SOURCE: William Davis Hooper, in an introduction to Marcus Porcius Cato on Agriculture, Marcus Terentius Varro on Agriculture, translated by William Davis Hooper, Harvard University Press, 1935, pp. ix-xxii.

In the introduction, excerpted below, to his translation of Cato's De agricultura, Hooper provides a synopsis of the work and a brief sketch of Cato's biography.

Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C., known also as the Orator, the Censor, Cato Major, or the Elder, to distinguish him from his great-grandson Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, was born of an old plebeian family at Tusculum, an ancient town of Latium, within ten miles of Rome. His youth was spent on his father's farm near Reate, in the Sabine country. Here he acquired early in life those qualities of simplicity, frugality, strict honesty, austerity, and patriotism for which he was regarded by later generations as the embodiment of the old Roman virtues. His...