Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Throughout the last hours of his life he was fiercely active. His one outburst of emotion done with, he accepted his doom, and proceeded to do all that remained to be done with the scrupulous thoroughness with which, all his life, he had discharged his public duties. He was everywhere. He was in the city, urging the merchants not to betray the remaining senators. He was interviewing the emissary chosen by the merchants to go on their behalf to Caesar. He was disdainfully ignoring a message from another Pompeian commander who had escaped from Thapsus and wished to claim the leadership. He was patiently attempting to persuade those most at risk of Caesar’s anger to get away. He was at the city’s seaward gates controlling the rush to escape. He was down at the docks overseeing the embarkations and ensuring that each boat was properly provisioned. Most characteristically, he was handing over to the Uticans the detailed accounts of his administration, and returning the surplus funds to the public treasurer. While all around him others were prostrated by anxiety or brutalized by greed and fear he alone was imperturbably competent. The horsemen became uncontrollable and attacked the Uticans in the concentration camps, looting and killing. Having so passionately begged them to stay, Cato had eventually to bribe them to leave in order to stop the massacre.

  At last, on the evening of the second day since the terrible news had arrived from Thapsus, he judged that the evacuation of those at risk was all but completed: his work was almost done. He retired to his quarters to take a bath. Afterwards he dined. He ate sitting upright (the acme of discomfort for a Roman), as he had ever since he left Rome, but afterwards, over the wine, he joined in the high-minded conversation. His household, as usual, included at least two philosophers. The talk turned to the Stoic definition of freedom. Cato “broke in with vehemence, and in loud and harsh tones maintained his argument at greatest length and with astonishing earnestness.” His companions, understanding, fell silent. It was a tenet of Stoicism that, as Lucan was to put it, “the happiest men are those who chose freely to die at the right time.”

  After supper he walked for a while, gave orders to the officers of the watch, embraced his son and close friends with especial affection, and withdrew to his bedchamber. There he began to read Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates comforts his companions by offering them proofs of the immortality of the soul before serenely, even joyfully, drinking the hemlock which will heal his soul of the flaws inherent in bodily life. While still in the midst of his reading, Cato noticed that his sword was not hanging in its usual place by his bed (his son had removed it). He called a servant and asked where it was. The servant had no answer. Cato returned to his book but a little later, without any evident anxiety or urgency, asked again for the sword. Still it was not brought. He finished his reading and called the servants again. This time he became angry and struck one over the mouth, hurting his own hand. (This incident, in which the great man gives evidence of irascibility, even nervousness, is omitted from some accounts.)

  He cried out that his friends had betrayed him, by so arranging that he would fall unarmed into his enemy’s hands. At that his son and several companions rushed into the room sobbing and imploring him to save himself. Cato addressed them sternly, asking if they considered him an imbecile, reminding them that if deprived of the sword he had only to hold his breath or dash his head against the wall when he chose to die, and asking why, in this crisis, they wished him to “cast away those good old opinions and arguments which have been part of our lives.” All who heard him wept, and, ashamed, left him alone once more. A child was sent with his sword. He received it impassively, saying, “Now I am my own master.” Laying it aside, he returned to his reading (it was said that he read Phaedo through three times in the course of that night) before lying down and sleeping so deeply that those in the next room could hear his snores.

  Around midnight he woke, asked the doctor to bandage his hand, and sent a servant down to the harbor to report on the evacuation. When the servant returned with the news that there were heavy seas and high winds Cato, mindless of his own trouble, groaned with pity for those at sea, then briefly slept again, having sent the servant back down to the waterfront to ensure nothing further could be done to help the fugitives. When the servant returned for the second time, reporting that all was quiet, Cato, satisfied that his earthly responsibilities were fully discharged, dismissed him.

  Alone, he drove his sword into his midriff and fell heavily, knocking over the abacus that stood in his chamber. His servants and his son ran in and found him alive but all besmeared with blood, his bowels protruding from the ghastly wound. His doctor sewed up the gash but Cato pushed him away (or perhaps waited until he and the other attendants had left) and tore his belly open once more. This time he accomplished his purpose. “He drew forth by his hand that holiest spirit,” wrote Seneca, “too noble to be defiled by steel.”

