Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

Dead, he was every bit as troublesome to Caesar as he had been when living. A painted placard depicting Cato tearing himself apart ‘like a wild animal’ was carried in the triumph Caesar celebrated on returning to Rome. The gruesome image’s effect was the opposite of that intended: instead of exulting in the death of Caesar’s most inflexible opponent, the crowd groaned and muttered as it passed. Brutus wrote and published a eulogy to Cato. So, showing a degree of political courage unusual for him, did Cicero. Caesar commissioned his loyal historian Hirtius to reply to them in a text, now lost, that belittled Cato’s virtues and catalogued his failings. This literary controversy over a dead man’s reputation masked a more dangerous debate over his living enemy’s claim to power: Caesar clearly considered it absolutely necessary to his own security that Cato be discredited. Unsatisfied with Hirtius’ effort, he wrote his own Anti-Cato, a pamphlet so extravagantly vitriolic as to have defeated its own object. The allegations he made in it were luridly, self-defeatingly exaggerated. He accused Cato of financial greed and dishonesty, of sexual depravity and of laziness. He wrote that Cato had sieved the ashes from the funeral pyre of his much-loved brother in search of gold, that he came drunk to the courts, and that he had an incestuous relationship with his sister Servilia (a particularly self-damaging accusation this – Servilia was actually Caesar’s mistress). He was not believed. Cicero thought the pamphlet had greatly enhanced Cato’s posthumous reputation – presumably by making manifest the hatred and fear he had inspired in his great opponent.

Cato’s influence persisted, and grew deadly. Plutarch relates that when Cato was taken as a boy to the house of the dictator Sulla he asked his tutor, ‘Why didst thou not give me a sword, that I might slay this man and set my country free from slavery?’ Whether or not Cato the child ever said such a thing, Cato the man never advocated or condoned the use of violence as a political tool. Yet though in life he had staunchly defended the forms of law against the summary use of force, in his afterlife he became the presiding genius of a political movement aimed at an act of lethal violence. Cato had initiated the opposition to Caesar, and that opposition achieved its end on the Ides of March, brought to a murderous conclusion by Brutus, Cato’s nephew and son-in-law who, according to Plutarch, admired Cato ‘more than any other Roman’.

Caesar was killed, but the Caesarean dynasty survived and flourished and Cato, who had made his name in opposition, flourished with it, growing ever greater in Rome’s collective memory. Cicero, who in his lifetime had found Cato an awkward colleague, paid tribute to him after his death in reverential terms as a ‘god-like and unique man’ who had ‘remained ever true to his purpose and fixed resolve’. To Horace (who was nineteen when Cato died), he was the model of the just man, even of manhood itself.

Cato’s posthumous exaltation had a philosophical basis. He became the exemplar of the increasingly influential ideal of Stoic virtue. In the fifth century BC Socrates had taught that nothing can harm the good man. To one whose mind is on eternal verities, no material loss, not even the loss of life itself, is of any consequence. In Plato’s Phaedo, the book Cato chose to read three times over on the last night of his life, Socrates explains that, since a wise man’s ultimate goal must be to free himself from the body, which ‘fills us with loves, desires and all sorts of fancies and great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything’, he need dread no bodily harm. Death, which will free him to apprehend more clearly the ideas of which the things of this world are merely dim reflections, is actually desirable. When Cato rebuked his friends for hiding his sword, thus seeking to make him abandon ‘those good old opinions’ to which they all subscribed, these are the sort of opinions to which he referred.

The wise man had no fear. Indeed, the wisest had few emotions of any kind. Plato, synthesizing in the Republic the teachings of Socrates with the example of Sparta, promulgated an ideal of the impassive hero. Homer’s heroes raged and wept, mourning each other’s deaths and openly declaring the terror they felt at the prospect of their own. To Plato, the admirer of Spartan discipline and self-repression, they seemed contemptible. His decision to ban poets from his ideal republic was motivated partly by his revulsion at Homer’s extended description of Achilles’ lamentation for Patroclus. No hero (even Plato could not deny Achilles that status) should be seen to express himself with so little restraint, such a lack of the self-mastery which, to Plato, was essential not only to dignity but also to virtue.

Drawing on Socrates and Plato, and on the mystic traditions of the Orphics and Pythagoreans, the Stoics, whose philosophy first evolved under that name in Athens in the second century BC, elaborated their vision of the wise man. Such a man hopes for nothing and is therefore delivered from all fear of disappointment. Desire, ambition, even human love, are to be shunned. To ask for nothing is to render oneself invulnerable. That was the condition that Cato was judged to have achieved. When Seneca, writing some fifty years after Cato’s death, wished to answer the objection that the Stoic ‘wise man’ was a chimera, he had only to point to Cato: ‘I almost think he surpasses our ideal.’

In life, Cato had been a student of philosophy – Cicero reports that he had ‘a voracious appetite for reading’. An early riser, he would always bring a book with him to the Senate and sit studying it until his fellow senators were assembled. In late Roman and medieval texts he is referred to as ‘Cato the philosopher’, meaning not that he left behind him a body of written work (he didn’t), but that he liked to ponder the profound and difficult questions with which philosophy is concerned. When he was granted leave of absence during his term as military tribune, he took ship to Pergamum expressly in order to meet the celebrated philosopher Athenodorus and invite the old man to live with him thereafter. Back in Rome, he sought out teachers and readers of philosophy, several of whom received his patronage. In Sicily, during the opening months of the civil war, he found opportunities, despite his responsibility as commander of the Pompeian forces on the island, to walk about discoursing with the philosopher Philostratus. Even in Utica, in the last two terrible days of his life, he found time to confer with the two sages, one a Stoic, the other a Peripatetic, who were attached to his household there.

What he learned, he practised. He went barefoot and inadequately dressed in all weathers, not only to harden his body but also in order to train his spirit, ‘accustoming himself to be ashamed only of what was really shameful’. What seemed to most of his contemporaries to be a lack of dignity and decorum in his appearance was a self-imposed penance, a spiritual exercise. He was, wrote Cicero, ‘endowed by nature with an austerity beyond belief’.