When to conditions of unequal peace I' the' sands when he before his day shall fall! With fire, and sword, and famine; when at length Through all the court the fright and clamours rise, Did you for this yourself and me beguile? Yourself and me, alas! this fatal wound Then clips her hair: cold numbness straight bereaves Her corpse of sense, and the' air her soul receives. SARPEDON'S SPEECH TO GLAUCUS, IN THE TWELFTH BOOK OF HOMER. THUS to Glaucus spake Divine Sarpedon, since he did not find Our cheerful guests carouse the sparkling tears Or if death sought not them who seek not death, CATO MAJOR. TO THE READER. I CAN neither call this piece Tully's nor my own, being much altered from the original, not only by the change of the style, but by addition and subtraction. I believe you will be better pleased to receive it, as I did, at the first sight; for to me Cicero did not so much appear to write, as Cato to speak: and, to do right to my author, I believe no character of any person was ever better drawn to the life than this. Therefore, neither consider Cicero nor me, but Cato himself, who being then raised from the dead to speak the language of that age and place, neither the distance of place or time makes it less possible to raise him now to speak ours. Though I dare not compare my copy with the original, yet you will find it mentioned here how much fruits are improved by graffing; and here, by graffing verse upon prose, some of these severer arguments may receive a more mild and pleasant taste. Cato says (in another place) of himself, that he learned to speak Greek between the seventieth aud eightieth year of his age: beginning that so late, he may not yet be too old to learn English, being now but between his seventeenth and eighteenth hundred year. For these reasons I shall leave to this piece no other name than what the author gave it, of Cato Major. PREFACE. THAT learned critic, the younger Scaliger, comparing the two great orators, says, that nothing can be taken from Demosthenes, nor added to Tully; and if there be any fault in the last, it is the resumption or dwelling too long upon his arguments: for which reason, having intended to translate this piece into prose, (where translation ought to be strict) finding the matter very proper for verse, I took the liberty to leave out what was only necessary to that age and place, and to take or add what was proper to this present age and occasion, by laying his sense closer, and in fewer words, according to the style and ear of these times. The three first parts I dedicate to my old friends, to take off those melancholy reflections which the sense of age, infirmity, and death, may give them. The last part I think necessary for the conviction of those many who believe not, or at least mind not, the immortality of the soul, of which the Scripture speaks only positively as a lawgiver, with an ipse dixit; but it may be, they neither believe that, (from which they either make doubts or sport) nor those whose business it is to interpret it, supposing they do it only for their own ends but if a heathen philosopher bring such arguments from reason, nature, and second causes, which none of our atheistical sophisters can confute, if they may stand convinced that there is an immortality of the soul, I hope they will so weigh the consequences as neither to talk nor live as if there was no such thing. |