challenge him, as he had himself jealously challenged rivals, for having pretended to a triumph on an inadequate harvest of dead.
Triumphs, by the way, have been a curse to Rome. How many unnecessary wars have been fought because generals wanted the glory of riding crowned through the streets of Rome with enemy captives led in chains behind them, and the spoils of war heaped on carnival wagons? Augustus realised this: on Agrippa's advice, he decreed that hence--forth no general, unless a member of the Imperial family, should be awarded a public triumph. This decree, published in the year that I was born, read as though Augustus were jealous of his generals, for by that time he had finished with active campaigning himself and no members of his family were old enough to win triumphs; but all if meant was that he did not wish the boundaries of the Empire enlarged any further, and that he reckoned that his generals would not provoke the frontier tribes to commit acts of war if they could not hope to be awarded triumphs by victory over them. None the less he allowed
'triumphal ornaments'--an embroidered robe, a statue, a chaplet, and so on--to be awarded to those who would otherwise have earned a triumph; this should be a sufficient incentive to any good soldier to fight a necessary war. Triumphs, besides, are very bad for military discipline. Soldiers get drunk and out of hand and usually finish the day by breaking up the wine-shops and setting fire to the oil-shops and insulting the women and generally behaving as if Rome were the city they had conquered, not some miserable log hut encampment in Germany or sand- burrowed village in Morocco. After a triumph celebrated by a nephew of mine, whom I shall soon be telling you about, four hundred soldiers and nearly four thousand private citizens lost their lives one way and another--five big blocks of tenements in the prostitutes' quarter of the City were burned to the I, C L A U D I V S [1;8] ground and three hundred wine-shops sacked, besides any amount of other damage.
But I was on the subject of Cato the Censor. His manual of husbandry and household economy was made my spelling book and every tune I stumbled over a word I used to get two blows; one on my left ear for stupidity, and one on my right for insulting the noble Cato. I remember a passage in the book which summed up the mean-souled fellow very well: 'A master of a household should sell his old oxen, and all the horned cattle that are of a delicate frame; all his sheep that are not hardy, their wool, their very pelts; he should sell his old wagons and his old instruments of husbandry; he should sell such of his slaves as are old and infirm and everything else that is worn out or useless.' For myself, when I was living as a country gentleman on my little estate at Capua, I made a point of putting my wornout beasts first to light work and then to grass until old age seemed too much of a burden to them, when I had them knocked on the head. I never demeaned myself by selling them for a trifle to a countryman who would work them cruelly to their last gasp. As for my slaves, I have always treated them generously in sickness and health, youth and old age and expected the highest degree of devotion from them in return. I have seldom been disappointed, though when they have abused my generosity I have had no mercy on them. I have no doubt old Cato's slaves were always falling sick, with the hope of being sold to a more humane master, and I also think it likely that he got, on the whole, less honest work and service out of them than I get out of mine. It is foolish to treat slaves like cattle.
They are more intelligent than cattle, capable besides of doing more damage in a week to one's property by wilful carelessness and stupidity than the entire price you have paid for them. Cato made a boast of never spending more than a few pounds on a slave: any evil-looking cross-eyed fellow that seemed to have good muscles and teeth would do.
How on earth he managed to find buyers for these beauties when he had quite finished with them I cannot say. From what I know of the character of his descendant, who was supposed to resemble him closely in looks-- sandy-haired, green-eyed, harsh-voiced and heavily built--and in character, I guess that he bullied his poor neighbours into taking all his cast-off stuff at the price of new.
My dear friend Postumus, who was a little less than two years older than myself--the truest friend, except Germanicus, that I have ever had--told me that he had read in a contemporary book that old Cato was a regular crook besides being a skinflint: he was guilty of some very sharp practice in the shipping trade, but avoided public disgrace by making one of his ex-slaves the nominal trader. As Censor, in charge of public morals, he did some mighty queer things: they were allegedly in the name of public decency but really, it seems, to satisfy his personal spites.
On his own showing, he expelled one man from the order of senators because he had been 'wanting in Roman gravity'--he had kissed his wife in daylight in his daughter's presence! When challenged by a friend of the expelled man, another senator, as to the justice of his decision and asked whether he himself and his wife never embraced except during the marital act, Cato replied hotly: 'Never!'
'What,
never?'
'Well, a couple of years ago, to be frank with you, my wife happened to throw her arms around me during a thunderstorm which scared her, but fortunately nobody was about and I assure you it will be a long time before she does it again.'
'Oh,' said the senator, pretending to misunderstand him, for Cato meant, I suppose, that he had given his wife a terrible lecture for her want of gravity. 'I'm sorry about that. Some women aren't very affectionate with plain-looking husbands, however upright and virtuous they may be. But never mind, perhaps Jove will be good enough to thunder again soon.'
Cato did not forgive that senator, who was a distant relative. A year later he was going through the roll of senators, as his duty as Censor was, asking each man in turn whether he was married. There was a law, which has since lapsed, that all senators should be honourably married. The turn came for his relative to be examined, and Cato asked him in the usual formula, which enjoined the senator to answer 'in his confidence and honesty'. 'If you have a wife, in your confidence and honesty, answer.' Cato intoned in his raucous voice. The man felt a little foolish, because after Joking about Cato's wife's affection for Cato, he had found that his own wife had so far lost her affection for himself that he was now forced to divorce her. So to show good-will and turn the joke decently against himself he replied: 'Yes, indeed, I have a wife, but she's not in my confidence any more, and I wouldn't give much for her honesty, either.' Cato thereupon expelled him from the Order for irreverence.
And who brought the Punic Curse on Rome? That same old Cato who, whenever he was asked his opinion in the Senate on any matter whatever, would end his speech with:/'This is my opinion; and my further opinion is that Carthage should be destroyed: she is a menace to Rome,'
By harping incessantly on the menace of Carthage he brought about such popular nervousness that, as I have said, the Romans eventually violated their most solemn commitments and razed Carthage to the ground.
I have written about old Cato more than I intended, but it is to the point: he is bound up in my mind both with the ruin of Rome, for which he was just as responsible as the men whose 'unmanly luxury,' he said, 'enervated the State,'
and with the memory of my unhappy childhood under that muleteer, his great-great-great-grandson. I am already an old man and my tutor has been dead these fifty years, yet my heart still swells with indignation and hatred when I think of him.
Germanicus stood up for me against my elders in a gentle persuasive way, but Postumus was a lion-like champion.
He seemed not to care a fig for anyone. He even dared to speak out straight to my grandmother Livia herself. Augustus made a favourite of Postumus, so for a while Livia pretended to be amused at what she called his boyish impulsiveness.
Postumus trusted her at first, being himself incapable of deceit. One day when I was twelve and he was fourteen he happened to be passing by the room where Cato was giving me my lessons. He heard the sound of blows and my cries for mercy and came bursting angrily in. 'Stop beating him, at once!' he shouted.
Cato looked at him in scornful surprise and fetched me another blow that knocked me off my stool. Postumus said: 'Those that can't beat the ass, beat the saddle.'
[That was a proverb at Rome.] [61]
'Impudence, what do you mean?' roared Cato.
'I mean,' said Postumus, 'that you're revenging yourself on Claudius for what you consider a general conspiracy to keep you down. You're really too good for the job of tutoring him, eh?' Postumus was clever: he guessed that this would make Cato angry enough to forget himself. And Cato rose to the bait, shouting out with a string of old-fashioned curses that in the days or his ancestor, whose memory this stammering imp was insulting,
