I'm reading John Williams' Life of Julius Caesar and he says " It is a real loss... ...that neither the Ciceronian "Cato," nor the Caesarean "Anticato," have come down to our times" Is this still true, or have we found anything in the 160 odd years since that was written?.

by rahl422000
TheoAngelopoulos

No complete manuscript of either work have turned up or is ever likely to turn up. More recent analysis has tried to use other texts, especially Plutarch's Life of Caesar, to reconstruct elements of Caesar's Anticato and of the biography of Cato by his close friend Munatius Rufus. But this kind of study is very much incremental: no one hopes to reconstruct the text, but working out some aspects of the ways in which these writers reacted to one another may be recoverable to an extent. It appears that Plutarch borrows bits and pieces here and there from Munatius, like for example when he uses the phrase "pen and sword", which is common in Latin (the language Munatius wrote in) but rare in Greek (which Plutarch wrote in).

The most thorough work on the remnants of Caesar's Anticato is H. J. Tschiedel's monograph Caesars Anticato: eine Untersuchung der Testimonien und Fragmente (Darmstadt, 1981).

The fragments of Munatius' biography of Cato can be found in the 2013 set of Fragments of the Roman Historians, edited by T. J. Cornell, historian no. 37 (introduction: vol. 1 pp. 358-60 ff., text: vol. 2 pp. 738-745).

And for Cicero's Cato (or Laudes Catonis), it seems the best study is W. Kierdorf, "Ciceros Cato", Rheinisches Museum 121 (1978) 167-184.

The New Pauly reports that M. Iunius Brutus also wrote some material in praise of Cato, but without citing any bibliography. Not enough of that survives even to make it into Fragments of the Roman Historians.