by Plutarch
When we consider the men in this way, the differences become hard to evaluate. Consider whether, if we give the crown to the Greek for military skill and leadership and to the Roman for justice and generosity, we shall not seem to go wrong.20
ELDER CATO
* * *
Introduction to Elder Cato
Cato and Roman Virtue
Cato was a self-made man who rose to the top – he was consul, triumphant general and censor – through personal valour, oratory and literary accomplishment. Indeed, he invented Latin historiography, was the first political figure in Rome to publish his orations and, by way of his treatises and essays, imposed on contemporaries and posterity his stern and uncompromising view of what it meant to be an authentic Roman aristocrat. So successful was he in fashioning an enduring model of senatorial probity, and in adducing himself as its finest exemplar, that he remained an icon of Roman virtue down to Plutarch’s own day and beyond: ‘For speech and for action his reputation excels all others’ by far’, as Fronto put it.1
Plutarch had at his disposal an abundance of flattering portraits of the man. He was idolized by Cicero,2 and Livy offered his readers a copious and comprehensive celebration of Cato’s talents and character, in a passage that was nonetheless honest enough to include notice of its subject’s acerbity and contentiousness (39.40.4–12). And still Livy concludes:
His reason could not be vanquished by his appetites; his integrity was uncompromising; influence and wealth he despised; in his frugality, his capacity for hard work and for danger, in the steely constitution of his body and mind, he remained unbroken, even in old age, which shatters everything.
Much, then, for Plutarch to admire, in a eulogistic tradition of long standing – originating, in fact, in Cato’s own writings, their author being, as Livy described him, ‘in no way whatsoever inclined to stint in self-praise’ (34.15.9).
But if Plutarch could not deny Cato’s greatness, this biography is far from uncritical, which is perhaps not surprising in the case of a Roman who ‘pronounced with all the solemnity of a prophet that if ever the Romans became infected with the literature of Greece, they would lose their empire’ (ch. 23).3 Such a view was obviously unacceptable to Plutarch, not least from an orator and writer whose compositions, he insists, ‘are often enriched by ideas and anecdotes borrowed from the Greek, and many of his maxims and proverbs are literally translated from it’ (ch. 2). In Plutarch’s account, this is only one of several inconsistencies that, in the end, raise profound questions about the authentic Cato and his real character.
The Historical Cato
Cato was born in 234 BC, a member of the local aristocracy in Tusculum. By this time, Roman political life was no longer riven by strife between patricians and plebeians, but was instead dominated by men called nobles – nobiles – who came from families whose ancestors had been consuls. Noble families possessed great wealth and enjoyed wide influence, and their natural superiority was largely conceded by the voters of Rome, who preferred to elect nobles to high office till the last days of the republic. This was a mentality that made it difficult for a newcomer in public life. For such a man, if he was rich enough and exhibited military or forensic talent, it was possible to reach the lower magistracies and find a seat in the senate, where he would be described, with some disdain, as a New Man (novus homo). Rising to the praetorship, however, was a different matter, and the consulship was nearly out of the question.4 That rare New Man who succeeded in becoming consul ennobled his family thereafter. Cato was a New Man, and his rise to the consulship was as singular as it was spectacular.
He got there by way of military distinction and personal rectitude. When he was still seventeen years old, Cato enlisted as a cavalry officer and fought in the Second Punic War, serving under the most distinguished generals of the time, Claudius Marcellus and Fabius Maximus.5 At the battle of the Metaurus in 207 BC, when the Romans destroyed the army of Hasdrubal as it attempted to relieve Hannibal, Cato displayed conspicuous valour for which he won high praise.6 At home, he exhibited old-fashioned parsimony and hard work, always admirable values in republican Rome, and he was tireless in local public life. This brought him to the attention of the patrician Lucius Valerius Flaccus, with whose assistance Cato began a political career in Rome. He was quaestor in 204 BC, aedile in 1997 and praetor in 198. It was a swift and successful rise, during which, by way of his conduct and published speeches, Cato fashioned himself, in the view of the public, as a New Man who brought, or perhaps brought back, to the senate the kind of moral fibre they associated with their ancestors. He was elected to the consulship of 195 BC, with his friend Valerius Flaccus as colleague.
