Page:Cicero - de senectute (on old age) - Peabody 1884.djvu/27

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Marcus Porcius Cato Censorius was born at Tusculam in Latium, probably B. C. 234, and died at the age of at least eighty-five years. Livy and Plutarch both say that he passed his ninetieth year. He was of plebeian birth, and the founder of his own illustrious family. Porcius was the family name, and Cato was a name either given to him in childhood with foresight of his shrewdness and practical wisdom, or else bestowed on him and accepted by him after his peculiar traits of character were well known and distinctly recognized. It denotes wisdom of an entirely terrestrial, and even feline type, and is on the whole more appropriate to him than the surname Sapiens, which attached itself to him in his later years. He had great virtues, but defects as great. In not one of the beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount could he have claimed a part, nor would he have deigned to claim it, unless, in the almost numberless suits at law in which he was his own advocate, he might have regarded himself as "persecuted for righteousness' sake." He was rigidly truthful, sternly and ferociously upright, intensely courageous, and devotedly patriotic,—kind, too, to his wives and children. But he was mean and miserly, an exacting and tyrannical master, an