  At once his reputation, released from the confines of his human reality, began to swell like a genie freed from a bottle. Alive he was a pugnacious politician, an obstructionist and filibusterer, a man of unquestionable probity and great courage but also a bit of an oddball, one who courted trouble to the detriment of his own cause, a prig, an embarrassment, a pedant, perhaps even a bore. His hostility to Caesar has been compared to the kind of bitter envy a dull schoolboy, a dutiful plodder and keeper of the rules, might feel for a charismatic, carelessly successful fellow student who defies authority and gets away with it by virtue of his cheek and charm. It is a cruelly reductive characterization (several of their contemporaries attest that Cato had a kind of personal magnetism different from but almost equal to Caesar’s) but, all the same, it has the ring of partial truth to it.

  Even judged by Cato’s own standards he was not quite perfect. He was to be remembered as the one and only incorruptible Roman. “No man of that day,” wrote Dio Cassius two centuries later, “took part in public life from pure motives and free from any desire of personal gain except Cato.” But there were various episodes in his political career which suggest that his righteousness was not absolute. When he opposed the ratification of Pompey’s arrangements in Asia Minor he was not only checking the growth of Pompey’s inordinate power, he was also doing a favor to his own brother-in-law Lucullus, whom Pompey had supplanted.

  As a tribune, just after the suppression of Catiline’s rebellion, he had authorized the free distribution of grain to the populace, a crowd-pleasing measure which he furiously condemned as tending to demoralize and corrupt the people when Caesar did the same. When Caesar was elected consul in 55 BC Cato condoned the use of bribery, which he otherwise so rigorously condemned, to get the constitutionalist Bibulus elected as his colleague. He allowed Cicero to persuade him that he should swear to uphold a land law of Caesar’s, on the grounds that otherwise he was likely to be exiled and “even if Cato did not need Rome, still Rome needed Cato.” He would not declare Clodius’s legislation as tribune invalid, though there was good reason for doing so, because then his own work in Cyprus would be annulled. Clodius had boasted at the time that in giving Cato the commission he had “torn out his tongue,” and it was true: Cato had been embarrassingly compromised. But once he was dead all such lapses were forgotten. The noisy, obstreperous troublemaker was magnified into a figure of marmoreal grandeur and serenity. The inveterate opponent of great men was himself accorded greatness.

  The process of his exaltation began within minutes of his death. The news of his suicide spread through the town. The people of Utica, whom he had twice saved from massacre, assembled outside his house, along with the remaining Romans. Caesar was fast approaching but, uncowed, they gave his adversary an honorable funeral. Cato’s body, splendidly dressed (as it had never been in life), was carried at the head of a solemn procession to the seashore, where it was buried. When Caesar arrived to accept the Uticans’ surrender, he exclaimed, “O Cato, I begrudge you your death; for you begrudged me the sparing of your life.” Perhaps he meant that he would have been proud to act rightly towards such a paragon of righteousness; m
ore likely he felt, as Cato did, that Cato’s submission would have been an abject defeat, and his mercy the cruelest and most satisfying of victories. But Cato had eluded him. As Seneca triumphantly declared, “All the world has fallen under one man’s sway, yet Cato has a way of escape: with one single hand he opens a wide path to freedom.”

  Dead, he would prove every bit as troublesome to Caesar as he had been when living. A painted placard depicting him tearing himself apart “like a wild animal” was carried in the triumph Caesar celebrated on returning to Rome. The gruesome image’s effect was the opposite of that intended: instead of exulting in the death of Caesar’s most inflexible opponent, the crowd groaned and muttered as it passed. Brutus wrote and published a eulogy to Cato. So, showing a degree of political courage unusual for him, did Cicero. Caesar commissioned his loyal historian Hirtius to reply to them in a text, now lost, which belittled Cato’s virtues and catalogued his failings. This literary controversy over a dead man’s reputation masked a more dangerous debate over his living enemy’s claim to power: Caesar clearly considered it absolutely necessary to his own security that Cato be discredited. Unsatisfied with Hirtius’s effort he wrote his own Anti-Cato, a pamphlet so extravagantly vitriolic that it defeated its own object. The allegations he made in it were luridly exaggerated. He accused Cato of financial greed and dishonesty, of sexual depravity and of laziness. He wrote that Cato had sieved the ashes from the funeral pyre of his much-loved brother in a search for gold, that he came drunk to the courts, and that he had an incestuous relationship with his sister Servilia (a particularly self-damaging accusation this—Servilia was actually Caesar’s mistress). He was not believed. Cicero thought the pamphlet had greatly enhanced Cato’s posthumous reputation, presumably by making manifest the hatred and fear he had inspired in his great opponent.

