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For other individuals, see Marcus Porcius Cato.
| CATO THE YOUNGER | |
|---|---|
| Inscribed bronze bust from Volubilis | |
| BORN | 95 BC Roman Republic |
| DIED | April 46 BC (aged 49) Utica, Africa, Roman Republic |
| CAUSE OF DEATH | Suicide |
| OCCUPATION | Politician |
| KNOWN FOR | Opposition to Julius Caesar |
| OFFICE | Military tribune (67 BC)Quaestor (64 BC)Plebeian tribune (62 BC)Praetor (54 BC)[1] |
| SPOUSES | AtiliaMarcia |
| CHILDREN | Marcus Porcius CatoPorcia |
| PARENTS | Marcus Porcius Cato (father)Livia (mother) |
| RELATIVES | Brutus (nephew)Servilia (half-sister) |
| FAMILY | gens Porcia |
| Military career | |
| ALLEGIANCE | Roman Republic (72–49 BC)Pompey (49–46 BC) |
| RANK | Praetor |
| WARS | Third Servile WarSecond Catilinarian ConspiracyCaesar’s Civil War † |
Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (“of Utica“; /ˈkeɪtoʊ/, KAY-toe; 95 BC – April 46 BC), also known as Cato the Younger (Latin: Cato Minor), was an influential conservative Roman senator during the late Republic. A staunch advocate for liberty and the preservation of the Republic’s principles, he dedicated himself to protecting the traditional Roman values he believed were in decline. A noted orator and a follower of Stoicism, his scrupulous honesty and professed respect for tradition gave him a political following which he mobilised against powerful generals of his day, including Julius Caesar and Pompey.
Before Caesar’s civil war, Cato served in a number of political offices. During his urban quaestorship in 63 BC, he was praised for his honesty and incorruptibility in running Rome’s finances. He passed laws during his plebeian tribunate in 62 BC to expand the grain dole and force generals to give up their armies and commands before standing in elections. He also frustrated Pompey’s ambitions by opposing a bill brought by Pompey’s allies to transfer the military command to Pompey against the Catilinarian conspirators. He opposed, with varying success, Caesar’s legislative programme during Caesar’s first consulship in 59 BC. Leaving for Cyprus the next year, he was praised for his honest administration and after his return was elected as praetor for 54 BC.
He supported Pompey’s sole consulship in 52 BC as a practical matter and to draw Pompey from his alliance with Caesar. In this, he was successful. He and his political allies advocated a policy of confrontation and brinksmanship with Caesar; though it seemed that Cato never advocated for actual civil war, this policy greatly contributed to the start of civil war in January 49 BC. During the civil war, he joined Pompey and tried to minimise the deaths of his fellow citizens. But after Pompey’s defeat and his own cause’s defeat by Caesar in Africa, he chose to take his own life rather than accept what he saw as Caesar’s tyrannical pardon, turning himself into a martyr for and a symbol of the Republic.
His political influence was rooted in his moralist principles and his embodiment of Roman traditions that appealed to both senators and the innately conservative Roman voter. He was criticised by contemporaries and by modern historians for being too uncompromising in obstructing Caesar and other powerful generals. Those tactics and their success led to the creation of the First Triumvirate and the outbreak of civil war. The epithet “the Younger” distinguishes him from his great-grandfather, Cato the Elder, who was viewed by ancient Romans in similar terms as embodying tradition and propriety.
Early life
Cato was born in 95 BC, the son of his homonymous father and Livia.[2] He was descended from Cato the Elder – this Cato’s great-grandfather[3] – who was a novus homo (“new man”) and the first of the family to be elected to the consulship.[4] The elder Cato was famed for his austerity and traditional Roman values,[5] which was affected for political reasons[6] and meant to embellish his reputation as “the foremost representative of the mos maiorum“.[7]
He and his sister Porcia were orphaned, probably before Cato was four years old, and the children were taken in by their maternal uncle, Marcus Livius Drusus.[8] After Drusus’ death and the resulting start of the Social war in 91 BC, Cato and his sister probably came into the household of his mother’s older brother, Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus.[9] Moving in with Cato and his sister were a half-brother and two half-sisters from his mother Livia’s first marriage to Quintus Servilius Caepio.[10] Cato was especially close to his half-brother, Gnaeus Servilius Caepio, and his elder half-sister, Servilia, who would later marry Marcus Junius Brutus (the father of the tyrannicide) and become the mistress of Julius Caesar.[11]
Stories of Cato’s early childhood are broadly unreliable and told mainly to suggest that Cato’s character as an adult had been established in childhood.[12] They include claims that Cato was a poor student, a dubious tale that Quintus Poppaedius Silo – one of the Italian leaders during the Social war – once threatened to hang Cato out of a window unless he voiced support for Italian citizenship (Cato supposedly remained silent), and a claim that Cato asked his tutor for a sword with which to assassinate Sulla during Sulla’s proscription.[13]
Around the age of 16, Cato was inducted into the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, the board of priests in charge of consulting and interpreting the Sibylline Oracles.[14] This was a prestigious honour, for which he was likely selected on the initiative of his uncle Mamercus Lepdius, and it put Cato into the centre of the senatorial elite.[15]
Statue of Cato the Younger in the Louvre Museum. He is about to kill himself while reading the Phaedo, a dialogue of Plato which describes the death of Socrates. The statue was begun by Jean-Baptiste Roman (Paris, 1792–1835) using white Carrara marble. It was finished by François Rude (Dijon, 1784 – Paris, 1855).
