Читать книгу Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen - Lucy Hughes-Hallett - Страница 8

LONDON, 1714. The first night of Joseph Addison’s tragedy, Cato, which was to enjoy such a triumph that Alexander Pope, who wrote the prologue, declared that ‘Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days as he is of Britain in ours.’ The curtain rises on the last act. The hero is discovered ‘Solus, sitting in a thoughtful posture: in his hand Plato’s book on the Immortality of the Soul. A drawn sword on the table by him.’ The tableau – the sword, the book, the pensive hero – was repeated exactly in numerous neo-classical paintings. Its drama lies not in what is represented, but in what is still to come, the horror to which (as most male members of Addison’s classically educated eighteenth-century audience would have known) this tranquil scene is prelude. Before the night is out Cato will read the book through three times, and then, still serene, still ‘thoughtful’, drive the sword into his belly. When that first attempt to free himself from tyranny fails he will submit calmly while his friends bind up the dreadful wound and remove the weapon. Once more alone, he will tear open his body with his bare hands and resolutely disembowel himself.

Cato, true until death. Cato, so inflexible in his righteousness that he was ready to kill himself not once, but twice. Cato, who had no self-pity, but grieved only for Rome and its venerable institutions. Cato, who, on the night of his death, read of the death of Socrates and who, like the Athenian philosopher, chose not to save himself from a death made inevitable by the mismatch between his own integrity and the imperfection of the world he inhabited. This Cato was venerated alike by pagan Rome and Christian Europe. Addison describes him as ‘godlike’, an epithet first applied to him by Lucan nearly seventeen hundred years earlier. Of his contemporaries, only Julius Caesar, whose most inveterate opponent he was, denied his virtue. Cicero and Brutus both eulogized him. Horace praised his ‘fierce heart’. Virgil imagined for him an illustrious afterlife as lawgiver to the virtuous dead. To later generations of Romans, especially to the Stoics who formed the opposition to Nero’s tyranny, he was an exemplar, a philosopher (though he left no philosophical writings), and the embodiment of their ideal. The Christian Fathers saw him as the paragon of pagan virtue. To Lactantius he was ‘the prince of Roman wisdom’. To Jerome he had a glory ‘which could neither be increased by praise nor diminished by censure’. Dante placed Brutus, who was Cato’s son-in-law and political heir, in the lowest circle of hell with Judas Iscariot, in the very mouth of Satan, to be eaten alive ceaselessly through all eternity, and he condemned others who had, like Cato, committed the sin of self-murder to an afterlife of unremitting mute agony in the form of trees whose twigs ooze blood. But Cato is exempt. Despite being a suicide and a pagan he is the custodian of Dante’s Purgatory and is destined eventually for a place in Paradise. In the Convivio Dante goes even further. Cato divorced his wife Marcia so that she could be married to his political ally Hortensius. After Hortensius’ death he remarried her. The story has proved troubling to most Christian moralists, but Dante treats the couple’s reunion as an allegory of the noble soul’s return to God: ‘And what man on earth is more worthy to signify God than Cato? Surely no one.’

It was his intransigence that rendered Cato all but divine. Sophocles, Alcibiades’ contemporary and fellow Athenian, had described the tragic hero as one who refuses to compromise or conform but remains, however beset by trouble, as immovable as a rock pounded by stormy seas, or as the one tree which, when all the others preserve themselves by bending before a river in flood, stays rigidly upright and is therefore destroyed root and branch. Cato was as steadfast as that rock, as self-destructively stubborn as that tree. An Achilles, not an Odysseus, he was the antithesis of Alcibiades, the infinitely adaptable, infinitely persuasive charmer. Cato never charmed, never changed.

He has been revered as a hero, but he put all his energies into thwarting the aspirations of the heroic great men among his contemporaries, and into attempting to save his fellow Romans from the folly of the hero-worship he so passionately denounced. The defining drama of his life was his resolute opposition to Julius Caesar. Friedrich Nietzsche considered Caesar to be one of the few people in human history to have rivalled Alcibiades’ particular claims to superman status, the two of them being Nietzsche’s prime examples of ‘those marvellously incomprehensible and unfathomable men, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and the seduction of others’. Cato was their opposite. Obstinately tenacious of a lost cause, he was predestined for defeat and temperamentally incapable of seduction.

Caesar – adroit and charismatic politician, ruthless, brilliant conqueror – was a hero of an instantly recognizable type. Cato’s claim to heroic status is of quite a different nature. He is the willing sacrifice, the patiently enduring victim. His glory is not that of the brilliant winner but of the loser doggedly pursuing a course that leads inevitably to his own downfall. Small wonder that Christian theologians found his character so admirable, his story so inspiring. He embodied the values of asceticism and self-denial that Jesus Christ and his followers borrowed from pagan philosophers and, like Christ’s, his life can be seen with hindsight as a steady progress towards a martyr’s death.

That death retrospectively invested his career and character with a melancholy grandeur that compensated for the glamour which, alive, he notably lacked. Curmudgeonly in manner, awkward and disobliging in his political dealings and his private relationships alike, he sought neither his contemporaries’ affection nor posterity’s admiration. Yet he received both. Cicero, who knew him well, wrote that he ‘alone outweighs a hundred thousand in my eyes’. ‘I crawl in earthly slime,’ wrote Michel de Montaigne, some sixteen hundred years after Cato’s death, ‘but I do not fail to note way up in the clouds the matchless heights of certain heroic souls’, the loftiest of them all being Cato, ‘that great man who was truly a model which Nature chose to show how far human virtue and fortitude can reach’.

He had a personality of tremendous force. His contemporaries were awed and intimidated by him – not as the Athenians had feared the capricious bully Alcibiades, more nearly as the moneylenders in the Temple feared the righteous and indignant Christ. His mind was precise and vigorous and he was an orator of furious talent. He was deferred to, by the soldiers he commanded, by the crowds he stirred or subdued, by those of his peers who recognized and admired his selflessness and integrity; but he was also a troublemaker and an oddity. He was a well-known figure in Rome, but one who inspired irritation and ridicule as well as respect.

He was a nuisance. He embarrassed and annoyed his peers by loudly denouncing corrupt practices that everyone else had come to accept as normal. He had no discretion, no urbanity. He looked peculiar. He habitually appeared in the Forum with bare feet and wearing no tunic beneath his toga, an outfit that seemed to his contemporaries at best indecorous, at worst indecent. When challenged about it he pointed to the statue of Romulus (represented similarly underdressed) and said that what was good enough for the founder of Rome was good enough for him. When he became praetor (a senior magistrate) his judgements were acknowledged to be scrupulously correct; but there were those who muttered that he disgraced the office by hearing cases – even those solemn ones in which important men stood to incur the death penalty – looking so raffish, so uncouth.

He never laughed, seldom smiled and had no small talk. He stayed up late, all night sometimes, drinking heavily; but his nightlife was not of the gracious and hospitable kind that his fellow aristocrats found congenial. Rather, he would engage in vehement debate with philosophers who tended to encourage him in his eccentricities. Rigorously ascetic, he disdained to think of his own comfort, and had a way of undermining other people’s. He never rode if he could walk. When he travelled with friends he would stalk along beside their horses on his bare and callused feet, his head uncovered, talking indefatigably in the harsh, powerful voice that was his most effective political weapon. Few people felt easy in his company; he was too judgemental and too much inclined to speak his mind. To his posthumous admirers his disturbing ability to search out others’ imperfections was among his godlike attributes. Montaigne called him one ‘in whose sight the very madmen would hide their faults’. But his contemporaries shunned him for it. He was his community’s self-appointed conscience, and the voice of conscience is one to which most people prefer not to listen. His incorruptibility dismayed his rivals: ‘the more clearly they saw the rectitude of his practice’, writes Plutarch, ‘the more distressed were they at the difficulty of imitating it’. All the great men of Rome ‘were hostile to Cato, feeling that they were put to shame by him’. Even great Pompey was said to have been unnerved by him. ‘Pompey admired him when he was present but … as if he must render account of his command while Cato was there, he was glad to send him away.’

His life (95–46 BC) coincided with the last half century of the Roman Republic, a time of chronic political instability and convulsive change. It was a time when the institutions of the state had ceased to reflect the real distribution of power within it. Rome and all its provinces were nominally ruled by the Senate and the people of Rome; but by the end of Cato’s life, Rome’s dominions extended from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to the North Sea. The constitution, evolved within a city-state, provided none of the machinery required to subdue, police, and administer an international empire. The prosecution of foreign wars and the exploitation of the conquered provinces required great armies and teams of officials – none of which Rome’s institutions could provide. The provinces were effectively autonomous states, far larger and frequently richer than the metropolis, with their own separate administrations. The pro-consuls who conquered and governed them at their own expense and to their own profit, who were often absent from Rome for years on end acting as effectively independent rulers in their allotted territories, and who returned at last enormously wealthy and to the adulation of the people, had, in reality, infinitely more clout than the institutions they were supposed to serve. When Pompey celebrated his triumph on returning from Asia in 61 BC his chariot was preceded by the captive families of three conquered kings. He boasted of having killed or subjected over twelve million people and of increasing Rome’s public revenues by 70 per cent. There was no room in the Republic for such a man, no legitimate channel for his influence or proper way in which he could exert his power. The Athenians had been afraid when Alcibiades demonstrated his prowess, his wealth, and his international connections at Olympia. Just so were the Roman republicans apprehensive as first Pompey, and subsequently Crassus and Caesar, grew so great they loomed over the state like unstable colossi.

Cato was the little man who dared oppose these giants, the Prometheus nobly defying the ruthless gods (one of whom Caesar would soon become) for the sake of oppressed humanity. Armed only with his voice, his knowledge of the law and his unshakeable certainty of his own rectitude, he resolutely obstructed their every attempt to have their actual power acknowledged. Whether he was wise to do so is open to question. Theodor Mommsen, the great nineteenth-century German historian, called Cato an ‘unbending dogmatical fool’. Even Cicero, who thought so highly of him and whose political ally he was throughout most of their contemporaneous careers, found him exasperating at times. Cicero was a pragmatist, a sophisticated political operator and a practitioner of the art of the possible. Cato, by contrast, loudly and dogmatically insisting on the letter of ancient and anachronistic laws, repeatedly damaged his own cause by exposing his allies’ misdemeanours and defending his opponents’ rights. To many commentators, ancient and modern alike, it has appeared that, had it not been for Cato’s dogged refusal to compromise his political principles, or to allow anyone else to do so without being publicly shamed, the Senate might have been able to come to terms with Julius Caesar in 49 BC, that Caesar need never have led his troops across the Rubicon, that thousands of lives might have been saved.

But Cato’s failings are identical with his claims to heroic status. What in the man was awkward was transmuted by time and changing political circumstance to become, in the context of the legend that grew up around him, evidence of his superhuman fortitude. His obstinate refusal to take note of historical change or political expediency are manifestations of his magnificent staunchness. His tactlessness and naivety are the tokens of his integrity. His unpopularity proves his resolution. Even his downfall is a measure of his selfless nobility. He opposes Julius Caesar – by common consent one of Western history’s great men – and is inevitably defeated by him; but his defeat makes him even greater than that great opponent. He dies as a flawed and vulnerable person, and rises again as a marmoreal ideal. Seneca, writing in the next century, imagined the king of the gods coming down among men in search of instances of human grandeur. ‘I do not know what nobler sight Jupiter could find on earth,’ he wrote, ‘than the spectacle of Cato … standing erect amid the ruins of the commonwealth.’

