Cato the Elder ended speeches demanding Carthage be destroyed
Late in life, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder reportedly closed speeches with the same blunt line: Carthage must be destroyed. The stern farmer-soldier also wrote the oldest surviving Latin prose, a practical handbook on farming, rituals and recipes, and made himself the scourge of Greek-style luxury in Rome.
Cato was born around 234 BC in Tusculum, into a plebeian family known for soldiering; a great-grandfather was rewarded for losing five horses beneath him in battle. No ancestor had held Roman office, so he entered politics as a new man, driven by a sense of inferior status and superior ability. Orphaned young, he grew up running a small Sabine farm, inspired by a neighbour's old hut once owned by the famously frugal general Manius Curius Dentatus. His name Cato suggested practical wisdom born of experience, and in old age he was known simply as the Wise.
He fought through the Second Punic War, serving under Quintus Fabius Maximus and helping win the Battle of the Metaurus in 207 BC, where Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal was killed. Between campaigns he worked beside his labourers in plain clothes and argued neighbours' cases, sharpening his oratory. A patrician neighbour, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, spotted his talent and steered him to Rome.
As quaestor under Scipio Africanus he protested the general's lax discipline and spending; Scipio retorted that he would account for victories, not money. Cato rose to consul in 195 BC alongside Flaccus, failed to prevent repeal of a law limiting women's luxuries, then won a triumph for his campaigns in Hispania. He fought against Antiochus III at Thermopylae, and his attacks eventually drove Scipio into retirement.
Elected censor in 184 BC, the only Cato ever to hold that office, he taxed luxuries, funded public works and defended ancestral customs against Hellenistic influence. His Origines was the first history of Rome written in Latin, though only fragments survive. He died in 149 BC, aged about 85, and his great-grandson became known as Cato the Younger.
Source: Cato the Elder
