Cato:

(95- 46 BC) or Cato the Younger, a statesman in late Roman Republic, a Stoic philosophy & noted orator, remembered for his stubbornness and tenacity (especially in his lengthy conflict with Julius Caesar), his immunity to bribes, his moral integrity, and his famous distaste for the ubiquitous corruption of the period.

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Don Quixote:

character in Man of La Mancha, Spanish novel by Cervantes, published 1605 & 1615; most influential literature of Spanish Golden Age, a novel of the Spanish literary canon.  Follows adventures of a member of the Spanish nobility named Alonso Quixano, who has reads so many chivalric romances he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha.  Spengler uses him as an allusion to enthusiastic but impractical & idealistic historians.

 

Sancho Panza:

a fictional character in Man of La Mancha, he acts as squire to Don Quixote and provides comments throughout the novel, known as sanchismos, a combination of broad humor, ironic Spanish proverbs & earthy wit.  "Panza" in Spanish means belly.   He represents practicality over idealism, the everyman, interested in earthy materialism, not ideals, a  realist.  Spengler uses him as an allusion to historians who are fact based materialists, focused on economics, blind to the spiritual.

 

Civilization:

Spengler’s very specific reference to the Autumn & Winter of the high Culture’s morphology, the later stages; it is the inevitable destiny of the culture; the most external & artificial state of which a species of developed humanity is capable; a conclusion, the thing become following the thing becoming,  death following life, rigidly following expansion.

 

Culture:

Spengler’s very specific reference to Spring & Summer of the high Culture’s morphology, the early stages; the periods of cultural growth, creativity, of becoming.