Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

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In Athens political debate was urgent, incessant, bafflingly inconclusive. The political process was obstructed and complicated at every turn by envy, corruption, and blackmail. The tenure of any office was brief. There was no certainty, no continuity, no easy-going reliance on precedent. Every principle, and every practical detail, was to be debated and voted upon. This edgy insistence on examining every question afresh each time it arose is one of the things that made Athens so exhilarating a society and gave it its extraordinary intellectual and political vitality. But it imposed a burden on the citizens that exasperated or frightened many, and which others found simply too great to bear. In the summer of 408 BC, when Alcibiades descended on Athens surrounded by the golden aura of the conquering hero, as splendid as one of those godlike men whom Aristotle judged fully entitled to enslave their fellows, there were many who entertained the fantasy of surrendering their exhausting freedom to him. People came to him and begged him to ‘rid them of those (#litres_trial_promo) loud-mouthed wind-bags who were the bane of the city’, to silence the ceaseless, bewildering play of argument and counter-argument for which the entire city was the stage by seizing absolute power. In an extraordinary frenzy of self-abasement, people begged him to make himself dictator, to ‘sweep away decrees and laws as he thought fit’, to overturn the constitution and wipe out all opposition, thus relieving the demoralized and insecure citizens of the awful burden of their liberty.

Alcibiades did not respond to the invitation. He had work to do elsewhere. The Spartan fleet under its formidable new commander Lysander was lying at Ephesus, a menace to the Athenian colonies. The Assembly granted Alcibiades all the men and ships he required, even allowing him the unprecedented honour of choosing his own fellow generals. Their generosity was expressive of the people’s adulation of their new commander-in-chief. Besides, the Assembly’s more thoughtful members were probably anxious to speed him on his way. ‘We do not know (#litres_trial_promo) what Alcibiades himself thought of a dictatorship,’ writes Plutarch, ‘but certainly the leading citizens at this time were frightened of it.’ They mistook their man. The insatiable ambition Socrates had seen in his disciple was not for stay-at-home executive power, but for world-bestriding glory. Soon after the Eleusinian festival, just four months after he had entered the city, Alcibiades left Athens for ever.

He had seduced the people and alarmed the leading democrats, but he had not won over the gods. The day on which he landed in Athens to be so rapturously received was the unluckiest of the year, the day when the image of Athena on the Acropolis was veiled for secret purification rites. Perhaps those citizens hostile to Alcibiades pointed out the inauspicious circumstance at the time, to be ignored by the ecstatic majority. Perhaps it was only with hindsight that people were to remember it as a sign of what was to come. At the zenith of his popularity, the city’s patron goddess turned her face away from him. Only months later the city’s people were, as though in imitation, to withdraw their favour.

‘If ever a man (#litres_trial_promo) was destroyed by his own high reputation,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘it was Alcibiades.’ He was now expected to work miracles; and when he failed to do so the lethally volatile democratic Assembly began to grumble and to doubt his loyalty, ‘for they were convinced that nothing which he seriously wanted to achieve was beyond him’. He sailed to Andros, where he established a fort but failed to take the city. When he arrived at Notium in Asia Minor, across the bay from the Peloponnesian fleet at Ephesus, he was unable to lure Lysander out of the safety of the harbour. The oarsmen began to defect: the Spartans, now subsidized by the Persian Prince Cyrus, were able to offer them 25 per cent more pay than the Athenians. Alcibiades, foreseeing a long and expensive wait before he could force a decisive engagement, sailed off to raise funds elsewhere, leaving the main fleet under the temporary command of Antiochus, the pilot of his ship. It was a controversial appointment. Antiochus was a professional sailor, not one of the aristocratic trierarchs or amateur captains who, though probably less competent, were his social superiors and who would have seen themselves as outranking him. He had known and served Alcibiades for nearly twenty years, ever since he had caught his future commander’s errant quail for him in the Assembly. Alcibiades’ decision to place him in command was audacious, unconventional and, as it turned out, calamitous. In Alcibiades’ absence, and in defiance of his explicit order, Antiochus provoked a battle for which he was totally unprepared. Lysander put the Athenians to flight, sinking twenty ships. Antiochus was killed. Alcibiades raced back to Notium and attempted, unsuccessfully, to induce Lysander to fight again. Only a brilliant victory could have saved him, but it was not forthcoming.

When the news reached Athens, all the old accusations against him were revived. He was arrogant. He was depraved. He was untrustworthy. The people who, only months before, had been ready to give up their political rights for the privilege of being his subjects now turned on him with a fury as irrational as their adulation had been. It was alleged that he intended to make himself a tyrant. It was pointed out that he had built a castle in Thrace – why, asked his accusers, would a loyal Athenian need such a bolt-hole? The appointment of Antiochus, unquestionably a mistake, was presented as evidence of his wicked frivolity. ‘He had entrusted (#litres_trial_promo) the command’, said one of his accusers, ‘to men who had won his confidence simply through their capacity for drinking and spinning sailors’ yarns, because he wanted to leave himself free to cruise about raising money and indulging in debauchery and drunken orgies with the courtesans of Abydos and Ionia.’ He was accused of accepting a bribe from the King of Cyme, a city he had failed to take. None of the charges against him were substantiated. They did not need to be. After all, in 417 BC, the Athenians had come close to banishing him by ostracism for no reason at all except that he had grown too great. Now new generals were elected, one of whom was ordered to sail east and relieve Alcibiades of his command. On hearing that his city, whom he had so grossly betrayed but to whom he had since done such great service, had once again rejected him Alcibiades left the fleet, left the Greek world entirely, and, Coriolanus-like, sought a world elsewhere.

Taking only one ship, he sailed away northward to Thrace, where he had indeed had the foresight to acquire not one, but three castles. There, among the lawless barbarians, he recruited a private army and embarked upon the life of a brigand chief, a robber baron, preying upon his neighbours and taking prisoners for ransom. Adaptable as ever, he assumed the habits of his new countrymen, winning the friendship of the tribal chieftains by matching them, according to Cornelius Nepos, ‘in drunkenness and lust (#litres_trial_promo)’. Perhaps, as the historian and novelist Peter Green has suggested, this was the debauchery attendant on despair; or perhaps it was the zestful beginning of yet another new life. We shall see how Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid, another outcast hero who grew too great for the state he served, was to begin again as a bandit in the badlands of eleventh-century Spain and ultimately to make himself prince of a great city. After two years in Thrace, Alcibiades was to boast that he was treated there ‘like a king’.

In Athens meanwhile, as disaster followed upon disaster, he gradually acquired the mystique of a king over the water, a once and perhaps future redeemer of his native city. A year after the beginning of his second exile Aristophanes had a character in The Frogs say of Alcibiades that the Athenians ‘yearn for him, they hate him, but they want to have him back’. His history was to touch theirs just once more, in an encounter that yet again identified him as the man who could have saved Athens if only Athens had allowed him to do so.

In 405 BC, on the eve of the disastrous battle of Aegosopotami, he appeared, a troubling deus ex machina, in the Athenian camp. The Athenian and Spartan fleets were drawn up facing each other in the narrowest part of the Hellespont, the Athenians being on the Thracian shore, only a few miles from his stronghold. Alcibiades, uninvited and unexpected, came riding in and demanded a meeting with the generals. He pointed out to them that their position was dangerously exposed, and too far from their source of supplies. He advised them to move and offered them the armies of two Thracian kings on whom he could rely. The Athenian generals would not listen. Perhaps they remembered how he had once offered to deliver Persian money and Phoenician ships and failed to do so. Perhaps they thought of how Thrasybulus had been eclipsed and, as Diodorus suggests, were jealously protecting their own reputations, fearing ‘that if they were defeated (#litres_trial_promo) they themselves would get the blame, but that the credit for any success would go to Alcibiades’. Whatever their motives, they turned him away rudely saying, ‘We are in command (#litres_trial_promo) now, not you.’ As he rode out of the camp, Alcibiades told his companions that had he not been so outrageously insulted the Spartans would have lost all their ships. Some thought this boast mere bravado, but many, including some modern historians, have believed him. Rejected for the third time, he galloped away. At Aegosopotami the Athenian fleet was utterly destroyed. The survivors, including all but one of the generals, were slaughtered. A few months later Athens fell.

For the last year of his life Alcibiades was a fugitive. The Spartans still wanted him dead. Their victory rendered coastal Thrace unsafe for him. He withdrew into the interior, leaving behind the bulk of his possessions, which the neighbouring chieftains promptly looted. As he travelled inland he was set upon and robbed of his remaining belongings but he managed to escape capture and made his way, armed now only with his reputation and his miracle-working charm, to the headquarters of the Persian Satrap Pharnabazus. Once more, as when he arrived at Tissaphernes’ court, ‘he so captivated (#litres_trial_promo) Pharnabazus that he became the Persian’s closest friend’. Graciously, the Satrap granted him the Phrygian city of Grynium and all its revenues. He had found a refuge, a protector and an income. But, characteristically, he wanted more. He was in his forties, his prime, and his ambitions were still inordinate, his conception of his own potential still as extravagant as the awe he inspired. He resolved to make the formidable journey eastward to visit the Great King Artaxerxes at Susa. He would have had in mind the example of Themistocles, the victor of Salamis, another great Athenian who, half a century earlier, had been banished and condemned to death by the city for whom he had won great victories but who had been received with honour by a Persian king. Besides, he had information that Artaxerxes’ brother Cyrus, who was closely associated with the Spartan Lysander, was plotting to usurp the Persian throne. Perhaps he hoped to foment war between Persia and Sparta, a war in which he might play a glorious part as the liberator of Athens.

He asked Pharnabazus to arrange an audience for him with the Great King. Pharnabazus demurred. Alcibiades set out anyway. He halted one night in a small town in Phrygia. There, while he lay in bed with the courtesan Timandra (whose daughter Lais was later said to be the most beautiful woman of her generation), hired killers heaped fuel around the wooden house in which he was lodged and set fire to it. Waking, Alcibiades seized his sword, wrapped a cloak around his left arm for a shield and charged out through the flames. His assassins backed off, but from a distance they hurled javelins and spears at him until he fell. Then they closed in and hacked off his head before departing. Timandra wrapped his decapitated body in her own robe and buried it, or, according to Nepos, burned the dead Alcibiades in the fire that had been set to burn him alive.

