Heroes: A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In The Republic Plato proposes that there should be no exclusive marriage among the elite. Instead “all the women are to be shared among all the men,” and sexual intercourse is to be carefully controlled (as it was in Sparta) to ensure that only the fittest breed. Even Plato’s Socrates is aware that this proposal is likely to cause an uproar, but it was consistent with the Platonic rejection of the worldly, physical love of one individual for another, in favor of the transcendental rapture Socrates describes in the Symposium. The Stoic philosophers elaborate the point. To the Stoic all human relationships, as well as the possession of worldly things, were temporary and provisional, not be invested with too much emotional intensity. A beloved person or object should be “taken care of as a thing that is not your own, as travellers treat their inn.” Love is a weakness, and an expectation of sexual fidelity a form of avarice. In so coolly giving up Marcia, Cato was acting, according to his lights, with admirable detachment, as a number of subsequent commentators have understood. The Alexandrian historian Appian, writing in the second century AD, praised Cato for the “high-souled philosophy” of which he gave evidence when he gave away his wife, despite being extremely fond of her. Even the early-twentieth-century historian Sir Charles Oman, who found the story illustrative of “Roman morals in the aspect which appears most unlovely to us,” conceded that it was also “surely the most extraordinary instance of altruism known.”

  A man unswayed by any emotion is as unalterable as a god. Socrates identifies consistency as the primary attribute of the deity. Among Plato’s complaints against the poets was the charge that they represent the gods as sometimes mourning, sometimes rejoicing, whereas it was his belief that “whether acting or speaking, God is entirely uniform and truthful.” Similarly to the Stoics it was the mark of the godlike wise man that, because his actions are determined by absolute moral principles, his behavior never varied. Cato, who never courted favor nor showed fear, awed his contemporaries by knowing his own mind and never changing it. As a boy he had been slow to learn, or, rather, slow to accept received ideas until he had thoroughly examined them and persuaded himself of their truth, “but what he once comprehended he held fast.” As an adult he was equally dogged in his adherence to his notions of rectitude. At a dinner party once he diced for the first choice among the dishes. When he lost his host urged him to help himself anyway, but he refused. Even such a trivial and frivolous piece of cheating was repugnant to him. For Cato, everything was serious. He was slow to anger but “once angered he was inexorable.” “No-one,” wrote Seneca, “ever saw a change in Cato.”

  Paragon of Stoic virtue, the dead Cato was also a potent and usefully malleable political figurehead. He became the posthumous patron of numerous causes which the living Cato might well have found dubious. The process began early. The emperor Augustus, Caesar’s heir, attempted to lay claim to some of the glory of Caesar’s adversary. He wrote a biography of Cato, which he read aloud to friends, in which he suggested that his rival for power, Marcus Antonius, was as dangerously ambitious as Caesar had been while he himself, like Cato before him, represented legitimacy and good government. According to Macrobius, Augustus once visited Cato’s house and, when one of his companions made a disparaging remark about the dead republican hero, reproved him saying, “Whoever wishes to preserve the state in its present form is a good citizen and a good man.” Cato’s virtue was thus co-opted into the service of the Caesarean revolution he had died opposing.

  More appropriately Caesar’s adversary became the model for those (many of them Stoics) who resisted Caesar’s tyrannical successors. Pliny reports that prominent Romans critical of the emperors identified themselves by displaying busts of Cato in their houses. In death Cato not only grew, he changed as well, his iconic significance shifting until it became almost the direct opposite of what it had once been. In his lifetime, a period of political disorder so extreme as to foster a widespread yearning for stability, he had been revered as one who stood for legitimacy, tradition, and the scrupulous preservation of established institutions against the rampant individualism of his ambitious contemporaries. Afterwards, under emperors whose authority was all too brutally well established, he was idealized as the champion of an abstraction of which—legalist and conservative that he was—he would have heartily disapproved: that of liberty.

  In the middle of the first century AD, when the emperor Nero turned cruelly on his opponents, one of his most outspoken critics was Thrasea Paetus. Thrasea wrote a biography of Cato, which the persecuted read to gain courage from Cato’s example, rather as Cato himself had fortified himself for his own death by reading of Socrates’. Thrasea’s story parallels Cato’s. He too was a comparatively junior senator who became the most influential advocate of senatorial authority. His “grim and gloomy manner” was a tacit rebuke to Nero’s self-indulgence, just as Cato by his austere example once shamed his frivolous fellow aristocrats. The informer who brought about his death told the emperor, “As this faction-loving country once talked of Caesar versus Cato, so now, Nero, it talks of you versus Thrasea.” On the night of his death Thrasea was in his garden, engaging, like Cato, in a philosophical discussion. When a quaestor arrived with his death warrant, he calmly dismissed his friends and invited the quaestor to watch while he slit his wrists, saying, “Look, young man! For you have been born into an age when examples of fortitude may be a useful support.” Just such an example was that of Cato: Haterius, another of Nero’s victims, described him as “a model for living and for dying.”

