The versatility of talent displayed by Cato the censor (224-144 B.C.) entitles him to a place among orators, jurists, economists, and historians. His life extends over a wide and important period of literary history, when everything was in a state of change,--morals, social habits, and literary taste. Cato was born in Tusculum, and passed his boyhood in the pursuits of rural life at a small Sabine farm belonging to his father. The skill with which he pleaded the causes of his clients before the rural magistracy made his abilities known, and he rose rapidly to eminence as a pleader. He filled many high offices of state. His energies were not weakened by advancing age, and he was always ready as the advocate of virtue, the champion of the oppressed, and the punisher of vice. With many defects, Cato was morally and intellectually one of the greatest men Rome ever produced. He had the ability and the determination to excel in everything which he undertook. His style is rude, unpolished, ungraceful, because to him polish was superficial, and, therefore, unreal. His statements, however, were clear, his illustrations striking; the words with which he enriched his native tongue were full of meaning; his wit was keen and lively, and his arguments went straight to the intellect, and carried conviction with them. Cato's great historical and antiquarian work, "The Origins," was a history of Italy and Rome from the earliest times to the latest events which occurred in his own lifetime. It was a work of great research and originality, but only brief fragments of it remain. In the "De Re Rustica," which has come down to us in form and substance as it was written, Cato maintains, in the introduction, the superiority of agriculture over other modes of gaining a livelihood. The work itself is a commonplace book of agriculture and domestic economy; its object is utility, not science: it serves the purpose of a farmer's and gardener's manual, a domestic medicine, herbal, and cookery book. Cato teaches his readers, for example, how to plant osier beds, to cultivate vegetables, to preserve the health of cattle, to pickle pork, and to make savory dishes. Of the "Orations" of Cato, ninety titles are extant, together with numerous fragments. In style he despised art. He was too fearless and upright, too confident in the justness of his cause to be a rhetorician; he imitated no one, and no one was ever able to imitate him. Niebuhr pronounces him to be the only great man in his generation, and one of the greatest and most honorable characters in Roman history. Varro (116-28 B.C.) was an agriculturist, a grammarian, a critic, a theologian, a historian, a philosopher, a satirist. Of his miscellaneous works considerable portions are extant, sufficient to display his erudition and acuteness, yet, in themselves, more curious than attractive.