His life began and ended in times of civil war. When he was seven years old the Roman general Sulla marched on Rome at the head of his legions, demanding the leadership of the campaign against King Mithridates of Pontus. The Senate capitulated. Sulla then departed for the East, leaving his followers to be killed by his political enemies. Five years later, after having subdued all Asia Minor, he returned to Italy and fought his way to Rome, confronting and defeating the armies of the consuls. Once he had taken the city, the people granted him absolute power. He set about putting to death anyone who had opposed him. His proscriptions, the terrible lists of those outlawed with a price on their heads that served as an incitement to mass murder, were posted in the Forum. Forty senators and at least sixteen hundred others (nine thousand according to one source) were named. Some were formally executed, some murdered by Sulla’s paid killers, some torn apart by the mob. Cato was thirteen at the time. His father, by then dead, had been favoured by Sulla. Plutarch, who wrote his Life of Cato a century and a half after the latter’s death but whose sources included accounts (subsequently lost) written by Cato’s contemporaries, relates that the boy’s tutor took him to pay court to the dictator. Sulla’s house was an ‘Inferno’, where his opponents were tortured, and on whose walls their severed heads were displayed. Early in his life Cato witnessed at first hand what befalls a state whose constitution has been overturned by a military dictator.

He bore an illustrious name. He was the great-grandson of Cato the Censor, a man who was remembered as an embodiment of the stern virtues that those who came later liked to imagine had been characteristic of the Roman Republic in its prime. The Censor was a byword for his asceticism and his moral rigour. He travelled everywhere on foot, even when he came to hold high office. At home he worked alongside his farm labourers, bare-chested in summer and in winter wearing only a sleeveless smock, and was content with a cold breakfast, a frugal dinner and a humble cottage to live in. Wastage was abhorrent to him. To his rigorous avoidance of it he sacrificed both beauty and kindness. He disliked gardens: land was for tilling and grazing. When his slaves became too old to work, he sold them rather than feed useless mouths. In office he was as harsh on others as he was on himself. When he discovered that one of his subordinates had been buying prisoners of war as slaves (a form of insider dealing that was improper but not illegal) the man hanged himself rather than suffer the Censor’s rebuke. Grim, graceless and incorruptible, the elder Cato was unpopular but generally revered. The younger Cato, or so several of his contemporaries believed, took him as a model.

His early career followed the conventional path for a young man of Rome’s ruling class. When Crassus put down the revolt of the slaves under Spartacus Cato served as a volunteer in his army, his zeal and self-discipline, according to Plutarch, providing a striking contrast with the ‘effeminacy and luxury’ of his fellow officers. Like his virtuous ancestor, who ‘never embraced his wife except when a loud peal of thunder occurred’, he was sexually abstemious, remaining a virgin until his first marriage (something unusual enough to arouse comment). Surly and forbidding in company, in private he drilled himself rigorously for the political career before him. He frequented philosophers, especially the Stoic Antipater, ‘and devoted himself especially to ethical and political doctrines’. He trained his voice and disciplined his body not only by exercising hard but also by a programme of self-mortification involving exposure to all weathers.

When he was twenty-eight he stood for election as one of the twenty-four military tribunes chosen each year. In canvassing for support he shamed and irritated his fellow candidates by being the only one of them to obey the law forbidding the employment of nomenclatores, useful people (usually slaves) whose job it was to murmur in the candidate’s ear the name of the man whose vote he was soliciting. Despite this self-imposed handicap he won his place and was posted to Macedonia to command a legion. He proved himself an efficient and popular officer. When his year’s term of office was up he made a grand tour of Asia Minor before returning home, stopping at Ephesus to pay his respects to Pompey. To the surprise of all observers, Rome’s greatest commander (Caesar’s career was only just beginning) rose to greet the young man, advanced towards him and gave him his hand ‘as though to honour a superior’.

Cato was still young, his political career had yet to begin, but he was already somebody to whom the mighty deferred. Quite how he achieved that status is mysterious. He was not physically remarkable: none of the ancient authors considered his looks worth describing. A portrait bust shows him with a lean and bony face, a serviceable container for a mind but not a thing of beauty. He came of a distinguished family, but so did plenty of other hopeful young Romans. He had inherited some money: so did most men of his class. He had done decent service in the army, but he was never to prove a particularly gifted warrior. His distinguishing characteristics were those of inflexibility and outspokenness, scarcely the best qualifications for worldly success. He was more studious than most, but what was impressive about him seems to have had little to do with his intellectual attainments. Something marked him out, something very different from the dangerous brilliance of Achilles or Alcibiades’ winning glamour, something his contemporaries called ‘authority’.

According to Plutarch, he had already been a known and respected figure in his early teens. When Sulla was appointing leaders for the two teams of boys who performed the ritual mock battle, the Troy Game, one team rejected the youth appointed and clamoured for Cato. In adulthood his nature, wrote Plutarch, was ‘inflexible, imperturbable, and altogether steadfast’. His peers were awed by it. His acknowledged incorruptibility gave him a kind of power that was independent of any formal rank. From his first entry into public life the amount of influence he was able to exert and the deference he inspired were unprecedented for one so comparatively young. His ascendancy over the Roman political scene has been described by the German historian Christian Meier as ‘one of the strangest phenomena in the whole of history’. Inexplicable in terms of his official or social status, it can only have derived from the extraordinary force of his personality.

By the time he returned to Rome from Asia he was thirty, and therefore eligible to stand for election as one of the twenty quaestors chosen annually. The constitution of Republican Rome was a complicated hybrid, evolved over centuries. The Greek historian Polybius, who had been held hostage in Rome in the previous century, had described it as being at once monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. His analysis is not exact – no one within the Republic had the absolute lifelong power of a monarch – but near enough. The consuls, of whom two at a time were elected for a year’s term, seemed to Polybius like kings. Originally the consuls had been military commanders and generally absent from the metropolis, but by Cato’s day it had become normal for them to remain in Rome for their year of office, departing at the end of it each to his own province (traditionally chosen by lot), which he would govern for a further year.

The consuls were the senior members of the Senate, but they were not prime ministers. The state was administered by annually elected officials – in ascending order of seniority, quaestors, aediles, praetors and consuls – each of whom held power independently of all the rest. There might be alliances between officeholders, but there was no unified government, no cabinet of ministers working in concert. Anyone who had ever held office became a lifelong member of the Senate. Theoretically, any free adult male could present himself for election to office once he attained the prescribed age. In practice, only the rich could afford to do so. Election campaigns were expensive; bribery was commonplace; and if it cost a lot of money to gain office, it cost far more to hold it. Officials were expected to provide their own staff, to lay on public games and maintain public buildings, all at their own expense. And not only were officeholders obliged to spend money copiously: they were debarred, for the rest of their lives, from earning it. It was forbidden for a senator to engage in business. Besides, to win elections it was necessary to have the right connections. Inevitably, the majority of officeholders and senators were drawn from a small pool of families, of which Cato’s was one, of substantial wealth and long-established influence.

Rome was nonetheless a democracy. The Senate was not a legislative body, its members could propose laws, but those laws were passed or rejected by the people of Rome (that is, the male, adult, unenslaved people) voting in person. And the people’s interests were protected by the tribunes of the people, elected officials (ten a year) who shared with the consuls and praetors the right to propose laws to the voters, who had the devastating power of the veto – a single tribune could block any measure – and whose persons were sacrosanct.

In Cato’s lifetime this ramshackle and mutually inconvenient assemblage of institutions began to fall apart. The upholders of the ancient constitution – of whom Cato was to become the most passionately committed – struggled to enforce the elaborate rules that were designed, above all, to ensure that no one man should ever achieve too much power. They failed. Defying the Senate, making use of the tribunes and appealing direct to the people, first Pompey, then Crassus, and finally Julius Caesar demanded and obtained powers that vastly exceeded any that the constitution allowed. It was Cato’s life’s work to oppose them.

From his first entry into public life Cato signalled his punctilious regard for the workings of the constitution. To most candidates the post of quaestor, the most junior magistracy, was primarily the portal through which a man entered the Senate – not so much a job as a rite of passage. In 65 BC Cato astonished all observers by qualifying himself for the position before applying for it. The quaestors were responsible for the administration of public funds. According to Plutarch, Cato ‘read the law relating to the quaestorships, learned all the details of the office from those who had had experience in it, and formed a general idea of its power and scope’. Once elected he assumed control of the treasury, instituting a purge of the clerks who had been accepting bribes and embezzling money with impunity. Next he set about paying those, however insignificant, to whom the state was indebted, and ‘rigorously and inexorably’ demanding payment from those, however influential, who were its debtors – a policy whose simple rectitude appeared to his contemporaries breathtakingly novel.

The society in which Cato lived was described by his contemporary Sallust (who was himself convicted of extortion) as one in which ‘instead of modesty, incorruptibility and honesty, shamelessness, bribery and rapacity held sway’. Sulla’s coup, the ensuing civil wars and his reign of terror had left the state punch-drunk and reeling. More recently and insidiously, a series of constitutional reforms and counter-reforms had undermined the perceived legitimacy of established institutions. Meanwhile wealth flooded into Rome from the conquered provinces, but there was no mechanism whereby the state could put it to good use and few channels for its redistribution among the populace. Rome had no revenue service. Romans paid no tax, but the inhabitants of the overseas provinces did. The money was collected by tax farmers, who paid dearly for the right to do the job and who set the level of tribute exacted high enough to ensure themselves handsome profits. The Roman provincial governors who oversaw their operations took their cut as well. Corruption was endemic throughout the system. The records of Rome’s law courts are full of cases of returning governors facing charges of extortion. It was a time when the best lacked all conviction: Sallust denounced those magnates who squandered their wealth shamefully on fantastically grandiose projects for beautifying their private grounds – ‘they levelled mountains and built upon the seas’ – instead of spending it honourably for the public’s good, and Cicero inveighed against aristocrats who chose to retire to their country estates and breed rare goldfish rather than wrestle with the intractable problems besetting the state.

In such a society Cato, scrupulously balancing his books, shone out. Heroes of a flashier sort disdain accountancy. In Alcibiades’ youth, when his guardian Pericles was accused of using public money for his own private ends, Alcibiades told him ‘You should be seeking not how to render, but how not to render an accounting’ and advised him to divert attention from his alleged embezzlements by provoking a major war. But Cato was a man who believed that right and wrong were absolute and non-negotiable, that ethics was a discipline as clear and exact as arithmetic. In paintings of his death it is conventional for the artist to include, along with the sword and the book, an abacus, the tool of the accountant and token of his absolute integrity.

Under Cato’s administration the treasury became an instrument of justice. There were still at large several men known to have been used as assassins by Sulla at the time of his murderous proscriptions. ‘All men hated them as accursed and polluted wretches,’ says Plutarch, ‘but no one had the courage to punish them.’ No one, that is, except Cato. He demanded that they repay the large sums with which they had been rewarded for their killings, and publicly denounced them. Shortly thereafter they finally came to trial.

