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

It would be a mistake, however, to think that Cato was incapable of compromise or collaboration. Plutarch tells us that he was incapable of enmity. Yes, he was “stubborn and immovable . . . when it came to protecting the public welfare,” but when it came to personal disagreements, he was always calm and friendly. Within him there was “an equal blend . . . of severity and kindness, of caution and bravery, of solicitude for others and fearlessness for themselves, of the careful avoidance of baseness and, in like degree, the eager pursuit of justice.”

Cato was kind. Cato was tough. He was, in a way, the embodiment of an expression that a stoic in modern times, General James Mattis, would adapt as a motto of the 1st Marine Division: No better friend, no worse enemy. Where Rutilius had been a quiet paragon of political virtue, Cato was aggressive and would not be easy to beat. He would invite, only on a far greater scale, a martyr’s fate as well. And unlike that of Rutilius, this fate would affect not just him, but the Republic itself.

After Cato lost his bid for consul in 52 BC—no doubt due to the machinations of his political enemies—he decided to push his hand. It was time, he felt, for the Senate to recall Caesar from Gaul. It was certainly the right thing to do, in the sense that Caesar had accumulated incredible power and his wealthy legions menaced the state with their undying loyalty to their master. But Cicero, more pragmatic, dreaded the implications. In 49 BC, Caesar did come up . . . and the 13th Legion followed him home, across the Rubicon, carrying civil war with them.

As with the failed potential alliance with Pompey, it’s worth asking: Did it have to be this way? Could a less intransigent politician have navigated the crisis better? Or not forced it to the breaking point? Possibly. But it was not Cato’s way to meditate on whether his insistence on the right thing had precipitated a much worse thing than the current status quo. Those questions were for the Ciceros of the world, of the theorists and sophists whom his great-grandfather had so despised.

For Cato, to compromise—to play politics with the bedrock laws of his nation at stake—would have been moral capitulation.

In protecting the Roman Republic, Cato may have hastened its destruction. Or perhaps he was drawing a line that should have been drawn by others long before. In any case, he was ready to go down fighting, as we all must be—if we are true philosophers—at some point in our lives.

After a long antagonism, and having spurned Pompey’s entreaties years earlier, Cato and Pompey were suddenly on the same team, and both now bore arms in protection of their country. Cato had been a brave soldier early in life and he was again.

He was a selfless solider too. Pompey placed him in command of the military fleet—a massive armada of more than five hundred ships. But quickly, Pompey, thinking about the political situation after the war, reconsidered giving his former enemy so much power. Within days of Cato’s appointment, Pompey revoked it. Yet Cato remained undaunted. Without a hint of bitterness, Plutarch tells us, he handed the command over. Indeed, on the eve of the next great battle, it was Cato—so recently demoted and betrayed—who stepped up to inspire Rome’s troops in defense of their homeland. As Cato spoke of freedom and virtue and death and flame, Plutarch tells us, “there was such a shouting and so great a stir among the soldiers thus aroused that all the commanders were full of hope as they hastened to confront the peril.”

A Stoic does the job that needs to be done. They don’t care about credit.

Seneca observed that all ages produce men like Clodius and Caesar and Pompey, “but not all ages men like Cato.” Few politicians would have risked their lives for something as abstract as principle, few would have kept going even when the cause spit in their face, few had the combined genius at arms, at leadership, at strategy to have brought his people so close to success.

But Cato did. Pompey hesitated and Caesar won the field in central Greece at Pharsalus in 48 BC. Cato would slip away to North Africa with the hope of fighting on, leading his army on a grueling thirty-day foot march across the hot desert to Utica where they prepared to make a last stand. It was desperate. It was violent.

Victory was not his to win.

Now, the Republic obviously lost, Cato stood and addressed the senators and officers who had so nobly resisted with him. It was time for them to make their way to Caesar and beg for clemency, he said. He asked only one last thing of them. Do not pray for me, he said, do not ask for my grace. Such pleas belonged to the conquered, and Cato had not lost. Where it mattered, he believed, in all that was honorable and just, he had beaten Caesar. He had defended his country. He had, for all his flaws, shown his true character.

So too, he believed, had Rome’s enemies.