Even his death, wretched as it was, is evidence of Alcibiades’ extraordinary charisma. One story goes that the killers were the brothers of a girl he had seduced, but most of the sources agree they had been hired by Pharnabazus. The Satrap had been persuaded to violate the duties of the host, and his affection for the man who had so captivated him, by the urgings of the Spartan Lysander, who had threatened that Sparta would break off its alliance with Persia if Pharnabazus did not hand over Alcibiades, alive or dead. Lysander, in turn, was responding to pressure from Critias – the man who long ago had sat with Alcibiades at Socrates’ feet, and who was now the leader of the puppet government the Spartans had installed in Athens. Such was the potency of Alcibiades’ reputation, so widespread the hope that he might yet come to save his city, that while he lived, complained Critias, ‘none of the arrangements (#litres_trial_promo) he made at Athens would be permanent’. In those dark days for Athens, it was not only the oppressed democrats who ascribed to Alcibiades the power to turn the course of history single-handed. His enemies feared him, or feared the legend he had become. He was a man without a state, without an army, without a fortune, without allies; but he was also a human phoenix who had repeatedly risen from the ashes of disaster in a flaming glory all of his own making.

Alcibiades’ talents were never fully put to the test. His career was a sequence of lost opportunities. Perhaps, given the chance, he might have won the war for Athens. Certainly Thucydides, who was as judicious as he was well informed, believed that the Athenians’ failure to trust Alcibiades (for which Alcibiades, who had failed to win their trust, was partially to blame) brought about the city’s undoing. ‘Although in a public (#litres_trial_promo) capacity his conduct of the war was excellent, his way of life made him objectionable to everyone as a person; thus they entrusted their affairs to other hands, and before long ruined the city.’ But great reputations do not flourish, as Alcibiades’ did in his lifetime and afterwards, on the foundation only of what might have been. It is possible that his career – thwarted, dangerous, and isolated as it was – was precisely suited to his particular genius. He was an actor, a seducer, a legend in his own lifetime and of his own making, a true con-artist, one whose self-invented myth was a creation of awesome grandeur and brilliance, a man who owed the large place he occupied in his contemporaries’ imagination not to any tangible achievement, but simply to the magnitude of his presence.

Poets of the classical and medieval era imagined Achilles to be a giant. He was born different from others. Statius describes him as a baby lapping not milk but ‘the entrails of lions (#litres_trial_promo) and the marrow of half-dead wolves’. Pindar, who lived in Athens a generation before Alcibiades, imagined the six-year-old Achilles outrunning deer, fighting with lions, and dragging the vast corpses of slaughtered boars back to Chiron’s cave. In fiction and myth, exorbitant size and prodigious strength were the tokens of the hero. In the real world, Alcibiades, marked out from others by his aristocratic origins, his striking beauty, his intimidating capacity for violence and his inordinate self-confidence, was received by his contemporaries as though he were another such prodigy, a being intrinsically greater than his fellows.

Such a person is not easily assimilable within any community: in a democracy his very existence is a form of sedition. The dizzying reversals of Alcibiades’ career reflect the constant interplay between his fellow citizens’ adulation of him and their ineradicable distrust of the magic whereby he was able temporarily, but never for long enough, to dominate them. They ascribed to him the potential to be alternately their saviour or their oppressor. They ‘were convinced (#litres_trial_promo)’, wrote Nepos, ‘that it was to him that all their disasters and their successes were due’. They imagined superhuman power for him: they adored him for it, and they found it unforgivable. Like Achilles, he was as terrifying as a god, or a beast. ‘Better not bring up a lion inside your city/But if you must, then humour all his moods’, wrote Aristophanes, with reference to Alcibiades. ‘Most people became frightened (#litres_trial_promo) at a quality in him that was beyond the normal,’ wrote Thucydides. That supranormal quality posed a temptation as alluring as it was insidious. Perhaps what the Athenians feared most in Alcibiades was not any ambition of his to seize absolute power but their own longing to hand it to him, to abase themselves before him as a superman capable not only of rescuing them from their enemies but also of freeing them of the burden of being free.

III CATO (#ulink_42ea4df9-3ef2-59ce-8103-612b62f539d4)

LONDON, 1714. The first night of Joseph Addison’s tragedy, Cato, which was to enjoy such a triumph that Alexander Pope, who wrote the prologue, declared that ‘Cato was not so much (#litres_trial_promo) the wonder of Rome in his days as he is of Britain in ours.’ The curtain rises on the last act. The hero is discovered ‘Solus, sitting in a (#litres_trial_promo) thoughtful posture: in his hand Plato’s book on the Immortality of the Soul. A drawn sword on the table by him.’ The tableau – the sword, the book, the pensive hero – was repeated exactly in numerous neo-classical paintings. Its drama lies not in what is represented, but in what is still to come, the horror to which (as most male members of Addison’s classically educated eighteenth-century audience would have known) this tranquil scene is prelude. Before the night is out Cato will read the book through three times, and then, still serene, still ‘thoughtful’, drive the sword into his belly. When that first attempt to free himself from tyranny fails he will submit calmly while his friends bind up the dreadful wound and remove the weapon. Once more alone, he will tear open his body with his bare hands and resolutely disembowel himself.

Cato, true until death. Cato, so inflexible in his righteousness that he was ready to kill himself not once, but twice. Cato, who had no self-pity, but grieved only for Rome and its venerable institutions. Cato, who, on the night of his death, read of the death of Socrates and who, like the Athenian philosopher, chose not to save himself from a death made inevitable by the mismatch between his own integrity and the imperfection of the world he inhabited. This Cato was venerated alike by pagan Rome and Christian Europe. Addison describes him as ‘godlike’, an epithet first applied to him by Lucan nearly seventeen hundred years earlier. Of his contemporaries, only Julius Caesar, whose most inveterate opponent he was, denied his virtue. Cicero and Brutus both eulogized him. Horace praised his ‘fierce heart (#litres_trial_promo)’. Virgil imagined for him an illustrious afterlife as lawgiver to the virtuous dead. To later generations of Romans, especially to the Stoics who formed the opposition to Nero’s tyranny, he was an exemplar, a philosopher (though he left no philosophical writings), and the embodiment of their ideal. The Christian Fathers saw him as the paragon of pagan virtue. To Lactantius he was ‘the prince of (#litres_trial_promo) Roman wisdom’. To Jerome he had a glory ‘which could neither (#litres_trial_promo) be increased by praise nor diminished by censure’. Dante placed Brutus, who was Cato’s son-in-law and political heir, in the lowest circle of hell with Judas Iscariot, in the very mouth of Satan, to be eaten alive ceaselessly through all eternity, and he condemned others who had, like Cato, committed the sin of self-murder to an afterlife of unremitting mute agony in the form of trees whose twigs ooze blood. But Cato is exempt. Despite being a suicide and a pagan he is the custodian of Dante’s Purgatory and is destined eventually for a place in Paradise. In the Convivio Dante goes even further. Cato divorced his wife Marcia so that she could be married to his political ally Hortensius. After Hortensius’ death he remarried her. The story has proved troubling to most Christian moralists, but Dante treats the couple’s reunion as an allegory of the noble soul’s return to God: ‘And what man (#litres_trial_promo) on earth is more worthy to signify God than Cato? Surely no one.’

It was his intransigence that rendered Cato all but divine. Sophocles, Alcibiades’ contemporary and fellow Athenian, had described the tragic hero as one who refuses to compromise or conform but remains, however beset by trouble, as immovable as a rock (#litres_trial_promo) pounded by stormy seas, or as the one tree which, when all the others preserve themselves by bending before a river in flood, stays rigidly upright and is therefore destroyed root and branch. Cato was as steadfast as that rock, as self-destructively stubborn as that tree. An Achilles, not an Odysseus, he was the antithesis of Alcibiades, the infinitely adaptable, infinitely persuasive charmer. Cato never charmed, never changed.

He has been revered as a hero, but he put all his energies into thwarting the aspirations of the heroic great men among his contemporaries, and into attempting to save his fellow Romans from the folly of the hero-worship he so passionately denounced. The defining drama of his life was his resolute opposition to Julius Caesar. Friedrich Nietzsche considered Caesar to be one of the few people in human history to have rivalled Alcibiades’ particular claims to superman status, the two of them being Nietzsche’s prime examples of ‘those marvellously incomprehensible (#litres_trial_promo) and unfathomable men, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and the seduction of others’. Cato was their opposite. Obstinately tenacious of a lost cause, he was predestined for defeat and temperamentally incapable of seduction.

Caesar – adroit and charismatic politician, ruthless, brilliant conqueror – was a hero of an instantly recognizable type. Cato’s claim to heroic status is of quite a different nature. He is the willing sacrifice, the patiently enduring victim. His glory is not that of the brilliant winner but of the loser doggedly pursuing a course that leads inevitably to his own downfall. Small wonder that Christian theologians found his character so admirable, his story so inspiring. He embodied the values of asceticism and self-denial that Jesus Christ and his followers borrowed from pagan philosophers and, like Christ’s, his life can be seen with hindsight as a steady progress towards a martyr’s death.

That death retrospectively invested his career and character with a melancholy grandeur that compensated for the glamour which, alive, he notably lacked. Curmudgeonly in manner, awkward and disobliging in his political dealings and his private relationships alike, he sought neither his contemporaries’ affection nor posterity’s admiration. Yet he received both. Cicero, who knew him well, wrote that he ‘alone outweighs (#litres_trial_promo) a hundred thousand in my eyes’. ‘I crawl (#litres_trial_promo) in earthly slime,’ wrote Michel de Montaigne, some sixteen hundred years after Cato’s death, ‘but I do not fail to note way up in the clouds the matchless heights of certain heroic souls’, the loftiest of them all being Cato, ‘that great man who was truly a model which Nature chose to show how far human virtue and fortitude can reach’.