Cato possessed, writes Plutarch, ‘that form of goodness which consists in rigid justice that will not bend to clemency or favour’. Eccentric as his straight dealing was perceived to be, it won him a degree of respect quite disproportionate to his actual achievements. His truth-telling became a by-word. ‘When speaking of matters that were strange and incredible, people would say, as though using a proverb “This is not to be believed even though Cato says it”.’ Any defendant who attempted to have him removed from a jury was immediately assumed to be guilty. His evident probity gave him a degree of power out of all proportion to his official rank. It was said that he had given the relatively lowly office of quaestor the dignity normally attached to that of consul.

He had become a notable player in the political game. That game, as played in the last years of the Roman Republic, was a rough one. Rome had no police force. Prominent people never went out alone. In good times they were accompanied wherever they went by an entourage of clients and servants. In bad times they had their own trains of guards-cum-enforcers, troops of armed slaves and gladiators, in some cases so numerous as to amount to private armies. Political dispute developed, rapidly and often, into physical conflict. To read the ancient historians’ account of the period is to be repeatedly astonished by the contrast between the grandeur and efficacy of Rome’s rule over its expanding empire and the rowdiness and violence at its very heart. The Forum was not only parliament, law court, sports arena, theatre and place of worship. It was also, frequently, a battlefield. The temples that surrounded it, which were used on occasion as debating chambers or polling stations, could and frequently did serve as fortresses occupied and defended by fighting men. During his career Cato was to be spat upon, stripped of his toga, pelted with dung, dragged from the rostrum (the platform in the Forum from which orators addressed the people), beaten up and hauled off to prison. He escaped with his life, but he was present on occasions when others did not. The making of a political speech, in his lifetime, was an act that called for considerable courage.

His quaestorship over, he was an assiduous senator, always the first to arrive in the morning at the Senate House and the last to leave, attending every session to ensure no corrupt measure could be debated without his being there to oppose it. But in 65 BC he resolved to take a reading holiday. He set off for his country estate, accompanied by a group of his favourite philosophers and several asses loaded down with books. The projected idyll – quiet reading and high-minded discussion in a bucolic setting – was aborted. On the road Cato met Metellus Nepos, brother-in-law and loyal supporter of Pompey. Learning that Nepos was on his way to Rome to stand for election as a tribune of the people, Cato decided that it was his duty to return forthwith and oppose him.

It was an edgy time in Rome. Two years previously, during Cato’s quaestorship, a group of influential men had plotted a coup d’état. The plot was aborted, but those suspected of instigating it were all still at liberty, all highly visible on the political scene. The ancient historians differ as to who they were. Sallust identifies the ringleader as Catiline, a charismatic, dangerous man whom Cicero credited with a phenomenal gift for corrupting others and a corresponding one for ‘stimulating his associates into vigorous activity’. Catiline was a glamorous figure: nineteen hundred years later Charles Baudelaire was to identify him, along with Alcibiades and Julius Caesar, as being one of the first and most brilliant of the dandies. Scandals clung to his name. He was said to have seduced a vestal virgin, even to have murdered his own stepson to please a mistress. His sulphurous reputation had not prevented him achieving the rank of praetor, but his first attempt to win the consulship was thwarted when he was accused of extortion. Sallust maintains that, prevented from attaining power by legitimate means, Catiline plotted to assassinate the successful candidates and make himself consul by force. Suetonius, on the other hand, asserts that the chief conspirators were Crassus and Caesar.

Crassus was a man some seventeen years older than Cato who had grown fabulously rich by profiting from others’ misfortunes. He had laid the foundations of his wealth at the time of Sulla’s proscriptions, buying up the confiscated property of murdered men at rock-bottom prices. He had multiplied it by acquiring burnt-out houses for next to nothing (in Rome, a cramped and largely wooden city, fires were frequent and widespread) and rebuilding them with his workforce of hundreds of specially trained slaves until he was said to own most of Rome. A genial host, a generous dispenser of loans and a shrewd patron of the potentially useful, he ensured that his money bought him immense influence. No one, he is reported to have said, could call himself rich until he was able to support an army on his income. He was one who could.

Julius Caesar was one of Crassus’ many debtors. Five years older than Cato and politically and temperamentally his opposite, he was already noted for his military successes, his sexual promiscuity and his fabulous munificence – all of which endeared him to the populace. As aedile in 65 BC, the year of the alleged conspiracy, he staged at his own expense a series of wild-beast hunts and games of unprecedented magnificence, filling the Forum with temporary colonnades and covering the Capitoline Hill with sideshows. In Alcibiades’ lifetime, Plato had warned ‘any politician who seeks to please the people excessively … is doing so only in order to establish himself as a tyrant’. Whether or not he was actually plotting sedition, Caesar was already one of the handful of men who threatened to destabilize the Roman state – as Alcibiades had once undermined the stability of Athens – simply by being too glittering, too popular, too great.

But though Catiline, Crassus and Caesar were all present in Rome when Cato returned in 63 BC to stand for election, it was Pompey whom the guardians of republican principles were watching most apprehensively. It was because Metellus Nepos was Pompey’s man that Cato had felt it so imperative to oppose him. Pompey had treated Cato graciously in Ephesus, but Cato was not the man to be won over by a display of good manners, however flattering. Cato was a legalist. His political philosophy was based on the premise that only by a strict and absolute adherence to the letter of the law could the Republic be preserved. Pompey’s entire career had been conducted in the law’s defiance.

When only twenty-three he had raised an army of his own and appointed himself its commander. When he returned triumphant from Spain in 71 BC he had insisted on being allowed to stand for consul – the highest office in the state – despite the fact that he was ten years too young and had held no previous elected office, and he had backed up his demand by bringing his legions menacingly close to the city. Sulla had drastically reduced the powers of the tribunes and enhanced those of the Senate. As consul in 70 BC, Pompey had reversed the balance. In subsequent years he had seen to it that a fair number of the tribunes were his supporters and he worked through them, as Caesar was to do later, to bypass the increasingly unhappy Senate and appeal directly to the electorate for consent to the expansion of his privileges and power.

In 66 BC a tribune had proposed and seen through a law granting Pompey extraordinary and unprecedented powers to rid the eastern Mediterranean of pirates. In the following year another tribune had proposed that he should be granted command of the campaign against Mithridates of Pontus (Sulla’s old adversary who had risen against Rome again). Military commands brought glory, which in turn brought popularity. They brought tribute money and ransoms and loot that could be used to buy power. Military commanders also had armies (which the Senate did not). Pompey had been spectacularly successful, both against the pirates and against Mithridates. There were plenty who remembered that he had begun his career as one of Sulla’s commanders, that it was Sulla who had named him ‘Pompey the Great’. And Sulla, who had returned from defeating Mithridates to make war on Rome itself, had set a terrible precedent. In 63 BC the senators awaited the return of their victorious general with mounting fear.

Cato and Metellus Nepos were both among those elected to hold office as tribunes in the following year. At once Cato resumed his role as self-appointed guardian of public morality, while simultaneously demonstrating how unable, and indeed unwilling, he was to act the wily politician. He accused one of his own political allies, the consul Murena, of bribery. He was almost certainly correct in doing so. The bribing of voters was so commonplace that Cato’s own refusal to practise it made him highly unpopular. But those who had assumed that Cato was their ally were exasperated. Cicero, the celebrated advocate and the other great luminary of the constitutionalist party, defended Murena (and got him off), remarking acidly in court that Cato had acted ‘as if he were living in Plato’s Republic, rather than among the dregs of Romulus’ descendants’ – a remark designed less to lament the imperfection of modern life than to reproach the incorruptible Cato for his political ineptitude.

Later that year, though, Cato got the chance to demonstrate that what he lacked in adroitness he made up for in passion and persuasiveness. For years he had been developing his powers of oratory, rigorously preparing himself for his calling, and he had, besides, two gifts worth more than any acquired rhetorical skill. One was an exceptionally powerful voice. It was loud and penetrating enough for him to be able to address enormous crowds, and he had trained and exercised it until he had the stamina and the lung power to speak all day at full volume. The other was ferocity. He is reported to have believed that political oratory was a discipline as ‘warlike’ as the defence of a city, and he put his theory into practice. His speeches were performances of thunderous belligerence, full of devastating energy, of aggression and of righteous rage. He was soon to have occasion to employ his talent.

Catiline had once more stood for election as consul and lost. Whether or not he had conspired against the state two years earlier, this time he certainly did. According to Sallust he bound his followers to him with a solemn ritual during which they were all required to drink from a cup full of human blood, and he prepared to lead an armed revolt.

Cicero was consul. He heard – from his wife, who had heard it from a female friend, who had heard it from her lover, who was one of Catiline’s fellow conspirators – that Catiline’s coup was imminent. Unable to act on such hearsay evidence, Cicero provided himself with a bodyguard of hired thugs and ostentatiously wore a breastplate in public, as though to announce that he knew he and his fellow officeholders were under threat and that he was ready to defend himself. Catiline, too, had his personal guard, made up, according to a contemporary, of ‘troops of criminals and reprobates of every kind’. The situation was doubly dangerous. The prospect of an uprising was alarming in itself. Even worse, to Cato and like-minded senators, was the probability that Pompey would use it as a pretext for bringing his legions back to Italy and marching on Rome – ostensibly to suppress the revolt, in fact to seize power for himself. It was among the most essential provisions of the Roman constitution that no army should ever be brought into Rome, and that a military leader must lay aside his command (and the legal immunity it gave him) before entering the city. When in Rome, all Romans were civilians and subject to the law. Sulla had breached that rule, with terrible consequences for the Republic. There was a real prospect that Pompey, Sulla’s protégé, might follow his lead.

In October there was an uprising in Etruria. In November an armed gang attempted to force their way into Cicero’s house before dawn, apparently to assassinate him, but were driven off by his guards. In an atmosphere of mounting panic rumours circulated that the conspirators intended to burn the city to the ground. The Senate declared a state of emergency, but still there was no concrete evidence against anyone. Catiline defiantly took his seat in the Senate. No one would sit next to him. Shortly afterwards he left to join the rebels in the countryside. At last a letter was intercepted naming the leading conspirators. On 3 December the five of them who were still in Rome were arrested.

What was to be done with them? Two days later the Senate met in a temple on the edge of the Forum. Outside were crowds whose shouts and murmurs could be heard from within the chamber, crowds that included many of Catiline’s supporters. Around the building, and in all the other temples in the Forum, were stationed Cicero’s armed guard. It was a dangerous and solemn occasion. The first speakers all demanded ‘the extreme penalty’, clearly meaning death. Then came the turn of Julius Caesar.

Caesar’s speech on that momentous December day was elegant, tightly argued, and – given that he himself was widely suspected of having instigated the earlier plot and of complicity in the current one – coolly audacious. Summary execution was illegal, he argued. The conspirators deserved punishment, but to kill them without legal sanction would be to set a dangerous precedent. He advocated life imprisonment ‘under the severest terms’ instead. So persuasive was he (and so intimidating) that all the following speakers endorsed his opinion, and of those who had spoken earlier several abjectly claimed that by the ‘extreme penalty’ they had meant not execution, but precisely the kind of sentence Caesar was now recommending. The outcome of the debate seemed certain. At this point, very late in the proceedings because senators spoke in order of seniority and he was one of the youngest and lowest ranking, Cato intervened.

