The speeches of Cato, of which upwards of a hundred and fifty were extant
in Cicero's time, and which the _virtuosi_ of the age of Hadrian
preferred, or professed to prefer, to Cicero's own, are lost, with the
exception of inconsiderable fragments. The fragments show high oratorical
gifts; shrewdness, humour, terse vigour and controlled passion; "somewhat
confused and harsh," says a late but competent Latin critic, "but strong
and vivid as it is possible for oratory to be." We have suffered a
heavier loss in his seven books of _Origines_, the work of his old age.
This may broadly be called an historical work, but it was history treated
in a style of great latitude, the meagre, disconnected method of the
annalists alternating with digressions into all kinds of subjects--
geography, ethnography, reminiscences of his own travels and experiences,
and the politics and social life of his own and earlier times. It made no
attempt to keep up either the dignity or the continuity of history. His
absence of method made this work, however full of interest, the despair
of later historians: what were they to think, they plaintively asked,
of an author who dismissed whole campaigns without even giving the names
of the generals, while he went into profuse detail over one of the
war-elephants in the Carthaginian army?

The only work of Cato's which has been preserved in its integrity is that
variously known under the titles _De Re Rustica_ or _De Agri Cultura_. It
is one of a number of treatises of a severely didactic nature, which he
published on various subjects--agricultural, sanitary, military, and
legal. This treatise was primarily written for a friend who owned and
cultivated farms in Campania. It consists of a series of terse and
pointed directions following one on another, with no attempt at style or
literary artifice, but full of a hard sagacity, and with occasional
flashes of dry humour, which suggest that Cato would have found a not