He had a personality of tremendous force. His contemporaries were awed and intimidated by him – not as the Athenians had feared the capricious bully Alcibiades, more nearly as the moneylenders in the Temple feared the righteous and indignant Christ. His mind was precise and vigorous and he was an orator of furious talent. He was deferred to, by the soldiers he commanded, by the crowds he stirred or subdued, by those of his peers who recognized and admired his selflessness and integrity; but he was also a troublemaker and an oddity. He was a well-known figure in Rome, but one who inspired irritation and ridicule as well as respect.

He was a nuisance. He embarrassed and annoyed his peers by loudly denouncing corrupt practices that everyone else had come to accept as normal. He had no discretion, no urbanity. He looked peculiar. He habitually appeared in the Forum with bare feet and wearing no tunic beneath his toga, an outfit that seemed to his contemporaries at best indecorous, at worst indecent. When challenged about it he pointed to the statue of Romulus (represented similarly underdressed) and said that what was good enough for the founder of Rome was good enough for him. When he became praetor (a senior magistrate) his judgements were acknowledged to be scrupulously correct; but there were those who muttered that he disgraced the office by hearing cases – even those solemn ones in which important men stood to incur the death penalty – looking so raffish, so uncouth.

He never laughed, seldom smiled and had no small talk. He stayed up late, all night sometimes, drinking heavily; but his nightlife was not of the gracious and hospitable kind that his fellow aristocrats found congenial. Rather, he would engage in vehement debate with philosophers who tended to encourage him in his eccentricities. Rigorously ascetic, he disdained to think of his own comfort, and had a way of undermining other people’s. He never rode if he could walk. When he travelled with friends he would stalk along beside their horses on his bare and callused feet, his head uncovered, talking indefatigably in the harsh, powerful voice that was his most effective political weapon. Few people felt easy in his company; he was too judgemental and too much inclined to speak his mind. To his posthumous admirers his disturbing ability to search out others’ imperfections was among his godlike attributes. Montaigne called him one ‘in whose sight (#litres_trial_promo) the very madmen would hide their faults’. But his contemporaries shunned him for it. He was his community’s self-appointed conscience, and the voice of conscience is one to which most people prefer not to listen. His incorruptibility dismayed his rivals: ‘the more clearly (#litres_trial_promo) they saw the rectitude of his practice’, writes Plutarch, ‘the more distressed were they at the difficulty of imitating it’. All the great men of Rome ‘were hostile to Cato (#litres_trial_promo), feeling that they were put to shame by him’. Even great Pompey was said to have been unnerved by him. ‘Pompey admired him (#litres_trial_promo) when he was present but … as if he must render account of his command while Cato was there, he was glad to send him away.’

His life (95–46 BC) coincided with the last half century of the Roman Republic, a time of chronic political instability and convulsive change. It was a time when the institutions of the state had ceased to reflect the real distribution of power within it. Rome and all its provinces were nominally ruled by the Senate and the people of Rome; but by the end of Cato’s life, Rome’s dominions extended from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to the North Sea. The constitution, evolved within a city-state, provided none of the machinery required to subdue, police, and administer an international empire. The prosecution of foreign wars and the exploitation of the conquered provinces required great armies and teams of officials – none of which Rome’s institutions could provide. The provinces were effectively autonomous states, far larger and frequently richer than the metropolis, with their own separate administrations. The pro-consuls who conquered and governed them at their own expense and to their own profit, who were often absent from Rome for years on end acting as effectively independent rulers in their allotted territories, and who returned at last enormously wealthy and to the adulation of the people, had, in reality, infinitely more clout than the institutions they were supposed to serve. When Pompey celebrated his triumph on returning from Asia in 61 BC his chariot was preceded by the captive families of three conquered kings. He boasted of having killed or subjected over twelve million people and of increasing Rome’s public revenues by 70 per cent. There was no room in the Republic for such a man, no legitimate channel for his influence or proper way in which he could exert his power. The Athenians had been afraid when Alcibiades demonstrated his prowess, his wealth, and his international connections at Olympia. Just so were the Roman republicans apprehensive as first Pompey, and subsequently Crassus and Caesar, grew so great they loomed over the state like unstable colossi.

Cato was the little man who dared oppose these giants, the Prometheus nobly defying the ruthless gods (one of whom Caesar would soon become) for the sake of oppressed humanity. Armed only with his voice, his knowledge of the law and his unshakeable certainty of his own rectitude, he resolutely obstructed their every attempt to have their actual power acknowledged. Whether he was wise to do so is open to question. Theodor Mommsen, the great nineteenth-century German historian, called Cato an ‘unbending dogmatical fool’ (#litres_trial_promo). Even Cicero, who thought so highly of him and whose political ally he was throughout most of their contemporaneous careers, found him exasperating at times. Cicero was a pragmatist, a sophisticated political operator and a practitioner of the art of the possible. Cato, by contrast, loudly and dogmatically insisting on the letter of ancient and anachronistic laws, repeatedly damaged his own cause by exposing his allies’ misdemeanours and defending his opponents’ rights. To many commentators, ancient and modern alike, it has appeared that, had it not been for Cato’s dogged refusal to compromise his political principles, or to allow anyone else to do so without being publicly shamed, the Senate might have been able to come to terms with Julius Caesar in 49 BC, that Caesar need never have led his troops across the Rubicon, that thousands of lives might have been saved.

But Cato’s failings are identical with his claims to heroic status. What in the man was awkward was transmuted by time and changing political circumstance to become, in the context of the legend that grew up around him, evidence of his superhuman fortitude. His obstinate refusal to take note of historical change or political expediency are manifestations of his magnificent staunchness. His tactlessness and naivety are the tokens of his integrity. His unpopularity proves his resolution. Even his downfall is a measure of his selfless nobility. He opposes Julius Caesar – by common consent one of Western history’s great men – and is inevitably defeated by him; but his defeat makes him even greater than that great opponent. He dies as a flawed and vulnerable person, and rises again as a marmoreal ideal. Seneca, writing in the next century, imagined the king of the gods coming down among men in search of instances of human grandeur. ‘I do not know (#litres_trial_promo) what nobler sight Jupiter could find on earth,’ he wrote, ‘than the spectacle of Cato … standing erect amid the ruins of the commonwealth.’

His life began and ended in times of civil war. When he was seven years old the Roman general Sulla marched on Rome at the head of his legions, demanding the leadership of the campaign against King Mithridates of Pontus. The Senate capitulated. Sulla then departed for the East, leaving his followers to be killed by his political enemies. Five years later, after having subdued all Asia Minor, he returned to Italy and fought his way to Rome, confronting and defeating the armies of the consuls. Once he had taken the city, the people granted him absolute power. He set about putting to death anyone who had opposed him. His proscriptions, the terrible lists of those outlawed with a price on their heads that served as an incitement to mass murder, were posted in the Forum. Forty senators and at least sixteen hundred others (nine thousand (#litres_trial_promo) according to one source) were named. Some were formally executed, some murdered by Sulla’s paid killers, some torn apart by the mob. Cato was thirteen at the time. His father, by then dead, had been favoured by Sulla. Plutarch, who wrote his Life of Cato a century and a half after the latter’s death but whose sources included accounts (subsequently lost) written by Cato’s contemporaries, relates that the boy’s tutor took him to pay court to the dictator. Sulla’s house was an ‘Inferno’, where his opponents were tortured, and on whose walls their severed heads were displayed. Early in his life Cato witnessed at first hand what befalls a state whose constitution has been overturned by a military dictator.

He bore an illustrious name. He was the great-grandson of Cato the Censor, a man who was remembered as an embodiment of the stern virtues that those who came later liked to imagine had been characteristic of the Roman Republic in its prime. The Censor was a byword for his asceticism and his moral rigour. He travelled everywhere on foot, even when he came to hold high office. At home he worked alongside his farm labourers, bare-chested in summer and in winter wearing only a sleeveless smock, and was content with a cold breakfast, a frugal dinner and a humble cottage to live in. Wastage was abhorrent to him. To his rigorous avoidance of it he sacrificed both beauty and kindness. He disliked gardens: land was for tilling and grazing. When his slaves became too old to work, he sold them rather than feed useless mouths. In office he was as harsh on others as he was on himself. When he discovered that one of his subordinates had been buying prisoners of war as slaves (a form of insider dealing that was improper but not illegal) the man hanged himself rather than suffer the Censor’s rebuke. Grim, graceless and incorruptible, the elder Cato was unpopular but generally revered. The younger Cato, or so several of his contemporaries believed, took him as a model.

His early career followed the conventional path for a young man of Rome’s ruling class. When Crassus put down the revolt of the slaves under Spartacus Cato served as a volunteer in his army, his zeal and self-discipline, according to Plutarch, providing a striking contrast with the ‘effeminacy and luxury (#litres_trial_promo)’ of his fellow officers. Like his virtuous ancestor, who ‘never embraced (#litres_trial_promo) his wife except when a loud peal of thunder occurred’, he was sexually abstemious, remaining a virgin until his first marriage (something unusual enough to arouse comment). Surly and forbidding in company, in private he drilled himself rigorously for the political career before him. He frequented philosophers, especially the Stoic Antipater, ‘and devoted himself (#litres_trial_promo) especially to ethical and political doctrines’. He trained his voice and disciplined his body not only by exercising hard but also by a programme of self-mortification involving exposure to all weathers.

When he was twenty-eight he stood for election as one of the twenty-four military tribunes chosen each year. In canvassing for support he shamed and irritated his fellow candidates by being the only one of them to obey the law forbidding the employment of nomenclatores, useful people (usually slaves) whose job it was to murmur in the candidate’s ear the name of the man whose vote he was soliciting. Despite this self-imposed handicap he won his place and was posted to Macedonia to command a legion. He proved himself an efficient and popular officer. When his year’s term of office was up he made a grand tour of Asia Minor before returning home, stopping at Ephesus to pay his respects to Pompey. To the surprise of all observers, Rome’s greatest commander (Caesar’s career was only just beginning) rose to greet the young man, advanced towards him and gave him his hand ‘as though to honour (#litres_trial_promo) a superior’.

