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Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
" Cato, history's most famous foe of authoritarian power , was the pivotal political man of Rome; an inspiration to our Founding Fathers; and a cautionary figure for our times. He loved Roman republicanism, but saw himself as too principled for the mere politics that might have saved it. His life and lessons are urgently relevant in the harshly divided America―and world―of today. With erudition and verve, Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni turn their life of Cato into the most modern of biographies, a blend of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Game Change ."―Howard Fineman, Editorial Director of The Huffington Post Media Group, NBC and MSNBC News Analyst, and New York Times bestselling author of The Thirteen American Arguments
" A truly outstanding piece of work. What most impresses me is the book's ability to reach through the confusing dynastic politics of the late Roman Republic to present social realities in a way intelligible to the modern reader. Rome's Last Citizen entertainingly restores to life the stoic Roman who inspired George Washington, Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale. This is more than a it is a study of how a reputation lasted through the centuries from the end of one republic to the start of another."―David Frum, DailyBeast columnist, former White House speech writer, and New York Times bestselling author of The Right Man
Marcus Porcius aristocrat who walked barefoot and slept on the ground with his troops, political heavyweight who cultivated the image of a Stoic philosopher, a hardnosed defender of tradition who presented himself as a man out of the sacred Roman past―and the last man standing when Rome's Republic fell to tyranny. His blood feud with Caesar began in the chamber of the Senate, played out on the battlefields of a world war, and ended when he took his own life rather than live under a dictator.
Centuries of thinkers, writers, and artists have drawn inspiration from Cato's Stoic courage. Saint Augustine and the early Christians were moved and challenged by his example. Dante, in his Divine Comedy , chose Cato to preside over the souls who arrive in Purgatory. George Washington so revered him that he staged a play on Cato's life to revive the spirit of his troops at Valley Forge. Now, in Rome's Last Citizen , Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni deliver the first modern biography of this stirring figure.
Cato's life is a gripping tale that resonates deeply with our own turbulent times. He grappled with terrorists, a debt crisis, endemic political corruption, and a huge gulf between the elites and those they governed. In many ways, Cato was the ultimate man of principle―he even chose suicide rather than be used by Caesar as a political pawn. But Cato was also a political his stubbornness sealed his and Rome's defeat, and his lonely end casts a shadow on the recurring hope that a singular leader can transcend the dirty business of politics.
Rome's Last Citizen is a timeless story of an uncompromising man in a time of crisis and his lifelong battle to save the Republic.
" A truly outstanding piece of work. What most impresses me is the book's ability to reach through the confusing dynastic politics of the late Roman Republic to present social realities in a way intelligible to the modern reader. Rome's Last Citizen entertainingly restores to life the stoic Roman who inspired George Washington, Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale. This is more than a it is a study of how a reputation lasted through the centuries from the end of one republic to the start of another."―David Frum, DailyBeast columnist, former White House speech writer, and New York Times bestselling author of The Right Man
Marcus Porcius aristocrat who walked barefoot and slept on the ground with his troops, political heavyweight who cultivated the image of a Stoic philosopher, a hardnosed defender of tradition who presented himself as a man out of the sacred Roman past―and the last man standing when Rome's Republic fell to tyranny. His blood feud with Caesar began in the chamber of the Senate, played out on the battlefields of a world war, and ended when he took his own life rather than live under a dictator.
Centuries of thinkers, writers, and artists have drawn inspiration from Cato's Stoic courage. Saint Augustine and the early Christians were moved and challenged by his example. Dante, in his Divine Comedy , chose Cato to preside over the souls who arrive in Purgatory. George Washington so revered him that he staged a play on Cato's life to revive the spirit of his troops at Valley Forge. Now, in Rome's Last Citizen , Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni deliver the first modern biography of this stirring figure.
Cato's life is a gripping tale that resonates deeply with our own turbulent times. He grappled with terrorists, a debt crisis, endemic political corruption, and a huge gulf between the elites and those they governed. In many ways, Cato was the ultimate man of principle―he even chose suicide rather than be used by Caesar as a political pawn. But Cato was also a political his stubbornness sealed his and Rome's defeat, and his lonely end casts a shadow on the recurring hope that a singular leader can transcend the dirty business of politics.
Rome's Last Citizen is a timeless story of an uncompromising man in a time of crisis and his lifelong battle to save the Republic.
366 pages, Paperback
First published October 16, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 127 reviews
July 31, 2013
Two disclaimers: I know and like Rob Goodman (he was my student for two years) and I am a Latin teacher, so both of these factors probably made me more favorably disposed towards this book from the get-go. That said, I found this biography of Cato the Younger really informative and readable. I especially appreciated that second piece: "readable." I am tired of scholarly works that get so bogged down in specialized terminology or biographies that forget that you can make even the most fascinating life seem boring if you pile on enough irrelevant details. Rob and Jimmy have created a portrait of the man that brings him to life fully immersed in his time without assuming that you know everything there is to know about 1st century BCE Roman history or, on the other hand, assuming that you can't find Rome on the globe. This is the perfect work for a student (high school or older) with some background in Roman history, a Latin teacher who, like myself, has a solid knowledge of the period but doesn't know much about Cato, or the general reader of history who's looking for the story of a man who played a crucial role in a critical moment in Western history.
If you want to read gripes about how Rob and Jimmy are not professional academics, check out the reviews on amazon.com. For my part, I would strongly recommend this biography - it's educational AND a page-turner.
If you want to read gripes about how Rob and Jimmy are not professional academics, check out the reviews on amazon.com. For my part, I would strongly recommend this biography - it's educational AND a page-turner.
January 11, 2013
This is an impressive work of popular history, focusing on the life and times of one of Rome's strangest politicians.
Cato the Younger was the great-grandson of the famously puritanical Cato the Elder (he of "Carthago delenda est" fame, or however it goes.) Growing up in the shadow of his great ancestor's reputation, and following his own proclivities toward abstention and self-denial, he became an acolyte of Stoic philosophy and adopted a wide range of extremely eccentric behaviours, from wearing and outdated and simple toga to refusing to wear shoes. The authors liken this to a modern senator showing up in 18th century costume to a regular day's business.
The real strength of the book is the careful yet lively accounts of Rome's political battles in the tumultuous decades of the late republic. This is a story we've all seen or read parts of, but it's a complex and confusing tale of shifting alliances and unfamiliar institutions. I've read a fair number of contemporary histories as well as modern accounts of the same period, and this one does an extremely good job of threading a coherent path through the chaos of events. The authors wisely skim over some of the weirder political machinations (Julius Caesar's ploy to hold office despite being pontifex maximus is given no mention) while giving fair accounts of the relevant ones, particularly Cato's strange treatment of his wife.
They also draw fewer parallels to the intransigent and politically tone-deaf conservatives of the present day than they might, but that's a good decision. It lets the reader decide to what extent history is repeating itself, or perhaps merely rhyming.
If you have an interest in late republican Roman history--and really, anyone who is interested in the struggles of democracy in the present day ought to be--this is an excellent book for both neophytes and relatively knowledgeable readers.
Cato the Younger was the great-grandson of the famously puritanical Cato the Elder (he of "Carthago delenda est" fame, or however it goes.) Growing up in the shadow of his great ancestor's reputation, and following his own proclivities toward abstention and self-denial, he became an acolyte of Stoic philosophy and adopted a wide range of extremely eccentric behaviours, from wearing and outdated and simple toga to refusing to wear shoes. The authors liken this to a modern senator showing up in 18th century costume to a regular day's business.
The real strength of the book is the careful yet lively accounts of Rome's political battles in the tumultuous decades of the late republic. This is a story we've all seen or read parts of, but it's a complex and confusing tale of shifting alliances and unfamiliar institutions. I've read a fair number of contemporary histories as well as modern accounts of the same period, and this one does an extremely good job of threading a coherent path through the chaos of events. The authors wisely skim over some of the weirder political machinations (Julius Caesar's ploy to hold office despite being pontifex maximus is given no mention) while giving fair accounts of the relevant ones, particularly Cato's strange treatment of his wife.
They also draw fewer parallels to the intransigent and politically tone-deaf conservatives of the present day than they might, but that's a good decision. It lets the reader decide to what extent history is repeating itself, or perhaps merely rhyming.
If you have an interest in late republican Roman history--and really, anyone who is interested in the struggles of democracy in the present day ought to be--this is an excellent book for both neophytes and relatively knowledgeable readers.
June 23, 2017
A great biography of the forgotten man of the Republic's last days. Cato didn't leave us stacks of letters and speeches like Cicero; he didn't leave us third-person editions of his diary like Caesar. The standard pop history version of the story is all about Caesar and Pompey, with some timely mentions of Cicero, and the occasional aside that there was this guy named Cato who was important at the time too--but good luck getting many details of his life and career.
What I love about this biography is that the authors don't let the paucity of sources stop them from helping us get to know Cato. So instead of bemoaning all the things we don't know, they do an outstanding job of contextualizing Cato and showing the reader how he relates to all the other major players in the era--Sulla, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Catiline, Caesar, Clodius, etc. The ups and downs of the relationship with Cicero are a highlight, but I'd say the two most compelling, interesting sections relate to how Cato's actions led to the formation of the First Triumvirate, and then the role Cato played in Pompey's decision to fight for the Republic against Caesar a decade later. With regards to the first, the standard line is that each of the three had things they couldn't get, and so banded together to achieve their goals; what is left out is that it is Cato specifically who is standing in the way for all three. And again a decade later, Pompey's break with Caesar is often something of a black box--he goes in friendly, then Julia dies and at some point he changes sides; here, we see the role Cato played in both attacking Pompey and also bringing him over.
