Rob Goodman - Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar

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Whether these things should be set down to greatness of spirit or smallness of mind is an open question.

PLUTARCH

For Ellen

R. G.

For my parents, Bhupendra and Aruna

J. S.

C ONTENTS

A N OTE ON THE T EXT

For the sake of clarity, where Anglicized names are better known than their Latin counterparts (e.g., Pompey for Pompeius, Catiline for Catilina, Lucan for Lucanus), we have used the former. Along similar lines, we have modernized the punctuation and diction of translated quotations from ancient sources, where such changes are appropriate and helpful, but we have not changed the meaning or purpose of any quotation. Additionally, all dates in the text are BCE through chapter 14, where the transition is noted. And finally, though settling on the modern value of Roman currency has proved notoriously difficult, estimates for the equivalent of one Roman sesterce have ranged from one dollar to five dollars.

PROLOGUE

T HE D REAM

General Washington paused and studied his boot prints in the newly thawed mud. He took a deep breath of spring air, closed his eyes, and released the breath. He was pensive; it had been a year of long marches and small success, and winters toll on his troops had been heavy.

Food was scarce at Valley Forge. The men had to make do with a tasteless, tough, fire-baked combination of flour and water. Hundreds of horses were dead, some from sheer exhaustion, and others wasted away with hunger. The shelters the men had built could hardly handle the freezing and melting snows of the Pennsylvania winter. The entire camp seemed to be soaked and full of men yellow with jaundice, feverish with typhoid, or doubled over from diarrhea.

At the end of that bitter winter, before an audience packed into a converted bakery at the Valley Forge camp, soldiers dressed in togas mounted a rickety stage and began reciting blank verse. Washington did not have many means of inspiration at his disposal, but he did have drama. And the play he chose to stage for his officer corps was the story of a Roman senator named Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger.

For much of the captive, bone-tired audience, the story was a familiar one. Washington, along with a good part of the worlds English speakers, counted Joseph Addisons Cato: A Tragedy as a personal favorite. By the time the play made its debut at Valley Forge, it had already been staged 234 times in England alone. With twenty-six different editions in print, it had become a mandatory text for every well-read man of the day. On the front lines of his first war, a twenty-six-year-old Washington wrote that he would rather be home, acting a part in Cato himself.

Washingtons peers studied and memorized the tragedy. They quoted it, consciously and unconsciously, in public statements and in private correspondence. When Benjamin Franklin opened his private diary, he was greeted with lines from the play that he had chosen as a motto. When John Adams wrote love letters to his wife, Abigail, he quoted Cato . When Patrick Henry dared King George to give him liberty or death, he was cribbing from Cato. And when Nathan Hale regretted that he had only one life to give for his countryseconds before the British army hanged him for high treasonhe was poaching words straight from Cato.

George Washington, John Adams, and Samuel Adams were all honored in their time as the American Catoand in revolutionary America, there was little higher praise. When Washington wrote to a pre-turncoat Benedict Arnold and said, It is not in the power of any man to command success; but you have done moreyou have deserved it, he too lifted the words from Addisons Cato .

How did the legend of a Roman who walked the halls of his Senate eighteen hundred years before America was born speak so powerfully through the ages? And why did Washington, in the darkest moment of his career, choose Cato to lift the spirits of his army?

Who was Cato?

* * *

For Washington and the entire revolutionary generation, Cato was Libertythe last man standing when Romes Republic fell. For centuries of philosophers and theologians, Cato was the Good Suicidethe most principled, most persuasive exception to the rule against self-slaughter. For Julius Caesar, the dictator who famously pardoned every opponent, Cato was the only man he could never bring himself to forgive.

Through two millennia, Cato was mimicked, studied, despised, feared, revered. In his own day, he was a soldier and an aristocrat, a senator and a Stoic. The last in a family line of prominent statesmen, Cato spent a lifetime in the public eye as the standard-bearer of Romes optimates, traditionalists who saw themselves as the defenders of Romes ancient constitution, the preservers of the centuries-old system of government that propelled Romes growth from muddy city to mighty empire.

Catos world was the Roman Republic, a state at the apex of its power, able to make foreign kings tremble with a single decree, and rotting from the inside out. Catos arena was the Senate, an awesome assemblage of gray-haired eminences, the symbol of Romes republican heritage, and a body crippled by personality politics, rigged elections, ritualized bribery, and sex scandals. Public life in the late Republic resembled a soap opera, and if we didnt find in that fact a sharp enough reflection of our own time, we could surely find familiarity in the grave challenges that threatened Rome and its Senate. They included homegrown terrorism, a debt crisis, the management of multiple foreign wars, the fraying of conventional social bonds and mores, and a yawning gap between rich and poor.

For our time, the question that Cato most urgently poses is this: What happens when a public man, in the face of all that, treats compromise like a dirty word? 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 Catos 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 Republics fall. Yet few did more, in the last accounting, to bring that fall to pass.

At the same time, Catos 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 inflexibilityCato 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 Catos 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.