Catius (fl. c. 50s–40s BC) was an Epicurean philosopher, identified ethnically as an Insubrian Celt from Gallia Transpadana. Epicurean works by Amafinius, Rabirius, and Catius were the earliest philosophical treatises written in Latin. Catius composed a treatise in four books on the physical world and on the highest good (De rerum natura et de summo bono). Cicero credits him, along with the lesser prose stylist Amafinius, with writing accessible texts that popularized Epicurean philosophy among the plebs, or common people.
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Catius (fl. c. 50s–40s BC) was an Epicurean philosopher, identified ethnically as an Insubrian Celt from Gallia Transpadana. Epicurean works by Amafinius, Rabirius, and Catius were the earliest philosophical treatises written in Latin. Catius composed a treatise in four books on the physical world and on the highest good (De rerum natura et de summo bono). Cicero credits him, along with the lesser prose stylist Amafinius, with writing accessible texts that popularized Epicurean philosophy among the plebs, or common people.
==Sources== In a letter dated January 45 BC, Cicero speaks of Catius as having died recently. The letter is addressed to Cassius Longinus, one of the future assassins of Julius Caesar and a recent convert to Epicureanism. Cicero prods Cassius about his new philosophy, and jokes about spectra Catiana ("Catian apparitions"), that is, the εἴδωλα or material images which were supposed by the Epicureans to present themselves to the mind and to call up the idea of absent objects:
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