The later discussions of Cato as a symbol after his death are also great--this is a man who seems like he was always destined to be more powerful as a symbol than as a man, and the twists and turns of how groups used Cato throughout history are fascinating, especially the 18th century tragedy that was claimed by both sides of the aisle in Britain. I'm also glad the authors resist the urge to get into discussions of contemporary politics (they imply it a bit in the introduction, but never really get into it in the text), which I think would distract attention from the real subject of this piece and inevitably oversimplify the legacy and meaning of a complex character.
I find Cato a fascinating figure, the ultimate "Means Justify the Ends" guy, doing the right thing even though it leads to his destruction. It's tragic as you can see what's coming, how breaking his code in just a few places could have changed the history of the Republic--but then he wouldn't have been Cato.
What I love about this biography is that the authors don't let the paucity of sources stop them from helping us get to know Cato. So instead of bemoaning all the things we don't know, they do an outstanding job of contextualizing Cato and showing the reader how he relates to all the other major players in the era--Sulla, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Catiline, Caesar, Clodius, etc. The ups and downs of the relationship with Cicero are a highlight, but I'd say the two most compelling, interesting sections relate to how Cato's actions led to the formation of the First Triumvirate, and then the role Cato played in Pompey's decision to fight for the Republic against Caesar a decade later. With regards to the first, the standard line is that each of the three had things they couldn't get, and so banded together to achieve their goals; what is left out is that it is Cato specifically who is standing in the way for all three. And again a decade later, Pompey's break with Caesar is often something of a black box--he goes in friendly, then Julia dies and at some point he changes sides; here, we see the role Cato played in both attacking Pompey and also bringing him over.
The later discussions of Cato as a symbol after his death are also great--this is a man who seems like he was always destined to be more powerful as a symbol than as a man, and the twists and turns of how groups used Cato throughout history are fascinating, especially the 18th century tragedy that was claimed by both sides of the aisle in Britain. I'm also glad the authors resist the urge to get into discussions of contemporary politics (they imply it a bit in the introduction, but never really get into it in the text), which I think would distract attention from the real subject of this piece and inevitably oversimplify the legacy and meaning of a complex character.
I find Cato a fascinating figure, the ultimate "Means Justify the Ends" guy, doing the right thing even though it leads to his destruction. It's tragic as you can see what's coming, how breaking his code in just a few places could have changed the history of the Republic--but then he wouldn't have been Cato.
May 4, 2024
Fascinating biography of Cato the Younger, overlooked in our days but such a great influence on history, especially that of the U.S. No, he was not a "democrat" [not the political party but the general idea] as we understand it, but tried to hold on to the idea of "libertas" [freedom] and the Roman Republic, which were slipping away in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, autocrats both. Rather than live under Caesar, in Utica on the African coast, he kills himself, a gruesome drawn-out death as described by Plutarch. A nugget of information I found that I had not known before--every American schoolchild knows the stirring words of Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale. No, they were not original with these men, but cribbed [either paraphrases or direct quotations] from Addison's Cato, a play VERY popular in the 18th century, with the theme of "death in defense of liberty". Also, the "unalienable rights" section from this play influenced the Declaration of Independence. So, who was Cato? This readable biography gives us the portrait of a stubborn man holding to his Stoic ideals, his probity and his principles, whether they agree with others' or not. All sides of the man are given, good and bad, so we can reflect on him, the lessons his life teaches, and his importance through the ages.
This quotation from Lucan describes him perfectly: "Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni" [The victorious cause was dear to the gods, the lost cause to Cato.]"
Highly recommended.
This quotation from Lucan describes him perfectly: "Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni" [The victorious cause was dear to the gods, the lost cause to Cato.]"
Highly recommended.
March 6, 2018
A well-written, if slightly breathless, biography of one of the key figures in the fall of the Roman Republic. I enjoyed this, against my expectations, despite it being shot through with the feel of speculation, assumption and opinion. It was coloured, I could not help but feel, rather strongly with authorial bias (mainly against Caesar).
But yes, I still think Cato was a bit of a dick.
But yes, I still think Cato was a bit of a dick.
January 2, 2013
An interesting book with great potential, but wildly uneven in its pacing, unclear in its narrative, helter skelter in its topic choices, and prone to far too much remote psycho-analysis. The authors take time out to explain nuances of late Republican politics that aren't relevant and skip points that are. The citations and resources are good, the use of them not so much. Still, not bad for the first biography of the man himself in 2,000 years.
August 17, 2016
In the first 4 chapters the book explores Cato's early development, and since it is impossible to do so the author explains what a typical aristocratic education would be,the changes that happened to Rome(dictators and tyrannicides,the cultural shift brought about mainly by Greek influence and the introduction of slavery after the wars with Carthage which lead to a highly dysfunctional and volatile society and army). The first few chapters also lists some notable events in the life of the Stoic philosopher including his successful defense of his families pillar in the Basilica,his meeting with the "virtual" king Pompey, and the time he was most away from his stoic principles that is when his older Brother died. Cato is praised in his time as a paradigm of virtue and is portrayed in this book as a Stoic sage.
The fifth chapter documents Cato's early career as a quaestor, a treasury bureaucrat, in which he waged an anti-corruption campaign which was successful only during his reign because it was "personality-driven reform" not one with checks and balances. This chapter also portrays Cato as a champion of the disenfranchised because he singly handedly successfully persecuted the murders during the reign of the Sulla the dictator.
In one of the best chaptersof the book the sixth chapter sees Cato elected tribune wherein he continues standing up for Rome's constitution which he had previously memorized along with Rome's laws. In a corruption case against Murena who was politically necessary for that stage in Rome's history to keep the empire from the glimpse of war Cato fails to persecute him only because his rival was equally impressive since after all he is now much more famous than Cato namely Cicero. But Cicero being the wise man he is knew that Rome was on the brink of collapse and was knowledgeable of one such conspiracy against Rome led by a thug,Catiline , who lost the elections twice despite the armies he had surrounding Rome. So Cicero made sure to make friends with Cato by praising him and Cato the elder at the end of the speech that have outperformed Cato's whether on merit or on the jurors bias remains uncertain. In any case a conspirator deflected,knowing the consequences of failed coup are dire [Spartacus], gave away locations of weapons and letters and Roman legions. Cicero has been granted dictatorial powers earlier and thus was able to simply execute them but not wanting to take on the blame he put the matter for a vote in the senate and all but Caesar were calling for an immediate death sentence. Cato was both enraged and suspicious and gave an exhilarating speech.The slave army "were aimless and leaderless;in Catiline's metaphor,the strong body still lacked a head. Caesar was deft enough to see the opportunity,and as the nephew of Marius,[he had the family ties]... At the right time,Caesar himself might be the populare's[slave army/other poor and out of work Italians] champion.With his words in the Senate,he was staking a powerful claim.With his dramatic,he was demonstrating that he would fight another day. So Cato was retrospectively justified in his suspicion of Caesar."Caesar was a war hero,a politician par excellence,a religious figure and have done everything right yet to Cato he was no match.The historian Sallust who was Caesar's partisan,when weighing the two said:
Caesar grew eminent by generosity and munificence; Cato by the integrity of his life. Caesar was esteemed for his humanity and benevolence; austerity had given dignity to Cato. Caesar acquired renown by giving, relieving, and pardoning; Cato by bestowing nothing. In Caesar, there was a refuge for the unfortunate; in Cato, destruction for the bad. In Caesar, his easiness of temper was admired; in Cato, his firmness. Caesar, in sum, had applied himself to a life of energy and activity; intent upon the interests of his friends, he was neglectful of his own; he refused nothing to others that was worthy of acceptance, while for himself he desired great power, the command of an army, and a new war in which his talents might be displayed. But Cato’s ambition was that of temperance, discretion, and, above all, of austerity; he did not contend in splendor with the rich or in faction with the seditious, but with the brave in fortitude, with the modest in simplicity, with the temperate in abstinence; he was more desirous to be, than to appear, virtuous; and thus, the less he courted popularity, the more it pursued him.
To be continued in part two.
Chapter 7 recounts Pompey's failed power grab blocked by Cato. Pompey demanded to run for consulship for a second year,a sacrilege, and to make things worse he wanted to do it in abstention,meaning he can keep his legions, and to top all that he wanted a triumphant entrance. Pompey disbanded his army and requested at least a triumphant entry which he can then capitalize to run for office but his offer was rejected.Cato also rejected an alliance with Pompey through marriage,which turned out to be a major mistake in retrospect but Cato could not foresee that three enemies will soon be allies and create a monster.
Cato could not conceive of allying himself with anyone for any reason other than a sincere and bloodless agreement on first principles. Rather than see his daughter as the means by which Pompey could be brought fully over into the optimates’[Cato's conservative faction] camp, Cato refused to make Porcia a “hostage” for Pompey’s good behavior...
What did Cato throw away with his refusal? Nothing less than the chance to integrate Rome’s greatest political force, Pompey, into the senatorial order. By Cato’s own terms for preserving the Republic, it was an unmatched, unmissable opportunity.
In another drama packed chapter called "Creating the Monster" we witness a another six month debate between Cicero and Cato. After decades of war in the east,the eastern provinces could not abide by their contracts, and so they asked for a change in the contract after it was signed. A clear violation of every principle there is. But it was something necessary,ugly nonetheless, to do in Cicero's view inorder not to alienate the rich who backed the conservatives in the Senate,like Crassus , and grow resentment in the east as Cicero would put it " “He[Cato] talks like he’s living in Plato’s Republic, not Romulus’s shit-hole.”. In any case,Cato had his way and Crassus went on to join the triumvirate.Cato contued to stand up to the power grabs by both Pompey and Caesar. As the author puts it:
But at least in politics, by the rules of the game Cato had learned so well, he could keep infuriating Rome’s most powerful men with little consequence. As long as they were trapped in the Roman ethos of competition, as long as Caesar measured himself against Pompey, as long as Pompey and Crassus held to their decade-old hatred, Cato could continue to sting each in turn, one by one. What Cato failed to imagine was that the rules could ever change.