Cato was still young, his political career had yet to begin, but he was already somebody to whom the mighty deferred. Quite how he achieved that status is mysterious. He was not physically remarkable: none of the ancient authors considered his looks worth describing. A portrait bust shows him with a lean and bony face, a serviceable container for a mind but not a thing of beauty. He came of a distinguished family, but so did plenty of other hopeful young Romans. He had inherited some money: so did most men of his class. He had done decent service in the army, but he was never to prove a particularly gifted warrior. His distinguishing characteristics were those of inflexibility and outspokenness, scarcely the best qualifications for worldly success. He was more studious than most, but what was impressive about him seems to have had little to do with his intellectual attainments. Something marked him out, something very different from the dangerous brilliance of Achilles or Alcibiades’ winning glamour, something his contemporaries called ‘authority’.

According to Plutarch, he had already been a known and respected figure in his early teens. When Sulla was appointing leaders for the two teams of boys who performed the ritual mock battle, the Troy Game, one team rejected the youth appointed and clamoured for Cato. In adulthood his nature, wrote Plutarch, was ‘inflexible, imperturbable (#litres_trial_promo), and altogether steadfast’. His peers were awed by it. His acknowledged incorruptibility gave him a kind of power that was independent of any formal rank. From his first entry into public life the amount of influence he was able to exert and the deference he inspired were unprecedented for one so comparatively young. His ascendancy over the Roman political scene has been described by the German historian Christian Meier as ‘one of the strangest (#litres_trial_promo) phenomena in the whole of history’. Inexplicable in terms of his official or social status, it can only have derived from the extraordinary force of his personality.

By the time he returned to Rome from Asia he was thirty, and therefore eligible to stand for election as one of the twenty quaestors chosen annually. The constitution of Republican Rome was a complicated hybrid, evolved over centuries. The Greek historian Polybius, who had been held hostage in Rome in the previous century, had described it as being at once monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. His analysis is not exact – no one within the Republic had the absolute lifelong power of a monarch – but near enough. The consuls, of whom two at a time were elected for a year’s term, seemed to Polybius like kings. Originally the consuls had been military commanders and generally absent from the metropolis, but by Cato’s day it had become normal for them to remain in Rome for their year of office, departing at the end of it each to his own province (traditionally chosen by lot), which he would govern for a further year.

The consuls were the senior members of the Senate, but they were not prime ministers. The state was administered by annually elected officials – in ascending order of seniority, quaestors, aediles, praetors and consuls – each of whom held power independently of all the rest. There might be alliances between officeholders, but there was no unified government, no cabinet of ministers working in concert. Anyone who had ever held office became a lifelong member of the Senate. Theoretically, any free adult male could present himself for election to office once he attained the prescribed age. In practice, only the rich could afford to do so. Election campaigns were expensive; bribery was commonplace; and if it cost a lot of money to gain office, it cost far more to hold it. Officials were expected to provide their own staff, to lay on public games and maintain public buildings, all at their own expense. And not only were officeholders obliged to spend money copiously: they were debarred, for the rest of their lives, from earning it. It was forbidden for a senator to engage in business. Besides, to win elections it was necessary to have the right connections. Inevitably, the majority of officeholders and senators were drawn from a small pool of families, of which Cato’s was one, of substantial wealth and long-established influence.

Rome was nonetheless a democracy. The Senate was not a legislative body, its members could propose laws, but those laws were passed or rejected by the people of Rome (that is, the male, adult, unenslaved people) voting in person. And the people’s interests were protected by the tribunes of the people, elected officials (ten a year) who shared with the consuls and praetors the right to propose laws to the voters, who had the devastating power of the veto – a single tribune could block any measure – and whose persons were sacrosanct.

In Cato’s lifetime this ramshackle and mutually inconvenient assemblage of institutions began to fall apart. The upholders of the ancient constitution – of whom Cato was to become the most passionately committed – struggled to enforce the elaborate rules that were designed, above all, to ensure that no one man should ever achieve too much power. They failed. Defying the Senate, making use of the tribunes and appealing direct to the people, first Pompey, then Crassus, and finally Julius Caesar demanded and obtained powers that vastly exceeded any that the constitution allowed. It was Cato’s life’s work to oppose them.

From his first entry into public life Cato signalled his punctilious regard for the workings of the constitution. To most candidates the post of quaestor, the most junior magistracy, was primarily the portal through which a man entered the Senate – not so much a job as a rite of passage. In 65 BC Cato astonished all observers by qualifying himself for the position before applying for it. The quaestors were responsible for the administration of public funds. According to Plutarch, Cato ‘read the law (#litres_trial_promo) relating to the quaestorships, learned all the details of the office from those who had had experience in it, and formed a general idea of its power and scope’. Once elected he assumed control of the treasury, instituting a purge of the clerks who had been accepting bribes and embezzling money with impunity. Next he set about paying those, however insignificant, to whom the state was indebted, and ‘rigorously and inexorably’ demanding payment from those, however influential, who were its debtors – a policy whose simple rectitude appeared to his contemporaries breathtakingly novel.

The society in which Cato lived was described by his contemporary Sallust (who was himself convicted of extortion) as one in which ‘instead of modesty (#litres_trial_promo), incorruptibility and honesty, shamelessness, bribery and rapacity held sway’. Sulla’s coup, the ensuing civil wars and his reign of terror had left the state punch-drunk and reeling. More recently and insidiously, a series of constitutional reforms and counter-reforms had undermined the perceived legitimacy of established institutions. Meanwhile wealth flooded into Rome from the conquered provinces, but there was no mechanism whereby the state could put it to good use and few channels for its redistribution among the populace. Rome had no revenue service. Romans paid no tax, but the inhabitants of the overseas provinces did. The money was collected by tax farmers, who paid dearly for the right to do the job and who set the level of tribute exacted high enough to ensure themselves handsome profits. The Roman provincial governors who oversaw their operations took their cut as well. Corruption was endemic throughout the system. The records of Rome’s law courts are full of cases of returning governors facing charges of extortion. It was a time when the best lacked all conviction: Sallust denounced those magnates who squandered their wealth shamefully on fantastically grandiose projects for beautifying their private grounds – ‘they levelled mountains (#litres_trial_promo) and built upon the seas’ – instead of spending it honourably for the public’s good, and Cicero inveighed against aristocrats who chose to retire to their country estates and breed rare goldfish rather than wrestle with the intractable problems besetting the state.

In such a society Cato, scrupulously balancing his books, shone out. Heroes of a flashier sort disdain accountancy. In Alcibiades’ youth, when his guardian Pericles was accused of using public money for his own private ends, Alcibiades told him ‘You should be seeking (#litres_trial_promo) not how to render, but how not to render an accounting’ and advised him to divert attention from his alleged embezzlements by provoking a major war. But Cato was a man who believed that right and wrong were absolute and non-negotiable, that ethics was a discipline as clear and exact as arithmetic. In paintings of his death it is conventional for the artist to include, along with the sword and the book, an abacus, the tool of the accountant and token of his absolute integrity.

Under Cato’s administration the treasury became an instrument of justice. There were still at large several men known to have been used as assassins by Sulla at the time of his murderous proscriptions. ‘All men hated them (#litres_trial_promo) as accursed and polluted wretches,’ says Plutarch, ‘but no one had the courage to punish them.’ No one, that is, except Cato. He demanded that they repay the large sums with which they had been rewarded for their killings, and publicly denounced them. Shortly thereafter they finally came to trial.

Cato possessed, writes Plutarch, ‘that form of goodness (#litres_trial_promo) which consists in rigid justice that will not bend to clemency or favour’. Eccentric as his straight dealing was perceived to be, it won him a degree of respect quite disproportionate to his actual achievements. His truth-telling became a by-word. ‘When speaking of matters that were strange and incredible, people would say, as though using a proverb “This is not (#litres_trial_promo) to be believed even though Cato says it”.’ Any defendant who attempted to have him removed from a jury was immediately assumed to be guilty. His evident probity gave him a degree of power out of all proportion to his official rank. It was said that he had given the relatively lowly office of quaestor the dignity normally attached to that of consul.

He had become a notable player in the political game. That game, as played in the last years of the Roman Republic, was a rough one. Rome had no police force. Prominent people never went out alone. In good times they were accompanied wherever they went by an entourage of clients and servants. In bad times they had their own trains of guards-cum-enforcers, troops of armed slaves and gladiators, in some cases so numerous as to amount to private armies. Political dispute developed, rapidly and often, into physical conflict. To read the ancient historians’ account of the period is to be repeatedly astonished by the contrast between the grandeur and efficacy of Rome’s rule over its expanding empire and the rowdiness and violence at its very heart. The Forum was not only parliament, law court, sports arena, theatre and place of worship. It was also, frequently, a battlefield. The temples that surrounded it, which were used on occasion as debating chambers or polling stations, could and frequently did serve as fortresses occupied and defended by fighting men. During his career Cato was to be spat upon, stripped of his toga, pelted with dung, dragged from the rostrum (the platform in the Forum from which orators addressed the people), beaten up and hauled off to prison. He escaped with his life, but he was present on occasions when others did not. The making of a political speech, in his lifetime, was an act that called for considerable courage.

His quaestorship over, he was an assiduous senator, always the first to arrive in the morning at the Senate House and the last to leave, attending every session to ensure no corrupt measure could be debated without his being there to oppose it. But in 65 BC he resolved to take a reading holiday. He set off for his country estate, accompanied by a group of his favourite philosophers and several asses loaded down with books. The projected idyll – quiet reading and high-minded discussion in a bucolic setting – was aborted. On the road Cato met Metellus Nepos, brother-in-law and loyal supporter of Pompey. Learning that Nepos was on his way to Rome to stand for election as a tribune of the people, Cato decided that it was his duty to return forthwith and oppose him.