  Cato’s influence persisted, and grew deadly. Plutarch relates that when Cato was taken as a boy to the house of the dictator Sulla he asked his tutor, “Why didst thou not give me a sword, that I might slay this man and set my country free from slavery?” Whether or not Cato the child ever said such a thing, Cato the man never advocated or condoned the use of violence as a political tool. But though in life he had staunchly defended the forms of law against the summary use of force, in his afterlife he became the presiding genius of a political movement aimed at an act of lethal violence. Cato had initiated the opposition to Caesar, and that opposition achieved its end on the Ides of March, brought to a murderous conclusion by Brutus, Cato’s nephew and son-in-law who, according to Plutarch, admired Cato “more than any other Roman.”

  Caesar was killed, but the Caesarean dynasty survived and flourished and Cato, who had made his name in opposition, flourished with it, growing ever greater in the Romans’ collective memory. Cicero, who in his lifetime had found him an awkward colleague, paid tribute to him after his death in reverential terms as a “god-like and unique man” who had “remained ever true to his purpose and fixed resolve.” To Horace, who was nineteen when Cato died, he was the model of the just man, even of manhood itself.

  His posthumous exaltation had a philosophical basis. He became the exemplar of the increasingly influential ideal of Stoic virtue. In the fifth century BC Socrates had taught that nothing can harm the good man. To one whose mind is on eternal verities, no material loss, not even the loss of life itself, is of any consequence. In Plato’s Phaedo, the book Cato chose to read three times on the last night of his life, Socrates explains that since a wise man’s ultimate goal must be to free himself from his body, which “fills us with loves, desires and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything,” he need dread no bodily harm. Death, which will free him to apprehend more clearly the ideas of which the things of this world are merely dim reflections, is actually desirable. When Cato rebuked his friends for hiding his sword and thus seeking to make him “cast away those good old opinions and arguments which have been part of our lives,” these are the sort of arguments to which he referred.

  The wise man had no fear. Indeed, the wisest had few emotions of any kind. Plato, synthesizing in The Republic the teachings of Socrates with the example of Sparta, promulgated an ideal of the impassive hero. Homer’s heroes raged and wept, mourning each other’s deaths and openly declaring the terror they felt at the prospect of their own. To Plato, the admirer of Spartan discipline and self-repression, they seemed contemptible. His decision to ban poets from his ideal republic was motivated partly by his revulsion from Homer’s extended description of Achilles’ lamentation for Patroclus. No hero (even Plato could not deny Achilles that status) should be seen to express himself with so little restraint, such a lack of the self-mastery which to Plato was the essential prerequisite not only of dignity but also of virtue.

  Drawing on Socrates and Plato and on the mystic traditions of the Orphics and Pythagoreans, the Stoics, whose philosophy first evolved under that name in Athens in the second century BC, elaborated their vision of the wise man. The wise man hopes for nothing and therefore is delivered from all fear of disappointment. Desire, ambition, even human love are to be shunned. To ask for nothing is to render oneself invulnerable. That was the condition which Cato was judged to have achieved. When Seneca, writing some fifty years after his death, wished to answer the objection that the Stoic “wise man” was a chimera, he had only to point to Cato. “I almost think he surpasses our ideal.”

  In life Cato was a student of philosophy. Cicero reports that he had “a voracious appetite for reading.” An early riser, he would always bring a book with him to the Senate and sit studying it until his fellow senators were assembled. In late Roman and medieval texts he is referred to as “Cato the philosopher,” meaning not that he left behind him a body of written work (he didn’t) but that he liked to ponder the profound and difficult questions with which philosophy is concerned. When he was granted leave of absence during his term as military tribune he took ship to Pergamum expressly in order to meet the celebrated philosopher Athenodorus and invite the old man to live with him thereafter. Back in Rome he sought out teachers and readers of philosophy, several of whom received his patronage. Even in Utica, in the last two terrible days of his life, he found time to confer with the two sages, one a Stoic, one a Peripatetic, who were attached to his household there.