Cato’s province was Nearer Spain. There he campaigned against local tribes, not without successes but not truly decisively. In his dispatches to Rome, however, he represented his victories in grand, even hyperbolic, terms: ‘Cato himself tells us that he captured more cities than he stayed days in Spain’ (ch. 10). His true accomplishment lay elsewhere. Spain was rich in iron and silver, and Cato organized the province’s mines on a highly profitable basis, a development as attractive to Roman businessmen as it was to his senatorial peers.8 Furthermore, he did not stint in rewarding his soldiers, to whom he gave an extraordinarily large bounty (ch. 10). It is hardly surprising, then, that when Cato returned to Rome, there was no resistance to his application for a triumph. But Cato had not in fact subdued the tribes in his province, as he claimed.9
Cato’s energies were not extinguished by his consulship and triumph. In 191 BC, he acted as a tribune of the soldiers during Acilius Glabrio’s campaign against Antiochus the Great, during which he played an important role in the battle of Thermopylae (chs. 12–14). Naturally, it was later written up by Cato as if it were the decisive role. He also carried on a series of intense political struggles, in the senate and especially in the courts, where he was a dominating speaker. He stood unsuccessfully for the censorship of 189 BC, but tried again in 184, when he was elected.10 Cato’s censorship was remembered and esteemed for its severity. At the time, however, it aroused a good deal of rancour among the nobility. Still, although some of its measures were invalidated by the senate, its enforcement of traditional standards was popular with the public at large. And Cato carried on. For the remainder of his life he remained a powerful political force. Even in his final months, he was giving speeches in his own defence and in the prosecution of others.
Cato’s contribution to Latin literature cannot be overestimated. By publishing his speeches – over 150 were known to Cicero – he established the literary oration as a Roman genre.11 Cato also composed didactic epistles (addressed to his elder son Marcus), a handbook on Roman medicine and introductions to Roman history suitable for the young. His principal monographs dealt with agriculture (his On Agriculture – the only work of Cato’s that survives in its entirety) and with military affairs and civil law. Without question his most consequential work was the Origins, which covered the early history of Rome and of other Italian peoples, and then reviewed Roman history from the First Punic War down to Cato’s own day. This was the first work of Roman history composed in Latin, and its influence was both profound and lasting. In Cicero’s day, almost no one any longer read Cato’s speeches (see Cicero, Brutus 65), and his essays had largely been superseded, but the style of the Origins inspired Sallust and through him Tacitus. And by Plutarch’s day, Cato’s literary star was again in the ascendant: Hadrian preferred his speeches to Cicero’s, and he continued to be admired by imperial litterateurs, such as Favorinus and Sulpicius Apollinaris, and Cornelius Fronto and Aulus Gellius. Marcus Aurelius, too, studied him eagerly.12
Cato’s attitude towards Greek culture remains a matter of dispute for modern scholars and is a part of the larger problem of the role of Greek culture in Roman society. Now, there is no question but that from its very beginnings Roman culture incorporated Hellenic elements, a reality that did not escape the Romans, for whom an important aspect of their cultural identity wa
s the presence of things Greek in the midst of things quintessentially Roman.13 It was not the adaptation of elements of Greek culture per se that was ever controversial in Rome. Instead, there was conflict over which Greek practices the Romans accepted, and the spirit in which they were received by the Romans. This was always an unfinished matter, and in the second century BC Cato, because his views were at once strident and influential, became a locus for subsequent Roman, and for modern, reflections on the nature of Hellenism in Rome.14
It is obvious that Cato’s writings were influenced by Greek literature. Each of the genres in which he worked had Greek antecedents, and, as Plutarch observed, there were traces of his Greek reading in his Latin pronouncements. What is unclear, however, is the depth of Cato’s erudition. Was it limited and cursory, or does his literary achievement reflect a more thorough engagement with Greek literature? In his On Old Age (3), for instance, Cicero gives us a Cato who is remarkably well versed in Greek literature and philosophy, but in this dialogue, Cicero points out explicitly, the extent of Cato’s learning is exaggerated. Cato’s Hellenism, and the degree of his genuine hostility towards Hellenism, continue to provoke debate, but implicit in that discussion is the question of whether the Roman’s denunciation of Greek medicine or Greek philosophy or Greek literature constituted his honest opinion or was actually some kind of posture.15 It is this aspect of Cato’s career that Plutarch finds arresting.
