BiblioVault - Books about Cato, Marcus Porcius

Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose

From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription

Enrica Sciarrino

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

In the past decade, classical scholarship has been polarized by questions concerning the establishment of a literary tradition in Latin in the late third century BCE. On one side of the divide, there are those scholars who insist on the primacy of literature as a hermeneutical category and who, consequently, maintain a focus on poetic texts and their relationship with Hellenistic precedents. On the other side are those who prefer to rely on a pool of Latin terms as pointers to larger sociohistorical dynamics, and who see the emergence of Latin literature as one expression of these dynamics. Through a methodologically innovative exploration of the interlacing of genre and form with practice, Enrica Sciarrinobridges the gap between these two scholarly camps and develops new areas of inquiry by rescuing from the margins of scholarship the earliest remnants of Latin prose associated with Cato the Censor—a “new man” and one of the most influential politicians of his day. By systematically analyzing poetic and prose texts in relation to one another and to diverse authorial subjectivities, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose: From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription offers an entirely new perspective on the formation of Latin literature, challenges current assumptions about Roman cultural hierarchies, and sheds light on the social value attributed to different types of writing practices in mid-Republican Rome.

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Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion

Julie Ellison

University of Chicago Press, 1999

How did the public expression of feeling become central to political culture in England and the United States? In this ambitious revisionist account of a much expanded "Age of Sensibility," Julie Ellison traces the evolution of the politics of emotion on both sides of the Atlantic from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

Early popular dramas of this time, Ellison shows, linked male stoicism with sentimentality through portrayals of stoic figures whose civic sacrifices bring other men to tears. Later works develop a different model of sensibility, drawing their objects of sympathy from other races and classes—Native Americans, African slaves, servants. Only by examining these texts in light of the complex masculine tradition of stoic sentimentality, Ellison argues, can one interpret women's roles in the culture of sensibility.

In her conclusion, Ellison offers "a short history of liberal guilt," exploring the enduring link between male stoicism and male sensibility in political and cultural life from the late seventeenth century to today.

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Testimonia. Origines

Cato

Harvard University Press, 2023

Ancient Rome’s original archconservative.

M. Porcius Cato (234–149 BC), one of the best-known figures of the middle Roman Republic, remains legendary for his political and military career, especially his staunch opposition to Carthage; his modest way of life; his integrity of character and austere morality; his literary works, composed in a style at once sophisticated and down-to-earth; his pithy sayings; and his drive to define and to champion Roman national character and traditions in the face of challenges from Greek culture. Cato’s legend derived to no small degree from his own distinctive and compelling self-presentation, which established a model later developed and elaborated by Cicero and by subsequent literary and historical authors for centuries to come.

This volume and its companion (LCL 552) join the Loeb edition of Cato’s only extant work, On Agriculture (LCL 283), by supplying all testimonia about, and all fragments by or attributed to Cato. Highlights are Origines, the first historical work attested in Latin, a history of Rome from its founding to the onset of the first Punic War, as well as the origins of major Italian cities; his orations, regarded as the beginning of Roman oratory; To His Son Marcus, which inaugurated a Roman tradition of didactic pieces addressed by fathers to their sons; Military Matters; the Poem on Morals; letters; commentaries on civil law; and memorable sayings.

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