His speech was electrifying. Caesar had been suave: Cato was enraged. With the furious probity of a Saint-Just he denounced the pusillanimous senators. Sarcastic and passionate by turn, he sneered at them – ‘You, who have always valued your houses, villas, statues and paintings more highly than our country’ – and fiercely drove them on: ‘Now in the name of the immortal gods I call upon you … Wake up at last and lay hold of the reins of the state!’ He mocked, he ranted, he painted a luridly dramatic picture of the dangers besetting the commonwealth. Finally, with awful solemnity, he demanded that the conspirators be put to death. The potency of his performance was demonstrated by its effect. When he had finished the senators, one after another, rose and went to stand beside him to signal their agreement.

Caesar, who only minutes before had held the assembly in his hand, was left isolated. For once losing his famous imperturbability, Caesar protested furiously. There was a fracas, during which (according to some sources) Cato accused Caesar of complicity with the conspirators. Cicero’s guard intervened, drawing their swords. Caesar was nearly killed in the ensuing mêlée. Eventually some kind of order was restored. Caesar left. The Senate stood firm behind Cato. The conspirators were led, one by one, across the Forum, through the agitated crowd (which included some of their confederates) to the place of punishment. There, in an underground chamber ‘hideous and fearsome to behold’, they were strangled. A few weeks later Catiline himself was killed in battle.

So began the essential drama of Cato’s life. ‘For a long time,’ wrote Sallust, ‘no one at all appeared in Rome who was great. But within my own memory there have been two men of towering merit, Cato and Caesar.’ Two thousand years on Caesar is by far the more celebrated of the two – thanks in part to his skilful fostering of his own fame, in part to our culture’s infatuation with military conquest. But to those who knew them, the two looked evenly matched – a comparable pair of brilliantly gifted men. They clashed for the first time in the debate over the conspirators’ sentence. From that day until his death seventeen years later Cato was to remain Caesar’s most inveterate political opponent.

Each of them was the prime representative of one of two tendencies in Roman political life (to call them parties would be to suggest a degree of cohesiveness notably absent from the political scene). Cato was to become the most eloquent spokesman of the Optimates, Caesar the most successful of the Populares. Optimates and Populares alike were oligarchs drawn from the same exclusive group of rich and well-descended Romans; but they differed in the ways in which they played the complicated political system of the Republic. The Populares were soldiers and empire-builders, or their clients and admirers, who tended to bypass the Senate by enlisting the support of the tribunes and through them of the electorate at large. Like Alcibiades, they were aristocratic populists, distrusted by their peers but adored by an electorate to whom they offered the violent excitement and huge potential profits of warfare. The Optimates – civilians at heart – were the defenders of the power of the Senate, and sticklers for the rules designed to uphold the senators’ dignity and, most importantly, to ensure that military commanders were prevented from using their armies to seize personal power.

Within a week of the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators the new tribunes, Cato and Metellus Nepos among them, took office, and so did Caesar as praetor. At once Nepos fulfilled Cato’s worst fears by proposing that Pompey, his patron, be recalled to Rome with his legions ‘to restore order’. When Nepos’ proposal was discussed in the Senate Caesar supported it, but Cato raged against it with such vehemence that some observers thought he was out of his mind. As a tribune he had the right to veto the measure and he announced that he would do so, swearing passionately ‘that while he lived Pompey should not enter the city with an armed force’.

It was no empty piece of rhetoric. It was widely believed that the Populares would have Cato prevented by whatever means were necessary, up to and including murder, from blocking their way. He would have to declare his veto formally the following day, when the people would be asked to vote on the measure in the Forum. That night he slept deeply, but he was alone of his household in doing so. According to Plutarch, ‘great dejection and fear reigned, his friends took no food and watched all night with one another in futile discussion on his behalf, while his wife and sisters wailed and wept’.

It was customary for friends and political allies to call for an officeholder at his house in the morning and escort him down to the Forum as a public demonstration of support. But on the day of the vote, so effectively had Nepos and Caesar cowed their opponents, Cato had only one companion of note, another tribune by the name of Thermus. As the two of them, attended only by a handful of servants, made their way towards the place of assembly they met well-wishers who exhorted them to be on their guard but who fearfully declined to accompany them. On arriving they found the Forum packed with people whom Nepos had succeeded in rousing to his cause and surrounded by his and Caesar’s armed slaves. (Caesar owned several gladiatorial training schools and had brought an unprecedented number of gladiators to Rome for the games he staged in 65 BC: the games over, he kept the surviving slaves around him as an armed guard.)

Nepos and Caesar were already seated in a commanding position on the exceptionally high and steep podium of the Temple of Castor. On the temple steps a troop of gladiators was massed. Seeing them, Cato exclaimed, ‘What a bold man, and what a coward, to levy such an army against a single unarmed and defenceless person!’ Accompanied only by Thermus, he pushed through the hostile crowd. The gladiators, disconcerted by his courage, made way for him. Climbing onto the podium, he brusquely positioned himself between Nepos and Caesar.

A law upon which the people were to vote had first to be read out loud to them. A herald prepared to declaim Nepos’ proposed measure. Cato, announcing his veto, stopped him. Nepos, in defiance of law and custom, attempted to override the veto. Snatching the document from the herald, he began to read it himself. Cato ripped it from him. Nepos continued to recite it from memory. Thermus, Cato’s sole supporter, clapped a hand over his mouth.

The tussle was taking place in full view of an excited and increasingly volatile crowd. People were yelling out encouragement for one side or another as though watching a gladiatorial show, and increasing numbers were shouting for Cato. ‘They urged one another to stay and band themselves together and not betray their liberty and the man who was striving to defend it.’ Furious at being so thwarted, Nepos signalled to his armed guards, who charged into the mob with fearsome yells, precipitating a riot that lasted for several hours. It was a day of brutal mayhem. At one point Nepos, having temporarily regained control of the Forum, attempted to force what would have been an illegal vote. At another Cato, standing dangerously exposed on the tribunal, was stoned by the crowd and was only saved from perhaps fatal injury by the intervention of the consul Murena (the man he had accused of bribery), who wrapped him in his own toga and dragged him into the shelter of a temple.

Nepos’ followers were eventually driven out. Cato addressed the people and, battered and exhausted as he must have been, he spoke with such fervour that he won them over entirely. The Senate assembled again and rallied behind him, condemning Nepos’ law. Nepos, according to Plutarch, saw ‘that his followers were completely terrified before Cato and thought him utterly invincible’. In defiance of the rule that no tribune might leave the city during his term of office he fled, ‘crying out that he was fleeing from Cato’s tyranny’, and made his way to Pompey’s camp in Asia. Caesar’s praetorship was temporarily suspended. The episode was a great political victory for Cato. Characteristically, he contrived to make it a moral one as well when he opposed a motion to deprive Nepos of his office: the tribunate must remain inviolable, however flawed the tribune might be.

In 61 BC Pompey returned from the East and celebrated his triumph. He had conquered fifteen countries and taken nine hundred cities, eight hundred ships and a thousand fortresses. For two whole days the celebrations engulfed Rome as the entire populace turned out to see the show. Captured monarchs and their children were led in procession along with manacled pirate chiefs. Huge placards proclaimed Pompey’s victories. There were bands playing; there were military trophies; there were wagonloads of weaponry and precious metal. Finally, there came Pompey himself wreathed with bay, his face painted to resemble Jupiter, his purple toga spangled with gold stars. He wore a cloak that had purportedly belonged to Alexander the Great. Beside him in his gem-encrusted chariot rode a slave whose task it was to whisper ceaselessly ‘Remember you are human’ while all about the noisy, gaudy, amazing spectacle proclaimed the opposite. Behind the godlike victor marched lines of soldiers, all hymning his glory.

It was a spectacle that boded ill for republican liberty, but for the time being Cato’s dark forebodings of civil war and dictatorship were not realized. Pompey, for all his magnificence, was still a republican. In Asia he had repudiated Nepos. Now he dismissed his army and re-entered Rome as a private citizen apparently intent on seeking a legitimate channel for his power. It was not his ambition but Cato’s absolute refusal to allow any concession to be made to him that rendered that impossible.

Doggedly disobliging, implacably opposed to the slightest modification of a political system which, like Sophocles’ tree, looked doomed to break if it would not bend, Cato obstructed Pompey’s every manoeuvre. It was Cato who persuaded the Senate not to postpone the consular elections so that Pompey might stand for office. It was Cato who vociferously opposed the ratification of Pompey’s settlements in the East. And it was Cato who spoke loudest against the bill whereby Pompey sought to reward his veterans for their victories with plots of publicly owned land. Pompey attempted to dissolve this thorn in his flesh by proposing a double marriage, with himself and his son as bridegrooms to Cato’s nieces (or perhaps his daughters), further evidence of the astonishingly high regard in which this still comparatively junior politician was held. Cato refused, saying ‘Tell Pompey that Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.’ Once again, in rejecting an opportunity to bind Pompey to the constitutionalist faction, he had done his own cause a grave disservice.

He did it another one when he antagonized Crassus. A consortium of tax farmers had paid too high for the right to raise money in Asia Minor. Unable to make a profit, they attempted to renegotiate their contract with the Senate. Crassus backed them. Cato opposed them with manic obduracy. Talking indefatigably for day after day, he succeeded in blocking the measure for months on end, effectively paralysing the Senate by the sheer power of his obstinate will.

In 60 BC Julius Caesar, who had been campaigning in Spain, also returned to Rome. He had been granted a triumph for his Iberian conquests, but in order to celebrate it he was obliged to remain outside the sacrosanct bounds of the city. However, he wished (as Pompey had done) to be elected consul for the following year, and in order to declare his candidacy he had to be in Rome. He asked the Senate’s permission to stand for office in absentia. Cato opposed him. A decision had to be reached before nightfall on a certain day. Once more Cato filibustered, haranguing his colleagues in his powerful, rasping voice until the sun went down. The next morning Caesar laid aside his command, thus giving up his triumph, and entered the city to seek election.

Rome’s three most powerful men had each found that, thanks to Cato’s intransigence, they were unable to impose their will on the Senate. They resolved instead to ignore it. In 60 BC Pompey, Caesar and Crassus arrived at a secret agreement (known as the First Triumvirate) that made them the effective, though unacknowledged, rulers of Rome, their combined wealth, manpower and political influence allowing them to bypass or overrule all the institutions of government.

Cato was outraged. Over the next four years, in the face of political intimidation that frequently escalated into violence, he unswervingly opposed the incremental growth of the power of Rome’s inordinately great men. Every time a rule was bent, a precedent ignored, an extraordinary privilege granted, he was there to oppose the innovation. Tireless and tiresome in equal measure, ‘always ready’, as Theodor Mommsen wrote, ‘to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so or not’, he let nothing pass. When Caesar became consul in 59 BC Cato obstructed and opposed his every move.

