Dictator

The death of Cato had a powerful effect on Cicero. As the lurid details became more widely known, there were those who said it was proof that Cato was insane; certainly this was Hirtius’s view. Cicero disagreed. ‘He could have had an easier death. He could have thrown himself from a building, or opened his veins in a warm bath, or taken poison. Instead he chose that particular method – exposing his entrails like a human sacrifice – to demonstrate the strength of his will and his contempt for Caesar. In philosophical terms it was a good death: the death of a man who feared nothing. Indeed I would go so far as to say he died happy. Neither Caesar, nor any man, nor anything in the world could touch him.’

The effect on Brutus and Cassius – both of whom were related to Cato, the one by blood and the other by marriage – was if anything even stronger. Brutus wrote from Gaul to ask if Cicero would compose a eulogy of his uncle. His letter arrived at the same time as Cicero learned that he had been named in Cato’s will as one of the guardians of his son. Like the others who had accepted Caesar’s pardon, Cicero found the suicide of Cato shaming. So he ignored the risk of offending the Dictator, complied with Brutus’s request, and dictated a short work, Cato, in little more than a week.

Sinewy in thought and person; indifferent to what men said of him; scornful of glory, titles and decorations, and even more of those who sought them; defender of laws and freedoms; vigilant in the public interest; contemptuous of tyrants, their vulgarities and presumptions; stubborn, infuriating, harsh, dogmatic; a dreamer, a fanatic, a mystic, a soldier; willing at the last to tear the very organs from his stomach rather than submit to a conqueror – only the Roman Republic could have bred such a man as Cato, and only in the Roman Republic did such a man as Cato desire to live.

Around this time Caesar returned from Africa, and soon afterwards, at the height of summer, he staged finally four separate triumphs on successive days to commemorate his victories in Gaul, the Black Sea, Africa and on the Nile – such an epic of self-glorification as even Rome had never seen. Cicero moved back into his house on the Palatine in order to attend – not that he wanted to: In civil war, as he wrote to his old friend Sulpicius, victory is always insolent. There were five wild-beast hunts, a mock battle in the Circus Maximus that included elephants, a naval battle in a lake dug out near the Tiber, stage plays in every quarter of the city, athletics on the Field of Mars, chariot races, games in honour of the memory of the Dictator’s daughter Julia, a banquet for the entire city at which meat from the sacrifices was served, a distribution of money, a distribution of bread, endless parades of soldiers and treasure and prisoners coiling through the streets – that noble leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, after six years of imprisonment, was garrotted in the Carcer – and day after day we could hear the vulgar chanting of the legionaries even from the terrace:

Home we bring our bald whoremonger,

Romans, lock your wives away!

All the bags of gold you lent him

Went his Gallic tarts to pay!

Yet despite their bombast, or perhaps because of it, Cato’s reproachful ghost seemed to haunt even these proceedings. When a float went by during the Africa triumph depicting him tearing out his entrails, the crowd let out a loud groan. It was said that Cato’s death had a particular religious meaning: that he had done it to bring down the wrath of the gods on Caesar’s head. When that same day the axle on the Dictator’s triumphal chariot broke and he was pitched to the ground, it was held to be a sign of divine displeasure, and Caesar took the crowd’s disquiet seriously enough to lay on the most extraordinary spectacle of all: at night, with forty elephants on either side of him ridden by men holding flaming torches, he mounted the slope of the Capitol on his knees to atone to Jupiter for his impiety.