He has glorified himself by recording that when men were detected in any fault, they would excuse themselves by saying that they must be pardoned if they did anything amiss, for they were not Catos:  and that those who endeavoured clumsily to imitate his proceedings were called left-handed Catos.  Also he states that the Senate looked to him in great emergencies as men in a storm look to the pilot, and that when he was not present, they frequently postponed their more important business.  This indeed is confirmed by other writers:  for he had great influence in Rome on account of his virtuous life, his eloquence, and his great age.

XX.  He was a good father and a good husband, and was in his private life an economist of no ordinary kind, as he did not despise money-making or regard it as unworthy of his abilities.  For this reason I think I ought to relate how well he managed his private affairs.  He married a wife who was well born, though not rich; for he thought that though all classes might possess equally good sense, yet that a woman of noble birth would be more ashamed of doing wrong, and therefore more likely to encourage her husband to do right.  He used to say that a man who beat his wife or his children laid sacrilegious hands on the holiest of things.  He also said that he had rather be a good husband than a great statesman, and that what he especially admired in Sokrates the Philosopher was his patience and kindness in bearing with his ill-tempered wife and his stupid children.  When his son was born, he thought that nothing except the most important business of state ought to prevent his being present while his wife washed the child and wrapped it in swaddling clothes.  His wife suckled the child herself; nay, she often gave her breast to the children of her slaves, and so taught them to have a brotherly regard for her own son.

As soon as he was able to learn, Cato himself taught him his letters, although he had a clever slave named Chilon, who taught many children to read.  He himself declares that he did not wish a slave to reprove his son or pull his ears because he was slow at learning.  He taught the boy to read, and instructed him also in the Roman law and in bodily exercises; not confining himself to teaching him to hurl the javelin, to fight in complete armour, and to ride, but also to use his fists in boxing, to endure the extremes of heat and cold, and to swim through swiftly-flowing and eddying rivers.  He tells us that he himself wrote books on history with his own hands in large letters, that the boy might start in life with a useful knowledge of what his forefathers had done, and he was as careful not to use an indecenr expression before his son as he would have been before the vestal virgins.  He never bathed with him; which indeed seems to have been customary at Rome, as even fathers-in-law scrupled to bathe naked before their sons-in-law.  In later times, however, the Romans learned from the Greeks the habit of bathing naked, and have taught the Greeks to do so even in the presence of women.