One of Caesar’s proposals was another bill granting land to Pompey’s soldiers. Pompey brought his veterans – the very men who would benefit from the measure – into the city, a tacit threat to anyone inclined to oppose its passage. A time limit was set for the Senate’s discussion. Few – nervously aware of the armed men thronging the streets around them – dared speak at all; but when it came to Cato’s turn he rose and, employing his favourite tactic, attempted to block the measure by speaking for hours on end. This time, though, he had an opponent with scant respect for senatorial procedure. Caesar’s gang of gladiators dragged him from the rostrum and hauled him off to the very prison cells where Catiline’s co-conspirators had been done to death. As Cato was hustled away, he continued to harangue the senators. Several followed him ‘with downcast looks’. Caesar called them back, demanding they finish the business in hand. One bravely replied: ‘I prefer to be with Cato in prison rather than here with you.’ Cato was marched across the Forum, still talking at the top of his powerful voice to the shocked and fearful crowd. He was released almost immediately, but his imprisonment was a crucial turning point in the history of the Republic, the moment when Caesar demonstrated that he would have his way, with or without the law.

There were more ugly scenes. When his ineffectual fellow-consul Bibulus (Cato’s son-in-law and ally) attempted to speak against him, Caesar had him and Cato thrown down the steps of the Temple of Castor. They were pelted with dung and Bibulus’ fasces, the emblems of his authority, were broken and thrown after him. There was little Cato could do in the face of such intimidation. Pompey, who had wished to be Cato’s son-in-law, became Caesar’s instead, marrying the consul’s daughter Julia, who was thirty years his junior. Caesar proposed a second land law. It was passed, for all Cato’s protests, the people seeming as entranced by Caesar’s glamour as the Athenians had been by Alcibiades’ (or perhaps they were just afraid of his enforcers). So was the one granting Caesar Gaul and Illyria for his provinces once his consulate lapsed, not for the usual one-year term, but for five years. A few years later Horace was to advise a poet wishing to represent Achilles, ‘Let him deny that the law was made for him.’ Caesar, bending every rule, ignoring every precedent, was acting with an Achillean disdain for legality. As the people gathered in the Forum to vote Cato addressed them with desperate vehemence, warning ‘that they themselves were establishing a tyrant in their citadel’. They voted the measure through regardless.

Caesar boasted at the end of his consulate that he had got everything he wanted to the accompaniment of his opponents’ groans: now he was free to dance on their heads. He departed for Gaul, having first contrived the election as tribune for the following year of his protégé Clodius, the man who was to plunge Rome into a state of such anarchy that, in Cicero’s words, ‘the blood that streamed from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges’. Clodius, whose personal name was Pulcher, ‘Beautiful’, dominated the circle of young aristocrats against whom Sallust railed for their ‘lewdness’ and ‘luxury’, their total lack of reverence for gods or man-made institutions. A blasphemer and sexual transgressor like Alcibiades, Clodius had – famously – disguised himself and gained entry to the secret festival of the Bona Dea, a women’s rite from which men were rigorously excluded. He was a womanizer whose lovers were said to include his own sister, Clodia, and Caesar’s wife. He was also, as the events of the next six years were to show, a brilliant political organizer, a charismatic demagogue and a man of dangerously unpredictable allegiance capable of turning savagely on magnates who had complacently imagined themselves to be manipulating him.

Immediately he took office he legalized the previously outlawed collegia, institutions that were part trade unions, part neighbourhood self-defence groups and part political clubs, and set about transforming them into units of street-fighting men. Owing their new legitimacy to him, the collegia became Clodius’ own instruments, making him, whether in or out of office, the warlord of the streets. First, though, he had to rid himself of those few public figures with the nerve and integrity to oppose him. He had Cicero sent into exile on the pretext that the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators had been illegal. Cato (without whom those executions would not have taken place) was treated less rudely. He was given the task of annexing Cyprus.

It was a prestigious and potentially lucrative assignment, but Cato saw it only as a means of getting rid of him. It was one of the fundamental differences between the constitutionalists like Cato and the Populares that the former clung to the anachronistic sense that nowhere outside Rome mattered. When Cicero was appointed governor of Cilicia (southern Turkey) he was to tell his friend Atticus that the task was ‘a colossal bore’. To others it might seem he was seeing the world. But he was pining for ‘the world, the Forum’, which to him seemed to be one and the same. Likewise, to Cato, that cramped and teeming rectangular space at the centre of Rome was the hub of the universe, the only place where words and actions had consequences. He accepted overseas postings grudgingly, and despatched them without enthusiasm. When his term of office as praetor ended he actually turned down the provincial governorship to which he was entitled. Pompey and Caesar, by contrast, made the provinces – the armies they were entitled to levy in order to subdue them and the fortunes they amassed there – the foundations of their power.

Cato’s role in Cyprus turned out to be one to which he was exactly suited, that of inventory clerk. The island’s ruler was a Ptolemy, brother of the King of Egypt, who was to be ousted ostensibly because he had supported the pirates against Pompey, but also so that his personal wealth and the revenue from his prosperous island could be added to the magnificence of Rome. Cato was not required to act the conqueror. On receiving his letter calling upon him to abdicate, Ptolemy poisoned himself. All Cato had to do was to take possession of his realm and convert his treasure into currency. This he did virtually single-handed, to the annoyance of his followers. Refusing to delegate any responsibility, he personally negotiated with merchants and private buyers, ensuring he got the highest possible price for all the jewels and golden cups and purple robes and other ‘furnishing of the princely sort’ poor Ptolemy had left. ‘For this reason’, reports Plutarch, ‘he gave offence to most of his friends, who thought that he distrusted them.’ The task was immense: the sum he brought back from Cyprus was so great that, when it was carried through Rome to the treasury, the crowds stood amazed at the quantity of it; but Cato insisted on making himself personally responsible for every detail of its collection and transport. He decided how the money was to be shipped and designed special coffers for the purpose, each one trailing a long rope with a cork float attached so they could be retrieved in the case of shipwreck. He had the accounts written out in duplicate. He had called the assignment an insult, but the people of Rome had voted that he must do it, so – punctilious and dutiful as ever – do it he did, with the driven thoroughness he brought to all his appointed tasks.

While he did so, the Roman Republic staggered under Clodius’ assault. ‘District by district,’ records Cicero, ‘men were being conscripted and enrolled into units and were being incited to violence, to blows, to murder, to looting.’ The collegia’s fighting bands were swelled by slaves. Gangs of swordsmen controlled the city’s public spaces. The Temple of Castor, the building whose high podium dominated the Forum and where Cato had twice suffered violence at Caesar’s hands, was converted from a place of worship and public assembly into a fortress. Clodius had its steps demolished, rendering access to it hard and its defence easy, and made it his arsenal and military headquarters. The political meetings, trials and plebiscites for which the Forum was the venue – all the public business of the state – now took place under the intimidating gaze of Clodius’ enforcers. Meetings of the Senate were interrupted by yelling crowds. A debate on Cicero’s possible recall from exile was broken up by rioters throwing stones and wielding clubs and swords. Some of the tribunes were injured (shockingly, since they were supposed to be inviolate) and several other people killed. When one of Clodius’ associates was put on trial a mob of his supporters invaded the court, overturning benches, dragging the judge from his place, knocking over the urns that served as ballot boxes and driving the prosecutors and jury in terror from the place. No one was exempt. Clodius had appeared originally to be the Triumvirs’ tool but now he turned viciously on one of them. When Pompey attempted to speak in the Forum, Clodius led a mob in heckling him cruelly. A fight broke out between Pompey’s and Clodius’ men: several people were killed and a man was caught apparently in the act of attempting to assassinate Pompey himself. Baffled and afraid, Pompey withdrew to his villa, where he lived virtually besieged.

By the time Cato returned from Cyprus in 56 BC with his haul of scrupulously catalogued treasure some kind of balance of power had been established, but at great cost to the cause of the constitutionalists and to the stability of the state. One of the new year’s tribunes, Milo, with Pompey’s encouragement and sponsorship, had assembled his own private army of slaves and hired thugs and emerged as a rival to Clodius. For weeks, the two gangs fought for control of the city. ‘The Tiber was full of citizens’ corpses,’ wrote Cicero, ‘the public sewers were choked with them.’ Clodius was at least temporarily contained. Pompey, recovering his nerve, reasserted himself and saw to it that Cicero was recalled amid scenes of public rejoicing all over Italy. Bread was scarce: the people were rioting for food. Cicero, returning a favour, advocated a measure granting Pompey control of the corn supply for the next five years, a commission that gave him ill-defined but enormous power both domestically and (since most of Rome’s corn was imported) throughout the Mediterranean.

Endemic violence, a near total collapse of the rule of law, disastrous food shortages, the acceptance even by a moderate like Cicero that only an armed potentate could save the disordered state – the situation to which Cato returned was the fulfilment of his direst predictions. At once he resumed his old task – that of preventing the great men becoming greater.

Caesar, Pompey and Crassus renewed their pact. Pompey and Crassus were standing together for election as the next year’s consuls. The constitutionalists in the Senate went into mourning, as though for the death of the Republic, but no one dared stand in opposition to the two magnates until Cato (who was not yet old enough to be eligible himself) persuaded his brother-in-law, Domitius Ahenobarbus, to do so and to declare that, if elected, he would terminate Caesar’s unprecedentedly long command in Gaul. Before dawn on the morning of the election Cato and Domitius went together to the Field of Mars, where voting was to take place. They were set upon in the darkness. Their torchbearer was killed. Cato was wounded in the arm. With furious resolution he tried to persuade Domitius to stand his ground ‘and not to abandon, while they had breath, the struggle in the behalf of liberty which they were waging against the tyrants, who showed plainly how they would use the consular power by making their way to it through such crimes’. His eloquence was futile. Ahenobarbus, less principled, or perhaps just more realistic, abandoned his candidature and took to his heels.

Cato, determined that the Triumvirs should not be unopposed, stood for election as praetor. Pompey and Crassus put up a candidate of their own and set about bribing the electorate in a vote-buying exercise of unprecedented scale and blatancy. On the day of the election Pompey had the Field of Mars surrounded by Milo’s thugs. Those who voted the wrong way could expect to suffer for it. Even so, so great was Cato’s prestige, the first votes declared were for him. Bribery and intimidation having both failed, Pompey invoked the gods. He declared he had heard thunder (though no one else had) and, thunder being a sign of divine displeasure, he cancelled the ballot. His supporters went to work on the voters again (whether with their money or their swords is not recorded). By the time a second vote could be held those who had initially voted for Cato had changed their minds.

Measure by measure the Triumvirs consolidated their power. Pompey and Crassus saw to it that they were assigned, as their proconsular commands, Spain and Syria respectively; they introduced bills allowing them to wage war as and when they saw fit and to levy as many troops as they wished. Pompey, further, had it agreed that he could delegate the government of Spain to his officials while remaining himself near Rome. Each time the people voted in their favour while all but one of the senators, listless in their impotence, allowed the legislation to pass without questioning or comment. The exception, of course, was Cato.

A man whose greatest skill was that of making a nuisance of himself, he let none of these measures pass without a hurly-burly. Time and again Cato forced his way onto the rostrum to harangue the people. Time and again he was manhandled down. He was briefly imprisoned again. Nothing could silence him. Denied the rostrum, he would mount his supporters’ shoulders instead. There was rioting. People were killed. But Pompey and Crassus, unperturbed, proceeded to their most controversial move. They proposed that Caesar’s command in Gaul should be extended for a further five years. This called from Cato a speech of the utmost passion and solemnity. He told Pompey that he had taken Caesar upon his own shoulders ‘and that when he began to feel the burden and to be overcome by it he would neither have the power to put it away nor the strength to bear it longer, and would therefore precipitate himself, burden and all, upon the city’. The prophecy, with its strange and awful image of the two giants, one weighing down upon the other, crushing the state beneath them as they toppled, was remembered by the historians, but in the short term it was as futile as all of Cato’s efforts. Caesar got his extended command.

