XV.  Of Cato’s warlike exploits these which we have related are the most remarkable.  In his political life he seems to have thought one of his most important duties to be the impeachment and prosecution of those whom he thought to be bad citizens.  He himself attacked many persons, and aided and encouraged others in doing so, a notable example being his conduct towards Scipio in the affair of Petillius.  However, as Scipio was a man of noble birth and great spirit, he treated the attack made upon him with contempt, and Cato, perceiving that he could not succeed in getting him condemned to death, desisted from annoying him.  But he was active in obtaining the condemnation of Scipio’s brother Lucius, who was adjudged to pay a heavy fine, which was beyond his means to provide, so that he had nearly been cast into prison, but was set free by the intervention of the tribunes of the people.

It is related of him that he once met in the forum a young man who had just succeeded in obtaining the disfranchisement, by an action at law, of an enemy of his father, who was dead.  Cato took him by the hand and said, “Thus ought men to honour their parents when they die, not with the blood of lambs and kids, but with the tears and condemnation of their enemies.”  He himself is said to have been the defendant in nearly fifty actions, the last of which was tried when he was eighty-six years of age:  on which occasion he uttered that well-known saying, that it was hard for a man who had lived in one generation to be obliged to defend himself before another.  And this was not the end of his litigations, for four years later, when at the age of ninety, he impeached Servius Galba.  Indeed his life, like that of Nestor, seems to havo reached over three generations.  He, as had been related, was a bitter political opponent of Scipio Africanus the Great, and he continued his enmity to Scipio’s adopted son, called Scipio the Younger, who was really the son of AEmilius Paulus, the conqueror of Perseus and the Macedonians.

XVI.  Ten years after his consulship, Cato became a candidate for the office of censor.  This is the highest dignity to which a Roman can aspire, and may be regarded as the goal of political life.  Its powers are very extensive, and it is especially concerned with the regulation of public morals, and the mode of life of the citizens of Rome.  The Romans thought that none of a man’s actions, his marriage, his family, his mode of life, his very entertainments, ought to be uncontrolled, and managed according to his own will and pleasure.  They considered that a man’s true character was much more clearly shown by his private life than by his public behaviour, and were wont to choose two citizens, one a patrician, and the other a plebeian, whose duty it was to watch over the morals of the people, and check any tendency to licentiousness or extravagance.  These officers they called censors, and they had power to deprive a Roman knight of his horse, and to expel men of loose