Marcus Cato

Meanwhile Manius also, down below, threw his whole force forward into the pass and stormed the enemy’s fortifications. Antiochus, being hit in the mouth with a stone which knocked his teeth out, wheeled his horse about for very anguish. Then his army gave way everywhere before the Roman onset.

Although flight for them meant impracticable roads and helpless wanderings, while deep marshes and steep cliffs threatened those who slipped and fell, still, they poured along through the pass into these, crowding one another on in their fear of the enemy’s deadly weapons, and so destroyed themselves. Cato, who was ever rather generous, it would seem, in his own praises, and did not hesitate to follow up his great achievements with boastings equally great, is very pompous in his account of this exploit.

He says that those who saw him at that time pursuing the enemy and hewing them down, felt convinced that Cato owed less to Rome than Rome to Cato; also that the consul Manius himself, flushed with victory, threw his arms about him, still flushed with his own victory, and embraced him a long time, crying out for joy that neither he himself nor the whole Roman people could fittingly requite Cato for his benefactions.

Immediately after the battle he was sent to Rome as the messenger of his own triumphs. He had a fair passage to Brundisium, crossed the peninsula from there to Tarentum in a single day, travelled thence four days more, and on the fifth day after landing reached Rome, where he was the first to announce the victory. He filled the city full of joy and sacrifices, and the people with the proud feeling that it was able to master every land and sea.

These are perhaps the most remarkable features of Cato’s military career. In political life, he seems to have regarded the impeachment and conviction of malefactors as a department worthy of his most zealous efforts. For he brought many prosecutions himself, assisted others in bringing theirs, and even instigated some to begin prosecutions, as for instance Petillius against Scipio.

That great man, however, trampled the accusations against him under foot, as the splendour of his house and his own inherent loftiness of spirit prompted him to do, and Cato, unable to secure his capital conviction, dropped the case. But he so co-operated with the accusers of Lucius, Scipio’s brother, as to have him condemned to pay a large fine to the state. This debt Lucius was unable to meet, and was therefore liable to imprisonment. Indeed, it was only at the intercession of the tribunes that he was at last set free.

We are also told that a certain young man, who had got a verdict of civil outlawry against an enemy of his dead father, was passing through the forum on the conclusion of the case, and met Cato, who greeted him and said: These are the sacrifices we must bring to the spirits of our parents; not lambs and kids, but the condemnations and tears of their enemies. However, he himself did not go unscathed, but wherever in his political career he gave his enemies the slightest handle, he was all the while suffering prosecutions and running risk of condemnation.