Marcus Cato

Much the same traits are revealed in the man’s oratory. It was at once graceful and powerful, pleasant and compelling, facetious and severe, sententious and belligerent. So Plato says of Socrates[*](Symposium, p. 215.) that from the outside he impressed his associates as rude, uncouth, and wanton; but within he was full of earnestness, and of matters that moved his hearers to tears and wrung their hearts.

Wherefore I know not what they can mean who say that Cato’s oratory most resembled that of Lysias. However, such questions must be decided by those who are more capable than I am of discerning the traits of Roman oratory, and I shall now record a few of his famous sayings, believing that men’s characters are revealed much more by their speech than, as some think, by their looks.