Cato the Younger

• 1. Introduction

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  Cato the Younger stabbed himself in the abdomen in April 46 BC rather than accept a pardon from Julius Caesar. The details of that final night in the city of Utica are vivid and brutal: after his family removed his sword, he tore his own wound open with his hands and died. Caesar, upon hearing the news, reportedly lamented that Cato had robbed him of the chance to show mercy. That response tells you everything about the trap these two men had built for each other over decades of Roman political life.

  Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis was born in 95 BC, the great-great-grandson of Cato the Elder, the legendary champion of old Roman virtue. He would spend his entire adult life performing that inheritance so relentlessly, so publicly, that disagreeing with him came to feel like rejecting Rome itself. He would block land reforms, filibuster generals, wreck political alliances, and in the end help light the fuse of a civil war he never wanted. The question that haunts his story is not whether he was principled. He clearly was. The question is whether his principles destroyed the republic he was trying to save.

• 2. The Performance of Virtue

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  Around the age of 16, Cato was inducted into the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, the board of priests responsible for consulting the Sibylline Oracles. It was a prestigious appointment, almost certainly arranged by his uncle Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus, and it placed the young man at the centre of the senatorial elite before he had done anything to earn it on his own merits.

  Shortly after, he received his inheritance and began studying philosophy under multiple teachers simultaneously: Stoicism under Antipater of Tyre, Epicureanism under a Philostratus, and Peripatetism under a Demetrius. But formal philosophy was not the most striking thing about his self-education. What was striking was the wardrobe.

  Cato chose to dress like a statue. He refused to wear a tunic beneath his toga, walked barefoot through the city, and declined to ride horses over long distances, preferring to walk. His biographer Fred Drogula argues this was a calculated political strategy, not a philosophical one: Cato was modelling himself on ancient depictions of Rome's legendary heroes, deliberately evoking an ancestral authority that would be impossible to argue against directly.

  His first public act confirmed the approach. When plebeian tribunes proposed moving a column in the Basilica Porcia, a building his great-grandfather had commissioned during his censorship in 184 BC, Cato showed up to defend it. Whether the column was actually part of the building is unclear. What mattered was the opportunity: here was the great-great-grandson of the Basilica's founder, defending Roman heritage in the Forum. It was an entrance designed to be remembered, and it was.

• 3. A Career Built on Refusal

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  On the 5th of December, 65 BC, Cato took office as one of Rome's urban quaestors, the officials in charge of the state treasury. He had spent months beforehand studying the financial laws governing the office, and he immediately put that preparation to use. He prosecuted corrupt treasury clerks, fired others, and when one was acquitted after a censor intervened, refused to rehire him.

  Plutarch records that he also spent the equivalent of five talents, roughly four percent of his inheritance, to commission personal copies of every treasury archive from the time of Sulla to his own day. This was not standard behaviour. He also took the opportunity to cooperate briefly with Julius Caesar, then acting as a court prosecutor, in challenging payments made to men who had received bounties for killings during the Sullan proscriptions. That cooperation would not last.

  His quaestorship earned him a reputation so exceptional that Plutarch credited him with elevating the prestige of the junior office to the level of the consulship itself. The compliment reveals how low expectations were. The preceding generation of Roman politics had been gutted by the Social War, by Sulla's civil war, and by the proscriptions. By 65 BC, only nine active former consuls remained in the senate. Into that vacuum stepped a young senator who actually prosecuted people for corruption and kept meticulous records. By the standards of the late Republic, this made him extraordinary.

  As plebeian tribune in 62 BC, he pushed through a law that more than doubled the number of people receiving subsidised grain, one of the most generous expansions of the grain dole in the Republic's history. He passed another law requiring military commanders to swear to the accuracy of their casualty reports, a measure that appeared aimed at Caesar, who was about to take up a governorship in Spain. He physically wrestled legislation from his fellow tribune Metellus Nepos on the floor of the Forum, with one ally pressing a hand over Nepos' mouth to prevent him from reading the bill aloud. His allies in the senate then passed a senatus consultum ultimum and Nepos fled the city.

