Marcus Porcius Cato: The Censor Who Demanded Carthage Be Destroyed

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Marcus Porcius Cato, Cato the Elder, was born in 234 BC in Tusculum to a plebeian family, a novus homo with no ancestors in high office. Raised on a Sabine farm near the hut of war hero Manius Curius Dentatus, he fought in the Second Punic War at Capua, Tarentum and the Metaurus, and between campaigns worked beside his laborers and judged neighbors' boundary disputes. The patrician Lucius Valerius Flaccus brought him to Rome. As quaestor in 204 BC under Scipio Africanus he left camp and complained to the Senate about Scipio's spending. As praetor in Sardinia in 198 BC he slashed costs, walked between towns and punished usury. Elected consul in 195 BC with Flaccus, he passed the Porcian laws protecting citizens from arbitrary scourging but lost his fight to keep the Oppian law against women's luxury.

In Hispania Citerior he declared that war will feed itself, plundered and taxed the territory and earned a triumph laden with captured silver and gold. As censor from 184 BC he expelled former consul Lucius Quinctius Flamininus from the Senate, taxed luxuries at ten times their value, repaired sewers, cut illegal taps on the public water and built the Basilica Porcia. He warned his son against Greek doctors yet learned Greek in his 80s. He wrote the Origines, the first Roman history in Latin, and De Agri Cultura, the oldest complete Latin prose work, which advises selling old or sick slaves like worn tools. After seeing a thriving Carthage in 157 BC he ended every speech with Carthago delenda est, and Rome razed the city after his death.

• Roman women blockaded the Forum in 195 BC to demand repeal of the Oppian law.
• Cato boasted he destroyed more towns in Hispania than he spent days there.
• As censor he could strike a name from the Senate roll with the nota, the mark of disgrace.
• He urged the Senate to send away a delegation of Greek philosophers quickly.
• His great-grandson Cato the Younger adopted the same persona against Julius Caesar.