Rome's Last Citizen

Cato made a career out of purity, out of his refusal to give an inch in the face of pressure to compromise and deal. His was a powerful and lasting political type: the man who achieves and wields power by disdaining power, the politician above politics. It was an approach designed to elicit one of two things from his enemies: either total surrender or (in Cato’s eyes) a kind of moral capitulation. This strategy of all-or-nothing ended in crushing defeat. No one did more than Cato to rage against his Republic’s fall. Yet few did more, in the

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At the same time, Cato’s behavior also established an enduring way of being a man in public, a style still seen in operation today. Playing up an idealized past, obstructing in the name of principle, drawing power from utter inflexibility—Cato could credibly claim to be an originator of such strategies. The history of the filibuster, for instance, essentially starts with Cato. If we notice some resemblance between Cato and present-day politicians, it might be because the patterns set by Cato’s life inspire our expectations of our leaders, and perhaps even their expectations of themselves. If this is so, then we have a great deal to learn from returning to the source.

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Cato’s struggle against Caesar, and against his Republic’s collapse, played out across the benches of the Senate House and the battlefields of a civil war. But it was their final confrontation that turned Cato into a legend. Facing Caesar’s total victory, Cato committed suicide in the North African town of Utica, choosing to take his own life rather than live a single day under Caesar’s rule. His stand against tyranny and his famous suicide made Cato the icon of civic duty. They also made him the pagan saint of lost causes.

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He is four years old and already an orphan; it is the year 91. The man dangling and shaking him out over the ground, intermittently threatening to drop him, is a stranger. He is Pompaedius Silo, an Italian politician visiting from out of town, a friend of Cato’s uncle and guardian. He is in Rome to plead once more for citizenship for the towns of Italy, Rome’s “allies.”

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There came another request for help, then a joke, then the guest’s dropped smile, then threats, and still the angry stare from this four-year-old boy either dumb or self-possessed beyond his years, until he was shaken and dangled out the window—without a scream, without a cry for help, yielding just that same unblinking stare. After Pompaedius gave up and set the boy back on his feet, he was overheard to say, “How lucky for Italy that he is a boy; if he were a man, I don’t think we could get a single vote.”

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is the kind of perfect story that could only come from a culture that didn’t believe in childhood. The truth is that we know precious little about the boy Cato, or the boy Caesar, or the boy Cicero. Most of the details of their childhoods, or any Roman childhood, were considered too trivial to remember. And when their stories do come down to us—like the story of Cato and the window, told by Plutarch about a hundred years after the fact—they are the stories of little adults. We talk about “formative” years, but in childhood stories like this one, it is as if the Romans were born fully formed.

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projection back into boyhood of all the indelible qualities of the grown Cato: stubbornness (or obstinacy); fearlessness (or foolhardiness); traditionalist politics (or reactionary politics). The story shows Cato grabbed by an overwhelming force, facing death, and evincing utter calm in the face of it. It shows him proving so unshakable that the force, while remaining every bit as overwhelming, recognizes that it has suffered some kind of moral defeat. Plutarch was a deliberate artist: He started Cato’s life with a typology of his death.

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the Senate pounced, moving for the repeal of his entire agenda. What was left of the Gracchan faction took this as such a provocation that it rioted. A consul’s servant was killed in the street fighting, all the cause needed for the Senate to deem Gracchus and his friends enemies of the state and call out the army against them. Though Gaius fled through the streets and “all the spectators, as at a race, urged Gaius on to greater speed, not a man came to his aid, or even consented to furnish him with a horse when he asked for one, for his pursuers were pressing close upon him.” Chased over the Tiber and cornered in a sacred grove, Gaius fell on his sword. Thousands of his followers joined him in death, summarily executed in a political purge. When it was over, and the blood was washed from the streets, the Senate broke ground for a grand new temple: the Temple of Concord.

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“Whoever wants to save the Republic, follow me!” the priest had cried on his way to sacrifice Tiberius Gracchus. And when Gaius Gracchus heard that his followers were being killed in the streets, he took refuge in Diana’s temple, where “he sank upon his knees … and with hands outstretched towards the goddess, prayed that the Roman people, in requital for their great ingratitude and treachery, might never cease to be enslaved.”