Cato kept up his attack. He argued in the Senate that Caesar’s aggression against the German and Gallic tribes was not only wicked but illegal: the Senate, which supposedly determined Rome’s foreign policy, had not authorized it. The Gallic war, on which Caesar’s enormous (and still extant) fame was based, constituted a monstrous atrocity, a genocidal war crime carried out in full view of all the world over a period of nearly a decade. Caesar had taken the leaders of two German tribes prisoner when they came to him under terms of truce and then massacred some four hundred thousand of their people. This, fulminated Cato, was an outrage for which the gods would exact retribution. Caesar should be put in chains and handed over to the enemy for just punishment. Until his guilt was expiated, all Rome would be accursed. Legally speaking, Cato was correct; but the people of Rome preferred conquests, however achieved, to a clear conscience. Caesar fought on.

Over the next two years, Cato struggled ever more desperately for the cause of legitimacy. It was like building card houses in a hurricane. In Gaul Caesar, conquering tribe after tribe and carting their treasure away with him, grew ever richer and more powerful. At the end of each campaigning season he returned to the Italian peninsula, bringing some of his legions with him, and established himself in winter quarters near Ravenna, within his province of Cisalpine Gaul. There he received visitors from Rome, clients and suitors to whom he dispensed largesse, agents who watched over his interest in the metropolis, candidates begging him to use his power to help them to office. Officially absent, he was nonetheless a drastically destabilizing off-stage presence in the drama of Rome’s politics.

While Caesar’s power grew insidiously, Pompey’s was paraded with superb ostentation. For five years he had been building a theatre of unprecedented size and grandeur on the Field of Mars. In 55 BC he inaugurated it with a series of spectacular shows. There were plays, extravagantly staged. (‘What pleasure is there in having a Clytemnestra with six hundred mules?’ wrote Cicero, who found the display vulgar.) There was a bloody series of games in which five hundred lions and untold numbers of gladiators were killed. There was an elephant fight (‘a most horrifying spectacle’, says Plutarch), which astonished the crowd. At the end of his consulate Pompey, invested now with the authority and the legal immunity of a pro-consul but declining to leave Rome, withdrew to his villa near the city. There he bided his time while the Republic tore itself to pieces.

Milo’s and Clodius’ gangs (the former apparently sponsored by Pompey, the latter by Caesar, but both in fact running way out of any sponsors’ control) bullied the citizens and battled each other for control of the streets. Meetings of the Senate were cut short for fear of violent interruptions by the mobs that gathered outside the chamber. Gangs of armed slaves burst into the Arena and put a stop to the sacred games. Elections took place, if at all, in an atmosphere of terror. It was apparent that the situation was untenable. ‘The city’, wrote Suetonius, ‘began to roll and heave like the sea before a storm.’

Yet Cato persisted. Mommsen called him a ‘pedantically stiff and half witless cloud-walker’, and certainly, viewed with hindsight, his dogged efforts to reform a political system on the eve of its extinction look absurd. But Cato, and most of his contemporaries, still assumed that the Republic would last for generations to come. To like-minded Romans his resolute campaign to restore it to rectitude looked not stupid, but saintly. Cato ‘stood alone against the vices of a degenerate state’, wrote Seneca. ‘He stayed the fall of the Republic to the utmost that one man’s hand could do.’

His stand did not make him popular. Repeatedly, when he spoke in the Forum, he was jeered by hostile agitators. ‘He fared’, says Plutarch, ‘as fruits do which make their appearance out of season. For as we look upon these with delight and admiration, but do not use them, so the old-fashioned character of Cato … among lives that were corrupted and customs that were debased, enjoyed great repute and fame, but was not suited to the needs of men.’ He was elected praetor on the second attempt and brought in a law banning bribery and requiring all candidates for office to submit full accounts of their election expenses. That year’s candidates acquiesced on condition that Cato himself (the only man who could be trusted with the job) would act as their umpire; but the electors, accustomed to being paid for their votes, were outraged by the notion that they should give them free. A riot broke out. Cato was set upon by an angry mob. He was knocked down and would have been lynched had he not succeeded in hauling himself upright for long enough to harangue the crowd into docility. As soon as he was eligible he stood for consul but, for all his prestige, was roundly defeated. When Alcibiades returned to his native city (as Pompey had done and Caesar was shortly to do) in the golden nimbus of victory, the citizens had begged him to make himself their absolute ruler, while only a handful of dissenters wished him on his way. So Cato was one of very few of his contemporaries unsusceptible to the glamour of the conquering generals who rode triumphant into Rome, apparently as superhuman in their swaggering magnificence as Plato’s men of gold. Compared with their splendour, Cato’s virtue seemed a dull and unappealing thing. While he clung to republicanism, Lucan was to write, ‘all Rome clamoured to be enslaved’.

In January 52 BC the first of the storms that had been so long gathering broke. The two urban warlords, Clodius and Milo, met – apparently by chance – some miles from Rome on the Appian Way. Clodius was attended by thirty slaves carrying swords, Milo by three hundred armed men, including several gladiators. A brawl began. Clodius was injured. He was carried into a tavern. Milo’s men broke in and killed him. As soon as the news reached Rome the city exploded into violence. Clodius the beautiful, Clodius the insolent, was gone, and the common people of Rome, to whom he had granted an intoxicating taste of their own power, ran wild. His associates, including two tribunes, displayed his corpse, naked and battered as it was, in the Forum. There were hysterical scenes of rage and grief. Prompted by the tribunes, the mob took over the Senate House, built a pyre of all the furniture and the senatorial records, hoisted Clodius’ corpse on top and set fire to the building. The seat of government, the repository of centuries of tradition, the brain controlling all the vast body of the Roman world, was reduced to charred ruins. The rioting spread as fast as the flames.

For a month the chaos continued. A hostile mob attacked Milo’s house, to be driven back by the archers of his personal guard. ‘Every day’, according to Plutarch, ‘the Forum was occupied by three armies, and the evil had well-nigh become past checking.’ The Senate declared a state of emergency, but the previous year’s consular elections had not yet taken place. There was no one to take control. ‘The city was left with no government at all like a ship adrift with no one to steer her.’ A mob invaded the sacred grove where the fasces were kept and seized them. Then, as though craving someone who could save them from their own licence, they swept on to Pompey’s villa outside the city and clamoured for him to make himself dictator. Pompey demurred. He was waiting for the more official invitation that he sensed could not be much longer withheld.

It came soon enough. Twelve years previously Cato had declared that ‘while he lived’ he would never consent to Pompey’s entering the city at the head of an army. Now, hopeless, he concluded that ‘any government was better than no government at all’. To the astonishment of his peers, he spoke in favour of a motion offering Pompey the post of sole consul.

Diplomatic and subtle as ever, Pompey invited Cato to work alongside him. Cato, his living opposite, stubbornly refused. He would be of no man’s party. He would give his advice when asked for it, he said, but he would also give his candid opinion whether asked for it or not.

Pompey ordered his legions into the city. Gradually order was restored; but Rome – while the emergency lasted – was effectually a military dictatorship. When Milo was put on trial for the murder of Clodius, Pompey’s troops, ringing the place of judgment, were so numerous and so menacing that even Cicero, who had undertaken Milo’s defence, lost his nerve, failed to deliver the speech he had planned and saw his client convicted.

The crisis over, Pompey stepped down, once more amazing the constitutionalists by the propriety of his behaviour. But a second storm was imminent. Caesar’s command in Gaul would lapse in the winter of 50 BC. Cato publicly swore that as soon as it did, and Caesar therefore became once more subject to the law, he would bring charges against Caesar for the illegal acts he had perpetrated as consul in 59 BC and for his unjustified and unsanctioned assaults on the people of Gaul.

Caesar had many clients and supporters in the city. Tribunes of his party repeatedly vetoed attempts to rescind his command and appoint a successor to him in Gaul. It began to look increasingly probable that he would refuse to surrender his legions. In December the Senate voted by an overwhelming majority that both he and Pompey should give up their commands. Again one of the tribunes vetoed the measure, at which the Senate once more went into mourning. By this time the danger posed by Caesar, which Cato had been railing against, largely unheard, for years, had served greatly to enhance the latter’s authority. In the general hysteria Cato was acclaimed as a prophet whose vision was being proved true. Terrified that Caesar might launch a coup d’état at any moment from his winter quarters in Ravenna, three senior senators visited Pompey, handed him a sword, and asked him to assume command of all the troops in Italy. Pompey accepted.

There was still a chance of peace. Caesar wanted power, but he was prepared at least to observe the outward forms of republican legitimacy. It was not he but Cato, by his strenuous insistence on refusing any compromise, who made war inevitable. A second Odysseus might have come to some kind of face-saving arrangement; might have bent rules and reinterpreted precedents, remodelling the anachronistic constitution to accommodate modern reality; but Cato was no Odysseus, and it was because he was incapable of Odyssean diplomacy that he has been remembered and revered for millennia. ‘I would rather have noise and thunder and storm-curses than a cautious, uncertain feline repose,’ wrote Nietzsche, meditating on the Superman nearly two thousand years after Cato’s death. There was nothing uncertain about Cato. He was neither beautiful, nor especially valorous, nor – so far as we know – fleet of foot; but he was all the same a true successor to Achilles in his abhorrence of anything less than absolute truthfulness, in his immovable insistence on every article of his creed, in his willingness to see his own cause defeated if the only alternative was a dilution of its purity, and in his preference for death over dishonour. Caesar offered to hand over Gaul to a governor of the Senate’s choosing and to disband all but one of his legions if he could only be granted the right to stand for election as consul in his absence (and so return to Rome protected by the privileges of office). It was not an unprecedented proposal, but Cato fulminated furiously against its acceptance. He would rather die, he said, than allow a citizen to dictate conditions to the Republic.

The Senators were persuaded. Caesar’s offer was refused. A measure was proposed declaring Caesar a public enemy. One of the tribunes (Caesar’s creature) vetoed it, whereupon the Senate declared a state of emergency. None of the ancient sources suggests that the two tribunes friendly to Caesar were physically threatened, but they acted as though they had been. Disguised as slaves, they slipped out of Rome and fled to Caesar’s camp. Their flight provided a pretext for war. Caesar had once dreamed of raping his mother. On 10 January 49 BC, after another troubled night, he led his legions across the Rubicon and marched on his mother city.

His advance was inexorable and swift. Pompey had boasted that he had only to stamp his foot and all Italy would rise in his support. He was wrong: the people, apparently indifferent to the threat to senatorial rights and their own liberties, let Caesar pass. Despairing of holding the city against him, Pompey and most of the officeholders, as well as many senators, abandoned Rome. After that day Cato never again cut his hair, trimmed his beard, wore a garland, or lay on a couch to eat. In deep mourning for the republic he had tried so hard to maintain, he followed Pompey, who was at least the Senate’s appointed representative, into war.

