234 B.C.E.–149 B.C.E.

Historian

Politics.

Cato was the author of the first surviving Latin prose work, and the first Roman historian to write a history of Rome in Latin. He was born at Tusculum near modern Frascati in the hills around Rome in 234 B.C.E., and spent his early years on a small farm in the country where he worked in the fields alongside the farm laborers. At seventeen, he joined the Roman army and served in the long war against the Carthaginian Hannibal which Rome did not win until 202 B.C.E. He settled in Rome about 208 B.C.E. and began his political career four years later, reaching the coveted post of consul in 195 B.C.E. He remained in many ways a small-town Italian, loyal to his native customs and shocked at the "philhellenism"—passion and imitation of everything Greek—that...