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throughout the province, wherever the resented Roman influence extended, the command was carried out—at the cost, Appian calculated, of eighty thousand lives. Though Rome had often inflicted similar treatment in its turn, Appian was shocked to report Roman children held under the sea by rough hands until they drowned, civilians’ hands chopped off as they desperately clutched sacred images, families murdered in cruel sequence before one another’s eyes—children first, then wives, then husbands.

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Who was the king who acted on that hate and gave the brutal order? Mithridates claimed descent from Alexander the Great and Darius, Persian King of Kings. On the strength of that ancestry—and of a flamboyant personality, which made him the anti-imperial standard-bearer of his day—he laid claim to Asia Minor and the Black Sea. By the time of the massacre, he had already created a counter empire in the image of Greek Alexander’s—a check on Rome’s regional dominance.

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Mithridates was ready to lock his mother and brother in prison to safeguard his throne; he was ready to swallow poison every day, to build his immunity to assassination; he was ready to conceive and launch the greatest premeditated massacre in the history of the ancient world. The massacre turned a border skirmish into a quarter century of war. And it put the future of Rome’s supremacy into grave doubt.

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Like Roman politics, of which it was simply another branch, Roman law had room for both remarkable flights of rhetoric and lewd personal attacks. When denouncing the wanton ex-lover of a client, Cicero, the greatest lawyer of his time, slipped in a mention of “her husband—oops, I mean her brother. I always make that mistake.”

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Sulla’s house “looked exactly like an Inferno.” In came the fresh heads of Rome’s leading men; out went gold. Undisturbed by screams or moans, there reclined in state the dictator with the fierce gray eyes and the blotchy red birthmark, “like a mulberry sprinkled with oatmeal”—Sulla Felix, the Fortunate; Sulla Epaphroditus, Venus’s Favorite. Cato and his half brother often sat by Sulla’s side, eyewitnesses to the arbitrary power of a man fond of making the Senate listen to his harangues and the cries of the executed at the same time.

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what passed for dissent in Sulla’s Rome, a senator begged at last, “At least let us know whom you intend to punish.” The next day, eighty names were posted on a white tablet in the Forum. The day after and the day after that, several hundred more joined the list. This was privatized justice: The head attached to any of those names brought a fat bounty. The estates of the executed were sold to the highest bidder, with Sulla himself presiding as auctioneer. And while his wish list at first had a certain brutal logic to it—a purge of popularis enemies and any lingering supporters of his old commanding officer Marius—it grew to include the names of the conspicuously rich, the victims of private grudges, and, in one notorious case, a man who was already dead. Having killed his own brother, a crony of Sulla’s arranged to have the dead man’s name added to the proscription list, blessing the fratricide after the fact.

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The sacred laws against bloodshed on hearths or in temples were pronounced null and void. Slaves had license to murder their masters, and sons their fathers. Any Roman sheltering a marked man was himself marked for death. A grisly commerce in human heads, the unpredictability of the killing amplified its terror—as Sulla well grasped. “I am adding to the list all of the names I can remember,” he announced with chilling nonchalance. “Those who have escaped my memory will be added sometime soon.” By the end of the bloodletting, as many as nine thousand Romans were dead.

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Sulla went about it with the resentment of a man reclaiming a right denied. His family was noble, illustrious, and ruined. He came of age in rented rooms in the Roman slums. A favorite of prostitutes and comedians, he was a tireless drinker and sexual omnivore, whose ruined complexion naturally sparked talk of venereal disease. At home among the plebs, he might have been a revolutionary. And yet the theme of Sulla’s political career was restoration. He was another Roman in love with the sacred past, so in love that he swore to wash out with blood everything he found modern or decadent.