Caesar,as consul now,proposed a spotless bill to redistribute untilthed land that would put the popularies, who were causing trouble and fueling Caesar, into work. The senators were willing to accept this bill but Cato swayed them to otherwise,seeing that this was just a power grab in disguise. Failing to go through the proper means, Caesar goes to the public assembly and passes the bill despite a veto from his co-consul and violating public holidays. All the senators were made to swear to uphold the bill save but Cato and two close allies of his. In the end Cato have in at Cicero's insistence or else he would be exiled and Rome needed him more than ever now. The first thing Caesar did is violating his own bill which went without resistance,despite the gadfly's arguments. The joke went that this year was the consulship of Julius and Caesar. Caesar also granted himself after the consulship 4 years and legions to go and conquer Gaul without them provoking an attack as was the tradition.
Chapter 9 recounts the story of a scoundrel Clodious, a patrician who made himself a pleb, to gain power and exile the two main defenders of the Republic:Cato and Cicero.With the support of the triumvirate he sent Cato to Cyprus to revenge a personal vendetta he had with a king that refused to free Clodious and thus was ravished by the pirates as a price of his freedom. And now with the support of everyone in power and a cowardly senate without its voice Cato the father of the fatherland,Cicero, was exiled.
Chapter 10 illustrates how Rome fell and all subsequent chapters are really just desperate pleas.[Rome with stood tyrants for centuries but this century was different the people wanted change because Rome itself was unjust!]. Pompey and Crassus ran for election using gladiators and even assassinations to win the election against Ahenobarbus,Cato's handpicked nominee. After much intiimidation Ahenobarbus withdrew but Cato determined to hold his feet won a lower office to try,faintly, to resist the inevitable.
The election had been so gratuitously stolen from him— with physical assault and slanderous attacks and bribes and false omens and more bribes and thugs at the polls— that Cato moved immediately to turn the theft to his advantage. He would not be praetor that year. But he could play to perfection the scorned prophet, the righteous victim. No one would ever be better cast in that role. A knot of his angry supporters gathered in protest on the edge of the Field of Mars. Cato formed them into an assembly to hear his nonconcession, and the crowd swelled— full of his ejected partisans, those supporters who had stayed at the polls to the end, and onlookers who had found the day’s best free show. Cato denounced the sham of an election and railed against Caesar and the consuls. “As if inspired from heaven, he foretold to the citizens all that would happen to their city.” And he identified that fate— the fate of the Republic and its liberty— with his own. Why, he cried, have Pompey and Crassus done this to me? Because they are afraid of me.
The author wonders why Cato with his significant influence failed to do anything? The answer the author suggests is that the Romans,who conquered every aggressor, became cowards.The first decision of the new unopposed consuls was to assign an army and governorship to each member of the triumvirate. Crassus would die soon.Cato and his faction would win the next election but it was a year too late.Cato proposed election reform that will end the farce called the election which included open bribery as common course and the bill went unopposed but the people in Rome rioted because they wanted free food in election season.
Electoral bribery was one of the few means of Roman redistribution— informal, but highly reliable. Optimates and their sympathizers might denounce the dependency of the idle, urban multitude, but few stopped to consider the system of enslaved labor that made such dependency inevitable. The Roman people were not about to give up their bribes, and neither were the ambitious senators who tacitly encouraged them.
Cato was baffled and dropped these verses of Homer
When guilty mortals break the eternal laws,
And judges bribed betray the righteous cause,
From their deep beds [Zeus] bids the rivers rise,
And opens all the flood-gates of the skies.
Chapter 11 sees what Cato always fear coming true. The anarchy that would bring the monarch came. Rome had not had a government in two years and Pompey ran yet another time and won as sole consul,only after Cato lobbied for it to be reduced to this rather than outright dictatorship Pompey demanded. So basically Pompey during his career broke every Roman law and tradition.But he wasn't satisfied and allowed Caesar to run for consul from Gaul that is without disbanding his army,to avoid persecution by Cato.At the same time:
Cato added another election reform, which he succeeded in pushing through the Senate. Not only would politicians have to campaign in person, they would have to do so alone. It was an attempt to make mandatory the austere kind of electioneering that had been Cato’s nearly exclusive style: no nomenclators, no networks of friends dealing out favors, no campaign apparatus at all. It may also have been another attempt to make Caesar’s life difficult. Depending on which interpretation of Pompey’s laws held when the time came, Caesar might find himself running for consul from Gaul— but legally prohibited from asking friends to canvass on his behalf. It was, at least, a fallback. But on the issue that Cato considered the single dominant problem of the day— the inhuman ambition of Julius Caesar, demagogue and war criminal— he now believed Pompey to be intolerably squishy. Pompey had proved it with his hesitant, vacillating behavior, passing laws that flatly canceled one another out, then half retreating under pressure, until no man knew where he stood. Did Pompey even know where Pompey stood?
Pompey before leaving office granted himself another 5 years as a governor of Spain with an army of course.Pompey also demanded that Ceasar at least disband his army,if he could not come to Rome but Ceasar refused and now the famous civil war began,with both outcome equally unfavourable in retrospect,though one could have seen hope in Pompey.
Caesar had once been a nuisance of Pompey’s own creation; then he was, at worst, a junior partner, to be suffered a consulship if he would pay the proper respect. Now, by year’s end, Pompey was heard to say that the consulship of Caesar, even a disarmed Caesar, would mean the destruction of the constitution. He had arrived at the position that Cato had held all along. That view of Caesar, his ambition and his danger, had once been largely powerless. Now it was mainstream and armed. After more than a decade of pounding away at the lonely warning bell, Cato could take no small share of the credit when the alarm was at last taken up and echoed.
Chapter 12 through 14 documents the civil war,the escape of Cato and his faction to Africa, and how Cato was perceived up to the 18th century. While in Africa all but Cato and his two philosopher companions,a stoic and an Aristotelian, accepted Caesar's clemency.Cato would commit suicide after reading the Pheado,which will fail but he will go on to remove the patches that healed his wounds and die.
At Caesar’s triumphs, not a word was said about Pompey. Caesar understood that he had become a universal figure, and that the political risks of “triumphing” over such a figure— rather than over an assorted collection of foreigners— were grave. But he failed to consider that Cato, partisan as he had been in life, now belonged in the same company. Humiliating death scenes of enemies were not uncommon at Roman triumphs; Pompey’s last triumph, for instance, had prominently featured the death of Mithridates. But Romans were supposed to be exempt from such shameful treatment. By broadcasting Cato’s grisly death— along with the death scenes of other defeated republicans— Caesar was branding him not only an animal, but an alien. The crowd’s response showed that it was not willing to follow Caesar that far, not after a war that had cost a hundred thousand lives and cut Rome’s population, whether by flight or battle casualties, in half.
Cicero could have depicted Cato as annoying gladly who died like a beast "Instead[and putting away their rivalry which I did not include here], Cicero painted an icon. He wrote of Cato the Stoic saint, the Roman ideal, the republican martyr. He swallowed his fear of reprisal long enough to write the definitive myth of Cato, and he brought to it all the polish of Rome’s greatest prose stylist."
Schoolboys through out Rome until its identity was completely wiped by Christians, fancied themselves as Catos. And the poet Lucan said that Cato was more worthy to swear by than the Gods:
No guardian gods watch over us from heaven:/ Jove is no king; let ages whirl along/ In blind confusion: from his throne supreme /Shall he behold such carnage and restrain /His thunderbolts?…/ Careless of men /Are all the gods./Rather would I lead With him[Cato] his triumph through the pathless sands /And Libya’s bounds, than in Pompeius’ car /Three times ascend the Capitol.… /Rome! in him behold/ His country’s father, worthiest of thy vows; /A name by which men shall not blush to swear,/ Whom, should’st thou break the fetters from thy neck, Thou may’st in distant days decree divine.
The Christians taking the idea of liberty as a joke and suicide as an offense against god, thought that Cato was either a coward or too full of pride to admit defeat. It would take 900 years until Dante and other humanists to recover his status as a hero.
In the last chapter documents his influence as a revolutionary in the 18th century when in the words of Montesque "it is impossible to be tired of so agreeable a subject as ancient Rome.” Cato became a sensation after Addison's play which was part of the education of every person.A copy cat published under the pseudonym Cato calling for limited government and liberty:
This Cato spoke like an eighteenth-century Englishman, but the lessons he had to offer read as if they had come down unchanged from the last days of republican Rome. “Thus it is,” Cato writes, “that liberty is almost everywhere lost: Her foes are artful, united and diligent: Her defenders are few, disunited, and inactive.” And elsewhere: “This passion for liberty in men, and their possession of it, is of that efficacy and importance, that it seems the parent of all the virtues.”
This book is one of the best I have read.Cato will definitely be with me as one of my heroes and moral guides at least for the better part of my life.Cato was a real life hero and his example should be a guide to every rational person. From this book I also formed a better picture of the fall of Rome;I knew that slavery was detrimental but I did not realize that the situation in Rome was so bad that the Romans almost stoned Cato and fought against the integrity of the elections. Romans were so ashamed of who they are and what they believe that they thought the only way to improve their lot was the total and complete destruction of Rome was we know it. Rome was built with a system of checks and balances,primitive nonetheless,but withstood the assault of many tyrants.But by the time Cato was growing up Liberty was bound to be quelled and Cato was just a mad prophet who tried despairingly to save the Republic from the disgruntled populace and to preach the virtues of Liberty and Law to the populace. But in the end culture determines politics and the Romans disavowed themselves from everything Roman. But let us not forget that the Romans still held to their culture for two hundred years during Pax Rome and the reign of the 5 good emperors which saw a great deal of cultural flourishing.But that was not a right to Romans but a gift,grant,mercy,or a privilege handed out by the emperor which changed at a whip like what happened in the reigns of Nero and Constantine. In the end the Ideals that Cato preached will never die and though the light of Liberty might go extinguished for millennia,it will reignite when the people believe in Liberty.