It was an edgy time in Rome. Two years previously, during Cato’s quaestorship, a group of influential men had plotted a coup d’état. The plot was aborted, but those suspected of instigating it were all still at liberty, all highly visible on the political scene. The ancient historians differ as to who they were. Sallust identifies the ringleader as Catiline, a charismatic, dangerous man whom Cicero credited with a phenomenal gift for corrupting others and a corresponding one for ‘stimulating his associates (#litres_trial_promo) into vigorous activity’. Catiline was a glamorous figure: nineteen hundred years later Charles Baudelaire was to identify him, along with Alcibiades and Julius Caesar, as being one of the first and most brilliant of the dandies. Scandals clung to his name. He was said to have seduced a vestal virgin, even to have murdered his own stepson to please a mistress. His sulphurous reputation had not prevented him achieving the rank of praetor, but his first attempt to win the consulship was thwarted when he was accused of extortion. Sallust maintains that, prevented from attaining power by legitimate means, Catiline plotted to assassinate the successful candidates and make himself consul by force. Suetonius, on the other hand, asserts that the chief conspirators were Crassus and Caesar.

Crassus was a man some seventeen years older than Cato who had grown fabulously rich by profiting from others’ misfortunes. He had laid the foundations of his wealth at the time of Sulla’s proscriptions, buying up the confiscated property of murdered men at rock-bottom prices. He had multiplied it by acquiring burnt-out houses for next to nothing (in Rome, a cramped and largely wooden city, fires were frequent and widespread) and rebuilding them with his workforce of hundreds of specially trained slaves until he was said to own most of Rome. A genial host, a generous dispenser of loans and a shrewd patron of the potentially useful, he ensured that his money bought him immense influence. No one, he is reported to have said, could call himself rich until he was able to support an army on his income. He was one who could.

Julius Caesar was one of Crassus’ many debtors. Five years older than Cato and politically and temperamentally his opposite, he was already noted for his military successes, his sexual promiscuity and his fabulous munificence – all of which endeared him to the populace. As aedile in 65 BC, the year of the alleged conspiracy, he staged at his own expense a series of wild-beast hunts and games of unprecedented magnificence, filling the Forum with temporary colonnades and covering the Capitoline Hill with sideshows. In Alcibiades’ lifetime, Plato had warned ‘any politician who seeks (#litres_trial_promo) to please the people excessively … is doing so only in order to establish himself as a tyrant’. Whether or not he was actually plotting sedition, Caesar was already one of the handful of men who threatened to destabilize the Roman state – as Alcibiades had once undermined the stability of Athens – simply by being too glittering, too popular, too great.

But though Catiline, Crassus and Caesar were all present in Rome when Cato returned in 63 BC to stand for election, it was Pompey whom the guardians of republican principles were watching most apprehensively. It was because Metellus Nepos was Pompey’s man that Cato had felt it so imperative to oppose him. Pompey had treated Cato graciously in Ephesus, but Cato was not the man to be won over by a display of good manners, however flattering. Cato was a legalist. His political philosophy was based on the premise that only by a strict and absolute adherence to the letter of the law could the Republic be preserved. Pompey’s entire career had been conducted in the law’s defiance.

When only twenty-three he had raised an army of his own and appointed himself its commander. When he returned triumphant from Spain in 71 BC he had insisted on being allowed to stand for consul – the highest office in the state – despite the fact that he was ten years too young and had held no previous elected office, and he had backed up his demand by bringing his legions menacingly close to the city. Sulla had drastically reduced the powers of the tribunes and enhanced those of the Senate. As consul in 70 BC, Pompey had reversed the balance. In subsequent years he had seen to it that a fair number of the tribunes were his supporters and he worked through them, as Caesar was to do later, to bypass the increasingly unhappy Senate and appeal directly to the electorate for consent to the expansion of his privileges and power.

In 66 BC a tribune had proposed and seen through a law granting Pompey extraordinary and unprecedented powers to rid the eastern Mediterranean of pirates. In the following year another tribune had proposed that he should be granted command of the campaign against Mithridates of Pontus (Sulla’s old adversary who had risen against Rome again). Military commands brought glory, which in turn brought popularity. They brought tribute money and ransoms and loot that could be used to buy power. Military commanders also had armies (which the Senate did not). Pompey had been spectacularly successful, both against the pirates and against Mithridates. There were plenty who remembered that he had begun his career as one of Sulla’s commanders, that it was Sulla who had named him ‘Pompey the Great’. And Sulla, who had returned from defeating Mithridates to make war on Rome itself, had set a terrible precedent. In 63 BC the senators awaited the return of their victorious general with mounting fear.

Cato and Metellus Nepos were both among those elected to hold office as tribunes in the following year. At once Cato resumed his role as self-appointed guardian of public morality, while simultaneously demonstrating how unable, and indeed unwilling, he was to act the wily politician. He accused one of his own political allies, the consul Murena, of bribery. He was almost certainly correct in doing so. The bribing of voters was so commonplace that Cato’s own refusal to practise it made him highly unpopular. But those who had assumed that Cato was their ally were exasperated. Cicero, the celebrated advocate and the other great luminary of the constitutionalist party, defended Murena (and got him off), remarking acidly in court that Cato had acted ‘as if he were living (#litres_trial_promo) in Plato’s Republic, rather than among the dregs of Romulus’ descendants’ – a remark designed less to lament the imperfection of modern life than to reproach the incorruptible Cato for his political ineptitude.

Later that year, though, Cato got the chance to demonstrate that what he lacked in adroitness he made up for in passion and persuasiveness. For years he had been developing his powers of oratory, rigorously preparing himself for his calling, and he had, besides, two gifts worth more than any acquired rhetorical skill. One was an exceptionally powerful voice. It was loud and penetrating enough for him to be able to address enormous crowds, and he had trained and exercised it until he had the stamina and the lung power to speak all day at full volume. The other was ferocity. He is reported to have believed that political oratory was a discipline as ‘warlike’ as the defence of a city, and he put his theory into practice. His speeches were performances of thunderous belligerence, full of devastating energy, of aggression and of righteous rage. He was soon to have occasion to employ his talent.

Catiline had once more stood for election as consul and lost. Whether or not he had conspired against the state two years earlier, this time he certainly did. According to Sallust he bound his followers to him with a solemn ritual during which they were all required to drink from a cup full of human blood, and he prepared to lead an armed revolt.

Cicero was consul. He heard – from his wife, who had heard it from a female friend, who had heard it from her lover, who was one of Catiline’s fellow conspirators – that Catiline’s coup was imminent. Unable to act on such hearsay evidence, Cicero provided himself with a bodyguard of hired thugs and ostentatiously wore a breastplate in public, as though to announce that he knew he and his fellow officeholders were under threat and that he was ready to defend himself. Catiline, too, had his personal guard, made up, according to a contemporary, of ‘troops of criminals (#litres_trial_promo) and reprobates of every kind’. The situation was doubly dangerous. The prospect of an uprising was alarming in itself. Even worse, to Cato and like-minded senators, was the probability that Pompey would use it as a pretext for bringing his legions back to Italy and marching on Rome – ostensibly to suppress the revolt, in fact to seize power for himself. It was among the most essential provisions of the Roman constitution that no army should ever be brought into Rome, and that a military leader must lay aside his command (and the legal immunity it gave him) before entering the city. When in Rome, all Romans were civilians and subject to the law. Sulla had breached that rule, with terrible consequences for the Republic. There was a real prospect that Pompey, Sulla’s protégé, might follow his lead.

In October there was an uprising in Etruria. In November an armed gang attempted to force their way into Cicero’s house before dawn, apparently to assassinate him, but were driven off by his guards. In an atmosphere of mounting panic rumours circulated that the conspirators intended to burn the city to the ground. The Senate declared a state of emergency, but still there was no concrete evidence against anyone. Catiline defiantly took his seat in the Senate. No one would sit next to him. Shortly afterwards he left to join the rebels in the countryside. At last a letter was intercepted naming the leading conspirators. On 3 December the five of them who were still in Rome were arrested.

What was to be done with them? Two days later the Senate met in a temple on the edge of the Forum. Outside were crowds whose shouts and murmurs could be heard from within the chamber, crowds that included many of Catiline’s supporters. Around the building, and in all the other temples in the Forum, were stationed Cicero’s armed guard. It was a dangerous and solemn occasion. The first speakers all demanded ‘the extreme penalty’, clearly meaning death. Then came the turn of Julius Caesar.

Caesar’s speech on that momentous December day was elegant, tightly argued, and – given that he himself was widely suspected of having instigated the earlier plot and of complicity in the current one – coolly audacious. Summary execution was illegal, he argued. The conspirators deserved punishment, but to kill them without legal sanction would be to set a dangerous precedent. He advocated life imprisonment ‘under the severest terms’ instead. So persuasive was he (and so intimidating) that all the following speakers endorsed his opinion, and of those who had spoken earlier several abjectly claimed that by the ‘extreme penalty’ they had meant not execution, but precisely the kind of sentence Caesar was now recommending. The outcome of the debate seemed certain. At this point, very late in the proceedings because senators spoke in order of seniority and he was one of the youngest and lowest ranking, Cato intervened.

His speech was electrifying. Caesar had been suave: Cato was enraged. With the furious probity of a Saint-Just he denounced the pusillanimous senators. Sarcastic and passionate by turn, he sneered at them – ‘You, who have always (#litres_trial_promo) valued your houses, villas, statues and paintings more highly than our country’ – and fiercely drove them on: ‘Now in the name of the immortal gods I call upon you … Wake up at last and lay hold of the reins of the state!’ He mocked, he ranted, he painted a luridly dramatic picture of the dangers besetting the commonwealth. Finally, with awful solemnity, he demanded that the conspirators be put to death. The potency of his performance was demonstrated by its effect. When he had finished the senators, one after another, rose and went to stand beside him to signal their agreement.

Caesar, who only minutes before had held the assembly in his hand, was left isolated. For once losing his famous imperturbability, Caesar protested furiously. There was a fracas, during which (according to some sources) Cato accused Caesar of complicity with the conspirators. Cicero’s guard intervened, drawing their swords. Caesar was nearly killed in the ensuing mêlée. Eventually some kind of order was restored. Caesar left. The Senate stood firm behind Cato. The conspirators were led, one by one, across the Forum, through the agitated crowd (which included some of their confederates) to the place of punishment. There, in an underground chamber ‘hideous and fearsome (#litres_trial_promo) to behold’, they were strangled. A few weeks later Catiline himself was killed in battle.

