I, Claudius - Robert Graves [28]
"What, never?"
"Well, a couple of years ago, to be frank with you, my wife happened to throw her arms around me during a thunderstorm which scared her, but fortunately nobody was about and I assure you it will be a long time before she does it again."
"Oh," said the senator, pretending to misunderstand him, for Cato meant, I suppose, that he had given his wife a terrible lecture for her want of gravity. "I'm sorry about that. Some women aren't very affectionate with plain-looking husbands, however upright and virtuous they may be. But never mind, perhaps Jove will be good enough to thunder again soon."
Cato did not forgive that senator, who was a distant relative. A year later he was going through the roll of senators, as his duty as Censor was, asking each man in turn whether he was married. There was a law, which has since lapsed, that all senators should be honourably married. The turn came for his relative to be examined, and Cato asked him in the usual formula, which enjoined the senator to answer "in his confidence and honesty". "If you have a wife, in your confidence and honesty, answer." Cato intoned in his raucous voice. The man felt a little foolish, because after Joking about Cato's wife's affection for Cato, he had found that his own wife had so far lost her affection for himself that he was now forced to divorce her. So to show good-will and turn the joke decently against himself he replied: "Yes, indeed, I have a wife, but she's not in my confidence any more, and I wouldn't give much for her honesty, either." Cato thereupon expelled him from the Order for irreverence.
And who brought the Punic Curse on Rome? That same old Cato who, whenever he was asked his opinion in the Senate on any matter whatever, would end his speech with:/"This is my opinion; and my further opinion is that Carthage should be destroyed: she is a menace to Rome,"
By harping incessantly on the menace of Carthage he brought about such popular nervousness that, as I have said, the Romans eventually violated their most solemn commitments and razed Carthage to the ground.
I have written about old Cato more than I intended, but it is to the point: he is bound up in my mind both with the ruin of Rome, for which he was just as responsible as the men whose "unmanly luxury," he said, "enervated the State," and with the memory of my unhappy childhood under that muleteer, his great-great-great-grandson. I am already an old man and my tutor has been dead these fifty years, yet my heart still swells with indignation and hatred when I think of him.
Germanicus stood up for me against my elders in a gentle persuasive way, but Postumus was a lion-like champion.
He seemed not to care a fig for anyone. He even dared to speak out straight to my grandmother Livia herself. Augustus made a favourite of Postumus, so for a while Livia pretended to be amused at what she called his boyish impulsiveness. Postumus trusted her at first, being himself incapable of deceit. One day when I was twelve and he was fourteen he happened to be passing by the room where Cato was giving me my lessons. He heard the sound of blows and my cries for mercy and came bursting angrily in. "Stop beating him, at once!" he shouted.
Cato looked at him in scornful surprise and fetched me another blow that knocked me off my stool. Postumus said: "Those that can't beat the ass, beat the saddle."
[That was a proverb at Rome.]
"Impudence, what do you mean?" roared Cato.
"I mean," said Postumus, "that you're revenging yourself on Claudius for what you consider a general conspiracy to keep you down. You're really too good for the job of tutoring him, eh?" Postumus was clever: he guessed that this would make Cato angry enough to forget himself. And Cato rose to the bait, shouting out with a string of old-fashioned curses that in the days or his ancestor, whose memory this stammering imp was insulting, woe betide any child who failed in reverence to his elders; for they dealt out discipline with a heavy hand in those days.
Whereas in these degenerate times the leading men of Rome gave any ignorant oafish lout [this was for Postumus] or any feeble-minded decrepit-limbed little whippersnapper [this was for me] full permission