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

It is obvious in retrospect that Cato had already decided how the end would come. All that was left were the arrangements. He attempted to persuade his son to flee on a ship. He got many of his friends off to safety. And then he sat down to dinner with everyone who remained. It was, by all accounts, a wonderful meal. Wine was poured. Dice were rolled for the first cuts. Plates were passed. Philosophy was discussed, as it always was at Cato’s table. Were only good men free? Were bad men, like Caesar, slaves?

It was one of those evenings where time passed quickly, where everyone present was present. With the specter of death looming, more than a few of them must have hoped the meal might go on forever. Cato, on the other hand, knew that it could not. So as the meal closed, he began to discuss the final travel arrangements and, quite out of character, expressed his worry for his friends embarking by sea. Then he hugged his son and friends and bade them good night.

In his chamber, Cato sat down with a dialogue of Socrates and read it leisurely. Then he called for his sword, which he noticed had been removed from his room, likely by a friend hoping to forestall what could not be forestalled.

It was time.

His son, knowing what his father wanted to do, sobbed, begging him to fight on, to live. Apollonides the Stoic was begged to convince Cato of the philosophical reasons against suicide, but words failed him, only tears came. Restored to his sword, Cato checked its razor edge with his finger. “Now I am my own master,” he said, and then sat back down to read his book once more from cover to cover.

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 CATOTHE IRON WOMAN (POUR-shya KAY-toe)

Origin: Rome

B. 70 BC

D. 43 or 42 BC