The fifth chapter documents Cato's early career as a quaestor, a treasury bureaucrat, in which he waged an anti-corruption campaign which was successful only during his reign because it was "personality-driven reform" not one with checks and balances. This chapter also portrays Cato as a champion of the disenfranchised because he singly handedly successfully persecuted the murders during the reign of the Sulla the dictator.
In one of the best chaptersof the book the sixth chapter sees Cato elected tribune wherein he continues standing up for Rome's constitution which he had previously memorized along with Rome's laws. In a corruption case against Murena who was politically necessary for that stage in Rome's history to keep the empire from the glimpse of war Cato fails to persecute him only because his rival was equally impressive since after all he is now much more famous than Cato namely Cicero. But Cicero being the wise man he is knew that Rome was on the brink of collapse and was knowledgeable of one such conspiracy against Rome led by a thug,Catiline , who lost the elections twice despite the armies he had surrounding Rome. So Cicero made sure to make friends with Cato by praising him and Cato the elder at the end of the speech that have outperformed Cato's whether on merit or on the jurors bias remains uncertain. In any case a conspirator deflected,knowing the consequences of failed coup are dire [Spartacus], gave away locations of weapons and letters and Roman legions. Cicero has been granted dictatorial powers earlier and thus was able to simply execute them but not wanting to take on the blame he put the matter for a vote in the senate and all but Caesar were calling for an immediate death sentence. Cato was both enraged and suspicious and gave an exhilarating speech.The slave army "were aimless and leaderless;in Catiline's metaphor,the strong body still lacked a head. Caesar was deft enough to see the opportunity,and as the nephew of Marius,[he had the family ties]... At the right time,Caesar himself might be the populare's[slave army/other poor and out of work Italians] champion.With his words in the Senate,he was staking a powerful claim.With his dramatic,he was demonstrating that he would fight another day. So Cato was retrospectively justified in his suspicion of Caesar."Caesar was a war hero,a politician par excellence,a religious figure and have done everything right yet to Cato he was no match.The historian Sallust who was Caesar's partisan,when weighing the two said:
Caesar grew eminent by generosity and munificence; Cato by the integrity of his life. Caesar was esteemed for his humanity and benevolence; austerity had given dignity to Cato. Caesar acquired renown by giving, relieving, and pardoning; Cato by bestowing nothing. In Caesar, there was a refuge for the unfortunate; in Cato, destruction for the bad. In Caesar, his easiness of temper was admired; in Cato, his firmness. Caesar, in sum, had applied himself to a life of energy and activity; intent upon the interests of his friends, he was neglectful of his own; he refused nothing to others that was worthy of acceptance, while for himself he desired great power, the command of an army, and a new war in which his talents might be displayed. But Cato’s ambition was that of temperance, discretion, and, above all, of austerity; he did not contend in splendor with the rich or in faction with the seditious, but with the brave in fortitude, with the modest in simplicity, with the temperate in abstinence; he was more desirous to be, than to appear, virtuous; and thus, the less he courted popularity, the more it pursued him.
To be continued in part two.
Chapter 7 recounts Pompey's failed power grab blocked by Cato. Pompey demanded to run for consulship for a second year,a sacrilege, and to make things worse he wanted to do it in abstention,meaning he can keep his legions, and to top all that he wanted a triumphant entrance. Pompey disbanded his army and requested at least a triumphant entry which he can then capitalize to run for office but his offer was rejected.Cato also rejected an alliance with Pompey through marriage,which turned out to be a major mistake in retrospect but Cato could not foresee that three enemies will soon be allies and create a monster.
Cato could not conceive of allying himself with anyone for any reason other than a sincere and bloodless agreement on first principles. Rather than see his daughter as the means by which Pompey could be brought fully over into the optimates’[Cato's conservative faction] camp, Cato refused to make Porcia a “hostage” for Pompey’s good behavior...
What did Cato throw away with his refusal? Nothing less than the chance to integrate Rome’s greatest political force, Pompey, into the senatorial order. By Cato’s own terms for preserving the Republic, it was an unmatched, unmissable opportunity.
In another drama packed chapter called "Creating the Monster" we witness a another six month debate between Cicero and Cato. After decades of war in the east,the eastern provinces could not abide by their contracts, and so they asked for a change in the contract after it was signed. A clear violation of every principle there is. But it was something necessary,ugly nonetheless, to do in Cicero's view inorder not to alienate the rich who backed the conservatives in the Senate,like Crassus , and grow resentment in the east as Cicero would put it " “He[Cato] talks like he’s living in Plato’s Republic, not Romulus’s shit-hole.”. In any case,Cato had his way and Crassus went on to join the triumvirate.Cato contued to stand up to the power grabs by both Pompey and Caesar. As the author puts it:
But at least in politics, by the rules of the game Cato had learned so well, he could keep infuriating Rome’s most powerful men with little consequence. As long as they were trapped in the Roman ethos of competition, as long as Caesar measured himself against Pompey, as long as Pompey and Crassus held to their decade-old hatred, Cato could continue to sting each in turn, one by one. What Cato failed to imagine was that the rules could ever change.
Caesar,as consul now,proposed a spotless bill to redistribute untilthed land that would put the popularies, who were causing trouble and fueling Caesar, into work. The senators were willing to accept this bill but Cato swayed them to otherwise,seeing that this was just a power grab in disguise. Failing to go through the proper means, Caesar goes to the public assembly and passes the bill despite a veto from his co-consul and violating public holidays. All the senators were made to swear to uphold the bill save but Cato and two close allies of his. In the end Cato have in at Cicero's insistence or else he would be exiled and Rome needed him more than ever now. The first thing Caesar did is violating his own bill which went without resistance,despite the gadfly's arguments. The joke went that this year was the consulship of Julius and Caesar. Caesar also granted himself after the consulship 4 years and legions to go and conquer Gaul without them provoking an attack as was the tradition.
Chapter 9 recounts the story of a scoundrel Clodious, a patrician who made himself a pleb, to gain power and exile the two main defenders of the Republic:Cato and Cicero.With the support of the triumvirate he sent Cato to Cyprus to revenge a personal vendetta he had with a king that refused to free Clodious and thus was ravished by the pirates as a price of his freedom. And now with the support of everyone in power and a cowardly senate without its voice Cato the father of the fatherland,Cicero, was exiled.
Chapter 10 illustrates how Rome fell and all subsequent chapters are really just desperate pleas.[Rome with stood tyrants for centuries but this century was different the people wanted change because Rome itself was unjust!]. Pompey and Crassus ran for election using gladiators and even assassinations to win the election against Ahenobarbus,Cato's handpicked nominee. After much intiimidation Ahenobarbus withdrew but Cato determined to hold his feet won a lower office to try,faintly, to resist the inevitable.
The election had been so gratuitously stolen from him— with physical assault and slanderous attacks and bribes and false omens and more bribes and thugs at the polls— that Cato moved immediately to turn the theft to his advantage. He would not be praetor that year. But he could play to perfection the scorned prophet, the righteous victim. No one would ever be better cast in that role. A knot of his angry supporters gathered in protest on the edge of the Field of Mars. Cato formed them into an assembly to hear his nonconcession, and the crowd swelled— full of his ejected partisans, those supporters who had stayed at the polls to the end, and onlookers who had found the day’s best free show. Cato denounced the sham of an election and railed against Caesar and the consuls. “As if inspired from heaven, he foretold to the citizens all that would happen to their city.” And he identified that fate— the fate of the Republic and its liberty— with his own. Why, he cried, have Pompey and Crassus done this to me? Because they are afraid of me.
The author wonders why Cato with his significant influence failed to do anything? The answer the author suggests is that the Romans,who conquered every aggressor, became cowards.The first decision of the new unopposed consuls was to assign an army and governorship to each member of the triumvirate. Crassus would die soon.Cato and his faction would win the next election but it was a year too late.Cato proposed election reform that will end the farce called the election which included open bribery as common course and the bill went unopposed but the people in Rome rioted because they wanted free food in election season.
Electoral bribery was one of the few means of Roman redistribution— informal, but highly reliable. Optimates and their sympathizers might denounce the dependency of the idle, urban multitude, but few stopped to consider the system of enslaved labor that made such dependency inevitable. The Roman people were not about to give up their bribes, and neither were the ambitious senators who tacitly encouraged them.
Cato was baffled and dropped these verses of Homer
When guilty mortals break the eternal laws,
And judges bribed betray the righteous cause,
From their deep beds [Zeus] bids the rivers rise,
And opens all the flood-gates of the skies.
Chapter 11 sees what Cato always fear coming true. The anarchy that would bring the monarch came. Rome had not had a government in two years and Pompey ran yet another time and won as sole consul,only after Cato lobbied for it to be reduced to this rather than outright dictatorship Pompey demanded. So basically Pompey during his career broke every Roman law and tradition.But he wasn't satisfied and allowed Caesar to run for consul from Gaul that is without disbanding his army,to avoid persecution by Cato.At the same time:
Cato added another election reform, which he succeeded in pushing through the Senate. Not only would politicians have to campaign in person, they would have to do so alone. It was an attempt to make mandatory the austere kind of electioneering that had been Cato’s nearly exclusive style: no nomenclators, no networks of friends dealing out favors, no campaign apparatus at all. It may also have been another attempt to make Caesar’s life difficult. Depending on which interpretation of Pompey’s laws held when the time came, Caesar might find himself running for consul from Gaul— but legally prohibited from asking friends to canvass on his behalf. It was, at least, a fallback. But on the issue that Cato considered the single dominant problem of the day— the inhuman ambition of Julius Caesar, demagogue and war criminal— he now believed Pompey to be intolerably squishy. Pompey had proved it with his hesitant, vacillating behavior, passing laws that flatly canceled one another out, then half retreating under pressure, until no man knew where he stood. Did Pompey even know where Pompey stood?
