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TECHNICAL WRITING
dimensions for the parts, he omits to explain adequately all his technical terms,
and he does not use (as he might) lettered diagrams in the manner of an Archimedes
or a Philon Mechanicus. For us, and for later generations of Romans, a
remarkable quality of the book is the vivid impression of its editor's personality
— his provocative directness (e.g. his advice on how to pick and control a
bailiff and what to do with an old slave, 2—3), his idiosyncratic enthusiasms
(e.g. for cabbage as a panacea, 156), his blend of sharp worldliness and credulous
superstition, his authoritarian outlook, and his respect for the mores maiorum.
The lack of formal organization can only to a very limited extent be explained
as due to the vicissitudes of transmission and interpolation, and in several ways
one is reminded of the characteristics of the satura of the poets.
This was only one of several monographs or treatises on practical subjects of
social relevance that Cato wrote (see Appendix). Some of these were addressed
as more or less open letters to his son Cato Licinianus, borne. 192 B.C. One on
rhetoric contained the definition orator est, Marce Jilt, tur bonus dicendi peritus
'The statesman, Marcus my boy, is a gentleman experienced in speaking' (fr.
14 Jordan, Sen. Contr. 1 praef. 9), and the famous precept rem tene, uerba
sequentur 'Hold to the subject, the words will follow' (fr. 15, Julius Victor p.
374 Halm). It is probably misleading to think of these works as a collection,
constituting a kind of encyclopaedia; apart from the fact that they were certainly
unsystematic and eclectic and quirky, there is no evidence at all to suggest
that Cato himself collected or edited them as a body, whatever their fortuna
may have been. 1
The one and only example of the Senate's patronage of 'literature' was the
commission given to D. Silanus after the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. to
translate into Latin the twenty-eight books of the farming manual of the
Carthaginian Mago (Pliny, N.H. 18.22). Other researches of which we hear
include the chronological and calendaric studies of M\ Acilius Glabrio and M.
Fulvius Nobilior, c. 190 B.C. (see p. 63), and the astronomical work of C.
Sulpicius Galus (cos. 166 B.C., Pliny, N.H. 2.53, 2.83, Livy 44.37.5), who,
however, is unlikely to have known, let alone understood, the researches of his
great contemporary, Hipparchus of Bithynia. As mentioned above, poets and
freedmen-scholars inaugurated the study of the history of Latin literature in the
Gracchan period; unfortunately for the quality of their work it was the school
of Pergamum rather than the tradition of Alexandrian scholarship which most
influenced them (see pp. 78,137). Much more important was the study of Roman
law, to which the methods of Peripatetic classification and definition were
directly appropriate, and this suffered less from the dogmatism and speculation
1 The important growth-point for florilegia which ultimately lie behind the collections of dicta
Catonis so well known in the Middle Ages (cf. F. Skutsch, RE v 358—70) will have been in Imperial
times, when the memory of Cato the Elder and Cato Minor, the Stoic sage, was confused.
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