Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

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.