Marcus Porcius Cato, 95-46 BC

It is said of Cato that even from his infancy, in his speech, his countenance, and all his childish pastimes, he discovered an inflexible temper, unmoved by any passion, and firm in everything...to go through with what he undertook. He was rough and ungentle toward those that flattered him, and still more unyielding to those who threatened him. It was difficult to excite him to laughter, his countenance seldom relaxed even into a smile; he was not quickly or easily provoked to anger, but if once incensed, he was no less difficult to pacify." Plutarch.

Marcus Porcius Cato "Uticensis" (also known as Cato the Younger) was many things, including the adamantine foe of the triumvirs Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus and the man whose undying enmity to Caesar in the Civil War led him to commit particularly violent suicide rather than give Caesar the pleasure of pardoning him in defeat. Austere, humorless, puritanical, incapable of compromise, he was a fanatic in defense of liberty and the Republic. Cato was deeply admired by Americans in the Revolutionary period; Addison's play Cato, in which Cato defies the tyrant Caesar in verse, was a favorite of George Washington. In his own time, while regarded as one of the greatest Romans, his implacable moral stands apparently stirred both reverence and exasperation:

	" As for Cato, my affection for him is no less than yours; but even with the best will in the world, there are times when his high-mindedness is a positive danger to the state. He delivers opinions which would be more at home in the pages of Plato's Republic than among the dregs of Romulus here. "
	Cicero, Letters to Atticus , 2.1 [Antium, June, 60]

Cato inherited a famous name as the great-grandson of the famous Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder (the Censor), the inveterate foe of Carthage in the third Punic War. He was reared by his uncle, Marcus Livius Drusus, along with several full and half-siblings (including half-sister, Servilia, later Caesar's longtime mistress and mother of Brutus). Cato deeply admired his ancestor and imbibed early both the austere principles of the early Republic and the fonts of Stoic philosophy. He also appears to have absorbed his forebear's inability to compromise and his utter certainty of his own right action. Yet in his own time of universal political and financial corruption, Cato was perhaps the one man in Italy who could not be bought.

After the normal young Roman's army service as a tribune in Macedon in 67 BC, Cato was elected quaestor in 65. The position gave him a forum to gain a reputation for honest, even eccentric, frugality, as well as a much-publicized intemperance of the bribery and corruption seething in contemporary Rome. He returned to Rome and continued in politics, although he never scaled the offices of the cursus honorum with the single-minded ambition of his contemporaries, reaching no higher than tribune. His reputation soon outweighed his political rank.

During the trial of Catiline in 63, the up-and-coming Cato first is known to have clashed with his great opponent, Julius Caesar. Cato's speeches during the drama of Catiline's conspiracy strongly supported Cicero and his actions in putting the alleged conspirators instantly to death. Cato also hinted that Caesar himself should be charged with the guilty conspirators. When the debates over the punishment for the accused were at their height, Caesar spoke for their banishment, not execution, and seemed to have changed the Senate's mind on the verdict. At the very moment of victory, Cato stood again and spoke for death with such passion and persuasiveness that the entire Senate reversed itself. In the end, Cato's firmness was applauded, the conspirators died, and the stamp was set on Caesar's and Cato's future enmity. Something of Cato's passion still shines through Sallust's reporting of his words:

	" Many a time, gentlemen, have I spoken at length in this House; many a time have I reproached our fellow citizens for their self-indulgence and greed - and by so doing have made many enemies; for as I had never, in my own conscience, excused myself for any wrongdoing, I found it hard to pardon the sins which other men's passions led them to commit...Now, however, it is not the question whether our morals are good or bad, nor is it the size and grandeur of the Roman empire that we have to consider. The issue is whether that empire, whatever we may think of it, is going to remain ours, or whether we and it together are to fall into the hands of enemies. In such a crisis does anyone talk to me of clemency and compassion? "
	Sallust, The Conspiracy of Cataline, 52.

"In birth, age and eloquence, they were well matched. They had the same nobility of soul, and equal, through quite different, reputations. Caesar was esteemed for the many kind services he rendered and for his lavish generosity; Cato, for the consistent uprightness of his life. The former was renowned for his humanity and mercy; the latter had earned respect by his strict austerity. Caesar won fame by his readiness to give, to relieve, to pardon; Cato, by never offering presents. The one was a refuge for the unfortunate, and was praised for his good nature; the other was a scourge for the wicked, admired for his firmness. Finally, Caesar had made it a rule to work hard and sleep little; to devote himself to the interests of his friends and to neglect his own; to be ready to give people anything that was worth the giving. For himself he wanted a high command, an army, and a war in some new field where his gifts could shine in all their brightness. Cato's taste was for restraint, propriety, and, above all, austerity...he was more concerned to be a good man than to be thought one; and so the less he courted fame, the more did it attend his steps unsought." Sallust, 54.

The collision between Cato and Caesar in the Catilinarian Conspiracy is also noteworthy for a scene, vouched for by Plutarch, which would seem laughable in a modern political satire, in which Cato intercepted a love-letter from his half-sister, Servilia, to her lover, Caesar, in full view of the Senate:

	" It is reported that while Caesar and he were in the very heat, and the whole senate regarding them two, a little note was brought in to Caesar which Cato declared to be suspicious, and urging that some seditious act was going on, bade the letter be read. Upon which Caesar handed the paper to Cato who, discovering it to be a love-letter from his sister Servilia to Caesar, by whom she had been corrupted, threw it to him again, saying, "Take it, you sot," and so went on with his discourse."
	Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger.