Plutarch’s Cato
Plutarch found much to admire in Cato: his valour (chs. 1–3, 10–11, 12–14), his rigorous moral standards (chs. 16–19), his energetic public service, even in old age (chs. 12, 24), his dutiful and kindly devotion to his family (ch. 20) and, especially, his old-fashioned austerity (chs. 1–4, 6, 10). These virtues are all registered and elaborated, and Plutarch concludes this Life in highly complimentary fashion with a coda describing Cato’s progeny (ch. 27), here with its final emphasis on the Younger Cato, another great man and also the subject of a Plutarchan biography. This kind of tag is one of Plutarch’s favoured means of indicating approval, also to be found in this volume at the conclusion of Marcellus and Aratus.16 In sum, then, this is a positive biography of a distinguished Roman hero.
But naturally in Plutarch there are complications. Plutarch early on condemns Cato’s inhumane treatment of his slaves (ch. 5) and, near the end of his Life, describes Cato’s repeated calls for Carthage’s destruction as ‘excessively brutal’ (ch. 27). Cato’s unremitting controversies and remorseless quarrels, many of which are enumerated in this Life, could have been adduced as evidence of Cato’s contentiousness, a theme that attracts Plutarch’s attention in other Lives.17 But here, interestingly, although Cato’s failing is conspicuous and the issue therefore available to the biographer, it goes largely unhighlighted.18 Instead, Plutarch is much more concerned with the question of Cato’s consistency, itself an important aristocratic value among Romans.
At chapter 16, in the introduction to Cato’s thorough and severe censorship, Plutarch describes the institution approvingly:
The Romans did not think it proper that anyone should be left free to follow his personal preferences and appetites, whether in marriage, the begetting of children, the regulation of his daily life or the entertainment of his friends, without a large measure of surveillance and control. They believed that a man’s true character was more clearly revealed in his private life than in his public or political career.
Cato puts these principles into action, even going so far as to expel from the senate a rising man named Manilius ‘on the ground that he had kissed his wife passionately by daylight in the presence of his daughter’ (ch. 17). Yet very soon Cato is sleeping with a slave girl under the same roof as his disapproving son and daughter-in-law, an awkward situation he resolves by marrying the extremely young daughter of a client (ch. 24). Cato justifies this action by appropriating the sentiments of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, which was perhaps not the best precedent to reach for, and the whole matter is so thoroughly objectionable to Plutarch that he closes his Comparison (ch. 6) in forceful animadversions on Cato’s hypocrisy.
Less direct is Plutarch’s examination of Cato’s austerity. In the early chapters of the Life, Cato is the embodiment of Roman parsimony. Later, however, he gives grand dinner parties at which he holds his slaves to exacting standards in the preparation and presentation of each meal, any violation of which incurs a whipping (ch. 21). Cato’s claims to be indifferent to wealth are also vitiated by his unrelenting capitalism (ch. 21). There begins to appear in this Life a very real gap between what Cato preaches and what he practises. This becomes even more obvious for anyone who comes to Cato after first reading its Greek parallel.
