e diminished the contract prices for the construction of
public works.

From the date of his censorship (184) to his death in 149, Cato held no
public office, but continued to distinguish himself in the senate as the
persistent opponent of the new ideas. He was struck with horror, along
with many other Romans of the graver stamp, at the licence of the
Bacchanalian mysteries, which he attributed to the fatal influence of
Greek manners; and he vehemently urged the dismissal of the philosophers
(Carneades, Diogenes and Critolaus), who came as ambassadors from
Athens, on account of the dangerous nature of the views expressed by
them. He had a horror of physicians, who were chiefly Greeks. He
procured the release of Polybius, the historian, and his
fellow-prisoners, contemptuously asking whether the senate had nothing
more important to do than discuss whether a few Greeks should die at
Rome or in their own land. It was not till his eightieth year that he
made his first acquaintance with Greek literature. Almost his last
public act was to urge his countrymen to the Third Punic War and the
destruction of Carthage. In 157 he was one of the deputies sent to
Carthage to arbitrate between the Carthaginians and Massinissa, king of
Numidia. The mission was unsuccessful and the commissioners returned
home. But Cato was so struck by the evidences of Carthaginian prosperity
that he was convinced that the security of Rome depended on the
annihilation of Carthage. From this time, in season and out of season,
he kept repeating the cry: "Delenda est Carthago."

To Cato the individual life was a continual discipline, and public life
was the discipline of the many. He regarded the individual householder
as the germ of the family, the family as the germ of the state. By
strict economy of time he accomplished an immense amount of work; he
exacted similar application from his dependents, and proved himself a
hard husband, a strict father, a severe and cruel master. There was
little difference apparently, in the esteem in which he held his wife
and his slaves; his pride alone induced him to take a warmer interest in
his sons. To the Romans themselves there was little in this behaviour
which seemed worthy of censure; it was respected rather as a traditional
example of the old Roman manners. In the remarkable passage (xxxix. 40)
in which Livy describes the character of Cato, there is no word of blame
for the rigid discipline of his household.