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PROSE LITERATURE
harmonious and civilized and sublime than either.' There are dangers in such
pat summaries. The individual's qualities will be over-simplified, and the first in
such a series is almost bound to appear by implication as less sophisticated and
various than he was. An Andronicus, an Ennius, or a Cato were naturally
especially liable to this kind of treatment in Roman literary criticism, which was
often quite crudely teleological. It puzzled and surprised Fronto, a frank
admirer of Cato's work, that the extended example of the figure of irocpdtAeuf is
(omission; our cliche 'not to mention. ..') which he quotes from the De sumptu
suo seemed unparalleled in his experience and better handled than in any writer
that he knew, Greek or Latin. This is typical of Cato. His rhetoric could not
be neatly pigeon-holed according to the rules of the manuals and exempla
(Gell. N.A. 6.3.52) which made teleological criticism easy.
Cato's style, 1 both in his speeches and in his Origines, was essentially paratactic,
reflecting the same speech-patterns as we hear in Terence's narrative and
dialogue rather than in his prologues. Sentence-connexion is simple, and Cato
shows no desire to avoid repetition of words in linking sentences. A Crassus or
Antonius would probably have regarded the brief narration at the beginning of
the passage cited as marred by the repetitions 'read through' (perlecta. . .
leguntur. . .perlecturri) and 'written in the speech' (oratio scripta erat. . .deinde
scriptum erat). On the other hand Cato took more care over phrasing in his
speeches than in his De agri cultura: tabulae. . .leguntur is a modestly rising
tricolon, and some of the attention to the rhythmical cadences of phrases and
sentences so characteristic of later Roman oratory is already apparent in Cato.
A small but clear sign of the different levels of diction which Cato felt appropriate
to his speeches and to his technical works is the fact that the weighty atque
is the normal word for 'and' in the speeches (so too in Cornelia's letter), but the
lightweight et in the De agricultura. When Cato is being self-consciously
didactic, this becomes a noticeable mannerism, as in the beginning of the speech
against the Rhodians (Gell. N.A. 6(7).3, fr. 95 Malcovati).
Cato's language is remarkably various. He would not have agreed with the
precept of the purist Julius Caesar that one should avoid an unknown word as
one would a reef. Cato enjoyed something of the freedom of the older Comedians
in exploiting the resources of morphology to make a striking phrase or to
find the mot juste, e.g.pauculos amicos in the De sumptu suo. The exclamation attat
is borrowed not from life but from comedy, and aptly, for Cato is here presenting
himself as a character in a tragicomedy, where true moral values have been
stood on their heads. Frequentatives (Jutare = fu-it-are = saepius fuisse),
analogical formations (pulchralia = bellaria 'desserts', fr. 107), new adjectives
(jmpudentiam praemiosam, 241), expressions like cloacaleflumen (126) 'a sewery
stream', uecticulariam uitam uiuere (246) 'to live a crowbarious life', nouns like
1
See Leo (1913) *73f-> 286ff., 299^; Till (1936) passim.
154
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