i necesse, at paucis, nam omnino haut placet.
Degustandum ex ea, non in eam ingurgitandum censeo.-

Nevertheless the poem on Morals and the instructions in Oratory, which
were found among the writings of Cato, may be regarded as the Roman
quintessence or, if the expression be preferred, the Roman -caput
mortuum- of Greek philosophy and rhetoric. The immediate sources
whence Cato drew were, in the case of the poem on Morals, presumably
the Pythagorean writings on morals (along with, as a matter of course,
due commendation of the simple ancestral habits), and, in the case of
the book on Oratory, the speeches in Thucydides and more especially
the orations of Demosthenes, all of which Cato zealously studied.
Of the spirit of these manuals we may form some idea from the golden
oratorical rule, oftener quoted than followed by posterity, "to think
of the matter and leave the words to follow from it."(68)

Medicine

Similar manuals of a general elementary character were composed by
Cato on the Art of Healing, the Science of War, Agriculture, and
Jurisprudence--all of which studies were likewise more or less under
Greek influence. Physics and mathematics were not much studied in
Rome; but the applied sciences connected with them received a certain
measure of attention. This was most of all true of medicine. In 535
the first Greek physician, the Peloponnesian Archagathus, settled in
Rome and there acquired such repute by his surgical operations, that a
residence was assigned to him on the part of the state and he received
the freedom of the city; and thereafter his colleagues flocked in
crowds to Italy. Cato no doubt not only reviled the foreign medical
practitioners with a zeal worthy of a better cause, but attempted,
by means of his medical manual compiled from his own experience and
probably in part also from the medical literature of the Greeks, to
revive the good old fashion under which the father of the family was
at the same time the family physician. The physicians and the public
gave themselves, as was reasonable, but little concern about his
obstinate invectives: at any rate the profession, one of the most
lucrative which existed in Rome, continued a monopoly in the hands
of the foreigners, and for centuries there were none but Greek
physicians in Rome.

Mathematics

Hitherto the measurement of time had been treated in Rome with
barbarous indifference, but matters were now at least in some degree
improved.