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PLUTARCH
Marcus Cato (95–46 BC) was one of the subjects of Plutarch’s Lives, a work composed in the first century AD. Although Cato is remembered as one of Rome’s greatest and most dignified statesmen, Plutarch here emphasizes Cato’s role as a father to his son and shows how raising a child should not be subcontracted to others.
As soon as he had a son born, though he had never such urgent business upon his hands, unless it were some public matter, he would be by when his wife washed it and dressed it in its swaddling clothes . . . When he began to come to years of discretion, Cato himself would teach him to read, although he had a servant, a very good grammarian, called Chilo, who taught many others; but he thought it not fit, as he himself said, to have his son reprimanded by a slave, or pulled, it may be, by the ears when found tardy in his lesson: nor would he have him owe to a servant the obligation of so great a thing as his learning; he himself, therefore, taught him his grammar, law, and his gymnastic exercises. Nor did he only show him, too, how to throw a dart, to fight in armor, and to ride, but to box also and to endure both heat and cold, and to swim over the most rapid and rough rivers. He says, likewise, that he wrote histories, in large characters, with his own hand, so that his son, without stirring out of the house, might learn to know about his countrymen and forefathers; nor did he less abstain from speaking anything obscene before his son than if it had been in the presence of the sacred virgins, called vestals.*
* The vestal virgins were priestesses of the Roman goddess Vesta, who were required to remain virgins for life, and were considered very holy by Roman society.