The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6)

Chapter 70: CHAP. 28. (27.)—UNION IN THE SAME PERSON OF THREE OF THE HIGHEST QUALITIES WITH THE GREATEST PURITY.

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The volume assembles an encyclopedic survey of the known world and its living inhabitants, moving from detailed regional geography and descriptions of seas, rivers, islands, and peoples to extended treatments of humanity, its generation, anatomy, and the origins and inventions of arts. Subsequent books catalog terrestrial animals—their habits, capture, and uses—followed by comprehensive observations on fish and marine creatures, their sizes and behaviors. Accounts mix naturalistic description, reported marvels, medicinal uses derived from animals, and travel and secondhand reports, organized as topical chapters intended as a practical compendium of natural and human phenomena.

CHAP. 28. (27.)—UNION IN THE SAME PERSON OF THREE OF THE HIGHEST QUALITIES WITH THE GREATEST PURITY.

Many other men have excelled in different kinds of virtues. Cato, however, who was the first of the Porcian family,1106 is generally thought to have been an example of the three greatest of human endowments, for he was the most talented orator, the most talented general, and the most talented politician;1107 all which merits, if they were not perceptible before him, still shone forth, more refulgently even, in my opinion, in Scipio Æmilianus, who besides was exempted from that hatred on the part of many others under which Cato laboured:1108 in consequence of which it was, what must be owned to be a peculiarity in Cato’s career, that he had to plead his own cause no less than four and forty times;1109 and yet, though no person was so frequently accused, he was always acquitted.