So began the essential drama of Cato’s life. ‘For a long time (#litres_trial_promo),’ wrote Sallust, ‘no one at all appeared in Rome who was great. But within my own memory there have been two men of towering merit, Cato and Caesar.’ Two thousand years on Caesar is by far the more celebrated of the two – thanks in part to his skilful fostering of his own fame, in part to our culture’s infatuation with military conquest. But to those who knew them, the two looked evenly matched – a comparable pair of brilliantly gifted men. They clashed for the first time in the debate over the conspirators’ sentence. From that day until his death seventeen years later Cato was to remain Caesar’s most inveterate political opponent.

Each of them was the prime representative of one of two tendencies in Roman political life (to call them parties would be to suggest a degree of cohesiveness notably absent from the political scene). Cato was to become the most eloquent spokesman of the Optimates, Caesar the most successful of the Populares. Optimates and Populares alike were oligarchs drawn from the same exclusive group of rich and well-descended Romans; but they differed in the ways in which they played the complicated political system of the Republic. The Populares were soldiers and empire-builders, or their clients and admirers, who tended to bypass the Senate by enlisting the support of the tribunes and through them of the electorate at large. Like Alcibiades, they were aristocratic populists, distrusted by their peers but adored by an electorate to whom they offered the violent excitement and huge potential profits of warfare. The Optimates – civilians at heart – were the defenders of the power of the Senate, and sticklers for the rules designed to uphold the senators’ dignity and, most importantly, to ensure that military commanders were prevented from using their armies to seize personal power.

Within a week of the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators the new tribunes, Cato and Metellus Nepos among them, took office, and so did Caesar as praetor. At once Nepos fulfilled Cato’s worst fears by proposing that Pompey, his patron, be recalled to Rome with his legions ‘to restore order’. When Nepos’ proposal was discussed in the Senate Caesar supported it, but Cato raged against it with such vehemence that some observers thought he was out of his mind. As a tribune he had the right to veto the measure and he announced that he would do so, swearing passionately ‘that while he lived (#litres_trial_promo) Pompey should not enter the city with an armed force’.

It was no empty piece of rhetoric. It was widely believed that the Populares would have Cato prevented by whatever means were necessary, up to and including murder, from blocking their way. He would have to declare his veto formally the following day, when the people would be asked to vote on the measure in the Forum. That night he slept deeply, but he was alone of his household in doing so. According to Plutarch, ‘great dejection (#litres_trial_promo) and fear reigned, his friends took no food and watched all night with one another in futile discussion on his behalf, while his wife and sisters wailed and wept’.

It was customary for friends and political allies to call for an officeholder at his house in the morning and escort him down to the Forum as a public demonstration of support. But on the day of the vote, so effectively had Nepos and Caesar cowed their opponents, Cato had only one companion of note, another tribune by the name of Thermus. As the two of them, attended only by a handful of servants, made their way towards the place of assembly they met well-wishers who exhorted them to be on their guard but who fearfully declined to accompany them. On arriving they found the Forum packed with people whom Nepos had succeeded in rousing to his cause and surrounded by his and Caesar’s armed slaves. (Caesar owned several gladiatorial training schools and had brought an unprecedented number of gladiators to Rome for the games he staged in 65 BC: the games over, he kept the surviving slaves around him as an armed guard.)

Nepos and Caesar were already seated in a commanding position on the exceptionally high and steep podium of the Temple of Castor. On the temple steps a troop of gladiators was massed. Seeing them, Cato exclaimed, ‘What a bold man (#litres_trial_promo), and what a coward, to levy such an army against a single unarmed and defenceless person!’ Accompanied only by Thermus, he pushed through the hostile crowd. The gladiators, disconcerted by his courage, made way for him. Climbing onto the podium, he brusquely positioned himself between Nepos and Caesar.

A law upon which the people were to vote had first to be read out loud to them. A herald prepared to declaim Nepos’ proposed measure. Cato, announcing his veto, stopped him. Nepos, in defiance of law and custom, attempted to override the veto. Snatching the document from the herald, he began to read it himself. Cato ripped it from him. Nepos continued to recite it from memory. Thermus, Cato’s sole supporter, clapped a hand over his mouth.

The tussle was taking place in full view of an excited and increasingly volatile crowd. People were yelling out encouragement for one side or another as though watching a gladiatorial show, and increasing numbers were shouting for Cato. ‘They urged one another (#litres_trial_promo) to stay and band themselves together and not betray their liberty and the man who was striving to defend it.’ Furious at being so thwarted, Nepos signalled to his armed guards, who charged into the mob with fearsome yells, precipitating a riot that lasted for several hours. It was a day of brutal mayhem. At one point Nepos, having temporarily regained control of the Forum, attempted to force what would have been an illegal vote. At another Cato, standing dangerously exposed on the tribunal, was stoned by the crowd and was only saved from perhaps fatal injury by the intervention of the consul Murena (the man he had accused of bribery), who wrapped him in his own toga and dragged him into the shelter of a temple.

Nepos’ followers were eventually driven out. Cato addressed the people and, battered and exhausted as he must have been, he spoke with such fervour that he won them over entirely. The Senate assembled again and rallied behind him, condemning Nepos’ law. Nepos, according to Plutarch, saw ‘that his followers (#litres_trial_promo) were completely terrified before Cato and thought him utterly invincible’. In defiance of the rule that no tribune might leave the city during his term of office he fled, ‘crying out that he was fleeing from Cato’s tyranny’, and made his way to Pompey’s camp in Asia. Caesar’s praetorship was temporarily suspended. The episode was a great political victory for Cato. Characteristically, he contrived to make it a moral one as well when he opposed a motion to deprive Nepos of his office: the tribunate must remain inviolable, however flawed the tribune might be.

In 61 BC Pompey returned from the East and celebrated his triumph. He had conquered fifteen countries and taken nine hundred cities, eight hundred ships and a thousand fortresses. For two whole days the celebrations engulfed Rome as the entire populace turned out to see the show. Captured monarchs and their children were led in procession along with manacled pirate chiefs. Huge placards proclaimed Pompey’s victories. There were bands playing; there were military trophies; there were wagonloads of weaponry and precious metal. Finally, there came Pompey himself wreathed with bay, his face painted to resemble Jupiter, his purple toga spangled with gold stars. He wore a cloak that had purportedly belonged to Alexander the Great. Beside him in his gem-encrusted chariot rode a slave whose task it was to whisper ceaselessly ‘Remember you are human’ while all about the noisy, gaudy, amazing spectacle proclaimed the opposite. Behind the godlike victor marched lines of soldiers, all hymning his glory.

It was a spectacle that boded ill for republican liberty, but for the time being Cato’s dark forebodings of civil war and dictatorship were not realized. Pompey, for all his magnificence, was still a republican. In Asia he had repudiated Nepos. Now he dismissed his army and re-entered Rome as a private citizen apparently intent on seeking a legitimate channel for his power. It was not his ambition but Cato’s absolute refusal to allow any concession to be made to him that rendered that impossible.

Doggedly disobliging, implacably opposed to the slightest modification of a political system which, like Sophocles’ tree, looked doomed to break if it would not bend, Cato obstructed Pompey’s every manoeuvre. It was Cato who persuaded the Senate not to postpone the consular elections so that Pompey might stand for office. It was Cato who vociferously opposed the ratification of Pompey’s settlements in the East. And it was Cato who spoke loudest against the bill whereby Pompey sought to reward his veterans for their victories with plots of publicly owned land. Pompey attempted to dissolve this thorn in his flesh by proposing a double marriage, with himself and his son as bridegrooms to Cato’s nieces (or perhaps his daughters), further evidence of the astonishingly high regard in which this still comparatively junior politician was held. Cato refused, saying ‘Tell Pompey that Cato (#litres_trial_promo) is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.’ Once again, in rejecting an opportunity to bind Pompey to the constitutionalist faction, he had done his own cause a grave disservice.

He did it another one when he antagonized Crassus. A consortium of tax farmers had paid too high for the right to raise money in Asia Minor. Unable to make a profit, they attempted to renegotiate their contract with the Senate. Crassus backed them. Cato opposed them with manic obduracy. Talking indefatigably for day after day, he succeeded in blocking the measure for months on end, effectively paralysing the Senate by the sheer power of his obstinate will.

In 60 BC Julius Caesar, who had been campaigning in Spain, also returned to Rome. He had been granted a triumph for his Iberian conquests, but in order to celebrate it he was obliged to remain outside the sacrosanct bounds of the city. However, he wished (as Pompey had done) to be elected consul for the following year, and in order to declare his candidacy he had to be in Rome. He asked the Senate’s permission to stand for office in absentia. Cato opposed him. A decision had to be reached before nightfall on a certain day. Once more Cato filibustered, haranguing his colleagues in his powerful, rasping voice until the sun went down. The next morning Caesar laid aside his command, thus giving up his triumph, and entered the city to seek election.

Rome’s three most powerful men had each found that, thanks to Cato’s intransigence, they were unable to impose their will on the Senate. They resolved instead to ignore it. In 60 BC Pompey, Caesar and Crassus arrived at a secret agreement (known as the First Triumvirate) that made them the effective, though unacknowledged, rulers of Rome, their combined wealth, manpower and political influence allowing them to bypass or overrule all the institutions of government.

Cato was outraged. Over the next four years, in the face of political intimidation that frequently escalated into violence, he unswervingly opposed the incremental growth of the power of Rome’s inordinately great men. Every time a rule was bent, a precedent ignored, an extraordinary privilege granted, he was there to oppose the innovation. Tireless and tiresome in equal measure, ‘always ready (#litres_trial_promo)’, as Theodor Mommsen wrote, ‘to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so or not’, he let nothing pass. When Caesar became consul in 59 BC Cato obstructed and opposed his every move.