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Judging by the man Cato would become, he would have found much to like in that program. The reactionary spirit of Sulla’s reforms would animate Cato’s politics. But as a teenager watching the imposition of Sulla’s platform by fiat, Cato was shocked by the blood it required—shocked not just secondhand but daily and in person, as he reclined with the dictator on his couch. Here was Cato’s early education in politics: his guardian’s assassination, and Sulla’s government by murder. This boyhood in civil war would produce a man with an almost neurotic attachment to rules, to precedent, to propriety—to everything that was not Sulla. One wonders how the boy Cato could have stomached the violence. “If you had put Marius himself in that place,” speculated an imperial chronicler, “he would have quickly started making plans for his own escape.” Coming home from the slaughter- and auction-house one day, Cato pulled aside the tutor walking with him and asked why Sulla was still alive. “Because,” he answered, “men fear him more than they hate him.” Cato regularly sat a mere arm’s reach away from the dictator, well out of any bodyguard’s range. And that, reports Plutarch, was all the plan his adolescent ambition needed: “Give me a sword, so I might kill him and set my country free from slavery.”

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Give me a sword, so I might kill him and set my country free from slavery. Surely he didn’t say that. It’s a line from a tragedy, or from the base of a statue, not from real life. We have good reason for skepticism. Again, this is Plutarch writing the boy Cato in light of the man. In this, and in all of his Roman and Greek Lives, Plutarch did not practice what we would recognize as straight history, but rather moral education, a kind of didactic drama.

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So Cato was drilled in composing, organizing, memorizing, and reciting repeatedly two eminently useful genres of rhetoric: the controversia and the suasoria. The controversia was lawyer training: given the law and the facts of a case, persuade a jury of your schoolmates in both directions. A rich man claimed that his poor neighbor’s bees were destroying his flowers. He dusted the flowers with poison, the bees died, and the poor man sued. Argue the rich man’s side of the case. Now argue the poor man’s.

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Gracchi brothers—each of whom was accused in his time of coveting a crown, and each of whom was righteously killed in turn. “There can be nothing baser, fouler than a tyrant … for though in form a man, he surpasses the most savage monsters,” writes Cicero, who would have known those stories by heart. “If anyone kills a tyrant—be he never so intimate a friend—he has not laden his soul with guilt, has he?” There wasn’t a Roman boy of such an education who hadn’t imagined himself the hero of such stories, time and again. In fact, it was mandatory. “Do you teach rhetoric?” sighed one burned-out teacher: What iron bowels must you have when your troop of scholars slays the cruel tyrant, when each in turn stands up and repeats what he has just been conning in his seat, reciting the same things in the same verses! Served up again and again, this cabbage is the death of the unhappy master.

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was too much for a boy, even for a young man. And perhaps Cato, rash as he was, understood this. When his formal lessons were over, he put off his entry into politics and went looking for training in philosophy. His classmates were already seeking army appointments or rich widows to defend in court, but Cato kept quiet. “Men find fault with you for your silence,” a friend once reproached him. Cato replied, “Only let them not blame my life. I will begin to speak when I am not going to say what was better off left unsaid.”

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In Rome, he made up for his rustic accent with an untrained eloquence and an ability to wrap any controversy in the comfortable mantle of Latin patriotism. For example, in defense of a law banning women from wearing colorful clothes or owning more than half an ounce of gold, Cato said: The community suffers from two opposite vices—avarice and luxury—pestilential diseases that have proved the ruin of all great empires. The brighter and better the fortunes of the Republic become day by day, and the greater the growth of its dominion … so much the more do I dread the prospect of these things taking us captive rather than we them.… I hear far too many people praising and admiring those statues that adorn Athens and Corinth and laughing at the clay images of our gods standing in front of their temples. I for my part prefer these gods who bless us.

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Hardly a soul in the crowd, the jury, or even the prosecution had not carried a shield, taken a wound, or lost a brother or son in that great war. Those memories were enough to see the general carried from the court with all charges dropped, to tears and cries of gratitude from the assembled. But they were not enough to save his reputation. The more perceptive members of the crowd must have realized that Scipio had offered not a word of rebuttal. Scipio himself felt that the trial had permanently shamed him. He spent the few remaining years of his life in self-exile and ordered that he be buried away from the city that had spurned him. When he died, he left on his tomb not a catalog of accomplishments, but only this inscription: UNGRATEFUL FATHERLAND, YOU WILL NOT EVEN HAVE MY BONES.

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morals. Woe betide the promising politician who kissed his wife in public, the prosperous merchant who was too fat to serve Rome in war, the senator who made a joke in Cato’s presence. Scipio’s own brother was singled out, ostensibly for luxurious living, but also, it was widely suspected, for spite.

