“I begin to speak,” Cato once explained, “only when I’m certain what I’ll say isn’t better left unsaid.”
When Cato did choose to break his silence, he was compelling. “Cato practiced the kind of public speech capable of moving the masses,” Plutarch tells us. The rage and fury that had frightened Sarpedon was channeled through his training in Stoic philosophy and rhetoric into a fierce advocacy for justice that would stand out as a defining feature of his personal and political character. As Plutarch put it, “Above all, he pursued the form of goodness which consists in rigid justice that will not bend to clemency or favor.” Armed with a resolute and fearless character, Stoic ethical principles, and a powerful proficiency in public speaking, Cato would become a formidable political figure—and a rare one, in that all knew his vote could never be bought.
But before he made his name as a politician, Cato was a soldier. In 72 BC, he volunteered for service in the Third Servile War, against Spartacus. It would have been unconscionable to let someone else serve in his place. To Cato, it was the actions one took, the sacrifices one was willing to make—especially at arms defending one’s country—that made you a philosopher. And so in that war, as in the battles he fought in, he was fearless and committed, as he believed every citizen was obligated to be.
Fresh from this crucible, he was ready in 68 BC, at age twenty-seven, to stand for military tribune—the same position his father had served in before him. In fact, the Basilica Porcia, the public forum where the tribunes conducted their business, was named after its builder, his great-grandfather. Pregnant with respect for this legacy and always deeply committed to what he felt was proper, Cato would be the only candidate who actually adhered to the canvassing restrictions and campaign laws. Corruption may have been endemic in Rome, but Cato was never one to buy the argument that “everyone else is doing it.” It was a strategy that won him respect—at the very least, it made him stand out. As Plutarch recounts, “The harshness of his sentiments, and the mingling of his character with them, gave their austerity a smiling graciousness that won men’s hearts.”
That included the troops he led over the next three years as his military service took him across the empire, exposing him to the provinces. Some thought visits to these exotic locations might soften the man, or his iron grip on himself, but they were mistaken. And this in part is why he was so well liked—because he carried himself like a common soldier.
War, although it began as a grand adventure, would soon break Cato’s heart. In 67 BC, a letter brought word that his beloved brother, Caepio, was ill. Cato and Caepio had always been different, Caepio favoring luxuries and perfumes that Cato would have never allowed himself. But sometimes when it’s your brother you look the other way. Cato did more than that—he idolized Caepio and, hearing that he was near death, rushed to his side, braving wild and dangerous seas that nearly killed him, in a tiny boat with the only captain he could convince to take him.
Life is not fair and it cares little for our feelings or our plans. Cato had seen this wisdom written countless ways in the books of the philosophy he loved, but he landed in Thrace after a perilous journey to discover that he had missed, by hours, his brother’s death. It was a crushing blow, and Cato mourned almost without restraint. “There are times,” his biographers Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman would write of Cato at his brother’s deathbed, “when the mask will slip, when our resolve will fail, when our attachments will get the better of us.” Yet much closer to Cato’s time, Plutarch believed that those who found inconsistency in Cato’s grief missed “how much tenderness and affection was mingled with the man’s inflexibility and firmness.” Historians too seem to have overlooked how the loss of his parents and then his cherished brother—without an opportunity to say goodbye—might have hardened an already hard man.
Certainly it didn’t soften his incorruptibility and commitment to his ideals. Even as Cato grieved, he politely declined expensive gifts that friends sent for the funeral rites and repaid, out of his own pocket, what others sent in the form of incense and ornaments. The inheritance went to Caepio’s daughter without a penny deducted for funeral costs. Cato covered the expenses himself.
Emerging from his grief, Cato was ready at age thirty—firm and without illusions—to stand for the office of quaestor. It was his first entrance into the Senate and, more important, a larger platform for his intractable dedication to eliminating corruption and returning Rome to its core values. He used his term as quaestor to overhaul the treasury, ousting corrupt clerks and scribes, and seeking to redress the ill-gotten gains under Sullan proscriptions and to track down deadbeat debtors. He was the first to show up for work each morning and the last to leave, and seemed to relish saying no to the pet projects of politicians, to needless diversions, and to state-funded luxuries. His commitment was so legendary that it became almost political cover for his less stringent colleagues, Plutarch tells us. “It’s impossible,” shrugging politicians would tell constituents lobbying for handouts. “Cato will not consent.”
Did this strictness create enemies? Yes. It was inevitable. Like Cicero, he was at odds with Catiline and other powerful figures vying for control in an increasingly kleptocratic state. Biographers tell us that powerful people were hostile to Cato nearly all his life, because his very essence seemed to shame them.
Even when Cicero aligned with Cato there was a distinction, for there was never a sense that Cato was benefiting from these reforms or that he was quietly accumulating his own wealth through them. In fact, despite his public positions and his wealthy family, Cato often looked like he had no money at all. He rejected the extravagant, brilliantly colored purple robes that were fashionable in the Senate and wore only a plain, ordinary dark robe. He never put on perfume. He walked Rome’s streets barefoot and wore nothing underneath his toga. While his friends rode horses, he declined, and enjoyed walking alongside them. He never left Rome while the Senate was in session. He threw no lavish parties and declined to gorge himself at feasts—and was strict about reserving the choicest portions for others. He lent his friends money without interest. He declined armed guards or an entourage, and in the army he slept in the trenches with his troops.
He was a man, Cicero would say, who acted as if he lived in Plato’s Republic, not “among the dregs of Romulus.”
Cato’s iron constitution may have been partly given to him at birth, but it’s unquestionable that his choices forged additional armor plating and prepared him for the ordeals he was to face in the future. Plutarch says that Cato was “accustoming himself to be ashamed only of what was really shameful and to ignore men’s low opinion of other things.”
We naturally care what people think of us; we don’t want to seem too different, so we acquire the same tastes as everyone else. We accept what the crowd does so the crowd will accept us. But in doing this, we weaken ourselves. We compromise, often without knowing it; we allow ourselves to be bought—without even the benefit of getting paid for it.
Of all the Stoics, it was Cato who most actively practiced Aristo’s ideas about being indifferent to everything but virtue. Public opinion? Keeping up with appearances? His “brand”? Cato could have lived in great luxury, but he chose the Spartan life. And while there might have been a sliver of haughtiness to his demeanor, we are also told that his walks through the streets of Rome were filled with polite salutes to everyone he met and many unsolicited offers to help those in need. Reputation didn’t matter. Doing right did.