He awoke sometime in the early morning after dozing. Alone and ready, he thrust his sword into his breast. It was not quite a mortal blow, but Roman steel had pierced Rome’s Iron Man. Still, he could not go quietly into that good night. Writhing, Cato fell, awakening his weeping and mourning friends as he raged against the dying of the light. A doctor rushed in and attempted to sew the wound shut while Cato drifted in and out of consciousness. In his final moments, Cato came to, and with the fierce and almost inhuman determination he had first exhibited as a young boy, he died at forty-nine years old, pulling his own wound open so that life could escape him more quickly.
He had lost his final battle—with Caesar, with the trends of his time, with mortality itself—but not before, as Plutarch would conclude, “he nevertheless gave Fortune a hard contest.”
Why suicide? Montaigne would write admiringly that with Cato’s unfailing constancy and commitment to principles, “he had to die rather than look on the face of a tyrant.” Napoleon, who once displayed a bust of Cato in his “hall of heroes,” and in the end faced defeat and lost all that he had striven for and considered suicide himself, would write of Cato’s death much more disparagingly. He believed that Cato should have fought on, or waited, rather than seal his fate with his own hand.
“The conduct of Cato was applauded by his contemporaries,” Napoleon said, “and has been admired by history; but who benefited from his death? Caesar. Who was pleased by it? Caesar. And to whom was it a tragedy? To Rome and to his party. . . . No, he killed himself out of spleen and despair. His death was the weakness of a great soul, the error of a stoic, a blot on his life.”
But then again, in Napoleon’s mind, Caesar was the great hero of the ancient world. He could not understand—not in the way that the true greats of the Enlightenment like Washington and Thomas Paine did—that there was more to this world than just power and accomplishment and winning. Who benefited from Cato’s death? Generations that remain inspired by his conduct, which was true and consistent all the way to the end.
You will not find many statues of Cato in Rome or many books about him. For some reason, the honors go to the conquering generals and the tyrants instead. His great-grandfather had once said that it was better to have people ask why there wasn’t a statue in your honor than why there was. In the case of Cato the Younger, it’s even simpler: His character was the monument; his commitments to justice and liberty and courage and virtue are the pillars of the temple that stands to this day.
He was a living statue in his own time, Rome’s Last Citizen and Rome’s Iron Man, and, now as then, on these pages and in memory, his finger points directly at us.
PORCIA CATO
THE IRON WOMAN
(POUR-shya KAY-toe)
Origin: Rome
B. 70 BC
D. 43 or 42 BC
It could be said that the conspicuous lack of credit given to women in the history of Stoicism is actually proof of their philosophical bona fides. Who better illustrates these virtues of endurance and courage, selflessness and duty, than the generations of anonymous wives and mothers and daughters of Greece and Rome who suffered, who resisted tyranny, who lived through wars, who raised families, and who were born and died without ever being recognized for their quiet heroism? Think of what they put up with, think of the indignities they tolerated, and think of the sacrifices they were willing to make.
But that’s sort of the problem. We don’t think about that. We think about Cato and his great-grandfather. We don’t think about his mother or his wife.
The biographer Robert Caro, writing thousands of years after the fall of the Roman Empire about the rise of the American Empire, observed just what this unconscious bias misses. “You hear a lot about gunfights in Westerns,” he said of the history of the frontier. “You don’t hear so much about hauling up the water after a perineal tear.”
While Rutilius Rufus deserves our respect for his brave stand against corruption, what about the forgotten woman who gave birth to him without anesthesia? What about his wife or his daughters, who too lost everything and went without complaint into exile with him? Surely, they deserved at least a mention from Plutarch or Diogenes.
Let us rectify this quickly by looking at the life of Porcia, the daughter of Cato, who seems to rival her father in steely determination and patriotism. Almost two centuries before Musonius Rufus would advocate that women be taught philosophy, Porcia was introduced to Stoicism as a child by her father and quickly dedicated herself to it. Her first marriage was to Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, an ally of Cato. Bibulus would serve honorably and bravely with Cato in Rome’s civil war, but would not survive it.
The only good news after the fall of the Republic that her family had so cherished, and the brutal suicide of the father she loved, was that Julius Caesar pardoned Porcia’s brother, Marcus Cato. As the family attempted to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, we are told she remained resolute. Somehow, her heart managed to find affection and she remarried to Brutus, the senator to whom Cicero had dedicated some of his writings. It appears she deeply loved her philosophical and principled husband, who must have reminded her of her father, and together they would have a son, though fate would once again visit tragedy on young Porcia.
As a knowing wife, she quickly intuited that Brutus was planning something in 44 BC, although what she wasn’t sure. Instead of demanding that he explain himself, Porcia decided she would prove her trustworthiness to her husband and fortitude to herself—though one would think that her family tree was sufficient.
Plutarch tells us that Porcia took a small knife and stabbed herself in the thigh, and then waited to see how long she could stand the pain. Bleeding profusely and shaking in near delirium from the wound, when Brutus finally came home, she grabbed him and said:
Brutus, I am Cato’s daughter, and I was brought into thy house, not, like a mere concubine, to share thy bed and board merely, but to be a partner in thy joys, and a partner in thy troubles. Thou, indeed, art faultless as a husband; but how can I show thee any grateful service if I am to share neither thy secret suffering nor the anxiety which craves a loyal confidant? I know that woman’s nature is thought too weak to endure a secret; but good rearing and excellent companionship go far towards strengthening the character, and it is my happy lot to be both the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus. Before this I put less confidence in these advantages, but now I know that I am superior even to pain.
Shakespeare renders the same scene quite beautifully as welclass="underline"
Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose ’em:
I have made strong proof of my constancy,
Giving myself a voluntary wound
Here in the thigh: can I bear that with patience,
And not my husband’s secrets?
As strange and nearly unbelievable as this story is to us today, Roman history is littered with examples of conspiracies revealed under torture and interrogation. It’s not a stretch that Porcia might want to see how much suffering she could endure. Brutus was so moved by what he witnessed that he immediately informed his wife of the plot to kill Caesar and prayed that he would be able to prove himself worthy of her courage.