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Some parts of Cato’s purge sound eminently sensible even now, such as the ex-consul ejected from the Senate for impressing his lover with a private execution at a banquet.

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same offhand, ferocious way: “In addition, Carthage must be destroyed.” Any laughter at the non sequitur would have died away with one look at his face. It was the foresight of a statesman, or a legendary display of grudge holding, or even “the first recorded incitement to genocide.” The Senate’s resistance eroded bit by bit—until Rome’s ships sailed for decisive, preemptive war. Eleven years after Cato took up his ruthless campaign, Carthage was destroyed utterly—though Cato did not live to see it. Perhaps he found it a satisfying end. Many years before, he had left his farm for war. Now his persistence had sent a new generation of Romans against the same enemy, this time to finish the work. Some things, then, had not changed.

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One of his last writings, in a manual for his son, deplores it: In due course, my son Marcus, I shall explain what I found out in Athens about these Greeks, and demonstrate what advantage there may be in looking into their writings (while not taking them too seriously). They are a worthless and unruly tribe. Take this as a prophecy: when those folk give us their writings they will corrupt everything. All the more if they send their doctors here. They have sworn to kill all barbarians with medicine—and they charge a fee for doing it.

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Cato the Elder expelled Stoicism from Rome; Cato the Younger was instrumental in replanting it. The imperial chronicler Pliny the Elder found it “a very remarkable fact that the same [Greek] language that had been proscribed by one of the Catos, was introduced among us by the other.” He was exaggerating, but not wildly.

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Even after the proscriptions ended, he showed inexhaustible creativity in inventing new sources of blood money. Whenever one of Rome’s shabbily built apartment complexes caught fire (in a city without police or fire services), Crassus would send his own private bucket brigade—and then refuse to douse the flames until the building’s owner sold it to him for next to nothing. Years of such shrewd dealing had left Crassus wealthy enough to buy and sell armies—and to scorn as a pauper anyone who couldn’t finance at least a legion out of his own pocket. The Senate understood that well when it appointed him commander.

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So Mummius was exemplified in the most brutal way imaginable—through the revival of an ancient and pitiless ritual called “the decimation.” Crassus ordered the bested troops to form ranks before the entire army. And then, no matter how a man had acquitted himself in battle, every tenth one was counted off, separated from the pack, and beaten to death. Plutarch and Appian cannot agree on whether a single battalion, a handful of legions, or even the entire army was subjected to the punishment. But Crassus’s message to his men was unmistakable: “He had demonstrated to them that he was more dangerous to them than the enemy.”

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This should have been welcome news, but it sparked a panic in Crassus, because he knew who returned at the head of the Spanish reinforcements: Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Pompey the Great. Every bit Crassus’s equal in ruthless ambition, Pompey had inherited his father’s legions at the age of nineteen and had wielded them so brutally against Sulla’s enemies that he had earned the nickname Adulescentulus Carnifex, “the Teenage Butcher.” Sulla could sense in the young general a potential rival, so he co-opted him by playing to his ego. The title Magnus was Sulla’s gift (bestowed only half seriously on someone so young), and so was Sulla’s stepdaughter, and so was a triumphal parade welcoming Pompey back to Rome, with Pompey decked out as a near-god in a chariot, his troops following in ordered march, the spoils of his victories pulled behind them in heaping wagons.

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Along one hundred miles of Italy’s busiest thoroughfare, the Appian Way, Crassus built a monument to his victory, befitting his ruthlessness. Every forty yards, a traveler could glimpse one of the half-dead remnants of Spartacus’s army nailed to a cross, slowly suffocating and rotting in the sun. The crosses stood for months. By his own measure, Crassus had saved the Republic from a slave rebellion. His grisly billboards were designed to ensure that no one would forget.