Pompey before leaving office granted himself another 5 years as a governor of Spain with an army of course.Pompey also demanded that Ceasar at least disband his army,if he could not come to Rome but Ceasar refused and now the famous civil war began,with both outcome equally unfavourable in retrospect,though one could have seen hope in Pompey.
Caesar had once been a nuisance of Pompey’s own creation; then he was, at worst, a junior partner, to be suffered a consulship if he would pay the proper respect. Now, by year’s end, Pompey was heard to say that the consulship of Caesar, even a disarmed Caesar, would mean the destruction of the constitution. He had arrived at the position that Cato had held all along. That view of Caesar, his ambition and his danger, had once been largely powerless. Now it was mainstream and armed. After more than a decade of pounding away at the lonely warning bell, Cato could take no small share of the credit when the alarm was at last taken up and echoed.
Chapter 12 through 14 documents the civil war,the escape of Cato and his faction to Africa, and how Cato was perceived up to the 18th century. While in Africa all but Cato and his two philosopher companions,a stoic and an Aristotelian, accepted Caesar's clemency.Cato would commit suicide after reading the Pheado,which will fail but he will go on to remove the patches that healed his wounds and die.
At Caesar’s triumphs, not a word was said about Pompey. Caesar understood that he had become a universal figure, and that the political risks of “triumphing” over such a figure— rather than over an assorted collection of foreigners— were grave. But he failed to consider that Cato, partisan as he had been in life, now belonged in the same company. Humiliating death scenes of enemies were not uncommon at Roman triumphs; Pompey’s last triumph, for instance, had prominently featured the death of Mithridates. But Romans were supposed to be exempt from such shameful treatment. By broadcasting Cato’s grisly death— along with the death scenes of other defeated republicans— Caesar was branding him not only an animal, but an alien. The crowd’s response showed that it was not willing to follow Caesar that far, not after a war that had cost a hundred thousand lives and cut Rome’s population, whether by flight or battle casualties, in half.
Cicero could have depicted Cato as annoying gladly who died like a beast "Instead[and putting away their rivalry which I did not include here], Cicero painted an icon. He wrote of Cato the Stoic saint, the Roman ideal, the republican martyr. He swallowed his fear of reprisal long enough to write the definitive myth of Cato, and he brought to it all the polish of Rome’s greatest prose stylist."
Schoolboys through out Rome until its identity was completely wiped by Christians, fancied themselves as Catos. And the poet Lucan said that Cato was more worthy to swear by than the Gods:
No guardian gods watch over us from heaven:/ Jove is no king; let ages whirl along/ In blind confusion: from his throne supreme /Shall he behold such carnage and restrain /His thunderbolts?…/ Careless of men /Are all the gods./Rather would I lead With him[Cato] his triumph through the pathless sands /And Libya’s bounds, than in Pompeius’ car /Three times ascend the Capitol.… /Rome! in him behold/ His country’s father, worthiest of thy vows; /A name by which men shall not blush to swear,/ Whom, should’st thou break the fetters from thy neck, Thou may’st in distant days decree divine.
The Christians taking the idea of liberty as a joke and suicide as an offense against god, thought that Cato was either a coward or too full of pride to admit defeat. It would take 900 years until Dante and other humanists to recover his status as a hero.
In the last chapter documents his influence as a revolutionary in the 18th century when in the words of Montesque "it is impossible to be tired of so agreeable a subject as ancient Rome.” Cato became a sensation after Addison's play which was part of the education of every person.A copy cat published under the pseudonym Cato calling for limited government and liberty:
This Cato spoke like an eighteenth-century Englishman, but the lessons he had to offer read as if they had come down unchanged from the last days of republican Rome. “Thus it is,” Cato writes, “that liberty is almost everywhere lost: Her foes are artful, united and diligent: Her defenders are few, disunited, and inactive.” And elsewhere: “This passion for liberty in men, and their possession of it, is of that efficacy and importance, that it seems the parent of all the virtues.”
This book is one of the best I have read.Cato will definitely be with me as one of my heroes and moral guides at least for the better part of my life.Cato was a real life hero and his example should be a guide to every rational person. From this book I also formed a better picture of the fall of Rome;I knew that slavery was detrimental but I did not realize that the situation in Rome was so bad that the Romans almost stoned Cato and fought against the integrity of the elections. Romans were so ashamed of who they are and what they believe that they thought the only way to improve their lot was the total and complete destruction of Rome was we know it. Rome was built with a system of checks and balances,primitive nonetheless,but withstood the assault of many tyrants.But by the time Cato was growing up Liberty was bound to be quelled and Cato was just a mad prophet who tried despairingly to save the Republic from the disgruntled populace and to preach the virtues of Liberty and Law to the populace. But in the end culture determines politics and the Romans disavowed themselves from everything Roman. But let us not forget that the Romans still held to their culture for two hundred years during Pax Rome and the reign of the 5 good emperors which saw a great deal of cultural flourishing.But that was not a right to Romans but a gift,grant,mercy,or a privilege handed out by the emperor which changed at a whip like what happened in the reigns of Nero and Constantine. In the end the Ideals that Cato preached will never die and though the light of Liberty might go extinguished for millennia,it will reignite when the people believe in Liberty.
December 20, 2017
Very enjoyable. Apparently he was also close to Sulla as a young man, which makes me wonder all the more why he hasn't gotten a mini-series about himself, or why Cato or Cicero haven't for that matter. Too much focus on Julius Caesar in popular media, if you ask me.
But with things as they are [falling apart, looking less and less like the constitution matters] Cato's reputation as a morally pure authority for liberty (as far from the truth as that may be) is increasingly relevant. Even two thousand years later, the force of his personality can speak to us and inspire.
But with things as they are [falling apart, looking less and less like the constitution matters] Cato's reputation as a morally pure authority for liberty (as far from the truth as that may be) is increasingly relevant. Even two thousand years later, the force of his personality can speak to us and inspire.
September 5, 2020
A balanced, readable biography of Cato.
The authors ably describe Cato’s struggle against corruption, his elitism, his hard drinking, his military acumen and his inability to master the political arts. They also use Cato’s life to provide insight into the republic’s fall, and describe how Cato inspired later historical figures. They describe Cato’s refusal to compromise, his belief that virtue was enough, and how these attitudes left him isolated and unable to achieve as much as he wanted.
The narrative is well-written, although the authors seem to take many sources at face value, and too often try to equate the Roman system with more modern ones (on budget issues, for example, or the use of phrases like “made headlines”) You also don’t really get to know Cato as a person, and Cato never really comes off as Caesar’s “mortal” enemy.
An enjoyable and dramatic but sometimes lackluster work.
The authors ably describe Cato’s struggle against corruption, his elitism, his hard drinking, his military acumen and his inability to master the political arts. They also use Cato’s life to provide insight into the republic’s fall, and describe how Cato inspired later historical figures. They describe Cato’s refusal to compromise, his belief that virtue was enough, and how these attitudes left him isolated and unable to achieve as much as he wanted.
The narrative is well-written, although the authors seem to take many sources at face value, and too often try to equate the Roman system with more modern ones (on budget issues, for example, or the use of phrases like “made headlines”) You also don’t really get to know Cato as a person, and Cato never really comes off as Caesar’s “mortal” enemy.
An enjoyable and dramatic but sometimes lackluster work.
November 23, 2015
Simply put this is the best book I've read so far this year. After finishing Hillyard's “Cincinnatus and the Citizen-Servant Ideal” I was still searching for a good biography on virtuous political leadership, so I stumbled onto Rob Goodman and Jimmi Soni's life of Cato the Younger (Caesar's mortal enemy), making it in the end the best possible follow-up.
The first thing that stands out from this biography is that it is extremely well written. The prose, intelligence and wit make this book definitely a page-turner (it made me even remember works from writers like David McCullough). This is hardly surprising given that both authors have ample experience as journalists (for example, Rob Goodman has written speeches for leaders in the U.S. Congress, as well as articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Jimmy Soni, on the other hand, is the managing editor of the Huffington Post).
As always, with regards to a legendary figure like Cato, one ends up usually shocked by the difference there is between the “historical” man and the legend. From Goodman and Soni's work (which is based on ample use of modern and classical sources) one gets the idea of a Cato far removed from the idea of prudence, compromise and flexibility. Instead one finds an extreme (almost fundamentalist) Stoic, a very un-political leader, ready to give up the “political possible” for moral principle. He is pictured as a very narcissistic person, who almost let the Republic fall in order to keep pure his moral integrity. Thus, from being the Republic's great defender, he unwittingly became its own worst enemy.
All in all I heartily recommend this book for those interested in politics, because it essentially teaches classic patterns of political behavior that are still around us today. The monumental transformation described in this book (the passage from Republic to Empire) saw the enactment of two classic political archetypes that would play out throughout history again and again: on the one hand a privileged minority that refuses to share power with the masses (once the time for that has become ripe); on the other, another privileged minority that rhetorically takes the banner of power-sharing and of recognizing the rights of the masses, but essentially ends up becoming a populist dictatorship.
Thus the “democracy” of the privileged (the old Republic) was transformed into the dictatorship of some other privileged group (the new Empire). In this sense this book has a lot to teach, making it in a sense, a warning from history.
The first thing that stands out from this biography is that it is extremely well written. The prose, intelligence and wit make this book definitely a page-turner (it made me even remember works from writers like David McCullough). This is hardly surprising given that both authors have ample experience as journalists (for example, Rob Goodman has written speeches for leaders in the U.S. Congress, as well as articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Jimmy Soni, on the other hand, is the managing editor of the Huffington Post).
