romans, at the licence of the Bacchanalian mysteries, which he attributed to the influence of Greek manners, and he vehemently urged the dismissal of the philosophers Carneades, Diogenes, and Critolaus, who had come as ambassadors from Athens, on account of what he believed was the dangerous nature of their ideas.

He obtained the release of Polybius, the historian, and his fellow prisoners, contemptuously asking whether the Senate had nothing more important to do than discuss whether a few Greeks should die at Rome or in their own land.

The mission was unsuccessful and the commissioners returned home, but Cato was so struck by Carthage's growing prosperity that he was convinced that the security of Rome depended on its annihilation.

Cato is portrayed by Vittorio Gassman in Scipione detto anche l'Africano, a 1971 Italian film starring Marcello Mastroianni as Scipio Africanus.