[19]
Marcus Porcius Cato was born in the year 95, and was thus five years
younger than Caesar and eleven years younger than Cicero. He was the
great-grandson, as was said above, of the stern rugged censor who hated
Greek, preferred the teaching of the plough-tail and the Twelve Tables to
the philosophy of Aristotle, disbelieved in progress, and held by the
maxims of his father--the last, he of the Romans of the old type. The
young Marcus affected to take his ancestor for a pattern. He resembled him
as nearly as a modern Anglican monk resembles St. Francis or St. Bernard.
He could reproduce the form, but it was the form with the life gone out of
it. He was immeasurably superior to the men around him. He was virtuous,
if it be virtue to abstain from sin. He never lied. No one ever suspected
him of dishonesty or corruption. But his excellences were not of the
retiring sort. He carried them written upon him in letters for all to
read, as a testimony to a wicked generation. His opinions were as pedantic
as his life was abstemious, and no one was permitted to differ from him
without being held guilty rather of a crime than of a mistake. He was an
aristocratic pedant, to whom the living forces of humanity seemed but
irrational impulses of which he and such as he were the appointed school-
masters. To such a temperament a man of genius is instinctively hateful.
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