Author Archive

Cato the Elder

Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Elder, 234–149 BCE) was a Roman statesman and moralist renowned for his fierce defense of traditional Roman values against Hellenistic influence. His sole surviving work, De Agri Cultura (On Farming), is a practical manual on estate management, while his lost Origines pioneered Latin historical writing. Cato’s intellectual legacy lies in his role as Rome’s first major Latin prose author and in the fragments of his speeches and writings that established the uncompromising moral rhetoric of the vir bonus .

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