  The two authors who did most to ensure Cato’s immortality also lost their lives under Nero. Seneca, who so venerated Cato, was Nero’s tutor and chief minister until, appalled by the emperor’s despotism, he conspired to kill him. One of his fellow conspirators was his nephew, the poet Lucan, in whose epic account of the civil war, Pharsalia, Cato is celebrated as a figure of somber grandeur and sublime goodness. When their plot was discovered both Seneca and Lucan were compelled to kill themselves. Their works lived on, Seneca’s essays especially being among the Latin texts most widely read and admired in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and Cato’s image lived on in them, stern, selfless, incorruptible, superhuman. To Seneca, Cato was the epitome of republican virtue and the incarnation of the utopian ideal which the republic became in the imagination of those who lived after its ending. “The two whom heaven willed should never part were blotted out together,” wrote Seneca. “For Cato did not survive freedom, nor freedom Cato.” To Lucan, Cato was an even more exalted figure. “One day,” he wrote, “when we are finally freed from slavery, if ever that should be, Cato will be deified, and Rome will have a god by whose name it need not be ashamed to swear.”

  The Cato Lucan describes in Pharsalia is a man of sorrows, but one whom no amount of grief or suffering can daunt. The most vivid and fantastical part of the poem’s narrative is that describing the march on which Cato led his troops through the North African desert to rendezvous with Scipio and King Juba. As Plutarch tells it, the journey was not so terribly difficult: Cato, always the conscientious manager, had prepared prudently by bringing along herds of cattle and a great number of asses to carry water. Strabo, writing only three decades after the event and knowing North Africa, believed the march to have taken four weeks. But Lucan extends the ordeal for months during which the sun never ceases to beat cruelly down, there is nothing to eat but sand, and the desert is swarming with deadly serpents whose shapes are bizarre and whose venom causes men to die macabre and terrible deaths. One soldier swells up until he is no longer recognizable as a human being. Another dissolves, leaving only a puddle of stinking slime. Through all these terrors Lucan’s Cato—austere, great-hearted, of adamantine resolution—remains unafraid. Every night he keeps watch, sitting on the bare ground. He endures sandstorms, heat, and thirst without complaining. He is an inspirational example of courage and self-control: “With Cato’s eye on him no soldier dared utter a groan.” When at last his army reaches a water hole and a soldier hands him
a helmet full of water he is furious at the supposition that he might be so weak as to accept. “How dare you insult me,” he roars. The only occasion on which he is the first to drink is one when the well is infested with serpents. Each time a soldier succumbs to snakebite Cato is beside him as he dies, “conferring on the victim a greater gift than life, the courage to die nobly.”

  Achilles was prepared to give his life to buy himself such praise from posterity. The pursuit of glory seemed to most of the thinkers of pagan antiquity proper and praiseworthy, and that glory was inseparable from fame. “It behoves all men,” wrote Sallust, Cato’s contemporary, “not to pass through life unheralded, like the beasts which Nature has fashioned grovelling and slave to the belly.” Only ambition, a craving for celebrity which Sallust called “a fault not so far removed from being a virtue,” could impel a man to transcend his degraded, animal nature, to live a life which amounted to something more than a ceaseless round of consumption and excretion, of futile exercise and sleep. For a Roman as for a Greek, fame offered the best hope of immortality. Plato’s Socrates argued for the existence of an undying soul and Cato comforted himself with his theory but to most Romans, as to most Athenians, the afterlife was shadowy and uncertain. Only a great name was certain to endure. “The span of life which we enjoy is short,” wrote Sallust. “It is fitting we may make the memory of our lives as long as possible.” It was a token of Cato’s oddity, one repeatedly remarked upon by his contemporaries, that he seemed careless of his reputation, that he actually rejected honors and memorials which would have assured him a place in posterity’s life-preserving consciousness.

  After he returned from Cyprus in 57 BC he declined the right to wear a purple-bordered robe in the theater. Throughout his career he avoided any kind of show of his status, a self-denial for which, in his lifetime, he was as often mocked as admired. He repeatedly refused presents—valuable gifts which were offered partly as bribes but also as acknowledgments of the receiver’s status. When he assumed responsibility for the management of theatrical spectacles he used to give the actors not crowns of gold, as was customary, but wreaths of wild olive, and he presented them with figs and lettuces and bundles of firewood rather than the usual ostentatious gifts. (“One trusts,” remarked Sir Charles Oman dryly, “that he remembered the difference when settling their salaries.”) His reputation was tremendous but it grew without his fostering it. “That to which Cato gave least thought was his in greatest measure, namely esteem, favour, surpassing honour,” wrote Plutarch.

  This carelessness of his seemed, to all the ancient commentators, remarkable. Dio Cassius, in summarizing his career, marveled that what he did he did “not with a view to power or glory or any honour, but solely for the sake of a life of independence, free from the dictation of tyrants.” He was free as well from the need to please either the public or posterity. Achilles’ glory existed only in the minds of the “men who come after.” Julius Caesar’s greatness was determined by his popularity. But Cato, indifferent to the opinion of others, guided only by the requirement of his self-respect, was in need of nobody’s endorsement. “He preferred rather to be than to seem virtuous,” wrote Sallust. “Hence the less he sought fame, the more it pursued him.”