As always, with regards to a legendary figure like Cato, one ends up usually shocked by the difference there is between the “historical” man and the legend. From Goodman and Soni's work (which is based on ample use of modern and classical sources) one gets the idea of a Cato far removed from the idea of prudence, compromise and flexibility. Instead one finds an extreme (almost fundamentalist) Stoic, a very un-political leader, ready to give up the “political possible” for moral principle. He is pictured as a very narcissistic person, who almost let the Republic fall in order to keep pure his moral integrity. Thus, from being the Republic's great defender, he unwittingly became its own worst enemy.
All in all I heartily recommend this book for those interested in politics, because it essentially teaches classic patterns of political behavior that are still around us today. The monumental transformation described in this book (the passage from Republic to Empire) saw the enactment of two classic political archetypes that would play out throughout history again and again: on the one hand a privileged minority that refuses to share power with the masses (once the time for that has become ripe); on the other, another privileged minority that rhetorically takes the banner of power-sharing and of recognizing the rights of the masses, but essentially ends up becoming a populist dictatorship.
Thus the “democracy” of the privileged (the old Republic) was transformed into the dictatorship of some other privileged group (the new Empire). In this sense this book has a lot to teach, making it in a sense, a warning from history.
November 7, 2013
Just before I read this book, I read Rubicon, and after Cato I read Cicero by Anthony Everitt. Rome's Last Citizen suffered in comparison, especially in comparison to Everit's book on Cicero.
First of all Cato is not an appealing historical character. He was rigid, totally inflexible except on a few occasions in which he benefitted personally, absolutely not open to compromise and thus hastened the end of the Republic. Probably nothing could have persuaded the aristocracy to change the Constitution so as to permit Rome to govern more than a city state. The needs of empire which it certainly was by that time were too great. Also the culture which produced those generals who wanted to be on top of the heap and vanquish all rivals would have still been intact. However, it makes a "what if" story possible in regard to Cato. What if he had only relinquished and been flexible enough to give Pompey, for example, the respect he craved.
Secondly, Cicero is a very very appealing historical character who is quite accessible to the historian and to the modern reader as he wrote so much, in particular 900 letters he wrote have survived, the majority to his best friend from childhood in which he completely unburdened himself.
Everitt's superior education shows itself in the comparison with the writing of Rob Goodman. He paints a very vivid and lively account, among many things, of the close relationships, even friendships which Ciero had with the nobility of the time, the principal actors anyway and also how the upper class lived. The author of the Cato book did not have all the material on his subject that Everitt had, but a good historian or popular writer would have included Cicero's correspondence at least in the Cato book to flesh out the times and the characters.
First of all Cato is not an appealing historical character. He was rigid, totally inflexible except on a few occasions in which he benefitted personally, absolutely not open to compromise and thus hastened the end of the Republic. Probably nothing could have persuaded the aristocracy to change the Constitution so as to permit Rome to govern more than a city state. The needs of empire which it certainly was by that time were too great. Also the culture which produced those generals who wanted to be on top of the heap and vanquish all rivals would have still been intact. However, it makes a "what if" story possible in regard to Cato. What if he had only relinquished and been flexible enough to give Pompey, for example, the respect he craved.
Secondly, Cicero is a very very appealing historical character who is quite accessible to the historian and to the modern reader as he wrote so much, in particular 900 letters he wrote have survived, the majority to his best friend from childhood in which he completely unburdened himself.
Everitt's superior education shows itself in the comparison with the writing of Rob Goodman. He paints a very vivid and lively account, among many things, of the close relationships, even friendships which Ciero had with the nobility of the time, the principal actors anyway and also how the upper class lived. The author of the Cato book did not have all the material on his subject that Everitt had, but a good historian or popular writer would have included Cicero's correspondence at least in the Cato book to flesh out the times and the characters.
September 3, 2017
Really enjoyed the book and historical events, however I think the sequence of facts about Cato's life made me picture him as an uneven character with several possibilities about his true personality and motivations. I think when I finished this book I know more about the context in which he lived but I would like to know more about his values and about him in general.
August 11, 2019
A balanced and extremely readable account of Cato's life, contrasting the man with the Stoic legend. The book is very approachable even if your knowledge of Ancient Rome is rusty at best. That period of history is really intriguing and I certainly came out of my reading interested in (re-)learning more about a few of the historical figures that show up through the book.
July 21, 2025
I have really liked both books written by Goodman & Soni. I hope they write more! Since Cato did not leave too many writings, the authors have done a great job in bringing Cato back to life through secondary sources. Fun read!
April 2, 2023
I felt conflicted reading this book. Because it forced me to consider Cato again. I still admire him for his virtues, but many of his flaws are more obvious now than ever. Still, at the very least, this book establishes Cato as not the 'hero' or the 'villian' but as a complicated man in a complicated time.
December 9, 2024
"Cato was, in sum, a 'godlike and unique man,' a man whose life was sufficient proof that virtue existed."
Det är synd att Cato den yngre inte lever kvar lika starkt i våra minnen som Julius Caesar gör, hans ärkefiende. Cato var personen som indirekt gjorde att tyrannen Caesar blev avrättad av Marcus Brutus och de andra 59 konspiratörerna eftersom Catos äldsta dotter, Porcia, var gift med Brutus. Brutus såg även upp till Cato som dog några år tidigare och några historiker ser Brutus giftermål med Porcia som en hyllning till Cato, eftersom han redan var gift med en annan kvinna.
Den här boken gav en tydlig bild av Cato men också insikt i liven av Cicero, Pompejus och Caesar. Jag skulle dock säga att lite för mycket fokus låg på andra saker än Cato, men jag förstår ändå varför vi spenderade så mycket tid ifrån honom. För annars hade vi inte vetat varför han agerade som han gjorde. Men på grund av det ger jag boken en 4/5 istället för en 5/5.
Boken är klart läsvärd för, antingen en Stoiker, eller personer som är intresserade av några av de viktigaste åren i Romarrikets historia.
Det är synd att Cato den yngre inte lever kvar lika starkt i våra minnen som Julius Caesar gör, hans ärkefiende. Cato var personen som indirekt gjorde att tyrannen Caesar blev avrättad av Marcus Brutus och de andra 59 konspiratörerna eftersom Catos äldsta dotter, Porcia, var gift med Brutus. Brutus såg även upp till Cato som dog några år tidigare och några historiker ser Brutus giftermål med Porcia som en hyllning till Cato, eftersom han redan var gift med en annan kvinna.
Den här boken gav en tydlig bild av Cato men också insikt i liven av Cicero, Pompejus och Caesar. Jag skulle dock säga att lite för mycket fokus låg på andra saker än Cato, men jag förstår ändå varför vi spenderade så mycket tid ifrån honom. För annars hade vi inte vetat varför han agerade som han gjorde. Men på grund av det ger jag boken en 4/5 istället för en 5/5.
Boken är klart läsvärd för, antingen en Stoiker, eller personer som är intresserade av några av de viktigaste åren i Romarrikets historia.
October 7, 2021
Great book on a highly influential figure in history. I loved the writing style, the vast amount of material covered, and the balanced approach that the authors took regarding the available sources. They also did not commit the all too common cliche of disclosing the consequences of certain actions that take place before finding out what happens. This was a chronological retelling of Cato's life, with ample analysis of how his actions affected the course of human history to this point.
I never once was bored, and the authors fill in the gaps of our knowledge on Cato with appropriate approximations and thoughtful insight. This book wasn't solely on Cato, as you need to tell the story of the collapse of the Roman republic to tell it, and even this was a somewhat refreshing telling of the events. Hard not to love the guy, even though he clearly would be terrible to have at parties.
I never once was bored, and the authors fill in the gaps of our knowledge on Cato with appropriate approximations and thoughtful insight. This book wasn't solely on Cato, as you need to tell the story of the collapse of the Roman republic to tell it, and even this was a somewhat refreshing telling of the events. Hard not to love the guy, even though he clearly would be terrible to have at parties.
August 23, 2016
Rome's Last Citizen is a fresh, vivid, thrilling narration of Rome's Republic last days and the vital role of Cato the Younger and his stoic principles on it.
The non-academic narrative style works for the piece and not against it and makes the book the most modern take on a classic figure/context I've read in a very long time.
The non-academic narrative style works for the piece and not against it and makes the book the most modern take on a classic figure/context I've read in a very long time.
September 6, 2019
A solid biography on Cato the Younger; a man who fought for his ideals; often handicapping himself in order to do so.
One of the most interesting things I learned was that his daughter Porcia married Brutus. Definitely explains Brutus turning on Caesar; even more so in antiquity than today, blood is thicker than water.
One of the most interesting things I learned was that his daughter Porcia married Brutus. Definitely explains Brutus turning on Caesar; even more so in antiquity than today, blood is thicker than water.
April 6, 2021
If a story about one man who lived long ago in a far away country can bring the reader to heartache and near tears, then one of two things has occurred. A) That man’s life was extraordinary beyond all measures. Or B) the author’s eloquence is beyond reproach. Both occur in this moving biography of the inimitable Marcus Cato.
February 25, 2013
Cato is a model for the idea that uncompromising integrity is likely to lead to uncompromising failure. One of the parts of the book I found most interesting was Goodman's concluding discussion of Cato's "afterlife" as a figure to emulate.
October 1, 2017
There was a time when Cato was a cultural icon in America. Today, most of us know that he was mentioned in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, or perhaps just that he was an old dead Roman dude. But at the time of the American revolution, and for quite a while afterwards, he was THE Roman; the model of duty before all, and of sacrifice for the ideal of one’s country, especially in the face of tyranny. Schoolboys memorized Cato’s speeches, in Latin. George Washington had his men enact a play of Cato’s life at the lowest point in their time at Valley Forge (an odd choice, since the play ends with Cato’s suicide and the loss of the Republic).