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Assuming, of course, that the texts were authentic—because Athenodorus, a proud and aloof old man, had a habit of cutting out the bits that disagreed with him. The librarian had been caught physically deleting controversial passages from the work of Zeno, the first Stoic. In Zeno’s Republic, a high-minded book on the ideal state that would cause considerable embarrassment to his successors, he had allegedly advocated free love, gender-neutral clothing, and the abolition of money. Ideas as radical as that may have been acceptable from a street philosopher building a new movement on the strength of converts he could round up at the marketplace. But as Stoicism grew domesticated, respectable—and Romanized—its radical origins grew increasingly scandalous. Further, the Stoics’ more easily caricatured notions threatened to overshadow the cosmopolitan vision at the center of their political thought. “We should look upon all people in general to be our fellow-countryfolk and -citizens, observing one manner of living and one kind of order, like a flock feeding together with equal right in one common pasture.” The Stoic ideal presented an enlightened vision of the brotherhood of man, but it could also become, in the right Roman hands, a friendly gloss for empire, with Rome playing the role of civilizing shepherd to a many-tongued flock.

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time, storm-tossed and soaking, but still whole. Caepio was already dead. Lead me, O Master of the high heavens, My Father, wheresoever you wish. I follow readily, but if I choose not, Wretched though I am, I must follow still. Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.

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So the Stoic was taught to pray, taught to welcome fate in, taught to see evil in greedy attachment to the beloved, not in the death that takes him away—taught to reflect on the utter fragility of the human vessels into which we pour our love.

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the luxury he railed against for the living. Cato gave himself to grief, this once, with the same fervor that had led him to preach the effeminacy of grief, the need for independence from pain in all things. For the rest of his life, friends and enemies alike would remark that this was the moment when philosophy most abandoned Cato.

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Caepio had been a Roman soldier, sober and self-possessed. Yet he had often said, in a mix of brotherly admiration and envy, that Cato made him look like a drunk. Once, when Cato was a boy in Rome, someone had asked him whom he loved the most. “My brother.” Second most? “My brother.” Third most? “My brother.”

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That was his stated purpose, but as he walked the Anatolian highlands from town to town on the edge of the Roman world, completely free for a short span, with only a handful of friends and slaves for company, how far from his mind was his devastating loss? If anyone could disguise mourning as duty, it was Cato.

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Pompey well understood the value of political theater, even on small occasions like this. Rather than allow Cato humbly to approach him where he sat, Pompey sprang out of his chair and crossed the room to offer his hand—as if Cato were the eminence in the room, as if the most decorated Roman alive “must render an account of his command while Cato was there.” Pompey spent the interview heaping praise on Cato’s virtue. He kept up the stream to anyone within earshot, even after he had ushered Cato out with a pat on the back.

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They were not fond of each other. “Everyone knew that Pompey admired him when he was present, but was glad to have him go away.” Still, Pompey understood Cato’s value. In a Senate that remained deeply suspicious of his irregular career and populist tendencies, Pompey would need a Cato on his side—and Pompey was prescient in understanding his dangerously exposed place in Roman politics. In Roman public life, one day’s hero was the next day’s tyrant. If Pompey had funded a mutiny—if he had helped to undermine a Roman army in the field, in service of his own ambition—then he was essentially guilty of treason. This was the time to embrace tradition, to persuade any doubters that, even as he was taking on vast powers, Pompey was still a man of the old ways, a man who served the Republic’s greatness, not his own. It was clear that the way to embrace tradition was to embrace Cato. Not yet a senator, not yet out of his twenties, Cato was already building a power not dependent on arms or office: He was arbiter of the mos maiorum, able to bestow their stamp of approval or to withhold it. But Pompey would find that securing even a part of Cato’s approval would take much more than an afternoon’s work.

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Veneration of the old pushed Roman practicality to the brink. Generation after generation, the Romans kept up their oldest structures at any cost, even when doing so ran up against the realities of managing a swelling city—or administering an empire. In Cato’s day, preservation still usually trumped utility, with predictable results. The Forum, littered with crumbling temples and run-down monuments, took on the character of a holy junkyard.

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For most hopefuls, preparation was an afterthought. So while other candidates spent their time canvassing the Forum and buying off voters, Cato was busy memorizing constitutional law. Strange as it might have seemed, Cato was studying for the one office that would most reward diligent preparation.