Plutarch pairs Cato with the Athenian statesman Aristeides (c. 530–468 BC), who was known as ‘the Just’. Although the historical Aristeides was a wily politician, in Plutarch’s Life he becomes a mild man of consistent principle. He shares with Cato, at least the Cato of the first half of his Life, an indifference to wealth (Aristeides 1 and 27). His simple lifestyle and lofty moral scruples form the basis for Plutarch’s matching Aristeides with Cato, and these are the dominant themes in Aristeides’ Life, along with his astonishing capacity for collaboration and cooperation, even with his rivals (e.g. chs. 3–4, 25 and Comparison Aristeides–Elder Cato 5). From boyhood, according to Plutarch, Aristeides possessed a steadfast character utterly lacking in falsehood or deceit (ch. 2), which is why he was admired and trusted on all sides. In the Comparison, Plutarch insists that Aristeides was free from contentiousness, and this is marked out as evidence of his mildness (praotes), a virtue prized by Plutarch as essential for moral perfection and civic excellence.19 And Plutarch goes on to agree with Plato’s judgement that Aristeides was superior to all his contemporaries because, even when engaged in statecraft, he led his city towards virtue (ch. 25, alluding to Plato’s Gorgias 526b).
The closing of Aristeides (ch. 27) is novel. It, too, employs the progeny trope that concludes other Lives, but with a twist. Here it is the poverty of Aristeides’ descendants that is emphasized, as is the willingness of the Athenians to honour the great man by way of kindness to his family. Such conduct, he concludes, was characteristic of the humanity and benevolence of Athens, virtuous behaviour, he adds, of the kind the city continues to exhibit even in Plutarch’s own day, and for which it is rightly admired. In essence, it is Athens and its virtues that represent Aristeides’ legacy in this Life. In this way, Plutarch brings a suitably Hellenic closure – Plato’s praise and the symbolism of Athens – to Aristeides’ flawless life, marked by its consistent and authentic principles.
A key inconsistency in Elder Cato lies in its subject’s attitude towards Greek culture. Cato’s hostility is pointed out more than once (chs. 12 and 22–3). At the same time, as Plutarch is at pains to observe, Cato’s celebrated eloquence, like his wisdom, actually derives from his acquaintance with Greek literature. Even when Cato attacks Greek medicine, Plutarch suggests, he does so by way of an idea he has borrowed from a Greek source. Plutarch’s exasperation with Cato reaches its pitch in his subject’s prediction that Greek culture would spell doom for Rome, a belief that was patently untrue, as the evidence of Plutarch’s own day made clear:
he pronounced with all the solemnity of a prophet that if ever the Romans became infected with the literature of Greece, they would lose their empire. At any rate, time has exposed the emptiness of this ominous prophecy, for in the age when the city rose to the zenith of her greatness, her people had made themselves familiar with Greek learning and culture in all its forms.
(ch. 23)
But did Cato, whose literary achievement was, in Plutarch’s view, grounded in Greek literature, really believe this? In this matter as in others, the credibility gap opened by Plutarch’s account renders the degree of Cato’s true attitude towards Greek literature uncertain. Cato simply lacks the transparency and steadfastness of Aristeides.
Cato’s lack of consistency recurs throughout the Comparison, most
pointedly in Plutarch’s complaint that Cato simultaneously praises the simple life and yet expounds and practices the best methods of accumulating wealth. In a sharp rhetorical turn, Plutarch does not simply ask the reader to make a judgement in this matter (a common Plutarchan device), but instead seeks the opinion of Cato himself:
I would very much like to put this question to Cato himself: if wealth is something that should be enjoyed, why, after amassing so much, do you boast of being satisfied with little?
(Comparison 4)
Plutarch leaves us with the problem of inferring Cato’s answer, and our reflections can only underscore the difficulty of diagnosing the authentic Cato.
This Life concludes in fascinating ironies that stress its complexities. The culmination of Cato’s legacy resides in the Younger Cato. But this man would never have existed were it not for Cato’s scandalous second marriage, which excites so much disapproval from Plutarch. There is also Plutarch’s final description of the Younger Cato, whom we meet in terms that could only shock his forebear, for in the end he is ‘Cato the Philosopher’ (ch. 27).
