Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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down and would have been lynched had he not succeeded in hauling himself upright for long enough to harangue the crowd into docility. As soon as he was eligible he stood for consul but, for all his prestige, was roundly defeated. When Alcibiades returned to his native city (as Pompey had done and Caesar was shortly to do) in the golden nimbus of victory, the citizens had begged him to make himself their absolute ruler, while only a handful of dissenters wished him on his way. So Cato was one of very few of his contemporaries unsusceptible to the glamour of the conquering generals who rode triumphant into Rome, apparently as superhuman in their swaggering magnificence as Plato’s men of gold. Compared with their splendour, Cato’s virtue seemed a dull and unappealing thing. While he clung to republicanism, Lucan was to write, ‘all Rome clamoured to be enslaved’.
In January 52 BC the first of the storms that had been so long gathering broke. The two urban warlords, Clodius and Milo, met – apparently by chance – some miles from Rome on the Appian Way. Clodius was attended by thirty slaves carrying swords, Milo by three hundred armed men, including several gladiators. A brawl began. Clodius was injured. He was carried into a tavern. Milo’s men broke in and killed him. As soon as the news reached Rome the city exploded into violence. Clodius the beautiful, Clodius the insolent, was gone, and the common people of Rome, to whom he had granted an intoxicating taste of their own power, ran wild. His associates, including two tribunes, displayed his corpse, naked and battered as it was, in the Forum. There were hysterical scenes of rage and grief. Prompted by the tribunes, the mob took over the Senate House, built a pyre of all the furniture and the senatorial records, hoisted Clodius’ corpse on top and set fire to the building. The seat of government, the repository of centuries of tradition, the brain controlling all the vast body of the Roman world, was reduced to charred ruins. The rioting spread as fast as the flames.
For a month the chaos continued. A hostile mob attacked Milo’s house, to be driven back by the archers of his personal guard. ‘Every day’, according to Plutarch, ‘the Forum was occupied by three armies, and the evil had well-nigh become past checking.’ The Senate declared a state of emergency, but the previous year’s consular elections had not yet taken place. There was no one to take control. ‘The city was left with no government at all like a ship adrift with no one to steer her.’ A mob invaded the sacred grove where the fasces were kept and seized them. Then, as though craving someone who could save them from their own licence, they swept on to Pompey’s villa outside the city and clamoured for him to make himself dictator. Pompey demurred. He was waiting for the more official invitation that he sensed could not be much longer withheld.
It came soon enough. Twelve years previously Cato had declared that ‘while he lived’ he would never consent to Pompey’s entering the city at the head of an army. Now, hopeless, he concluded that ‘any government was better than no government at all’. To the astonishment of his peers, he spoke in favour of a motion offering Pompey the post of sole consul.
Diplomatic and subtle as ever, Pompey invited Cato to work alongside him. Cato, his living opposite, stubbornly refused. He would be of no man’s party. He would give his advice when asked for it, he said, but he would also give his candid opinion whether asked for it or not.
Pompey ordered his legions into the city. Gradually order was restored; but Rome – while the emergency lasted – was effectually a military dictatorship. When Milo was put on trial for the murder of Clodius, Pompey’s troops, ringing the place of judgment, were so numerous and so menacing that even Cicero, who had undertaken Milo’s defence, lost his nerve, failed to deliver the speech he had planned and saw his client convicted.
The crisis over, Pompey stepped down, once more amazing the constitutionalists by the propriety of his behaviour. But a second storm was imminent. Caesar’s command in Gaul would lapse in the winter of 50 BC. Cato publicly swore that as soon as it did, and Caesar therefore became once more subject to the law, he would bring charges against Caesar for the illegal acts he had perpetrated as consul in 59 BC and for his unjustified and unsanctioned assaults on the people of Gaul.
Caesar had many clients and supporters in the city. Tribunes of his party repeatedly vetoed attempts to rescind his command and appoint a successor to him in Gaul. It began to look increasingly probable that he would refuse to surrender his legions. In December the Senate voted by an overwhelming majority that both he and Pompey should give up their commands. Again one of the tribunes vetoed the measure, at which the Senate once more went into mourning. By this time the danger posed by Caesar, which Cato had been railing against, largely unheard, for years, had served greatly to enhance the latter’s authority. In the general hysteria Cato was acclaimed as a prophet whose vision was being proved true. Terrified that Caesar might launch a coup d’état at any moment from his winter quarters in Ravenna, three senior senators visited Pompey, handed him a sword, and asked him to assume command of all the troops in Italy. Pompey accepted.
There was still a chance of peace. Caesar wanted power, but he was prepared at least to observe the outward forms of republican legitimacy. It was not he but Cato, by his strenuous insistence on refusing any compromise, who made war inevitable. A second Odysseus might have come to some kind of face-saving arrangement; might have bent rules and reinterpreted precedents, remodelling the anachronistic constitution to accommodate modern reality; but Cato was no Odysseus, and it was because he was incapable of Odyssean diplomacy that he has been remembered and revered for millennia. ‘I would rather have noise and thunder and storm-curses than a cautious, uncertain feline repose,’ wrote Nietzsche, meditating on the Superman nearly two thousand years after Cato’s death. There was nothing uncertain about Cato. He was neither beautiful, nor especially valorous, nor – so far as we know – fleet of foot; but he was all the same a true successor to Achilles in his abhorrence of anything less than absolute truthfulness, in his immovable insistence on every article of his creed, in his willingness to see his own cause defeated if the only alternative was a dilution of its purity, and in his preference for death over dishonour. Caesar offered to hand over Gaul to a governor of the Senate’s choosing and to disband all but one of his legions if he could only be granted the right to stand for election as consul in his absence (and so return to Rome protected by the privileges of office). It was not an unprecedented proposal, but Cato fulminated furiously against its acceptance. He would rather die, he said, than allow a citizen to dictate conditions to the Republic.
The Senators were persuaded. Caesar’s offer was refused. A measure was proposed declaring Caesar a public enemy. One of the tribunes (Caesar’s creature) vetoed it, whereupon the Senate declared a state of emergency. None of the ancient sources suggests that the two tribunes friendly to Caesar were physically threatened, but they acted as though they had been. Disguised as slaves, they slipped out of Rome and fled to Caesar’s camp. Their flight provided a pretext for war. Caesar had once dreamed of raping his mother. On 10 January 49 BC, after another troubled night, he led his legions across the Rubicon and marched on his mother city.
His advance was inexorable and swift. Pompey had boasted that he had only to stamp his foot and all Italy would rise in his support. He was wrong: the people, apparently indifferent to the threat to senatorial rights and their own liberties, let Caesar pass. Despairing of holding the city against him, Pompey and most of the officeholders, as well as many senators, abandoned Rome. After that day Cato never again cut his hair, trimmed his beard, wore a garland, or lay on a couch to eat. In deep mourning for the republic he had tried so hard to maintain, he followed Pompey, who was at least the Senate’s appointed representative, into war.
His was not a warlike nature. As a young military tribune he had been popular with his soldiers for his refusal to make a show of his dignity and for his readiness to share their work and their hardships. When the time had come for him to leave his legionaries wept and crowded round to embrace him, kissing his hands and laying down their cloaks in his path. Now, when he joined Pompey at his base in Dyrrachium, in northern Greece, he again proved his talents as a leader. Before a battle the generals were addressing their troops, who listened to them ‘sluggishly and in silence’. Then Cato spoke with his usual fervour and a great shout