  Frugality seems to have come naturally to him, and his distaste for pompous ostentation was something he shared with other members of the grand old republican families contemptuous of the vulgar new tycoons who came back from the colonies to make a spectacle of their wealth in Rome. But his deliberate underdressing, his exaggerated displays of modesty were not only the expression of his personality and his class-determined preferences, it was also a political performance, a kind of theater of poverty, a humble act with a proud subtext. By disdaining to parade his wealth as others did he, like his great-grandfather, was laying claim to something more illustrious, the high virtues of the fathers of the republic. His parsimony was pointed: “Cato did all this in disparagement of the usual practice,” writes Plutarch. This was the period when all Gaul was bleeding to pay for the building program with which Caesar hoped to rival Pompey, and when at Caesar’s games every gladiator wore armor of solid silver. In the short term Cato’s indifference to fame and refusal of magnificence had a specific political significance.

  In the longer term, after his death, they acquired a spiritual one, rendering Cato easily assimilable to the newfangled Christian valorization of self-denial and unworldliness. To Velleius Paterculus, Cato “resembled Virtue herself, and in all his acts he revealed a character nearer to that of gods than men.” The gods whom Cato resembles are no longer the highhanded amoral deities of the Homeric cosmos but beings of unsullied righteousness, beings not unlike the Jewish prophet of whose crucifixion Pontius Pilate had washed his hands only a few years before Velleius Paterculus wrote his history.

  In several of the key scenes in the drama of his life Cato plays a role which with hindsight was found to be rich in Christian associations. His opponents are conquerors and plutocrats, their greatness in the eyes of the world based on acts of aggression and self-aggrandizement. They cherish their honor, which they measure in terms of public recognition. They are proud of it and fiery in its defense: it was to protect his dignitas, wrote Caesar, that he crossed the Rubicon and plunged Rome into war. They display their wealth as though there were a virtue in the accumulation of gold. Cato is—or at least appears to be—their opposite.

  Cato was a rich man and a member of Rome’s ruling class, but he acted poor and he conducted himself like an outsider. He is the little man, vulnerable but unafraid, who dares oppose the great ones of the earth. Dressed in clothes humble to the point of unseemliness he enters the Forum poorly attended. Unarmed and unprotected he confronts gangs of sword-wielding gladiators. He is mocked and manhandled. He is spat upon and hauled off to prison. He bears his persecution patiently. His way is the way of nonviolent resistance: bullied and threatened he stands his ground, not fighting back but speaking out, shaming his persecutors with his tenacity and his courage, opposing their might with his righteousness. He is David to Caesar’s Goliath, and like David he is easily understood to be a forerunner of Christ. Whatever Cato would have thought of Christianity, there were many reasons why Christians found his story congenial, and why they agreed that he was among the best of the pagans. His disdain for fame won their approval. As St. Augustine pointed out, most Romans burned to possess a glory which was defined by the “favourable judgement of men.” How much better, how much more Christian, to aspire to virtue, as Cato apparently did, for its own sake! Even the equanimity with which he handed over his wife could be reconciled with Christian doctrine. Had not Christ taught that the love of one’s family must cede first place to one’s love for God?

  Best of all, he died. St. Augustine compared him with Regulus, another admirable pagan. A Roman general of the third century BC, Regulus was taken prisoner by the Carthaginians and then sent back to Rome on parole to negotiate peace terms on his captors’ behalf. Ever loyal to Rome, he advised the Senate to reject the Carthaginian terms. Then, although he knew that he was going back to certain torture and death, he insisted on keeping his word and returning to Carthage. Just so had Cato refused to save himself from the death that was coming to him. And just so had Jesus ridden into Jerusalem, and into the hands of his enemies, on Palm Sunday. “People commit suicide,” wrote Lucretius in Cato’s lifetime, “because they are afraid of dying.” Cato was afraid of nothing, but in taking his life he assured himself of a life to come. When Manlius Boethius, the fifth-century Roman interpreter of Plato’s philosophy who was posthumously revered as a Christian saint, wrote of “undefeated, death-defeating Cato,” he was conflating two concepts derived from opposed ethical cultures. As an ancient pagan Cato was undefeated. He refused to ask for Caesar’s clemency because his pride as a Roman forbade him to adopt the posture of the conquered. But it was as a proto–Christian that he was death-defeating because in dying he attained immortality, as Christ did and as his followers believed they
would.

  There was, though, a problem. Cato was not executed as Jesus was. He was not even, like Socrates, compelled to kill himself. He committed suicide of his own free will, and suicide was a sin. It was not only Christians who thought so. In the Phaedo Socrates reviews the case against taking one’s own life. He rejects the Orphic concepts of earthly life as a punishment which we do not have the right to dodge, or a prison from which it is cowardly to escape, but he endorses the idea that we are the possessions of the gods, and that to do away with ourselves is to steal from our masters. In general, therefore, Socrates concludes that suicide is to be condemned. But when God sends “some necessary circumstance”—like the death sentence facing Socrates himself—then the philosopher will welcome his release for “if a man has trained himself throughout his life to live in a state as close as possible to death, would it not be ridiculous for him to be distressed when death comes to him?”