FOOTNOTES:
[133] Another version is that he was sitting at the hearth roasting
turnips.--ED.
[134] 232 and 234 are both given as the date of Cato's birth. The latter
is the more probable.--ED.
[135] Nearly all Romans of Cato's time were husbandmen, tilling the soil
with their own hands.--ED.
[136] This taste for useless magnificence is exhibited in the stories of
the Thousand and One Nights.
[137] Cato the Elder had a horror of the Greeks. He said to his son: "I
will tell what I have seen in Athens. This race is the most perverse and
intractable. Listen to me as to an oracle: whenever this people teaches
us its arts it will corrupt everything."
[138] "Schola," from which we derive "school," signified leisure.
[139] Also to write and reckon, as previously stated.--ED.
CHAPTER XXIII
FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
DECADENCE OF REPUBLICAN INSTITUTIONS
=Destruction of the Peasantry.=--The old Roman people consisted of
small proprietors who cultivated their own land. These honest and
robust peasants constituted at once the army and the assembly of the
people. Though still numerous in 221 and during the Second Punic War,
in 133 there were no more of them.
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