Final campaign and death
Cato was given command of the city of Utica after convincing Metellus Scipio to spare the town’s inhabitants when they attempted to defect to Caesar. He successfully expanded the city’s defences, raised troops, and stockpiled supplies while waiting for Caesar’s eventual arrival. During his time in Africa, however, Cato became convinced that victory for his own cause under Metellus Scipio would be accompanied by appalling reprisals.[210]
When Cato pushed for a strategy of attrition against Caesar, Metellus Scipio accused Cato of cowardice for being unwilling to risk battle.[211] Around this time, Cato privately confided that the war was hopeless and that he would abandon Rome regardless of the victor.[212] Metellus Scipio ignored Cato’s relatively pacific advice and engaged in a decisive battle at Thapsus, where his forces were annihilated.[212]
Cato, garrisoning Utica, received news of the defeat three days later, which drove the city into a panic.[213] Knowing that the city would likely defect, Cato evacuated any Roman citizens who wished to flee.[213] He also sent an embassy consisting of his family and allies, headed by one of Caesar’s kinsmen, Lucius Julius Caesar, to seek pardon for themselves.[214] Cato himself prepared for death.[214]
After righting the city’s financial accounts and disbursing the remaining monies to the city’s inhabitants, Cato discussed with his friends at dinner the Stoic belief that a truly free man would never become a slave.[215] After he demanded his sword, which had been removed from his room, his family and friends begged him not to kill himself. Dismissing them, he asked for a report on the ships fleeing the city. Satisfied that all was well, he stabbed himself in the abdomen.[215] The specific details of Cato’s suicide were greatly embellished after his death, especially in Plutarch’s account,[215] which states:
Cato drew his sword from its sheath and stabbed himself below the breast. His thrust, however, was somewhat feeble… [and] he did not at once dispatch himself… His servants heard the noise and cried out, and his son at once ran in, together with his friends… [A] physician went to him and tried to replace his bowels, which remained uninjured, and to sew up the wound. Accordingly, when Cato recovered and became aware of this, he pushed the physician away, tore his bowels with his hands, rent the wound still more, and so died.[216]
Caesar is said to have responded to his death by lamenting that Cato’s death meant Caesar could not pardon him.[217]
Legacy and reception
Main article: Legacy of Cato the Younger
Cato’s death triggered a series of eulogies, of which both Cicero and Brutus were authors, starting to identify Cato as a great Stoic philosopher.[218] Caesar responded with an Anticato, which has not survived.[219]
Political legacy
The traditional political culture of the middle republic was one built around aristocratic compromise, political debate, and reform.[220] The extent of Cato’s obstruction broke down the traditional republican norms of compromise and discussion; escalation in response to that obstruction proved dangerous to the republic and ran contrary to its ethos.[221][105] His policies with regard to stopping powerful politicians such as Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus alienated – through its very success – them from the rest of the senatorial class, leading to the formation of their alliance in 59 BC.[222]
Many scholars believe that Cato’s political strategy before 49 BC contributed significantly in starting the civil war that was the proximate cause of the collapse of the Roman republic, even if he did not intend for conflict.[223][224][225][226][227] While his strategy – convincing senators that Caesar was a threat to the republic and wanted to make himself king – was successful, that success backfired when those senators then gambled everything on defeating Caesar, whom they saw as an existential threat to liberty, in civil war.[179]
During most of his political career, he consistently obstructed powerful military figures to the fullest extent possible.[223] This uncompromising position had him push strongly, before the civil war, for further confrontation with Caesar, seemingly to pressure Caesar to back down.[228] Cato and his allies also pushed Pompey away from the various olive branches and compromises before the civil war. Up to the last, when Pompey was close to accepting an offer where Caesar would give up all his legions except one and provinces except Illyricum, Cato played on Pompey’s paranoia by painting Pompey as a Caesarian mark.[229] To the extent that Caesar may have feared prosecution, conviction, and exile – a claim no longer accepted without controversy[230][231][232] – Cato was one of the few pushing strongly for Caesar’s political destruction via prosecution.[191]
Posthumously, Cato’s opposition to Caesar was cast in predominantly ideological terms, with Cato serving as a heroic symbol of republican values amid its collapse.[233] His life was also appropriated by Augustus as a symbol of republican values.[234]
Cato’s commitment to liberty and resistance to tyranny inspired Cato’s Letters, a series of 18th-century political essays by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, which played a significant role in shaping Enlightenment political thought and the principles underlying the American Revolution.[235][236]
As a stoic
Some scholars point to how Cato acted in ways profoundly inconsistent with Stoic tenets: his anger at the breaking of his betrothal to Aemilia Lepida, breakdown over the death of his half-brother Caepio, his visible despair at the sight of casualties from the civil wars, etc.[237] For such scholars, Cato’s actions fit into the mould of a traditional Roman acting in line with traditional Roman values rather than Stoic ones.[238] On the other hand, others point out that Cato’s contemporaries noted his Stoic behaviours and positions explicitly. Cicero lampooned it in Pro Murena, and also mentioned it in letters and contemporaneous philosophical texts.[239]
Modern scholars such as Kit Morell note that “the ‘Stoic martyr’ tradition[definition needed] has distorted or distracted from the historical Cato”.[239]
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