Comparison of Aristides and Marcus Cato

Man has no higher capacity than that for conducting cities and states, as is generally admitted. But the ability to conduct a household enters in no small degree into this higher political capacity, as most believe. For the city is but an organised sum total of households, and has public vigour only as its citizens prosper in their private lives. When Lycurgus banished both silver and gold from Sparta,

and introduced there a coinage of iron that had been ruined by fire, he did not set his fellow citizens free from the duty of domestic economy. He merely removed the swollen and feverish wantonness of wealth, and so provided that all alike might have an abundance of the necessary and useful things of life. He did this because, better than any other ancient legislator, he foresaw that the helpless, homeless, and poverty-stricken citizen was a greater menace to the commonwealth than one who was rich and ostentatious.

Cato, then, was no whit less efficient in the conduct of his household than in that of the city. He not only increased his own substance, but became a recognized teacher of domestic economy and agriculture for others, and compiled many useful precepts on these subjects. Aristides, on the other hand, was so poor as to bring even his righteousness into disrepute, as ruining a household, reducing a man to beggary, and profiting everybody rather than its possessor.

And yet Hesiod[*](Works and Days, 309.) has much to say by way of exhorting us to righteousness allied with domestic economy, and abuses idleness as a source of injustice; Homer also says well:—

1. Labour I never liked,
2. Nor household thrift, which breeds good children.
3. But ships equipped with oars were ever my delight,
4. Battles and polished javelins and arrows,

Oil, as physicians tell us, is very beneficial when externally applied, though very injurious when used internally. But the righteous is not so. He is not helpful to others, while heedless of himself and his family. Indeed, the poverty of Aristides would seem to have been a blemish on his political career, if, as most writers state, he had not foresight enough to leave his poor daughters a marriage portion,[*](Aristides, xxvii. 1.) or even the cost of his own burial.

And so it fell out that the family of Cato furnished Rome with praetors and consuls down to the fourth generation, for his grandsons, and their sons after them, filled the highest offices of state. Whereas, though Aristides was foremost of the Greeks, the abject poverty of his descendants forced some to ply a fortune-teller’s trade,[*](Aristides, xxvii. 3.) and others, for very want, to solicit the public bounty, while it robbed them all of every ambition to excel, or even to be worthy of their great ancestor.