This might be difficult, it might be exhausting, he said, but soon enough we forget about the hard labor. The results of doing well, though, “will not disappear as long as you live,” he said. And conversely, even though taking a shortcut or doing something bad may bring a few seconds of relief, “the pleasure will quickly disappear, but the wicked thing will stay with you forever.”
His job, Cato believed, in a tradition begun by Diogenes, was to serve the public good. Not himself. Not expediency. Not his family. But the nation. That’s what real philosophy was about, whether his skeptical great-grandfather or fame-chasing friend Cicero understood it or not.
When Cato was sent on a mission to supervise the annexation of Cyprus—precisely the kind of opportunity Roman politicians liked to use to fill up their personal bank accounts—his conduct was irreproachable. His scrupulous sale of Cypriot treasures showed zero irregularities and raised some seven thousand talents for Roman coffers. The only thing he left unsold was a statue of Zeno, the founder of the philosophy to which he was so committed. There was one loss: his friendship with a man, Munatius Rufus, who resented that Cato refused to let Munatius enrich himself.
These were powerful gestures—countersignals—in an empire obsessed with status and demonstrations of power. In Cato’s case, they were sincere. He was not playacting. He was practicing. His studies of Stoicism had taught him the importance of training, of actively resisting temptation and inoculating oneself from the need for comforts and externals. His forefathers had set down a firm example, and he intended to follow it—from the beginning to the end.
Not all Romans could be Catos, but Cato could represent them. In 63 BC, this austere man was named tribune of the plebs, now a powerful position he was eligible for because of his family’s ancient plebeian origins—giving him the chance to balance the interests of the disenfranchised with those of the elites. Cicero was consul, and though they quickly joined forces in calling for the death penalty for the Catilinarian conspirators, they were not always in agreement. The trial of Murena—an officer in the Third Mithridatic War and later a consul—became a study in contrast between Cato and Cicero, the inflexible Stoic on one side, the more fluid and ambidextrous Academic on the other. Cicero on the defense, Cato for the prosecution. More bluntly, Cicero was defending an obviously guilty man, who had gained his offices through bribery.
Defending the guilty was inconceivable to Cato, even if earlier Stoics like Diogenes had supported it. Murena had done wrong, he had not played fair, and he must be driven from public life. It was the Stoic argument: What’s right is right. Nothing else matters.
Cicero’s argument, which comes to us through his published oratory Pro Murena, is more complex. As always with Cicero, there was both self-interest and ego involved. But mostly, he believed that Murena’s defense was for the good of the state. With Catiline threatening violence against the state, could they really afford to tear themselves apart at the same time? If Murena was convicted and ousted from office, wouldn’t the consulship fall into worse hands? Cicero respected Cato immensely, but it’s impossible to read his arguments and not get the sense that he found the man’s unflinching idealism to be naive. Stoicism was well and good, but not if it was so rigid and inflexible that it put the survival of the government at risk.
Indeed, this would be the continual knock on Cato and on Stoicism to this day: Where does commitment end and obstinance begin? Doesn’t government—and life—require compromise? Aren’t there times when we have to pick the lesser of two evils?
Cato seemed not to be so sure. Or rather, he was sure, and this black-and-whiteness presaged the battles and the destruction that were to come.
As a young boy, Cato had shut down the entreaties of that visiting soldier with quiet, unbreakable defiance. As a politician, he would deploy that same tenacity in a similar fashion. Believing himself to be an essential check on Rome’s accelerating collapse and the abandonment of that mos maiorum beloved by his ancestors, he pioneered a political trick that remains in use: the filibuster. Using his voice and willpower as weapons, Cato effectively preserved the positions of his party by talking, talking, and talking. He was able to single-handedly prevent the delivery of tax collection contracts to corrupt parties and prevent laws that violated the spirit of Rome’s old ways.
At the same time, his inherent conservatism also meant that he resisted necessary change. It is not extreme to say that Cato’s one-man resistance fueled a sense in others that similarly unilateral moves would be necessary. When Caesar became consul, he would imprison Cato so as not to hear his marathon ramblings and so that the business of the state could resume.
If the contrast between Cato and Cicero was between personality types, between commitment and compromise, the contrast between Cato and Caesar was more ideological—between Republicanism and Caesarism. It was a battle of wills and a battle of philosophies.
The two were, each with his own excesses, incredible men. The historian Sallust, himself a Caesar supporter, highlighted both:
But within my own memory there were two men of towering merit, though of opposite character, Marcus Cato and Gaius Caesar. . . . In ancestry, age and eloquence, they were almost equal; on a par was their greatness of soul, likewise their renown, but each of a different sort. Caesar was considered great because of his benefactions and lavish generosity, Cato for the uprightness of his life. The former became famous for his gentleness and compassion; to the latter sternness had imparted prestige. Caesar gained renown by giving, by relieving difficulties, by forgiving; Cato by no conferral of lavish gifts. In the one was refuge for the unfortunate, in the other destruction for the wicked. The former’s easygoing nature was praised, the latter’s steadfastness. Finally, Caesar had made up his mind to work hard, to be alert; he devoted himself to the affairs of his friends at the neglect of his own; he refused nothing that was worthy of being given; he craved a major command, an army, a fresh war in which his merit might be able to shine forth. Cato, on the contrary, cultivated self-control, propriety, but above all sternness. He did not vie in riches with the rich, nor in intrigue with intriguers, but with the energetic in merit, with the self-restrained in moderation, with the blameless in integrity. He preferred to be, rather than merely to seem, virtuous; hence the less he sought renown the more it overtook him.
Caesar was motivated by power and control and change. Cato wanted things to go back to how they were in Rome’s golden age, before the decadence, before the strongmen and the corruption. If he could not have that, he at least wanted them to stay as they were now—he would do his best to prevent them from getting worse. And so the unstoppable force met the immovable object, and the crash was, over a period of several years, explosive.
History can sometimes seem, especially from a distance, like a Manichean struggle between good and evil. In truth, there is always gray—and the good, even the Catos, are not always blameless. Cato’s inflexibility did not always serve well the public good. For instance, after Pompey returned to Rome from his foreign conquests, he felt out potential alliances with Cato, a man whom he respected but often tangled with. It is said that Pompey proposed a marriage alliance with either Cato’s niece or daughter. The women, we are told, were excited at the prospect of tying the two families together. Cato dismissed it, and did so rudely. “Go and tell Pompey,” he instructed the go-between, that “Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.”