Cato the Elder

Roman statesman and writer — Marcus Porcius Cato the Censor — who wrote De Agricultura (On Farming, the oldest surviving Latin prose) and was famous for his austere conservatism and his repeated insistence that Carthage must be destroyed (Carthago delenda est).

Represents early Roman conservative virtue — the preference for traditional Roman agricultural simplicity over Greek luxury — and his career as Censor (enforcing Roman morality) establishes the Roman type of the conservative moralist who equates virtue with ancestral tradition.