One of Caesar’s proposals was another bill granting land to Pompey’s soldiers. Pompey brought his veterans – the very men who would benefit from the measure – into the city, a tacit threat to anyone inclined to oppose its passage. A time limit was set for the Senate’s discussion. Few – nervously aware of the armed men thronging the streets around them – dared speak at all; but when it came to Cato’s turn he rose and, employing his favourite tactic, attempted to block the measure by speaking for hours on end. This time, though, he had an opponent with scant respect for senatorial procedure. Caesar’s gang of gladiators dragged him from the rostrum and hauled him off to the very prison cells where Catiline’s co-conspirators had been done to death. As Cato was hustled away, he continued to harangue the senators. Several followed him ‘with downcast looks (#litres_trial_promo)’. Caesar called them back, demanding they finish the business in hand. One bravely replied: ‘I prefer to be (#litres_trial_promo) with Cato in prison rather than here with you.’ Cato was marched across the Forum, still talking at the top of his powerful voice to the shocked and fearful crowd. He was released almost immediately, but his imprisonment was a crucial turning point in the history of the Republic, the moment when Caesar demonstrated that he would have his way, with or without the law.

There were more ugly scenes. When his ineffectual fellow-consul Bibulus (Cato’s son-in-law and ally) attempted to speak against him, Caesar had him and Cato thrown down the steps of the Temple of Castor. They were pelted with dung and Bibulus’ fasces, the emblems of his authority, were broken and thrown after him. There was little Cato could do in the face of such intimidation. Pompey, who had wished to be Cato’s son-in-law, became Caesar’s instead, marrying the consul’s daughter Julia, who was thirty years his junior. Caesar proposed a second land law. It was passed, for all Cato’s protests, the people seeming as entranced by Caesar’s glamour as the Athenians had been by Alcibiades’ (or perhaps they were just afraid of his enforcers). So was the one granting Caesar Gaul and Illyria for his provinces once his consulate lapsed, not for the usual one-year term, but for five years. A few years later Horace was to advise a poet wishing to represent Achilles, ‘Let him deny (#litres_trial_promo) that the law was made for him.’ Caesar, bending every rule, ignoring every precedent, was acting with an Achillean disdain for legality. As the people gathered in the Forum to vote Cato addressed them with desperate vehemence, warning ‘that they themselves (#litres_trial_promo) were establishing a tyrant in their citadel’. They voted the measure through regardless.

Caesar boasted at the end of his consulate that he had got everything he wanted to the accompaniment of his opponents’ groans: now he was free to dance on their heads. He departed for Gaul, having first contrived the election as tribune for the following year of his protégé Clodius, the man who was to plunge Rome into a state of such anarchy that, in Cicero’s words, ‘the blood that streamed (#litres_trial_promo) from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges’. Clodius, whose personal name was Pulcher, ‘Beautiful’, dominated the circle of young aristocrats against whom Sallust railed for their ‘lewdness’ and ‘luxury’, their total lack of reverence for gods or man-made institutions. A blasphemer and sexual transgressor like Alcibiades, Clodius had – famously – disguised himself and gained entry to the secret festival of the Bona Dea, a women’s rite from which men were rigorously excluded. He was a womanizer whose lovers were said to include his own sister, Clodia, and Caesar’s wife. He was also, as the events of the next six years were to show, a brilliant political organizer, a charismatic demagogue and a man of dangerously unpredictable allegiance capable of turning savagely on magnates who had complacently imagined themselves to be manipulating him.

Immediately he took office he legalized the previously outlawed collegia, institutions that were part trade unions, part neighbourhood self-defence groups and part political clubs, and set about transforming them into units of street-fighting men. Owing their new legitimacy to him, the collegia became Clodius’ own instruments, making him, whether in or out of office, the warlord of the streets. First, though, he had to rid himself of those few public figures with the nerve and integrity to oppose him. He had Cicero sent into exile on the pretext that the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators had been illegal. Cato (without whom those executions would not have taken place) was treated less rudely. He was given the task of annexing Cyprus.

It was a prestigious and potentially lucrative assignment, but Cato saw it only as a means of getting rid of him. It was one of the fundamental differences between the constitutionalists like Cato and the Populares that the former clung to the anachronistic sense that nowhere outside Rome mattered. When Cicero was appointed governor of Cilicia (southern Turkey) he was to tell his friend Atticus that the task was ‘a colossal bore (#litres_trial_promo)’. To others it might seem he was seeing the world. But he was pining for ‘the world, the Forum’, which to him seemed to be one and the same. Likewise, to Cato, that cramped and teeming rectangular space at the centre of Rome was the hub of the universe, the only place where words and actions had consequences. He accepted overseas postings grudgingly, and despatched them without enthusiasm. When his term of office as praetor ended he actually turned down the provincial governorship to which he was entitled. Pompey and Caesar, by contrast, made the provinces – the armies they were entitled to levy in order to subdue them and the fortunes they amassed there – the foundations of their power.

Cato’s role in Cyprus turned out to be one to which he was exactly suited, that of inventory clerk. The island’s ruler was a Ptolemy, brother of the King of Egypt, who was to be ousted ostensibly because he had supported the pirates against Pompey, but also so that his personal wealth and the revenue from his prosperous island could be added to the magnificence of Rome. Cato was not required to act the conqueror. On receiving his letter calling upon him to abdicate, Ptolemy poisoned himself. All Cato had to do was to take possession of his realm and convert his treasure into currency. This he did virtually single-handed, to the annoyance of his followers. Refusing to delegate any responsibility, he personally negotiated with merchants and private buyers, ensuring he got the highest possible price for all the jewels and golden cups and purple robes and other ‘furnishing of the princely sort’ poor Ptolemy had left. ‘For this reason (#litres_trial_promo)’, reports Plutarch, ‘he gave offence to most of his friends, who thought that he distrusted them.’ The task was immense: the sum he brought back from Cyprus was so great that, when it was carried through Rome to the treasury, the crowds stood amazed at the quantity of it; but Cato insisted on making himself personally responsible for every detail of its collection and transport. He decided how the money was to be shipped and designed special coffers for the purpose, each one trailing a long rope with a cork float attached so they could be retrieved in the case of shipwreck. He had the accounts written out in duplicate. He had called the assignment an insult, but the people of Rome had voted that he must do it, so – punctilious and dutiful as ever – do it he did, with the driven thoroughness he brought to all his appointed tasks.

While he did so, the Roman Republic staggered under Clodius’ assault. ‘District by district (#litres_trial_promo),’ records Cicero, ‘men were being conscripted and enrolled into units and were being incited to violence, to blows, to murder, to looting.’ The collegia’s fighting bands were swelled by slaves. Gangs of swordsmen controlled the city’s public spaces. The Temple of Castor, the building whose high podium dominated the Forum and where Cato had twice suffered violence at Caesar’s hands, was converted from a place of worship and public assembly into a fortress. Clodius had its steps demolished, rendering access to it hard and its defence easy, and made it his arsenal and military headquarters. The political meetings, trials and plebiscites for which the Forum was the venue – all the public business of the state – now took place under the intimidating gaze of Clodius’ enforcers. Meetings of the Senate were interrupted by yelling crowds. A debate on Cicero’s possible recall from exile was broken up by rioters throwing stones and wielding clubs and swords. Some of the tribunes were injured (shockingly, since they were supposed to be inviolate) and several other people killed. When one of Clodius’ associates was put on trial a mob of his supporters invaded the court, overturning benches, dragging the judge from his place, knocking over the urns that served as ballot boxes and driving the prosecutors and jury in terror from the place. No one was exempt. Clodius had appeared originally to be the Triumvirs’ tool but now he turned viciously on one of them. When Pompey attempted to speak in the Forum, Clodius led a mob in heckling him cruelly. A fight broke out between Pompey’s and Clodius’ men: several people were killed and a man was caught apparently in the act of attempting to assassinate Pompey himself. Baffled and afraid, Pompey withdrew to his villa, where he lived virtually besieged.

By the time Cato returned from Cyprus in 56 BC with his haul of scrupulously catalogued treasure some kind of balance of power had been established, but at great cost to the cause of the constitutionalists and to the stability of the state. One of the new year’s tribunes, Milo, with Pompey’s encouragement and sponsorship, had assembled his own private army of slaves and hired thugs and emerged as a rival to Clodius. For weeks, the two gangs fought for control of the city. ‘The Tiber was full (#litres_trial_promo) of citizens’ corpses,’ wrote Cicero, ‘the public sewers were choked with them.’ Clodius was at least temporarily contained. Pompey, recovering his nerve, reasserted himself and saw to it that Cicero was recalled amid scenes of public rejoicing all over Italy. Bread was scarce: the people were rioting for food. Cicero, returning a favour, advocated a measure granting Pompey control of the corn supply for the next five years, a commission that gave him ill-defined but enormous power both domestically and (since most of Rome’s corn was imported) throughout the Mediterranean.

Endemic violence, a near total collapse of the rule of law, disastrous food shortages, the acceptance even by a moderate like Cicero that only an armed potentate could save the disordered state – the situation to which Cato returned was the fulfilment of his direst predictions. At once he resumed his old task – that of preventing the great men becoming greater.

Caesar, Pompey and Crassus renewed their pact. Pompey and Crassus were standing together for election as the next year’s consuls. The constitutionalists in the Senate went into mourning, as though for the death of the Republic, but no one dared stand in opposition to the two magnates until Cato (who was not yet old enough to be eligible himself) persuaded his brother-in-law, Domitius Ahenobarbus, to do so and to declare that, if elected, he would terminate Caesar’s unprecedentedly long command in Gaul. Before dawn on the morning of the election Cato and Domitius went together to the Field of Mars, where voting was to take place. They were set upon in the darkness. Their torchbearer was killed. Cato was wounded in the arm. With furious resolution he tried to persuade Domitius to stand his ground ‘and not to abandon (#litres_trial_promo), while they had breath, the struggle in the behalf of liberty which they were waging against the tyrants, who showed plainly how they would use the consular power by making their way to it through such crimes’. His eloquence was futile. Ahenobarbus, less principled, or perhaps just more realistic, abandoned his candidature and took to his heels.