• 4. The Enemy He Made

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  Caesar's consular year of 59 BC opened with a land reform bill that was, by contemporary accounts, well-written and deferential to the senate's prerogatives. Cato had no substantive objection. He filibustered anyway, for the entire month of January, until Caesar had him dragged to prison before releasing him. Caesar then brought the bill to the people directly.

  Cato's consular colleague Bibulus attempted a theatrical counter-manoeuvre: he showed up in the Forum each morning to announce unfavourable religious omens, blocking a vote by sacral technicality. The tactic worked until Bibulus and Cato were driven out of the Forum one morning by a mob that pelted them with manure. Bibulus then withdrew to his house and never re-emerged for the rest of the consular year, watching Caesar pass law after law from behind locked doors.

  Over that year, Caesar recognised Ptolemy XII Auletes as Egyptian king, ratified Pompey's eastern settlements, bailed out the publicani tax farmers for Crassus, and extended his agrarian law to cover Campania. When a law emerged that Cato himself supported, the lex Iulia de repetundis, targeting financial abuses by provincial governors, he backed it without hesitation. His opposition had always been targeted specifically at what would benefit Caesar personally. This distinction mattered to Cato. It is not clear that it mattered to anyone else.

  The cumulative effect of Cato's obstruction had been to push Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus into the arrangement historians now call the First Triumvirate. By blocking each man individually, Cato had given all three men a common interest in cooperating. His own allies, the classicist Fred Drogula writes, found in him a nearly impossible coalition partner: he accepted almost no deviations from what he saw as traditional Roman principles, which made him a powerful symbol and a difficult ally in equal measure.

• 5. Cyprus and Its Silences

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  In 58 BC, the tribune Publius Clodius Pulcher promulgated a bill annexing Cyprus and appointed Cato as its special administrator with the rank of pro quaestore pro praetore. Historians have argued about the motives ever since. The traditional view is that Clodius wanted Cato away from Rome. Others suggest it was an attempt at a political alliance. A third reading, noting that triumviral allies controlled all the major magistracies at that moment, sees it as a pragmatic retreat: leaving for Cyprus gave Cato a chance to wait out an unfavourable political environment while building his reputation as an honest administrator.

  When Cato arrived and announced the annexation, the island's king, who had been a Roman ally, killed himself rather than face deposition. Cato personally catalogued the royal possessions and solicited competitive bids on all of them. He was diligent to a fault, treating even his friends with suspicion and receiving them poorly. Some accounts suggest that his nephew Marcus Junius Brutus may have engaged in usurious moneylending on Cyprus during this period, with questions raised about whether Cato tacitly permitted it.

  His account books were lost on the return voyage. The amount recovered was considered low. And yet his reputation for personal honesty was powerful enough that none of this seriously damaged him. When he brought the treasury's proceeds up the Tiber, Plutarch describes something close to a naval parade, a glittering procession conveying the Cypriot treasures to Rome. He was elected praetor for 54 BC shortly after. The gap between what he lost and what he returned home with seems to have mattered less to Romans than the certainty that Cato himself had not stolen anything.

• 6. Toward the Breaking Point

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  By 52 BC, the political situation had deteriorated into open street warfare between the armed mobs of Publius Clodius Pulcher and Titus Annius Milo. When Clodius was murdered by Milo's men after a chance encounter outside Rome, his supporters burned his body in the senate house. The fire also destroyed the Basilica Porcia in the Forum, the same building Cato had made his public debut defending nearly four decades earlier.

  With the city leaderless and violent, Cato and his ally Bibulus proposed an unusual solution: make Pompey sole consul, consul without a colleague. The move was a deliberate departure from republican tradition, but Cato framed it as the lesser threat. A sole consulship gave Pompey authority without making him a dictator, and it precluded Milo's election to the consulship, where he would have had legal immunity for Clodius' murder. Pompey accepted.

