He was chosen CENSOR, in opposition to a number of powerful candidates, A.U.C. 568.  He was the adviser of the third Punic war.  The question occasioned several warm debates in the senate.  Cato always insisted on the demolition of Carthage:  DELENDA EST CARTHAGO.  He preferred an accusation against Servius Sulpicius Galba on a charge of peculation in Spain, A.U.C. 603; and, though he was then ninety years old, according to Livy (Cicero says he lived to eighty-five), he conducted the business with so much vigour, that Galba, in order to excite compassion, produced his children before the senate, and by that artifice escaped a sentence of condemnation.  Quintilian gives the following character of Cato the censor:  His genius, like his learning, was universal:  historian, orator, lawyer, he cultivated the three branches; and what he undertook, he touched with a master-hand.  The science of husbandry was also his.  Great as his attainments were, they were acquired in camps, amidst the din of arms; and in the city of Rome, amidst scenes of contention, and the uproar of civil discord.  Though he lived in rude unpolished times, he applied himself, when far advanced in the vale of years, to the study of Greek literature, and thereby gave a signal proof that even in old age the willing mind may be enriched with new stores of knowledge. Marcus Censorius Cato, idem orator, idem historiae conditor, idem juris, idem rerum rusticarum peritissimus fuit.  Inter tot opera militiae, tantas domi contentions, ridi saeculo literas Graecas, aetate jam declinata didicit, ut esset hominibus documento, ea quoque percipi posse, quae senes concupissent. Lib. xii. cap. 11.

[f] Lucius Licinius Crassus is often mentioned, and always to his advantage, by Cicero DE CLARIS ORATORIBUS.  He was born, as appears in that treatise (sect. 161), during the consulship of Laelius and Caepio, A.U.C. 614:  he was contemporary with Antonius, the celebrated orator, and father of Antony the triumvir.  Crassus was about four and thirty years older than Cicero.  When Philippus the consul shewed himself disposed to encroach on the privileges of the senate, and, in the presence of that body, offered indignities to Licinius Crassus, the orator, as Cicero informs us, broke out in a blaze of eloquence against that violent outrage, concluding with that remarkable sentence:  He shall not be to me A CONSUL, to whom I am not A SENATOR. Non es mihi consul, quia nec ego tibi senator sum. See Valerius Maximus, lib. xli. cap. 2.  Cicero has given his oratorical character.  He possessed a wonderful dignity of language, could enliven his discourse with wit and pleasantry, never descending to vulgar humour; refined, and polished, without a tincture of scurrility.  He preserved the true Latin idiom; in his selection of words accurate, with apparent facility; no stiffness, no affectation appeared; in his train of reasoning always clear and methodical; and, when the cause hinged upon a question