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On which Tullus crying out aloud, "O Pompey, you have deceived us," gave his advice to send off a deputation to Caesar. Favonius, a man of fair character, except that he used to suppose his own petulance and abusive talking a copy of Cato's straight-forwardness, bade Pompey stamp upon the ground, and call forth the forces he had promised.
Where the sensual appetites are repressed, whatever may be the theory of life, the affections are pretty sure to be strong, unless they are nipped by some such process as is undergone by a monk. Cato's resignation of his fruitful wife to a childless friend, revolting as it is to our sense, betokens not so much brutality in him as coarseness of the conjugal relations at Rome.
While among these marriage had for long been regarded as a burden which people took upon them at the best in the public interest, we now encounter even in Cato and those who shared Cato's sentiments the maxim to which Polybius a century before traced the decay of Hellas, that it is the duty of a citizen to keep great wealth together and therefore not to beget too many children.
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years; But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amid the war of elements, The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds! Cato's Soliloquy Men are not punished for their sins, but by them. Expression is necessary to life.
But presently bethinking himself, or put in mind by his friends, that Cato's principal and only aim being to free his country from all usurpation, if he were master of such great forces, as soon as ever Caesar should be conquered, he would certainly call upon Pompey, also, to lay down his arms, and be subject to the laws, he changed his mind, and though he had already mentioned it to Cato, nevertheless made Bibulus admiral.
Sempronius Gracchus. But the influence of Cato's house had become extinct with its first founder. The elder son, an amiable man and an accomplished jurist, had not out-lived his father; the second still survived, but seems to have inherited little of the fighting qualities of the terrible censor.
"Who e're has money may securely sail, On all things with all-mighty gold prevail. May Danae wed, or rival amo'rous Jove, And make her father pandar to his love. May be a poet, preacher, lawyer too: And bawling win the cause he does not know: And up to Cato's fame for wisdom grow.
The titles of Cato's speeches show that he played a great part in the deliberations of the senate concerning foreign affairs, but as his fighting days were over and he was unfitted for diplomacy, we have little explicit evidence of his activity in this direction. At the end of the third Macedonian war he successfully opposed the annexation of Macedonia.
If we develop Cato's methods but a little, if we admit a little more rigour and a little less discrimination, we get the dismal barrack-like system of the great plantations a barrack, or perhaps a prison, nominally ruled by a governor who might live a hundred miles away, really under the control of an anxious and terrified slave, who divided his fears between his master who wanted money and his servants who wanted freedom.
Cato's great historical and antiquarian work, "The Origins," was a history of Italy and Rome from the earliest times to the latest events which occurred in his own lifetime. It was a work of great research and originality, but only brief fragments of it remain.
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