His was not a warlike nature. As a young military tribune he had been popular with his soldiers for his refusal to make a show of his dignity and for his readiness to share their work and their hardships. When the time had come for him to leave his legionaries wept and crowded round to embrace him, kissing his hands and laying down their cloaks in his path. Now, when he joined Pompey at his base in Dyrrachium, in northern Greece, he again proved his talents as a leader. Before a battle the generals were addressing their troops, who listened to them ‘sluggishly and in silence’. Then Cato spoke with his usual fervour and a great shout went up. But though he could generate enthusiasm for the fight in others, he himself felt none. A civilian by nature, he once wrote to Cicero: ‘It is a much more splendid thing … that a province should be held and preserved by the mercy and incorruptibility of its commander than by the strength of a military force.’ He loved neither fighting nor the cause for which he fought. He had rejected Pompey’s repeated attempts to annex him to his party. Now he privately told his friends that if Caesar triumphed he would kill himself: if Pompey prevailed, he would at least continue living but would go into exile rather than submit to the dictatorship that he assumed was inevitable.

The first task Pompey assigned him was the defence of Sicily, source of most of Rome’s corn supply. When he realized that his troops were outnumbered by the invading Caesarean force, he avoided a confrontation by abandoning the island, advising the Syracusans to make their peace with whichever party was ultimately victorious. His priority was the prevention of Rome’s self-destruction. He persuaded Pompey to swear that he wouldn’t plunder any city under Rome’s protection, or kill any Roman except on the battlefield. When the Pompeians won a battle everyone rejoiced except Cato, who ‘was weeping for his country … as he saw that many brave citizens had fallen by one another’s hands’. He was not to be trusted with any command that would empower him to turn on his own commander. Pompey considered making him admiral of his fleet but changed his mind, reflecting that ‘the very day of Caesar’s defeat would find Cato demanding that he [Pompey] also lay down his arms and obey the laws’. When Pompey marched on Pharsalus, where he suffered his devastating defeat at Caesar’s hands, he left Cato at Dyrrachium to mind the camp and guard the stores.

At Pharsalus Pompey’s army, though twice as large as Caesar’s, was routed. Pompey escaped by sea, but in the aftermath of the battle few of his supporters knew whether he was dead or alive. Cato found himself the commander of those troops that had straggled back into camp after the battle. He led them out to join up with the still intact Pompeian fleet. A stickler for propriety even in this moment of calamity, he offered to surrender his command to Cicero who was with the ships and who, as a former consul, outranked him. Cicero was appalled – an altogether more flexible and pragmatic character, he was in a hurry to return to Italy and find himself a place on the winning side. Cato helped him get away (Pompey’s son wanted to kill him for his disloyalty) and set sail for Africa with the remnant of the Pompeian army. He had guessed, correctly, that Pompey would seek refuge in Egypt. In Libya he learnt that he was right, and that in Egypt the great man had been murdered. He also heard that another Pompeian army, commanded by Scipio (a sadly inferior descendant of the Scipio who defeated Hannibal), was in Numidia and had the backing of the Numidian King, Juba. Cato, who was proving himself a resourceful and efficient commander, led his troops on an arduous march across the Sahara to join them. When they met Cato, as scrupulous as ever in his observance of proper form, ceded overall command to Scipio – technically his superior – despite the fact that everyone, including Scipio himself, recognized that Cato would have been the better leader.

It took Caesar nearly two years to follow him into Numidia. The new ruler of Rome had business to attend to and battles to fight in Asia Minor, Egypt and back in Italy. Meanwhile, Cato and his fellow Pompeians marched into the Phoenician port-city of Utica and made it their base.

Enclosed on one side by the desert and on the other by the sea, Utica was an isolated place. Under occupation by Cato and his colleagues, its political nature was complicated and volatile. There were some three hundred Roman citizens of no particular allegiance living there, most of them moneylenders or merchants. These people would no doubt be ready to adapt to whatever political situation they found themselves in. But there were also a number of Roman senators who had left Italy with Pompey and come with Cato from Dyrrachium. There was good reason to suppose that should they fall into Caesar’s hands they would all be killed for their obstinate opposition. The African people of Utica were thought to favour Caesar. Scipio and Juba both wished to protect themselves and their followers against possible treachery by slaughtering the entire native population. Cato dissuaded them from this atrocity and took upon himself the responsibility of keeping the city secure, and its diverse inhabitants safe from each other. To do so he employed harsh measures. He forced all the indigenous young men of Utica to give up their arms and interned them in concentration camps outside the city walls. The rest of the population – women, children, and old men – were allowed to remain inside, living uneasily alongside the Roman occupiers while the latter fortified the city and stocked it with grain.

It was a tense and unhappy situation. The commanders bickered. Scipio accused Cato of cowardice. Cato, so observers believed, came profoundly to regret having handed over the command to a man he trusted neither to act competently in battle nor to be wise after it. Yet fractious and deeply divided as the Pompeian force at Utica was, it seemed to contemporary observers and later Roman historians to have a tragic grandeur. To those who rejected Caesar’s rule – whether still fighting for the scattered Pompeian resistance abroad or living resentfully under the new regime – the Senate Cato established in Utica was the one true Senate, and Utica itself, because Cato was there, the one true Rome. Cut off with his fugitive army in what to a Roman was the back of beyond, he loomed up in the Romans’ collective imagination, doomed but resolute, superbly alone, calmly awaiting Caesar’s arrival and his own surely inevitable defeat and death with what Seneca called ‘the unflinching steadiness of a hero who did not totter when the whole state was in ruins’.

At last Caesar, who in the previous year had visited the supposed site of Achilles’ tomb, making a show, as Alexander had done, of his claim to be a successor to that paragon of warriors, finally turned his attention to the man whose claim to Achilles-like integrity was generally and annoyingly perceived to be so much stronger than his own. He landed in Africa. Cato stayed in Utica to safeguard the supplies and keep the road to the sea open while Scipio led out the army. On 6 April 46 BC, at Thapsus, the Pompeians were crushingly defeated, many of them trampled to death by their own stampeding elephants, and the majority of them were slaughtered.

The news reached Utica late at night, brought by a messenger who had been three days on the road. At once the Romans in the city panicked. There were tumultuous scenes in the unlit streets as people dashed from their houses, shouting in terror, only to run back again, unsure where to seek safety. They had no troops to defend them. They were horribly aware of the men of Utica, penned into the prison camp outside the city and no doubt exulting in the news of their oppressors’ defeat, and of those men’s relatives all around them. They were crazy with fear, and they had good cause to be. Only one man remained calm. Once more, as he had so often done in the Roman Forum, Cato made use of his stentorian voice and his powers of self-assertion to still and quieten a frenzied crowd.

Striding through the darkened streets, shouting out in his harsh voice, he arrested the stampede. As soon as it was light, he summoned all the Romans present in Utica to assemble before the Temple of Jupiter. He made his appearance among them with characteristic sangfroid, apparently immersed in a book (it was in fact an inventory of the food supplies and weaponry stockpiled in the city). He spoke serenely, asking them to make up their minds whether they wished to fight or surrender to Caesar. He would not despise them, he said, if they chose the latter course; but if they decided to fight – and here his tone became more fervent – their reward would be a happy life, or a most glorious death. The immediate effect of his oratory was impressive. ‘The majority, in view of his fearlessness, nobility and generosity, almost forgot their present troubles in the conviction that he alone was an invincible leader and superior to every fortune.’

All too soon, though, the mood of exaltation passed. Someone suggested that all those present should be required to free their slaves, thereby providing the city with a defence force. Cato, correct as ever even in this desperate moment, refused to infringe private property rights by making such an action compulsory, but asked those who would give up their slaves of their own free will to do so. The Roman merchants – slave-owners all and probably slave-traders too, for whom business counted for more than politics – began to see the advantages of surrender. The situation was terrifyingly precarious. The merchants began talking about overpowering and interning their fellow Romans, the senators, before handing them over as a peace offering to the victorious Caesar.

A troop of horsemen, survivors from Scipio’s defeated army, appeared out of the desert like the answer to a prayer. At last Cato had the manpower of which he was in such urgent need. Leaving the Roman merchants in the city, he hurried out, accompanied by the senators, to welcome the newcomers and enlist their help in defending the city. But the soldiers had already endured a traumatic battle: they were demoralized and exhausted. Nothing could persuade them to make a stand against Caesar, who was now, pehaps, only hours away. There were angry scenes, both in the city, where the merchants were working themselves into a state of self-justifying indignation against anyone who might suggest they should risk opposing Caesar, and outside, where the senators and their families, now doubly threatened, wept and wailed. Eventually, the horsemen issued their ultimatum. They would stay and help defend Utica against Caesar, but only on condition that they might first slaughter all the Uticans. Cato refused. They began to ride away, taking with them any remaining hope of survival, let alone of saving the Republic. Cato went after them. For once showing emotion, he wept as he grasped at their horses’ bridles in a futile attempt to drag them back. For all his passion, the most he could get them to agree to was that they would guard the landward gates for one day while the senators made their escape by sea. Cato accepted.

They took up their positions. The Roman merchants meanwhile announced their intention of surrendering forthwith. They were not Cato, they said, ‘and could not carry the large thoughts of Cato’. Petty as most mortals, they had resolved to take the safest and probably most profitable course. They offered to intercede with Caesar for Cato. He told them to do no such thing. ‘Prayer belonged to the conquered and the craving of grace to those who had done wrong.’ It was Caesar who was defeated: since he had made war on his own country his guilt was exposed for all to see. He, Cato, was the true victor. It was as though he was already leaving this world – mundane definitions of success and failure no longer held any validity for him. Simply to be right was to prevail.

Throughout the last hours of his life he was fiercely active. His one outburst of emotion done with, he accepted his doom, and proceeded to do all that remained to be done with the scrupulous thoroughness with which, all his life, he had discharged his public duties. He was everywhere. He was in the city, urging the merchants not to betray the remaining senators. He was interviewing the emissary chosen by the merchants to go on their behalf to Caesar. He was disdainfully ignoring a message from another Pompeian commander who had escaped from Thapsus and wished to claim the leadership. He was patiently attempting to persuade those most at risk from Caesar’s anger to get away. He was at the city’s seaward gates controlling the rush to escape. He was down at the docks overseeing the embarkations and ensuring that each boat was properly provisioned. Most characteristically, he was handing over to the Uticans the detailed accounts of his administration, and returning the surplus funds to the public treasurer. While all around him others were prostrated by anxiety or brutalized by greed and fear, he alone was imperturbably competent. The horsemen became uncontrollable and attacked the Uticans in the concentration camps, looting and killing. Having so passionately begged them to stay, Cato had eventually to bribe them to leave in order to stop the massacre.

At last, on the evening of the second day since the terrible news from Thapsus had arrived, he judged that the evacuation of those at risk was all but completed: his work was almost done. He retired to his quarters to take a bath. Afterwards he dined. He ate sitting upright (the acme of discomfort for a Roman), as he had ever since he left Rome; but afterwards, over the wine, he joined in the high-minded conversation. His household, as usual, included at least two philosophers. The talk turned to the Stoic definition of freedom. Cato ‘broke in with vehemence, and in loud and harsh tones maintained his argument at greatest length and with astonishing earnestness’. His companions, understanding, fell silent. It was a tenet of Stoicism that, as Lucan was to put it, ‘The happiest men are those who chose freely to die at the right time.’