Cato, determined that the Triumvirs should not be unopposed, stood for election as praetor. Pompey and Crassus put up a candidate of their own and set about bribing the electorate in a vote-buying exercise of unprecedented scale and blatancy. On the day of the election Pompey had the Field of Mars surrounded by Milo’s thugs. Those who voted the wrong way could expect to suffer for it. Even so, so great was Cato’s prestige, the first votes declared were for him. Bribery and intimidation having both failed, Pompey invoked the gods. He declared he had heard thunder (though no one else had) and, thunder being a sign of divine displeasure, he cancelled the ballot. His supporters went to work on the voters again (whether with their money or their swords is not recorded). By the time a second vote could be held those who had initially voted for Cato had changed their minds.

Measure by measure the Triumvirs consolidated their power. Pompey and Crassus saw to it that they were assigned, as their proconsular commands, Spain and Syria respectively; they introduced bills allowing them to wage war as and when they saw fit and to levy as many troops as they wished. Pompey, further, had it agreed that he could delegate the government of Spain to his officials while remaining himself near Rome. Each time the people voted in their favour while all but one of the senators, listless in their impotence, allowed the legislation to pass without questioning or comment. The exception, of course, was Cato.

A man whose greatest skill was that of making a nuisance of himself, he let none of these measures pass without a hurly-burly. Time and again Cato forced his way onto the rostrum to harangue the people. Time and again he was manhandled down. He was briefly imprisoned again. Nothing could silence him. Denied the rostrum, he would mount his supporters’ shoulders instead. There was rioting. People were killed. But Pompey and Crassus, unperturbed, proceeded to their most controversial move. They proposed that Caesar’s command in Gaul should be extended for a further five years. This called from Cato a speech of the utmost passion and solemnity. He told Pompey that he had taken Caesar upon his own shoulders ‘and that when he began (#litres_trial_promo) to feel the burden and to be overcome by it he would neither have the power to put it away nor the strength to bear it longer, and would therefore precipitate himself, burden and all, upon the city’. The prophecy, with its strange and awful image of the two giants, one weighing down upon the other, crushing the state beneath them as they toppled, was remembered by the historians, but in the short term it was as futile as all of Cato’s efforts. Caesar got his extended command.

Cato kept up his attack. He argued in the Senate that Caesar’s aggression against the German and Gallic tribes was not only wicked but illegal: the Senate, which supposedly determined Rome’s foreign policy, had not authorized it. The Gallic war, on which Caesar’s enormous (and still extant) fame was based, constituted a monstrous atrocity, a genocidal war crime carried out in full view of all the world over a period of nearly a decade. Caesar had taken the leaders of two German tribes prisoner when they came to him under terms of truce and then massacred some four hundred thousand of their people. This, fulminated Cato, was an outrage for which the gods would exact retribution. Caesar should be put in chains and handed over to the enemy for just punishment. Until his guilt was expiated, all Rome would be accursed. Legally speaking, Cato was correct; but the people of Rome preferred conquests, however achieved, to a clear conscience. Caesar fought on.

Over the next two years, Cato struggled ever more desperately for the cause of legitimacy. It was like building card houses in a hurricane. In Gaul Caesar, conquering tribe after tribe and carting their treasure away with him, grew ever richer and more powerful. At the end of each campaigning season he returned to the Italian peninsula, bringing some of his legions with him, and established himself in winter quarters near Ravenna, within his province of Cisalpine Gaul. There he received visitors from Rome, clients and suitors to whom he dispensed largesse, agents who watched over his interest in the metropolis, candidates begging him to use his power to help them to office. Officially absent, he was nonetheless a drastically destabilizing off-stage presence in the drama of Rome’s politics.

While Caesar’s power grew insidiously, Pompey’s was paraded with superb ostentation. For five years he had been building a theatre of unprecedented size and grandeur on the Field of Mars. In 55 BC he inaugurated it with a series of spectacular shows. There were plays, extravagantly staged. (‘What pleasure is there (#litres_trial_promo) in having a Clytemnestra with six hundred mules?’ wrote Cicero, who found the display vulgar.) There was a bloody series of games in which five hundred lions and untold numbers of gladiators were killed. There was an elephant fight (‘a most horrifying (#litres_trial_promo) spectacle’, says Plutarch), which astonished the crowd. At the end of his consulate Pompey, invested now with the authority and the legal immunity of a pro-consul but declining to leave Rome, withdrew to his villa near the city. There he bided his time while the Republic tore itself to pieces.

Milo’s and Clodius’ gangs (the former apparently sponsored by Pompey, the latter by Caesar, but both in fact running way out of any sponsors’ control) bullied the citizens and battled each other for control of the streets. Meetings of the Senate were cut short for fear of violent interruptions by the mobs that gathered outside the chamber. Gangs of armed slaves burst into the Arena and put a stop to the sacred games. Elections took place, if at all, in an atmosphere of terror. It was apparent that the situation was untenable. ‘The city’, wrote Suetonius, ‘began to roll and heave like the sea before a storm.’

Yet Cato persisted. Mommsen called him a ‘pedantically stiff (#litres_trial_promo) and half witless cloud-walker’, and certainly, viewed with hindsight, his dogged efforts to reform a political system on the eve of its extinction look absurd. But Cato, and most of his contemporaries, still assumed that the Republic would last for generations to come. To like-minded Romans his resolute campaign to restore it to rectitude looked not stupid, but saintly. Cato ‘stood alone (#litres_trial_promo) against the vices of a degenerate state’, wrote Seneca. ‘He stayed the fall of the Republic to the utmost that one man’s hand could do.’

His stand did not make him popular. Repeatedly, when he spoke in the Forum, he was jeered by hostile agitators. ‘He fared’ (#litres_trial_promo), says Plutarch, ‘as fruits do which make their appearance out of season. For as we look upon these with delight and admiration, but do not use them, so the old-fashioned character of Cato … among lives that were corrupted and customs that were debased, enjoyed great repute and fame, but was not suited to the needs of men.’ He was elected praetor on the second attempt and brought in a law banning bribery and requiring all candidates for office to submit full accounts of their election expenses. That year’s candidates acquiesced on condition that Cato himself (the only man who could be trusted with the job) would act as their umpire; but the electors, accustomed to being paid for their votes, were outraged by the notion that they should give them free. A riot broke out. Cato was set upon by an angry mob. He was knocked down and would have been lynched had he not succeeded in hauling himself upright for long enough to harangue the crowd into docility. As soon as he was eligible he stood for consul but, for all his prestige, was roundly defeated. When Alcibiades returned to his native city (as Pompey had done and Caesar was shortly to do) in the golden nimbus of victory, the citizens had begged him to make himself their absolute ruler, while only a handful of dissenters wished him on his way. So Cato was one of very few of his contemporaries unsusceptible to the glamour of the conquering generals who rode triumphant into Rome, apparently as superhuman in their swaggering magnificence as Plato’s men of gold. Compared with their splendour, Cato’s virtue seemed a dull and unappealing thing. While he clung to republicanism, Lucan was to write, ‘all Rome clamoured (#litres_trial_promo) to be enslaved’.

In January 52 BC the first of the storms that had been so long gathering broke. The two urban warlords, Clodius and Milo, met – apparently by chance – some miles from Rome on the Appian Way. Clodius was attended by thirty slaves carrying swords, Milo by three hundred armed men, including several gladiators. A brawl began. Clodius was injured. He was carried into a tavern. Milo’s men broke in and killed him. As soon as the news reached Rome the city exploded into violence. Clodius the beautiful, Clodius the insolent, was gone, and the common people of Rome, to whom he had granted an intoxicating taste of their own power, ran wild. His associates, including two tribunes, displayed his corpse, naked and battered as it was, in the Forum. There were hysterical scenes of rage and grief. Prompted by the tribunes, the mob took over the Senate House, built a pyre of all the furniture and the senatorial records, hoisted Clodius’ corpse on top and set fire to the building. The seat of government, the repository of centuries of tradition, the brain controlling all the vast body of the Roman world, was reduced to charred ruins. The rioting spread as fast as the flames.

For a month the chaos continued. A hostile mob attacked Milo’s house, to be driven back by the archers of his personal guard. ‘Every day’ (#litres_trial_promo), according to Plutarch, ‘the Forum was occupied by three armies, and the evil had well-nigh become past checking.’ The Senate declared a state of emergency, but the previous year’s consular elections had not yet taken place. There was no one to take control. ‘The city was left with (#litres_trial_promo) no government at all like a ship adrift with no one to steer her.’ A mob invaded the sacred grove where the fasces were kept and seized them. Then, as though craving someone who could save them from their own licence, they swept on to Pompey’s villa outside the city and clamoured for him to make himself dictator. Pompey demurred. He was waiting for the more official invitation that he sensed could not be much longer withheld.

It came soon enough. Twelve years previously Cato had declared that ‘while he lived’ he would never consent to Pompey’s entering the city at the head of an army. Now, hopeless, he concluded that ‘any government (#litres_trial_promo) was better than no government at all’. To the astonishment of his peers, he spoke in favour of a motion offering Pompey the post of sole consul.

Diplomatic and subtle as ever, Pompey invited Cato to work alongside him. Cato, his living opposite, stubbornly refused. He would be of no man’s party. He would give his advice when asked for it, he said, but he would also give his candid opinion whether asked for it or not.

Pompey ordered his legions into the city. Gradually order was restored; but Rome – while the emergency lasted – was effectually a military dictatorship. When Milo was put on trial for the murder of Clodius, Pompey’s troops, ringing the place of judgment, were so numerous and so menacing that even Cicero, who had undertaken Milo’s defence, lost his nerve, failed to deliver the speech he had planned and saw his client convicted.

The crisis over, Pompey stepped down, once more amazing the constitutionalists by the propriety of his behaviour. But a second storm was imminent. Caesar’s command in Gaul would lapse in the winter of 50 BC. Cato publicly swore that as soon as it did, and Caesar therefore became once more subject to the law, he would bring charges against Caesar for the illegal acts he had perpetrated as consul in 59 BC and for his unjustified and unsanctioned assaults on the people of Gaul.