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” of his fellow officers. He was without self-indulgence. Like his virtuous ancestor, who “never embraced his wife except when a loud peel 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 especially to ethical and political doctrines.” He trained his voice and disciplined his body not only by exercising hard but by a program 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 nomenclators, 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 a superior.”
Cato was still young, his political career had yet to begin, but he was already somebody to whom the mighty deferred. Exactly 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 which his contemporaries called “authority.”
According to Plutarch he was already a known and respected figure in his early teens. When Sulla was appointing leaders for the two teams of boys who performed the Troy Game, a ritual mock battle, one team rejected the youth appointed and clamored for Cato. In adulthood his acknowledged incorruptibility gave him a kind of power which 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 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. The constitution of republican Rome was a complicated hybrid, evolved over centuries. The state was administered by annually elected officials—in ascending order of seniority, quaestors, aediles, praetors, and consuls. The consuls, of whom two were elected at a time, each for a year’s term, had originally 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, which he would govern for an additional year.
The consuls were the senior members of the Senate, but they were not prime ministers. Each officeholder held power independently of all the rest. There might be alliances between them 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 senators were drawn from a small pool of families, of which Cato’s was one, of substantial wealth and long-established influence.
But 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—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 self-destruct. The upholders of the ancient constitution—of whom Cato was to become the most passionately committed—struggled to enforce the elaborate rules which 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 at last, and most conclusively, Julius Caesar demanded and obtained powers which 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 signaled his punctilious regard for the workings of the constitution. To most candidates the post of quaestor, the most junior magistracy, was primarily the portal whereby 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 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 and instituted 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 where “instead of modesty, 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 counterreforms 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 wa
s collected by tax farmers, who paid dearly for the right to do the job and who set the level of tribute 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 and built upon the seas”—instead of spending it honorably 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 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 nonnegotiable, 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 his 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 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.
Eccentric as Cato’s straight dealing was perceived to be, it won him a degree of respect quite disproportionate to his actual achievements. His truth telling became a byword. “When speaking of matters that were strange and incredible, people would say, as though using a proverb, ‘This is not 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 bodyguards, 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 the very heart of it. The Forum was not only parliament, law court, sports arena, theater, and place of worship. It was also, frequently, a battlefield. The temples which 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 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 which called for considerable courage.
His quaestorship over, he was an assiduous senator, always first to arrive in the morning at the Senate house and last to leave, attending every session to ensure no corrupt measure could be debated without his being there to oppose it. But in 63 BC he resolved to take a reading holiday. He set off for his country estate, accompanied by a group of his favorite philosophers and several donkeys 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.
The republic, he thought, was in imminent danger. 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 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 sulfurous reputation hadn’t 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, blocked 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 burned-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 brought 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’s 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 Capitol hill with sideshows. In Alcibiades’ lifetime Plato had warned that “any politician who seeks 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 th
e law’s defiance.
When only twenty-three Pompey 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 not previously held an 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 to the passage of a law granting Pompey extraordinary and unprecedented powers to rid the eastern Mediterranean of pirates. In the following year another tribune had proposed he 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 which could be used to buy power. Besides, military commanders had armies, as 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.
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