Cato the Younger

Biography

Marcus Porcius Cato — Cato the Younger, or Cato Uticensis — was the conscience of the Roman Republic, a Stoic philosopher-senator who embodied in his own person the virtues he believed Rome was betraying. He wore rough wool when other senators wore fine cloth. He walked barefoot while others rode. He drank plain water and ate coarse bread. He had renounced a bribe of an enormous fortune. In an age of corruption and personal ambition, his personal austerity was so ostentatious as to be itself a form of politics. Caesar feared Cato's moral authority more than his military ability — Cato was no general but his incorruptibility made him the living argument that the Republican cause was not merely the defense of aristocratic privilege but of something genuinely worth defending. Caesar's famous clemency, which dissolved opposition faster than any military victory, failed completely on Cato: he refused to be pardoned by a man he considered a tyrant, refused to have his life preserved on terms that implied Caesar had the right to grant it. His suicide at Utica in 46 BC was characteristically deliberate. He spent the evening reading Plato's *Phaedo* (a dialogue on the immortality of the soul), attempted suicide but failed when his hand was wounded and the wound was bandaged by his doctor, then tore the bandages off and forced open the wound. Caesar's comment on hearing the news: 'Cato, I grudge you your death, as you have grudged me the chance of saving your life.' The Roman Stoic tradition elevated Cato's death immediately into the defining example of philosophical principle over political survival — and he haunted Caesar's reputation for the rest of Caesar's life.

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