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In the hands of the twenty quaestors lay the convoluted finances of the entire Republic. Quaestors received and cataloged all tax revenues, managed state debts, logged each and every financial transaction in the state account book, and handled public funds for state burials, monuments, and visiting dignitaries. Even though it was a mandatory stepping-stone to bigger things, and one that guaranteed a seat in the Senate as well, we can imagine many an established senator viewing the quaestors as glorified parchment-pushers

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Once elected quaestor, Cato, in his first act, stabbed straight at the heart of the bureaucracy. He summarily fired all clerks and assistants whom he judged unfit for office or guilty of corruption. It was the kind of wholesale housecleaning that made headlines—and drew out the long knives of the career clerks. Who did this young man think he was? What didn’t he understand about the compact between the elected and the appointed? This sort of thing was especially appalling from a son of the establishment, the same establishment that had so benefited from the energies and exertions of the bureaucracy.

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illustrate the sic vivitur sensibility. Eighty-five-year-old Catulus was a pillar of the establishment, one of the oldest living ex-consuls, a man famous for consistency and moderation, thought to “surpass all Romans in justice and discretion.” What’s more, he was a friend of Cato and an admirer of his Stoicism. No other advocate was better placed to paint the thirty-year-old’s latest move as childish and radical. But Cato hadn’t spent nights memorizing the law for nothing. In this instance, the law was clear: The clerk had defrauded the treasury. Cato dissected the case with clinical precision for the assembled jury, and Catulus knew almost instantly that he had been dealt a losing hand. On the merits, Cato won. But Roman justice was notoriously unpredictable, as subject to human drama as it was to legal reasoning. So Catulus chose to beg. An elderly censor, on his knees, he pled for mercy for a client victimized by a quaestor run amok. It was an inspired tactic, and Cato knew it might sway the jury if he let it go on much longer.

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He interrupted Catulus’s pleas with one of his own: “It would be a shameful thing, Catulus, if you, the censor, who scrutinizes our lives, were removed from the court by the bailiffs.” Catulus stopped, locked eyes with Cato, and struggled for a response. No words came. He simply stalked away in silence.

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Two powerful personalities, who should have been allies in a time of crisis, forced by their irreconcilable commitments into destructive conflict: It should have been the stuff of tragedy. It played out as a comedy.

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little philosophy with their corruption trial, Cicero also correctly gambled that none of them was informed enough to call his bluff on the parody that was to follow. What, then, he asked, does this slightly odd sect believe? That no one is merciful except a fool and a trifler … that wise men, no matter how deformed, are the only beautiful men; that even if they are beggars, they are the only rich men; that even in slavery, they are kings. And all of us who are not wise men, they call slaves, exiles, enemies, lunatics. They say that all offenses are equal, that every sin is an unpardonable crime, and that it is just as much of a crime to needlessly kill a rooster as to strangle one’s own father!

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Now, Caesar argued, these so-called pillars of the establishment were considering the nearly unprecedented step of an execution without a trial—for a crime that had not yet taken place. It went without saying that the plot against the city was the highest treason—“that the utmost degree of torture is inadequate to punish their crime”—but, still, it was un-Roman to debate fellow citizens’ punishments before they had been convicted in a court of law. Rather too cleverly, Caesar added that no punishment the Senate could invent could possibly equal the enormity of the alleged crime, which was all the more reason to stick to the books. If the Senate was going to start making up punishments for the conspirators, why not scourge their skin off first? Was that too severe? Then why had Silanus demanded the most “extreme penalty”? Besides, going beyond the law, no matter how dangerous the threat, carried its own risks. Today, Caesar courteously allowed, the Senate was full of the wise and the just—but lesser men would surely abuse their precedent, killing “the good and the bad indiscriminately.” Today’s national security exception would be tomorrow’s wholesale slaughter, he argued, with no one to “stay its progress or moderate its fury.” Confiscate the conspirators’ property, keep them in custody, disperse them across Italy, he urged—but show restraint, in the best Roman tradition. “For certainly,” Caesar concluded, “there was greater merit and wisdom in those who raised so mighty an empire from humble means, than in us, who can scarcely preserve what they so honorably acquired.” As Caesar’s words settled over the Senate, consul-elect Silanus could sense that the mood had shifted. Senators who minutes ago had been clamoring for death were now set on mercy. Executing a classic waffle, Silanus awkwardly rose to explain that he of course had agreed with Caesar all along. He had said the “extreme penalty” before—and what was more extreme than imprisonment? Any skepticism in the chamber was swallowed by the applause that followed; and we can imagine many a senator bearing admiration for Silanus’s well-crafted ambiguity, which had made it possible for him to tack in either direction. The man had not reached the top for nothing.

