Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

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.”

Bravo.

But in so rejecting the alliance, Cato drove the powerful Pompey into an alliance with Caesar instead, who promptly married his daughter, Julia, to Pompey. United and unstoppable, the two men would soon overturn centuries of constitutional precedent. “None of these things perhaps would have happened,” Plutarch reminds us, “had not Cato been so afraid of the slight transgressions of Pompey as to allow him to commit the greatest of all, and add his power to that of another.”

But Cato was at least consistent in his obstinacy. As Caesar ruled Rome in the Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, Cato resisted them at every turn. While they campaigned for co-consul in 55 BC, he was the perpetual thorn in their side, championing the ancestral tradition of the Senate against the dangerous new forces that Caesar unleashed. He accused Caesar of war crimes in Gaul. He cleaned up electoral corruption and designed corruption courts. He insisted on his antibribery policy in elections, which encouraged the fraudsters to whip up votes against him. As Seneca beautifully described:

In an age when the old credulity had long been thrown aside, and knowledge had by time attained its highest development, [Cato] came into conflict with ambition, a monster of many shapes, with the boundless greed for power which the division of the whole world among three men could not satisfy. He stood alone against the vices of a degenerate state that was sinking to destruction beneath its very weight, and he stayed the fall of the republic to the utmost that one man’s hand could do to draw it back.