Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

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.’