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Cato, as would have been immediately clear to anyone there to observe the contrast, had none of Caesar’s charm. He paid little attention to the rhetorical niceties that were so lovingly studied by his peers. He rarely rehearsed. In this, as in so much else, he could fall back instead on one of Cato the Censor’s earthy maxims: Rem tene, verba sequentur—“Stick to the point, the words will come.” And when the words came, they could continue for hours.

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In fact, though no one could have known it at the time, the clash between Caesar and the conservatives—specifically, between Caesar and Cato—was Catiline’s most permanent legacy. “Their birth, age, and eloquence were nearly on an equality; their greatness of mind similar, as was their reputation,” the historian Sallust, their contemporary, writes of the two rising stars of the Senate. Sallust was a partisan of Caesar, but when it came to weighing the two, he could only admit that the balance was level: Caesar grew eminent by generosity and munificence; Cato by the integrity of his life. Caesar was esteemed for his humanity and benevolence; austerity had given dignity to Cato. Caesar acquired renown by giving, relieving, and pardoning; Cato by bestowing nothing. In Caesar, there was a refuge for the unfortunate; in Cato, destruction for the bad. In Caesar, his easiness of temper was admired; in Cato, his firmness. Caesar, in sum, had applied himself to a life of energy and activity; intent upon the interests of his friends, he was neglectful of his own; he refused nothing to others that was worthy of acceptance, while for himself he desired great power, the command of an army, and a new war in which his talents might be displayed. But Cato’s ambition was that of temperance, discretion, and, above all, of austerity; he did not contend in splendor with the rich or in faction with the seditious, but with the brave in fortitude, with the modest in simplicity, with the temperate in abstinence; he was more desirous to be, than to appear, virtuous; and thus, the less he courted popularity, the more it pursued him.

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It was not the Romans who finished Mithridates off at last, nor the poison to which he had made himself invulnerable, but “that domestic poison, always the most dangerous to kings, the treachery of army, children, and friends.” Led by the king’s own son, Mithridates’ army and people revolted. Once the hope of the Eastern world, Mithridates was reduced to the image of a broken warmonger, the only man left who failed to accept the Roman reality. Barricaded in his tower chamber, unable even to poison himself, Mithridates begged a servant to end his life for him. When the news reached Pompey’s army, it seemed to them that “in the person of Mithridates, ten thousand enemies had died.”

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Pompey proposed to marry Cato’s daughter Porcia. To strengthen the bond further, he also asked, on his son’s behalf, for Cato’s young niece (the daughter of the same Servilia who had sent the love note to Caesar during the Catiline debate). The women’s shouts of joy, and dreams of the grandest wedding in memory, were crushed almost immediately by Cato’s brutally blunt reply: “Go, Munatius, and tell Pompey that Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s rooms.”

Ref. F2E1-B

It was among the greatest unforced errors of Cato’s career. Marriage was exactly how political allies were “captured,” and Cato knew it. Yet the same political autism that led him to prosecute Murena came to the fore again, at another moment of great consequence, and this time with results far more destructive. Cato could not conceive of allying himself with anyone for any reason other than a sincere and bloodless agreement on first principles. Rather than see his daughter as the means by which Pompey

Ref. 4D50-C

Cicero, in a private letter, had this to say about Cato:   “Dicit enim tamquam in Platonis πολιτεία, non tamquam in Romuli faece sententiam.”

Ref. D2E1-D

The word “faece” has been translated, with varying degrees of gentility, as everything from “cesspool” to “mud huts.” But perhaps the historian Tom Holland best captures Cicero’s bracing cynicism: “He talks like he’s living in Plato’s Republic, not Romulus’s shit-hole.” It was a quip

Ref. 2CF4-E

proposing a measure in his own interest.” The money to pay for the reforms would come from Pompey’s conquests in the East. Caesar had cobbled together legislation he could present as budget neutral, politically fair, and constitutionally sanctioned.