  What he learned he practiced. He went barefoot and inadequately dressed in all weathers not only to harden his body but also in order to train his spirit, “accustoming himself to be ashamed only of what was really shameful.” What seemed to most of his contemporaries to be a lack of dignity and decorum in his appearance was a self-imposed penance, a spiritual exercise. He was, wrote Cicero, “endowed by nature with an austerity beyond belief.”

  He controlled his emotions as severely as he disciplined his body. For the Stoic a man, to be truly admirable, truly heroic, must appear to be totally insensible. Seneca, the great Roman exponent of Stoicism, was full of admiration for Socrates because neither prison nor poison could “even affect the expression on his face.” Cato, likewise, was never seen to laugh (although Plutarch, who may have seen the humorous side of the paragon’s humorlessness, reports that “once in a while he relaxed his features so far as to smile”). His wonderful impassivity became proverbial. When, in 62 BC, he was the only senator who dared oppose Pompey’s recall to Rome, the people of his household kept watch the night before the crucial vote as though awaiting an execution, but Cato himself ate a hearty supper and slept soundly. When, in 52 BC, he was defeated in the election for consul he showed no sign of disappointment or humiliation. It was customary for unsuccessful candidates to retire at least temporarily from public view, but Cato passed the rest of the day playing ball in the Field of Mars and strolling with his friends in the Forum, barefoot and bizarrely underdressed as usual. Seneca wrote indignantly, about those who had dared abuse him, “He had to endure the vile language and spittle and all the other insults of a maddene
d crowd,” but noted that Cato himself was oblivious to petty indignities. “He is a great and noble man who acts as does the lordly wild beast that listens unconcernedly to the baying of tiny dogs.” Horace described him as being so sure of his righteousness and so tenacious of his purpose that “were the sky itself to fracture and collapse / the wreckage would immolate him unafraid.”

  The emotional frigidity which seemed so marvelous to his Stoic admirers affected even Cato’s most intimate relationships. His first wife bore him two children before he divorced her on grounds of adultery. His second, Marcia, was the occasion of his most controversial act of self-denial. Their marriage appears to have been a satisfactory one. But while Marcia was pregnant with their third child a brilliant advocate named Hortensius, who was Cicero’s only rival in the courts and who, as a fellow supporter of senatorial authority, was a valuable political ally of Cato’s, expressed a desire to be more nearly related to him. Specifically he wished his heirs to be of Cato’s family. He asked Cato to give him his daughter Portia “as noble soil for the production of children.” Cato demurred: Portia was already married. Hortensius persevered. He would give Portia back to her original husband, he said, once she had borne him a child. Still Cato refused. Hortensius then asked for Marcia, “since she was still young enough to bear children and Cato had heirs enough.” Cato, having conferred with his father-in-law (but not, as far as is recorded, with Marcia herself), consented, attended the wedding, and gave away the bride.

  The story has shocked the majority of subsequent commentators. After Hortensius’s death Cato remarried Marcia, who had been left an extremely rich widow, thus laying himself open to Julius Caesar’s accusation of fortune hunting: “The woman was set as a bait for Hortensius, and lent by Cato when she was young that he might take her back when she was rich.” To most of his contemporaries though, it was obvious that to accuse Cato of financial greed was as absurd as accusing Hercules of cowardice. Other charges are less easy to refute. Tertullian, writing in the third century, thought the transaction “vile,” as emotionally repellent as it was morally reprehensible. Seneca wrote approvingly that Cato once expressed a regret at having been so weak as to have kissed his wife. To later generations it was the regret, not the kiss, that seemed reprehensible. Robert Graves (who translated Lucan) accurately pointed out that both Cato and Hortensius were treating Marcia as though she were no more worthy of consideration than a brood mare. But distasteful though the story may be, alike to a Father of the Church or to a post-Romantic, postfeminist modern reader, it is consistent with the rest of Cato’s ethical code.