Marcus Porcius Cato (consul 118 BC)

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Marcus Porcius Cato notable orator who became consul in 118 BC, and died in that office.

Marcus Porcius Cato "nepos" (the grandson) was born into the stirps of Catones in the Roman plebeian gens Porcia in or before 161 BC. He was eldest son of Marcus Porcius Cato Licinianus and grandson of the famous politician, orator and historian Cato the Elder.[1] According to the known date of his consulate and the rules for holding the chief public offices (the lex Villia annalis at this time), he should have been praetor in or before 121. In 118 BC he became consul with Quintus Marcius Rex.[2]

A distinguished archaizing orator who produced written versions of his speeches, something rare before the 1st century BC. Little is known about him outside the brief, super accurate, tract "On lineage and names of the Porcian family" written by the antiquarian Aulus Gellius.[3] That chapter was written to place Cato "nepos" the orator in his correct genealogical context, and carefully distinguishes him and his works from the much more famous grandfather. Not only was he an exact homonym of the grandfather but he deliberately wrote his speeches in the grandfather's style.[4] Owing to this convergence of unusual circumstances the written speeches of Cato "nepos" were rapidly subsumed into the already famous and far greater corpus of his grandfather ; something known from the fact that even the great expert on the subject, Cicero, omitted him from his treatise on Roman rhetoric and orators entitled Brutus, a work which does include brief and almost disparaging mention of his younger brother Gaius Cato (cos. 114).[5] It is not known when Roman scholarship first successfully identified the speeches of the grandson and began to separate them out from the corpus of the grandfather, though the process most likely began with specialists in Catonian works such as the historian Sallust, and the Augustan epoch philologist Verrius Flaccus, who authored several books on obscure expressions in the Catonian corpus[6]

Accordingly although the standard modern work on the Roman orators and their fragments attributes only two brief fragments and one speech title to M. Cato nepos[7], it is likely that several of the numerous titles and fragments assigned to the grandfather[8] really belonged to the grandson, consul in 118. Two of the most likely speeches in this class are ;

  • De rege Attalo et vectigalibus Asiae,[9] which better suits the period after 133 BC when the Romans inherited the lands and revenues of the Attalid kings, than the epoch of Cato the Elder (died 149) when Attalid revenues were none of the Romans' business.
  • Numantiae apud equites.[10]

Cato the Elder did spend his consulate in the Spanish provinces (195 BC), but Livy's detailed record of those campaigns makes it plain that he never operated anywhere near Numantia.[11] Better to suppose that the speech belongs to Cato the nepos, and that he served as a young cavalry officer during the famous siege of Numantia by his uncle the Aemilian Scipio Africanus in 134-133 BC. The attested junior officers who served Scipio at Numantia included the Numidian prince Jugurtha[12], and it was probably on a mission to settle the Numidian succession disputes following King Micipsa's death that Cato nepos died in his province of Africa during his consulate in 118[13]


Notes

  1. ↑ Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae XIII, 20.9; Plutarch, Marcus Cato 27.8
  2. ↑ fasti Antiates (ILLRP 8): M.POR[ci.] CATO Q.[- - -]; Chronograph of AD 354: Catone et Rige; Velleius II, 7; Eutropius IV, 23; Valerius Maximus V, 10.3; Pliny the Elder, Natural history II, 99; Julius Obsequens Prod. 35
  3. ↑ Noctes Atticae XIII, 20. The accuracy of this piece is established by its numerous complex details and citation of two sources from the family records of the Catones ; laudationes funebres and a liber commentarius de familia Porcia
  4. ↑ Gellius NA XIII, 20. 10 : he was quite a forceful orator and left many speeches written to the model of the grandfather
  5. ↑ Brutus 108 : bracketed with M. Fulvius Flaccus as mediocres oratores
  6. ↑ Gellius NA XVII, 6. 2 cites libri . . . Verrii Flacci de obscuris Catonis
  7. ↑ ORF4 1976 orator no.41, pp. 160-161
  8. ↑ ORF4 1976 orator no. 8, pp. 12-97
  9. ↑ ORF4 1976, p. 77
  10. ↑ ORF4 1976, p. 18
  11. ↑ Michael Dobson in his recent detailed study of Roman campaigns against the Celtiberi and Numantia, The Army of the Roman Republic. The Second Century BC, Polybius and the Camps at Numantia, Spain (Oxbow, 2008), p. 43, acknowledges the lack of any hostility between Romans and Celtiberi at the time but nonetheless, perhaps unaware of any possible alternative, accepts traditional theoretical insertion of this speech into Cato's marches and counter-marches in 195
  12. ↑ Velleius II, 9 ; Sallust Iug. 7
  13. ↑ Gellius NA XIII, 20. 10 : et consul cum Q. Marcio Rege fuit inque eo consulatu in Africam profectus in ea provincia mortem obiit

References

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