United States or Bermuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


When he was informed that his fleet was still entire, and that Cato was gone to Africa with a considerable body of men which he had collected after their flight, he lamented to his friends his great error, in suffering himself to be forced into an engagement on land, and making no use of those forces, in which he was confessedly stronger; nor even taking care to fight near his fleet, that, in case of his meeting with a check on land, he might have been supplied from the sea with another army, capable of making head against the enemy.

Cato held his ground, and stormed at Caesar till he was led off by the police, raving and gesticulating. The law was then passed, and a resolution besides that every senator should take an oath to obey it.

Hence the necessity of their being written in verse, and unfortunately for the French, from the weakness of their language, in rhymes. And for the same reason, Cato the Stoic, expiring at Utica, rhymes masculine and feminine at Paris; and fetches his last breath at London, in most harmmonious and correct blank verse.

Seven years later they gave a stern and perhaps righteous example of their severity in the condemnation of Caius Porcius Cato. The accused when consul had obtained Macedonia as his province, and had waged a frontier war with the Scordisci, which ended in the annihilation of his forces and his own narrow escape from the field of battle.

They made him no answer, but went weeping out of the chamber. Then the sword being brought in by a little boy, Cato took it, drew it out, and looked at it; and when he saw the point was good, "Now," said he, "I am master of myself;" and laying down the sword, he took his book again, which, it is related, he read twice over.

Berkeley was in Addison's box at the first performance of "Cato," and tasted of the author's champagne and burgundy there, and listened with curious delight to the mingled applause and hisses that greeted Mr. Pope's prologue. A little later Berkeley went to Italy as the travelling tutor, the bear-leader, of the son of Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. In Italy he passed some four enchanted years.

Reforms in the Military Service Of a kindred character was the proposal, which Cato made in the senate, to remedy the decline of the burgess-cavalry by the institution of four hundred new equestrian stalls.

When Scipio expressed his dissatisfaction with this, Cato sarcastically answered, that Rome would be greatest if those of high birth and station, and those of plebeian origin like himself, would only contend with one another in virtue.

"Now," said Cato to his wife and sister, "had we contracted an alliance with Pompey, we had been allied to this dishonor too;" and this they could not but acknowledge, and allow his judgment of what was right and fitting to have been wiser and better than theirs.

Bibulus, Caesar's colleague, finding it was to no purpose to oppose his bills, but that he was in danger of being murdered in the forum, as also was Cato, confined himself to his house, and there let the remaining part of his consulship expire.