#cato the elder

thoodleoo:

• you are translating cicero. you have not yet made it through a full sentence even though you have been reading for nearly two hours. every time you think you have made progress, cicero throws in another rhetorical device to extend the passage. you find yourself lost in hyperbaton. you still have not found the verb. you do not think you ever will.
  
• you learn yet another usage of the ablative absolute and dutifully add it to the list of usages you already know. you have started to forget what the other cases are, but you are not sure they matter anymore. all is ablative. all is absolute.
  
• you have begun to pick up the speech patterns of this strange ancient language when you talk in your own. it is said that you use more passives and impersonal verbs. with these things having been spoken, you no longer sound like the person you once were. if this happens much longer, your friends and family will have forgotten the you who once spoke to them. your grades in translation have improved, though, so you do not mind too terribly.
• a bitter war emerges between two factions of those who study alongside you. they argue ceaselessly, shouting phrases such as ‘caecilius est in horto’ and ‘raeda est in fossa’ at each other. one side calls the other sextus molestus, thus destroying any possibility for peace while the rest of you look on in horror.
• every free thought in your mind gravitates towards the idea that carthage must be destroyed. you are not certain why. you have never been to carthage and, as far as you know, carthage was destroyed millennia ago and needs no further destruction. that does not stop the thoughts, though. you begin to write that carthage must be destroyed at the end of your essays, to say that carthage must be destroyed at the end of every conversation. soon afterwards, you find that the only food that appeals to you anymore is cabbage. your classmates look upon you with sadness. cato has your soul, now.
  

CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!

It is difficult as a classicist who works on ancient gender and sexuality to give a direct answer to a question like can we use the term patriarchy for the ancient Romans in the modern sense of an overarching societal concept where men purposefully benefited at the expense, and to the detriment, of women. But then you read a quote like this in Livy (Book 34.2-3) put into the mouth of Cato Please-Take-My-Wife the Elder about women:

omnium rerum libertatem, immo licentiam, si vere dicere volumus, desiderant….extemplo simul pares esse coeperint,superiores erunt

“If we want to speak truthfully, they desire freedom in all things, no, unrestrained license….As soon as they will have begun to be [our] equals, they will become more superior.”

And the answer is abso-fucking-lutely.