The thumbnail, cartoon, sketch of Cato’s death is this. He stood for old Rome, the Republic. He worried about encroaching imperialism, especially as embodied by Pompei and Caesar. He spent his life arguing for the old ways, but it was inevitable he would lose. When Rome’s imperial destiny became obvious, he fell on his sword. (Actually, he fell on his sword. It didn’t kill him. His household sewed him up. And he tore open the wound with his bare hands so that he could die.)
The reality, according to this history, was more complicated.
Cato comes across in this excellent history as a bit of a showman, a show-off even. He regularly overdoes his stoicism, letting his hair grow long and wearing coarse, skimpy clothing as he walks barefoot to the Senate. He is sometimes inconsistent, such as when he works for his own family even against the better interests of Rome. He takes pleasure in his military service, and especially in the good will of the soldiers—a very non-stoic attitude. His hostile attitude to Pompei sometimes makes little sense, and neutralizes the one person who might have stopped Caesar. And Cato’s complicated, on-again off-again friend-enemy relationship with Cicero was difficult to reconcile with Cato’s principles. Even the patriotism of his self-immolation is ambiguous, at best.
Nonetheless, the myth of Cato was profoundly important for the American revolution and early government.
This book is my favorite kind of history. It reads like a political thriller, a series of deep character studies, and a serious reflection on how history matters. I have never been comfortable with my knowledge of ancient Rome—I’m more of a Greek at heart. But after reading this book, at least I had a better feel for the Republican crisis, and the emergence of Imperialism, in Rome. And the “big names” (Cato, Cicero, Caesar, Pompeii, Brutus, Crassus, and more) felt more like people than names by the time I was done.
I found the discussion of how the Cato story affected the modern world less compelling. This was a shame, since the tension between autocracy and patriotism matters today, as it did in ancient Rome.
In short, this is an excellent, enjoyable, history of Rome in general and Cato in particular. Read the book for the pleasure of it, not for any profound commentary on the modern world.
The thumbnail, cartoon, sketch of Cato’s death is this. He stood for old Rome, the Republic. He worried about encroaching imperialism, especially as embodied by Pompei and Caesar. He spent his life arguing for the old ways, but it was inevitable he would lose. When Rome’s imperial destiny became obvious, he fell on his sword. (Actually, he fell on his sword. It didn’t kill him. His household sewed him up. And he tore open the wound with his bare hands so that he could die.)
The reality, according to this history, was more complicated.
Cato comes across in this excellent history as a bit of a showman, a show-off even. He regularly overdoes his stoicism, letting his hair grow long and wearing coarse, skimpy clothing as he walks barefoot to the Senate. He is sometimes inconsistent, such as when he works for his own family even against the better interests of Rome. He takes pleasure in his military service, and especially in the good will of the soldiers—a very non-stoic attitude. His hostile attitude to Pompei sometimes makes little sense, and neutralizes the one person who might have stopped Caesar. And Cato’s complicated, on-again off-again friend-enemy relationship with Cicero was difficult to reconcile with Cato’s principles. Even the patriotism of his self-immolation is ambiguous, at best.
Nonetheless, the myth of Cato was profoundly important for the American revolution and early government.
This book is my favorite kind of history. It reads like a political thriller, a series of deep character studies, and a serious reflection on how history matters. I have never been comfortable with my knowledge of ancient Rome—I’m more of a Greek at heart. But after reading this book, at least I had a better feel for the Republican crisis, and the emergence of Imperialism, in Rome. And the “big names” (Cato, Cicero, Caesar, Pompeii, Brutus, Crassus, and more) felt more like people than names by the time I was done.
I found the discussion of how the Cato story affected the modern world less compelling. This was a shame, since the tension between autocracy and patriotism matters today, as it did in ancient Rome.
In short, this is an excellent, enjoyable, history of Rome in general and Cato in particular. Read the book for the pleasure of it, not for any profound commentary on the modern world.
January 29, 2024
A biography of Cato the younger who’s life, and also a history of the last decades of the floundering Roman republic. I knew before reading this that Cato was the face of the conservative (optimates) and hated the triumvirate and Caesar. But beside that I knew nothing and this book filled in more details nicely. I love this period of Roman history for the drama and eternal relevance oof the political struggle.
Some quick hits of things learned:
Cato was not one to negotiate or meet his opponents in the middle. He was a purist in his politics and his philosophy.
The Triumvirate may never have happened and Pompey may have been an Optimate if Cato had been willing to be friends (and marry Pompey to his daughter Porcia).
Cato was one of the first Romans to adopt Stoicism from Greece. His famous grandfather Cato the Elder had actually banned the Stoics from Rome a couple generations prior.
The man loved wine and divorces.
Apparently he walked around barefoot everywhere whilst being a senator and slept on the ground with his troops back in his army days. What a man.
Relationship with Cicero was hot and cold. He was the purist that Cicero was not and Cicero was the man who could be flexible and adapt where Cato would not. But they generally agreed on politics and philosophy more than they ever disagreed.
He was something of a prophet about the republic’s coming doom but no one seemed to listen.
He and the other optimates are certainly partially to blame for the fall of the republic. Or in other words it is easy to see why the poor and the troops and such got behind the populares and the would be dictators instead of the austerity of Cato.
His suicide was legendary.
Some quick hits of things learned:
Cato was not one to negotiate or meet his opponents in the middle. He was a purist in his politics and his philosophy.
The Triumvirate may never have happened and Pompey may have been an Optimate if Cato had been willing to be friends (and marry Pompey to his daughter Porcia).
Cato was one of the first Romans to adopt Stoicism from Greece. His famous grandfather Cato the Elder had actually banned the Stoics from Rome a couple generations prior.
The man loved wine and divorces.
Apparently he walked around barefoot everywhere whilst being a senator and slept on the ground with his troops back in his army days. What a man.
Relationship with Cicero was hot and cold. He was the purist that Cicero was not and Cicero was the man who could be flexible and adapt where Cato would not. But they generally agreed on politics and philosophy more than they ever disagreed.
He was something of a prophet about the republic’s coming doom but no one seemed to listen.
He and the other optimates are certainly partially to blame for the fall of the republic. Or in other words it is easy to see why the poor and the troops and such got behind the populares and the would be dictators instead of the austerity of Cato.
His suicide was legendary.
January 4, 2020
A good book, providing a complete biography of Cato the Younger, Caesar’s nemesis and a person mythologized as the last true Roman of the Republic. The author presents the work both as a unique perspective on the decades of the various civil conflicts which ended Republican Rome and as an explainer on why Cato has held a special place in western thought from the Middle Ages to the present. He points out that Cato is the only person to 1) appear as a main character in Dante’s Divine Comedy, 2) be the subject of a 18th century play which inspired Washington’s army at Valley Forge, and 3) be the inspiration for the name of a major Washington think tank. The story steps throughout Cato’s life, doing a good job of focusing on him vice his major contemporaries (Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, etc). His singular purpose and stoic philosophy are well analyzed. Both his strengths and weaknesses are uncovered, helping to take Cato the man off of a pedestal, though still making him appear unique. The book does not end at Cato’s death, but rather looks at the history of Cato’s influence on western thought, especially in dealing with the clash between those seeking libertas and those supporting auctoritas. The dichotomy between Cato’s own views and how is name ended up being used is well covered. Great book for understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the Roman civil wars. Highly recommended for those wanting a different perspective on the history of the Late Roman Republic.
November 13, 2020
Oof, this book was a slog, but the story is tells is so good.
I went through fascinating phases. I started this book, obviously, as everyone does, admiring Cato. Rome's Iron Man, the Republic of One, Stoic in life and in death. As I read, I grew increasingly horrified in his actions. His absolute obstinance and inability to compromise directly lead to the rise of Ceasar and the Roman Empire; the exact thing he struggled to prevent. In his death, he redeemed himself through his Stoic and determined death, inspiring Seneca's own (greatly drawn out and dramatic) death some four centuries later.
Ultimately, I believe this book paints a realistic picture of a man who has been alternately deified and vilified for thousands of years. He was (likely) neither the raving lunatic Ceasar attempted to pain him as, nor the paragon of virtue and perfectionism he was depicted in the early 1700s, but rather a strong willed, strongly principled man with a collection of flaws and weak moments across his life, as we all do.
I went through fascinating phases. I started this book, obviously, as everyone does, admiring Cato. Rome's Iron Man, the Republic of One, Stoic in life and in death. As I read, I grew increasingly horrified in his actions. His absolute obstinance and inability to compromise directly lead to the rise of Ceasar and the Roman Empire; the exact thing he struggled to prevent. In his death, he redeemed himself through his Stoic and determined death, inspiring Seneca's own (greatly drawn out and dramatic) death some four centuries later.
Ultimately, I believe this book paints a realistic picture of a man who has been alternately deified and vilified for thousands of years. He was (likely) neither the raving lunatic Ceasar attempted to pain him as, nor the paragon of virtue and perfectionism he was depicted in the early 1700s, but rather a strong willed, strongly principled man with a collection of flaws and weak moments across his life, as we all do.
December 13, 2017
This highly readable biography describes the Roman power-struggles between Caesar, Pompey, the Senate, and Cato with all the lucidity and vividness you'd expect from a book about modern politics. It provides just about the right amount of background info concerning Roman civilization and tries to offer a balanced assessment of its subject (who's been – I think – rather unjustly lionized).
May 4, 2014
“Do not suppose that our ancestors, from so small a beginning, raised the Republic to greatness merely by force of arms . . . There were many other things that made them great, which we lack: industry at home; equitable government abroad; minds impartial in council, uninfluenced by any immoral or improper feeling.
Instead of such virtues, we have luxury and avarice, public distress and private superfluity; we extol wealth and yield to indolence; no distinction is made between good and bad men; and ambition usurps the honors due to virtue. . . .”
Soldier. Statesman. Stoic.