  Cato served as one of the jurors in the subsequent trial of Milo, with Cicero conducting the defence. Cato made his vote for acquittal clear. The jury convicted anyway. More troubling for Cato was a concession Pompey made during his consulship: he supported the so-called law of the ten tribunes, which granted Caesar the right to stand for the consulship without returning to Rome in person. That single provision kept Caesar's legions in Gaul while allowing him to seek re-election, precisely the scenario Cato's earlier laws had been designed to prevent.

  Cato stood for the consulship of 51 BC, reportedly citing a sense of public duty in the tradition of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus summoned from his farm. He ran an austere campaign, distributing no cash and promising no favours. Cicero later complained that while the state needed Cato, Cato seemed more interested in winning admiration than in actually winning. He lost, and did not stand for the consulship again.

• 7. War He Did Not Want

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  On the 7th of January, 49 BC, the senate passed a senatus consultum ultimum against Caesar, likely under the false pretence that Caesar was already invading. Caesar then crossed the Rubicon. Cato, by his own later admission, was surprised.

  The moment the war began, Cato's position shifted. He pushed for a negotiated settlement and forced his way into the war council when Caesar offered peace terms on the 23rd of January: Caesar would lay down his command and stand for the consulship in person in return for amnesty, and Pompey would depart for Spain. Cicero records that Cato strongly supported the plan. The hard-liners rejected it.

  Pompey assigned Cato to Sicily to raise men and supplies, possibly to keep his gloomy assessment of the war's prospects away from the troops. On the 23rd of April, faced with a landing by Gaius Asinius Pollio, Cato abandoned the island without giving battle, though Cicero noted his forces were sufficient to resist. After retreating to Dyrrhachium and joining what remained of the Pompeian cause, Cato admitted to the gathered officers that Cicero's more moderate policy had been correct all along.

  He was not present at the Battle of Pharsalus. Left in command at Dyrrhachium when Pompey marched to confront Caesar, he learned of the disaster from Titus Labienus. In the aftermath, he offered command to Cicero, who held higher consular rank. Cicero declined and sailed home to seek Caesar's pardon. Cato sailed the other direction, eventually joining Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio in Africa, where he reconciled warring Pompeian factions and arranged to have Metellus Scipio placed in overall command, in part because the name Scipio, as the heir to the family that had defeated Hannibal, would inspire the soldiers. Privately, Cato told his associates that he thought the war was hopeless and that he intended to abandon Rome regardless of who won.

• 8. Utica and Afterward

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  Cato defended the city of Utica on the North African coast, expanding its fortifications, raising troops, and stockpiling supplies while waiting for Caesar's advance. When Metellus Scipio's forces were annihilated at the Battle of Thapsus, news reached Utica three days later and sent the city into panic.

  Cato organized an orderly evacuation of Romans who wished to flee, sent a delegation headed by Caesar's own kinsman Lucius Julius Caesar to seek pardon for his family and allies, settled the city's financial accounts, and distributed the remaining funds to the inhabitants. At a final dinner with friends, he discussed the Stoic argument that a truly free man could never be made a slave. Then he asked for his sword.

  His family had removed it from his room. When he demanded it, they begged him not to proceed. He dismissed them, asked for a status report on the ships carrying refugees to safety, and, satisfied, stabbed himself. A physician was summoned; Cato revived long enough to push the doctor away and tear the wound open with his hands.

  Caesar, the sources record, lamented that Cato's death had denied him the chance to offer pardon. The comment was itself political. Within months, Cicero and Brutus each wrote eulogies identifying Cato as a great Stoic philosopher and a martyr for the Republic. Caesar replied with a pamphlet called the Anticato, which has not survived. The Republic itself would not survive much longer. In the 18th century, a series of political essays called Cato's Letters, by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, drew directly on Cato's life as a founding argument for the principles that would shape the American Revolution. Cato's son Marcus Porcius Cato would later die at the Second Battle of Philippi, fighting on the same losing side for the same lost cause.