After supper he walked for a while, gave orders to the officers of the watch, embraced his son and close friends with especial affection and withdrew to his bedchamber. There he began to read Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates comforts his companions by offering them proofs of the immortality of the soul before serenely, even joyfully, drinking the hemlock that will heal his soul of the flaws inherent in bodily life. While still in the midst of his reading, Cato noticed that his sword was not hanging in its usual place by his bed (his son had removed it). He called a servant and asked where it was. The servant had no answer. Cato returned to his book but a little later, without any evident anxiety or urgency, asked again for the sword. Still it was not brought. He finished his reading and called the servants again. This time he became angry and struck one over the mouth, hurting his own hand. (This incident, in which the great man gives evidence of distinctly un-godlike irascibility, even nervousness, is omitted from some accounts.)

He cried out that his friends had betrayed him, by so arranging that he would fall unarmed into his enemy’s hands. At that his son and several companions rushed into the room sobbing and imploring him to save himself. Cato addressed them sternly, asking if they considered him an imbecile, reminding them that, even if deprived of the sword, he had only to hold his breath or dash his head against the wall when he chose to die, and asking why, in this crisis, they wished him to ‘cast away those good old opinions and arguments which have been part of our lives’. All who heard him wept. Ashamed, they left him once more alone. A child was sent with his sword. He received it impassively, saying, ‘Now I am my own master.’ Laying it aside, he returned to his reading before lying down and sleeping so deeply that those in the next room could hear his snores.

Around midnight he woke, asked the doctor to bandage his hand, and sent a servant down to the harbour to report on the evacuation. When the servant returned with the news that there was a heavy storm and high winds, Cato (mindless of his own trouble) groaned with pity for those at sea, then briefly slept again, having sent the servant back down to the waterfront to ensure nothing further could be done to help the fugitives. When the servant returned for the second time, reporting that all was quiet, Cato, satisfied that his earthly responsibilities were fully discharged, dismissed him.

Alone, he drove his sword into his midriff and fell heavily, knocking over the abacus that stood in his chamber. His servants and his son ran in and found him alive but all besmeared with blood, his bowels protruding from the ghastly wound. His doctor sewed up the gash but Cato pushed him away (or perhaps waited until he and the other attendants had left) and tore his belly open once more. This time he accomplished his purpose. ‘He drew forth by his hand that holiest spirit,’ wrote Seneca, ‘too noble to be defiled by steel.’

At once his reputation, released from the confines of his human reality, began to swell like a genie freed from a bottle. Alive, he was a pugnacious politician, an obstructionist and filibusterer, a man of unquestionable probity and great courage but also a bit of an oddball who courted trouble to the detriment of his own cause. He was a prig, an embarrassment, a pedant, perhaps even a bore. His hostility to Caesar has been compared to the kind of bitter envy a dull schoolboy, a dutiful plodder and keeper of the rules, might feel for a charismatic, carelessly successful fellow-student who defies authority and gets away with it by virtue of his cheek and charm – a cruelly reductive characterization that, all the same, has the ring of partial truth to it.

Even judged by his own standards, Cato was not perfect. He was to be remembered as the one and only incorruptible Roman. ‘No man of that day’, wrote the Greek historian Dio Cassius two centuries later, ‘took part in public life from pure motives and free from any desire of personal gain except Cato.’ But there were various episodes in his political career that suggest that his righteousness was not absolute. When he opposed the ratification of Pompey’s arrangements in Asia Minor he was not only checking the growth of Pompey’s inordinate power, he was also doing a favour to his own brother-in-law, Lucullus, whom Pompey had supplanted. As a tribune, just after the suppression of Catiline’s rebellion, he had authorized the free distribution of grain to the populace, a crowd-pleasing measure that he furiously condemned as tending to demoralize and corrupt the people when Caesar did the same. When Caesar was elected consul in 55 BC Cato condoned the use of bribery (which he otherwise so rigorously condemned) to get the constitutionalist Bibulus elected as his colleague. He allowed Cicero to persuade him that he should swear to uphold a land law of Caesar’s, on the grounds that otherwise he was likely to be exiled and because ‘even if Cato did not need Rome, still Rome needed Cato’. He would not declare Clodius’ legislation as tribune invalid (though there was good reason for doing so) because then his own work in Cyprus would be annulled. But once he was dead, all such lapses were forgotten. The noisy, obstreperous troublemaker was magnified into a figure of marmoreal grandeur and serenity. The inveterate opponent of great men was himself accorded greatness.

The process of his exaltation began within minutes of his death. The news of his suicide spread through the town. The people of Utica, whom he had twice saved from massacre, assembled outside his house along with the remaining Romans. Caesar was fast approaching but, uncowed, they gave his adversary an honourable funeral. Cato’s body, splendidly dressed (as it had never been in life), was carried at the head of a solemn procession to the seashore, where it was buried. When Caesar arrived to accept the Uticans’ surrender, he exclaimed: ‘O Cato, I begrudge you your death; for you begrudged me the sparing of your life.’ Perhaps he meant that he would have been proud to act rightly towards such a paragon of righteousness: more likely he felt, as Cato did, that Cato’s submission would have been an abject defeat, and his mercy the cruellest and most satisfying of victories. But Cato had eluded him. As Seneca triumphantly declared: ‘All the world has fallen under one man’s sway, yet Cato has a way of escape: with one single hand he opens a wide path to freedom.’

Dead, he was every bit as troublesome to Caesar as he had been when living. A painted placard depicting Cato tearing himself apart ‘like a wild animal’ was carried in the triumph Caesar celebrated on returning to Rome. The gruesome image’s effect was the opposite of that intended: instead of exulting in the death of Caesar’s most inflexible opponent, the crowd groaned and muttered as it passed. Brutus wrote and published a eulogy to Cato. So, showing a degree of political courage unusual for him, did Cicero. Caesar commissioned his loyal historian Hirtius to reply to them in a text, now lost, that belittled Cato’s virtues and catalogued his failings. This literary controversy over a dead man’s reputation masked a more dangerous debate over his living enemy’s claim to power: Caesar clearly considered it absolutely necessary to his own security that Cato be discredited. Unsatisfied with Hirtius’ effort, he wrote his own Anti-Cato, a pamphlet so extravagantly vitriolic as to have defeated its own object. The allegations he made in it were luridly, self-defeatingly exaggerated. He accused Cato of financial greed and dishonesty, of sexual depravity and of laziness. He wrote that Cato had sieved the ashes from the funeral pyre of his much-loved brother in search of gold, that he came drunk to the courts, and that he had an incestuous relationship with his sister Servilia (a particularly self-damaging accusation this – Servilia was actually Caesar’s mistress). He was not believed. Cicero thought the pamphlet had greatly enhanced Cato’s posthumous reputation – presumably by making manifest the hatred and fear he had inspired in his great opponent.

Cato’s influence persisted, and grew deadly. Plutarch relates that when Cato was taken as a boy to the house of the dictator Sulla he asked his tutor, ‘Why didst thou not give me a sword, that I might slay this man and set my country free from slavery?’ Whether or not Cato the child ever said such a thing, Cato the man never advocated or condoned the use of violence as a political tool. Yet though in life he had staunchly defended the forms of law against the summary use of force, in his afterlife he became the presiding genius of a political movement aimed at an act of lethal violence. Cato had initiated the opposition to Caesar, and that opposition achieved its end on the Ides of March, brought to a murderous conclusion by Brutus, Cato’s nephew and son-in-law who, according to Plutarch, admired Cato ‘more than any other Roman’.

Caesar was killed, but the Caesarean dynasty survived and flourished and Cato, who had made his name in opposition, flourished with it, growing ever greater in Rome’s collective memory. Cicero, who in his lifetime had found Cato an awkward colleague, paid tribute to him after his death in reverential terms as a ‘god-like and unique man’ who had ‘remained ever true to his purpose and fixed resolve’. To Horace (who was nineteen when Cato died), he was the model of the just man, even of manhood itself.

Cato’s posthumous exaltation had a philosophical basis. He became the exemplar of the increasingly influential ideal of Stoic virtue. In the fifth century BC Socrates had taught that nothing can harm the good man. To one whose mind is on eternal verities, no material loss, not even the loss of life itself, is of any consequence. In Plato’s Phaedo, the book Cato chose to read three times over on the last night of his life, Socrates explains that, since a wise man’s ultimate goal must be to free himself from the body, which ‘fills us with loves, desires and all sorts of fancies and great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything’, he need dread no bodily harm. Death, which will free him to apprehend more clearly the ideas of which the things of this world are merely dim reflections, is actually desirable. When Cato rebuked his friends for hiding his sword, thus seeking to make him abandon ‘those good old opinions’ to which they all subscribed, these are the sort of opinions to which he referred.

The wise man had no fear. Indeed, the wisest had few emotions of any kind. Plato, synthesizing in the Republic the teachings of Socrates with the example of Sparta, promulgated an ideal of the impassive hero. Homer’s heroes raged and wept, mourning each other’s deaths and openly declaring the terror they felt at the prospect of their own. To Plato, the admirer of Spartan discipline and self-repression, they seemed contemptible. His decision to ban poets from his ideal republic was motivated partly by his revulsion at Homer’s extended description of Achilles’ lamentation for Patroclus. No hero (even Plato could not deny Achilles that status) should be seen to express himself with so little restraint, such a lack of the self-mastery which, to Plato, was essential not only to dignity but also to virtue.

Drawing on Socrates and Plato, and on the mystic traditions of the Orphics and Pythagoreans, the Stoics, whose philosophy first evolved under that name in Athens in the second century BC, elaborated their vision of the wise man. Such a man hopes for nothing and is therefore delivered from all fear of disappointment. Desire, ambition, even human love, are to be shunned. To ask for nothing is to render oneself invulnerable. That was the condition that Cato was judged to have achieved. When Seneca, writing some fifty years after Cato’s death, wished to answer the objection that the Stoic ‘wise man’ was a chimera, he had only to point to Cato: ‘I almost think he surpasses our ideal.’

In life, Cato had been a student of philosophy – Cicero reports that he had ‘a voracious appetite for reading’. An early riser, he would always bring a book with him to the Senate and sit studying it until his fellow senators were assembled. In late Roman and medieval texts he is referred to as ‘Cato the philosopher’, meaning not that he left behind him a body of written work (he didn’t), but that he liked to ponder the profound and difficult questions with which philosophy is concerned. When he was granted leave of absence during his term as military tribune, he took ship to Pergamum expressly in order to meet the celebrated philosopher Athenodorus and invite the old man to live with him thereafter. Back in Rome, he sought out teachers and readers of philosophy, several of whom received his patronage. In Sicily, during the opening months of the civil war, he found opportunities, despite his responsibility as commander of the Pompeian forces on the island, to walk about discoursing with the philosopher Philostratus. Even in Utica, in the last two terrible days of his life, he found time to confer with the two sages, one a Stoic, the other a Peripatetic, who were attached to his household there.

What he learned, he practised. He went barefoot and inadequately dressed in all weathers, not only to harden his body but also in order to train his spirit, ‘accustoming himself to be ashamed only of what was really shameful’. What seemed to most of his contemporaries to be a lack of dignity and decorum in his appearance was a self-imposed penance, a spiritual exercise. He was, wrote Cicero, ‘endowed by nature with an austerity beyond belief’.