Ref. 520D-F

Politics, then as now, was equal parts substance and stagecraft. Caesar was, more than any of his contemporaries, hyperconscious of both—but his real skill lay in theatrics. He was the master of keeping up appearances. He went to great lengths to present himself as a benevolent warrior, ferocious in battle but forgiving in its aftermath. In speech, in dress, in bearing, he carried himself like a practiced, polished actor. He even perfected his comb-over, a valiant attempt to cover up his baldness. And that may have been why—in the face of total legislative success, with his clients and friends overjoyed, the poor and powerless slightly richer, and the Senate reduced to passive resistance—the victory still felt less than whole. Caesar may have won, but Cato had upstaged him with a moment of well-placed submission.

Ref. 3A81-G

repeal of Caesar’s hated land bills. And in the law courts, he had a new roster of clients, largely drawn from the ranks of Caesar’s and Pompey’s hangers-on. There were times, Cicero confessed to his friend Atticus, when this new life in Rome drove him to self-hatred. But he was deep in the triumvirs’ debt, and the alternative to paying up was the one thing that Cicero feared above all: irrelevance. In a letter to Atticus, he made the case for self-preservation, as only one who had briefly lost everything could make it: Since those who have no power refuse me their affection, let us take care to secure the affection of those who have power. You will say, “I could have wished that you had done so before.” I know you did wish it, and that I have made a real ass of myself. But now the time has come to show a little affection for myself.…

Ref. DDA4-H

But it was another of those strange, half-spirited affairs in which Cato simply would not, or could not, bring himself to behave like a man who wanted power. He had, at one point, been a forceful and fiery politician; now, a step away from the pinnacle, all that mattered was all that Cato would not do. He would not show off his wounds. He would not discuss his war record. He would not smile or joke with the crowd. He would not pretend to know strangers. He would not compromise what he considered his dignity, or shift his personality in the slightest. He would not put on shoes. He would not do any of the things “by which the multitude is courted and captivated.” He would not be anything other than Cato; he preferred to lose on those terms.

Ref. B0DB-I

Gaius Scribonius Curio had been the conservatives’ shining young hope. The optimates loved him because few made the case against Caesar so forcefully and so intelligibly to the common man. The people loved him because, in contrast to so many of the dour men on his side, he was a partier and a gambler, “eloquent, reckless, prodigal alike of his own fortune and chastity and of those of other people, a man of the utmost cleverness in perversity.” They loved him, too, because he had built them a magnificent amphitheater out of his own pocket, one whose stadium seating rotated to present instant changes of scene. They had made Curio tribune for 50—but one did not get to that point without taking on deep debts. Sometime before he took office, Curio had been approached by Caesar’s people. By the time he was tribune, he was debt free, and a Caesarian.

Ref. 375E-J

But if Cato had asked the men of those legions where they put their loyalty, he might have heard differently. He might have heard that the era in which Rome’s armies answered to the Senate and the people was, in all but name, coming to an end. “Outside the Senate,” writes Plutarch, “Cato could accomplish nothing.” Outside the Senate, Caesar appeared both a man of peace and armed protector of the people’s ancient rights.

Ref. 450D-K

almost making it—but because it is the only writing of Cato’s that survives. For that reason, it is worth reproducing in full: I gladly obey the call of the state and of our friendship, in rejoicing that your virtue, integrity, and energy, already known at home in a most important crisis, when you were a civilian, should be maintained abroad with the same painstaking care now that you have military command. Therefore, what I could conscientiously do in setting forth in laudatory terms that the province had been defended by your wisdom; that the kingdom of Ariobarzanes [a client king whose domain bordered on Cicero’s province], as well as the king himself, had been preserved; and that the feelings of the allies had been won back to loyalty to our empire—that I have done by speech and vote.

Ref. 0553-L

was an ingenious way to spin a “no” vote: Thanksgivings were meant for divine intervention, but Cicero had succeeded entirely on the strength of his own virtues (which do not make up a very martial list: integrity, self-control, and mildness). Because the credit went to the governor, not the gods, no thanksgiving was necessary—it was a higher compliment not to give thanks. The trick here was that Cato, literal minded as ever, took “thanksgiving” at face value—whereas, for Cicero, it was a transparently political gesture, “a very signal mark of approbation.” Almost deliberately misreading Cicero’s request, Cato was able to deny him all the more politely.

Ref. 3E42-M