Marcus Cato’s life is the fascinating and improbable story of a man at war with himself, his countrymen, and his way of life – sometimes all at once. Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni do a superb job in describing the life of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (“Cato the Younger”).
Cato’s struggle to preserve the Roman Republic in its final days, as its government, culture, and morality decayed, is one of the more famous “lost causes” of history. He lived in times remarkably similar to ours, in a country dealing with terrorism, fiscal crises, and political corruption. As a Stoic, his personal self-discipline, austerity, and dispassion collided head-on with the vanity and dissipation of his fellow Senators and Romans. He ultimately failed in his mission to save the Republic, but his memory motivated men such as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and John Adams when they fought to establish their republic.
After reading Goodman and Soni, it is interesting to consider what could have been. If Cato had been less stubborn, more willing to accept Pompey into the Roman political system, would the Roman Republic have survived? Or was the rot so entrenched that a man like Caesar was inevitable? Despite Cato’s own personal rectitude, his incorruptibility and personal force of character never sparked the widespread, popular reforms (e.g. land reform, extension of citizenship) that could have saved the way of life he fought for. He was a man of principle in a job where success meant compromise.
I am a Christian who has read and studied Stoicism, and I appreciate much of the philosophy, such as its approach to pain and daily living. Historically, Cato was an appealing figure to many of the early church fathers, although they nonetheless rejected him due to his suicide (after being defeated by Caesar). While I do understand why he killed himself, I am troubled at the idea of a man who could not contemplate life after losing what was essentially a political game. Had he remained alive, he could have continued to effect change for the better. Hindsight is 20/20.
Instead of such virtues, we have luxury and avarice, public distress and private superfluity; we extol wealth and yield to indolence; no distinction is made between good and bad men; and ambition usurps the honors due to virtue. . . .”
Soldier. Statesman. Stoic.
Marcus Cato’s life is the fascinating and improbable story of a man at war with himself, his countrymen, and his way of life – sometimes all at once. Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni do a superb job in describing the life of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (“Cato the Younger”).
Cato’s struggle to preserve the Roman Republic in its final days, as its government, culture, and morality decayed, is one of the more famous “lost causes” of history. He lived in times remarkably similar to ours, in a country dealing with terrorism, fiscal crises, and political corruption. As a Stoic, his personal self-discipline, austerity, and dispassion collided head-on with the vanity and dissipation of his fellow Senators and Romans. He ultimately failed in his mission to save the Republic, but his memory motivated men such as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and John Adams when they fought to establish their republic.
After reading Goodman and Soni, it is interesting to consider what could have been. If Cato had been less stubborn, more willing to accept Pompey into the Roman political system, would the Roman Republic have survived? Or was the rot so entrenched that a man like Caesar was inevitable? Despite Cato’s own personal rectitude, his incorruptibility and personal force of character never sparked the widespread, popular reforms (e.g. land reform, extension of citizenship) that could have saved the way of life he fought for. He was a man of principle in a job where success meant compromise.
I am a Christian who has read and studied Stoicism, and I appreciate much of the philosophy, such as its approach to pain and daily living. Historically, Cato was an appealing figure to many of the early church fathers, although they nonetheless rejected him due to his suicide (after being defeated by Caesar). While I do understand why he killed himself, I am troubled at the idea of a man who could not contemplate life after losing what was essentially a political game. Had he remained alive, he could have continued to effect change for the better. Hindsight is 20/20.
December 12, 2017
I really, really enjoyed this book! So much that I read it in 3 days... and for me that is fast, considering I have an extremely busy load already. However, the final chapter was just as disappointing as the rest of the book was fascinating. I loved the book because I felt it tried to show Cato as a real human being, with good points and bad points. Just human. But a principled human who believed in something far bigger than himself and strove for virtue and goodness, even if he personally fell short, like all humans do. But in the final chapter, wherein the author tries to show the relevance of Cato's virtues and principles of freedom to the U.S. Revolutionary War and to George Washington in particular, the author mostly shows his lack of studying actual primary sources. Or at least he makes it look as if he has never read the primary sources by his lack of understanding of George Washington's character and motivations. Phrases such as a constitution "founded on slavery" show that this author has more of a point to prove instead of an understanding of the founding fathers, the constitution, and the principles of liberty and justice. His understanding of that entire historical era is lacking truth, and seems more so a political commentary, which in my opinion, jades his entire work. I wish I had never read the last chapter. I greatly appreciate people being honest about faults and failures, as well as virtues and successes. (I'm not trying to defend any of the founders faults.) And I felt the chapters focusing on Cato did that. But once the author moved into U.S. history and George Washington, it seemed he tried to only show faults - or at least spin "faults" into a history he doesn't or refuses to understand on a factual and primary level basis. I may be completely wrong, because I assume authors do a lot of research before writing books they wish to publish as fact. But I can't help state my opinion that his last chapter has more to do with his own politics and less to do with unsullied facts and truth. If he knew his personal politics would be hard to restrain in that subject matter, he should have just not written the last chapter at all.
January 9, 2014
Reading this after the American government shutdown, it's hard not to think of Sen. Ted Cruz. Cato also disrupted the business of government, theatrically filibustering laws he didn't like. He also disliked change in how the government did things, preferring the old ways. Though he railed against actual abuses and corruptions--instead of a positive health care law--he did nothing to fix the wider, more endemic and systematic problems that made those abuses possible. And he didn't compromise at all, just like the Tea Party of today. The difference is that he had legitimate concerns while the Tea Party wants to abolish the government. They would be the radicals Cato would be fighting today. A Republican reader of this book would say the exact opposite.
And that's one of the authors' themes. The life and legacy of Cato has been appropriated by different and contradictory groups for thousands of years. The biographers write a dramatic story of the man, fully aware and putting in ironies and tragedies, the missed opportunities, and the tyranny and destiny of character. They write of his Stoicism, an appealing philosophy that Cato could not live up to, though he, depending on which side you fall on the man, either tried his best, or, my view, used it in a very self-serving, theatrical, narcissistic manner, making a show of it so people could see what he believed in. (I tend to agree with St. Augustine.)
This is a great book on Roman history if you're new to it. There's a full bibliography of classical sources covering a lot of Roman history, and modern secondary works.
The biggest lesson I drew from it is that compromise and political shrewdness are much more effective in getting things done than loud standing on unwavering principle. Tell that to Sen. Cruz and the Tea Party.
And that's one of the authors' themes. The life and legacy of Cato has been appropriated by different and contradictory groups for thousands of years. The biographers write a dramatic story of the man, fully aware and putting in ironies and tragedies, the missed opportunities, and the tyranny and destiny of character. They write of his Stoicism, an appealing philosophy that Cato could not live up to, though he, depending on which side you fall on the man, either tried his best, or, my view, used it in a very self-serving, theatrical, narcissistic manner, making a show of it so people could see what he believed in. (I tend to agree with St. Augustine.)
This is a great book on Roman history if you're new to it. There's a full bibliography of classical sources covering a lot of Roman history, and modern secondary works.
The biggest lesson I drew from it is that compromise and political shrewdness are much more effective in getting things done than loud standing on unwavering principle. Tell that to Sen. Cruz and the Tea Party.
November 18, 2017
I read this after reading Goodman and Soni's second book, on Claude Shannon. The presentation was not as polished in this first team effort, but the subject just as interesting.
I have to admit I knew Cato only through HBO's Rome series, where, evidently, he was played by an actor much older than he really was during the events portrayed. All the same I couldn't get Karl Johnson's irascible scowl out of my head as I followed from Rome to Utica and points between. Strange to learn of history through drama, but then again perhaps not so strange, since George Washington et al. knew him through a play. Which is part of the point.
I don't know that this book adds anything to Cato scholarship, other than a clear telling of the tale, but that is certainly enough. Bookended by too-brief investigations of how later generations remembered him, the main narrative is built around those details of the late days of the Roman Republic that Cato himself participated in, objected to, and ultimately was right about - while also capturing the inherent tension in his principled stand against a corrupt political system, in defense of another.
"[W]hat was the Republic without Cato? It was Pompey and Crassus ambitiously racing to massacre an army of slaves. It was the quaestor Marcellus striking the debts of senators with a stroke of a pen. It was Cicero laughing his way through corruption trials. It was Catiline’s men strangled in a basement cell. It was Metellus Celer going to jail to stop a land reform. It was Scaurus draining his province of silver. It was Gabinius marching on Egypt for ten thousand talents. It was Clodius’s body burning with the Senate House. But the Republic also produced, as it collapsed, the man who cemented the myth of the Republic—who sanctified it into something worth dying and killing for."
I have to admit I knew Cato only through HBO's Rome series, where, evidently, he was played by an actor much older than he really was during the events portrayed. All the same I couldn't get Karl Johnson's irascible scowl out of my head as I followed from Rome to Utica and points between. Strange to learn of history through drama, but then again perhaps not so strange, since George Washington et al. knew him through a play. Which is part of the point.
I don't know that this book adds anything to Cato scholarship, other than a clear telling of the tale, but that is certainly enough. Bookended by too-brief investigations of how later generations remembered him, the main narrative is built around those details of the late days of the Roman Republic that Cato himself participated in, objected to, and ultimately was right about - while also capturing the inherent tension in his principled stand against a corrupt political system, in defense of another.
"[W]hat was the Republic without Cato? It was Pompey and Crassus ambitiously racing to massacre an army of slaves. It was the quaestor Marcellus striking the debts of senators with a stroke of a pen. It was Cicero laughing his way through corruption trials. It was Catiline’s men strangled in a basement cell. It was Metellus Celer going to jail to stop a land reform. It was Scaurus draining his province of silver. It was Gabinius marching on Egypt for ten thousand talents. It was Clodius’s body burning with the Senate House. But the Republic also produced, as it collapsed, the man who cemented the myth of the Republic—who sanctified it into something worth dying and killing for."
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