Having led the fight against Caesar's candidacy for the consulship, Cato did everything humanly possible to block Caesar's consular acts. He fought bitterly against Caesar's agrarian reforms to award land to his veterans. Tensions rose to such a fever-pitch that some authorities claim Caesar had Cato physically attacked; he certainly arrested him. Nevertheless, it was probably at Caesar's instigation (working through subordinates) that Cato was dispatched to settle the affairs of Cypress in 58. This position of honor also neatly removed him from interference in the Senate. Cato's praetorship in 54 was characterized by his sturdy effort to suppress graft; he was considered remarkable in his own, corrupt time for being completely immune to bribes.

In the deteriorating years before Caesar left Gaul to crossed the Rubicon, Cato spearheaded Optimate opposition against Caesar's continued command (Cato at one point suggested Caesar should be recalled and arrested for his prosecution of the war without senatorial approval and for breaking an oath to the rebellious Gauls). He vocally attacked Caesar's tribunes (including Antony). While Cato had long been deeply suspicious of Pompey's motives, he and his party increasingly supported Pompey against Caesar as the lesser of two evils. He accompanied Pompey across the Adriatic and held Dyrrhachium for him until after the defeat at Pharsalus. Then he and Metellus Scipio doggedly went to Africa and continued the struggle against Caesar there.

Cato was in command at Utica. After word reached Utica of Caesar's definitive victory against Scipio's army at the Battle of Thapsus (April, 46), Cato enjoined his son, with bitter pride, to surrender to Caesar; "I grew up in freedom, with the right of free speech. I cannot change my ways in my latter years and accustom myself to servitude. But it is right that you, having been born and brought up in such conditions, should serve the divinity that governs your destiny." Cassius Dio, XLIII, p. 227. His son would later fall at Philippi. Determined to die, Cato fell on his sword during an unwatched moment, claiming that, at last, he was free. However, he was discovered by those watching him and a doctor was called to bandage him tightly. Knowing that Caesar's arrival in the city was imminent, Cato ripped through his bandaged abdomen and bled to death, literally taking his life with his own hands rather than surviving to be pardoned by the man he viewed as the Republic's bane.

Cato's personal life was more than peculiar. One of his closest emotional attachments was to a young brother, Caepio, who died young in Thrace; the self-contained Cato, by all accounts, suffered a complete emotional breakdown. He put away his first wife for adultery. He divorced his second wife, marrying her to an aged patrician, Hortensius, and then remarried her when Hortensius died (and after she had inherited his property). He married his daughter, Porcia, to his political ally, Bibulus, and then to his nephew, Brutus. Ever puritanical in public, he was in private a notoriously heavy drinker. Caesar (as quoted by Pliny the Younger) wryly acknowledges Cato's legend even when drunk; a group of passersby, meeting the Great Man by chance when dead drunk, blush in embarrassment: "You would have thought they had been found out by Cato, not Cato by them." Pliny, Letters, III.12. What Cato must have thought of his own sister being Caesar's favorite of many mistresses can scarcely be imagined; of course, Cato was one of many contemporaries whom Caesar was alleged to have cuckolded. Fanatical to embody the primitive example of a "pure" early Rome, Cato roused titters by appearing in public wearing nothing but a toga, without either shoes or tunic. But none of these domestic infelicities affected Cato's reputation as the foremost champion of the Republic.

Lucan wrote, in his Civil War epic, The Pharsalia, "victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni" ('The victorious cause pleased the gods but the defeated cause pleased Cato'). In death, Cato's obdurate determination was elevated to the high pantheon of Roman patriotism. Caesar appears to have disliked Cato as he disliked few men; it is impossible otherwise to account for Caesar's genuine resentment at Cato's untimely death. He is said to have spoken, as if to the living man, "I envy you this death, for you envied [denied] me the chance to save you." Cassius Dio, Roman History, XLIII. When Cicero and Brutus published posthumous praises of Cato's noble qualities, Caesar published his Anti-Cato, which has not survived but which apparently was viewed disparagingly by his contemporaries. 90 years later, Cato could be seriously described by as having "...a character nearer to that of gods than of men. He never did a right action solely for the sake of seeming to do the right, but because he could not do otherwise." Velleius, History, II, XXXV. Cato, in spite of himself, had passed into legend.

It is difficult to warm to Cato, but it is possible to both admire and condemn him. Like some patriots of the American Revolution - Patrick Henry come to mind - the very qualities of obdurate determination not to compromise is arguably ill-suited - even harmful - to the act of governing. The tale is told that, in the early days of the Civil War, Pompey and Caesar almost found a peaceable accommodation which might have changed Roman history, except that Cato, discovering that Pompey was negotiating with Caesar, persuaded him to fight him instead. Like all fanatics, Cato's inflexible convictions were more than slightly frightening. Yet Cato's very implacability, in the corruption of his own age, earns its own grudging admiration. He was viewed by his own contemporaries as one of the very greatest men of his time. In the event, and by his death, he also earned the undying regard of Roman historians. The irony is that it may be his very obduracy which made the dictatorship of Caesar, the death of the Republic, and the Ides of March, inevitable. The conspirators, striking at Caesar, struck also for Cato.