The end of every speech
"Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" — furthermore, I judge that Carthage must be destroyed. According to Plutarch, Cato once shook out his toga in the Senate and let a few enormous figs roll to the floor: "The land that grows this fruit is only three days’ sail from Rome." Repetition is the most primitive and most effective propaganda: say a line a thousand times and deliberation turns into a countdown. The "Ceterum censeo" formula in political writing today is still his legacy.
The farm manual and the ledger
Cato’s surviving On Agriculture is the earliest complete work of Latin prose — and its contents are entirely without poetry: how to manage a vineyard, how much to ration a slave, that an old or sick slave, like a worn-out tool, ought to be sold. The book’s cold honesty shows the ground color of Roman "old virtue" more clearly than any moral treatise: it is the calculation of smallholders and slave-owners, not tenderness. Understand Cato’s ledger and you understand what fueled Rome’s expansion.