Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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A troop of horsemen, survivors from Scipio’s defeated army, appeared out of the desert like the answer to a prayer. At last Cato had the manpower of which he was in such urgent need. Leaving the Roman merchants in the city, he hurried out, accompanied by the senators, to welcome the newcomers and enlist their help in defending the city. But the soldiers had already endured a traumatic battle: they were demoralized and exhausted. Nothing could persuade them to make a stand against Caesar, who was now, pehaps, only hours away. There were angry scenes, both in the city, where the merchants were working themselves into a state of self-justifying indignation against anyone who might suggest they should risk opposing Caesar, and outside, where the senators and their families, now doubly threatened, wept and wailed. Eventually, the horsemen issued their ultimatum. They would stay and help defend Utica against Caesar, but only on condition that they might first slaughter all the Uticans. Cato refused. They began to ride away, taking with them any remaining hope of survival, let alone of saving the Republic. Cato went after them. For once showing emotion, he wept as he grasped at their horses’ bridles in a futile attempt to drag them back. For all his passion, the most he could get them to agree to was that they would guard the landward gates for one day while the senators made their escape by sea. Cato accepted.
They took up their positions. The Roman merchants meanwhile announced their intention of surrendering forthwith. They were not Cato, they said, ‘and could not carry the large thoughts of Cato’. Petty as most mortals, they had resolved to take the safest and probably most profitable course. They offered to intercede with Caesar for Cato. He told them to do no such thing. ‘Prayer belonged to the conquered and the craving of grace to those who had done wrong.’ It was Caesar who was defeated: since he had made war on his own country his guilt was exposed for all to see. He, Cato, was the true victor. It was as though he was already leaving this world – mundane definitions of success and failure no longer held any validity for him. Simply to be right was to prevail.
Throughout the last hours of his life he was fiercely active. His one outburst of emotion done with, he accepted his doom, and proceeded to do all that remained to be done with the scrupulous thoroughness with which, all his life, he had discharged his public duties. He was everywhere. He was in the city, urging the merchants not to betray the remaining senators. He was interviewing the emissary chosen by the merchants to go on their behalf to Caesar. He was disdainfully ignoring a message from another Pompeian commander who had escaped from Thapsus and wished to claim the leadership. He was patiently attempting to persuade those most at risk from Caesar’s anger to get away. He was at the city’s seaward gates controlling the rush to escape. He was down at the docks overseeing the embarkations and ensuring that each boat was properly provisioned. Most characteristically, he was handing over to the Uticans the detailed accounts of his administration, and returning the surplus funds to the public treasurer. While all around him others were prostrated by anxiety or brutalized by greed and fear, he alone was imperturbably competent. The horsemen became uncontrollable and attacked the Uticans in the concentration camps, looting and killing. Having so passionately begged them to stay, Cato had eventually to bribe them to leave in order to stop the massacre.
At last, on the evening of the second day since the terrible news from Thapsus had arrived, he judged that the evacuation of those at risk was all but completed: his work was almost done. He retired to his quarters to take a bath. Afterwards he dined. He ate sitting upright (the acme of discomfort for a Roman), as he had ever since he left Rome; but afterwards, over the wine, he joined in the high-minded conversation. His household, as usual, included at least two philosophers. The talk turned to the Stoic definition of freedom. Cato ‘broke in with vehemence, and in loud and harsh tones maintained his argument at greatest length and with astonishing earnestness’. His companions, understanding, fell silent. It was a tenet of Stoicism that, as Lucan was to put it, ‘The happiest men are those who chose freely to die at the right time.’
After supper he walked for a while, gave orders to the officers of the watch, embraced his son and close friends with especial affection and withdrew to his bedchamber. There he began to read Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates comforts his companions by offering them proofs of the immortality of the soul before serenely, even joyfully, drinking the hemlock that will heal his soul of the flaws inherent in bodily life. While still in the midst of his reading, Cato noticed that his sword was not hanging in its usual place by his bed (his son had removed it). He called a servant and asked where it was. The servant had no answer. Cato returned to his book but a little later, without any evident anxiety or urgency, asked again for the sword. Still it was not brought. He finished his reading and called the servants again. This time he became angry and struck one over the mouth, hurting his own hand. (This incident, in which the great man gives evidence of distinctly un-godlike irascibility, even nervousness, is omitted from some accounts.)
He cried out that his friends had betrayed him, by so arranging that he would fall unarmed into his enemy’s hands. At that his son and several companions rushed into the room sobbing and imploring him to save himself. Cato addressed them sternly, asking if they considered him an imbecile, reminding them that, even if deprived of the sword, he had only to hold his breath or dash his head against the wall when he chose to die, and asking why, in this crisis, they wished him to ‘cast away those good old opinions and arguments which have been part of our lives’. All who heard him wept. Ashamed, they left him once more alone. A child was sent with his sword. He received it impassively, saying, ‘Now I am my own master.’ Laying it aside, he returned to his reading before lying down and sleeping so deeply that those in the next room could hear his snores.
Around midnight he woke, asked the doctor to bandage his hand, and sent a servant down to the harbour to report on the evacuation. When the servant returned with the news that there was a heavy storm and high winds, Cato (mindless of his own trouble) groaned with pity for those at sea, then briefly slept again, having sent the servant back down to the waterfront to ensure nothing further could be done to help the fugitives. When the servant returned for the second time, reporting that all was quiet, Cato, satisfied that his earthly responsibilities were fully discharged, dismissed him.
Alone, he drove his sword into his midriff and fell heavily, knocking over the abacus that stood in his chamber. His servants and his son ran in and found him alive but all besmeared with blood, his bowels protruding from the ghastly wound. His doctor sewed up the gash but Cato pushed him away (or perhaps waited until he and the other attendants had left) and tore his belly open once more. This time he accomplished his purpose. ‘He drew forth by his hand that holiest spirit,’ wrote Seneca, ‘too noble to be defiled by steel.’
At once his reputation, released from the confines of his human reality, began to swell like a genie freed from a bottle. Alive, he was a pugnacious politician, an obstructionist and filibusterer, a man of unquestionable probity and great courage but also a bit of an oddball who courted trouble to the detriment of his own cause. He was a prig, an embarrassment, a pedant, perhaps even a bore. His hostility to Caesar has been compared to the kind of bitter envy a dull schoolboy, a dutiful plodder and keeper of the rules, might feel for a charismatic, carelessly successful fellow-student who defies authority and gets away with it by virtue of his cheek and charm – a cruelly reductive characterization that, all the same, has the ring of partial truth to it.
Even judged by his own standards, Cato was not perfect. He was to be remembered as the one and only incorruptible Roman. ‘No man of that day’, wrote the Greek historian Dio Cassius two centuries later, ‘took part in public life from pure motives and free from any desire of personal gain except Cato.’ But there were various episodes in his political career that suggest that his righteousness was not absolute. When he opposed the ratification of Pompey’s arrangements in Asia Minor he was not only checking the growth of Pompey’s inordinate power, he was also doing a favour to his own brother-in-law, Lucullus, whom Pompey had supplanted. As a tribune, just after the suppression of Catiline’s rebellion, he had authorized the