Cato did not just attack the Roman turn toward ostentatious consumption. Another feature of Roman life in the early second century BC also attracted his ire. Cato saw Rome’s growing engagement with the Greek world as a threat to the Roman and Latin culture he idealized.

His xenophobic attacks greatly exaggerated the impact of Greeks in Rome. Most Greeks would have come as slaves following a series of second-​century Roman victories in the East. Relatively small numbers of free Greek philosophers, teachers of rhetoric, and doctors had come to Rome, but it was precisely these high-​status, high-​visibility Greeks whom Cato targeted. Cato said that Greeks “will corrupt everything” in Rome and predicted that the Romans would lose their empire when they began to be “infected with Greek literature.”²⁰

Cato used this malignant rhetoric to support a series of reactionary policies. When he campaigned for election as censor for 184 BC, he “proclaimed that the city needed a drastic purification” through which he could “cut away and cauterize the luxury and degeneracy of the age.”²¹ This message of moral decline and the promise of a radical return to a more virtuous Roman past propelled Cato into office.

(Source.)

Huh… interesting.

So, how’s everybody doing?