Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Cato and Metellus Nepos were both among those elected to hold office as tribunes in the following year. At once Cato resumed his role as self-appointed guardian of public morality, while simultaneously demonstrating how unable, and indeed unwilling, he was to act the wily politician. He accused one of his own political allies, the consul Murena, of bribery. He was almost certainly correct in doing so. The bribing of voters was so commonplace that Cato’s own refusal to practice it made him highly unpopular. But those who had assumed that Cato was their ally were exasperated. Cicero, the celebrated advocate who was the other great luminary of the constitutionalist party, defended Murena (and got him off), remarking acidly in court that Cato had acted “as if he were living in Plato’s Republic, rather than among the dregs of Romulus’s descendants,” a remark designed less to lament the imperfection of modern life than to reproach the incorruptible Cato for his political ineptitude.

  Later that year, though, Cato got the chance to demonstrate that what he lacked in adroitness he made up for in passion and persuasiveness. For years he had been developing his powers of oratory, rigorously preparing himself for his calling, and he had, besides, two gifts worth more than any acquired rhetorical skill. One was an exceptionally powerful voice. It was loud and penetrating enough for him to be able to speak, without any form of amplification, to enormous crowds, and he had trained and exercised it until he had the stamina and the lung power to speak all day at full volume. The other was ferocity. He is reported to have believed that political oratory was a discipline as warlike as the defense of a city, and he put his theory into practice. His speeches were performances of thunderous belligerence, full of devastating energy, of aggression and righteous rage. He was soon to have occasion to employ his talent.

  Catiline had once more stood for election as consul and lost. Whether or not he had conspired against the state two years earlier, this time he certainly did. According to Sallust he bound his followers to him with a solemn ritual during which they were all required to drink from a cup full of human blood, and he prepared to lead an armed revolt.

  Cicero was consul. He heard—from his wife, who had heard it from a female friend who had heard it from her lover who was one of Catiline’s fellow conspirators—that Catiline’s coup was imminent. Unable to act on such hearsay evidence, Cicero provided himself with a bodyguard of hired thugs and ostentatiously wore a breastplate in public, as though to announce that he knew he and his fellow officeholders were under threat and that he was ready to defend himself. Catiline, too, had his personal guard, made up, according to a contemporary, of “troops of criminals and reprobates of every kind.” The situation was doubly dangerous. The prospect of an uprising was alarming in itself. Even worse, to Cato and like-minded senators, was the probability that Pompey would use it as a pretext for bringing his legions back to Italy and marching on Rome, ostensibly to suppress the revolt, but in fact to seize power for himself. It was among the most essential provisions of the Roman constitution that no army should ever be brought into Rome, and that a military leader must lay aside his command—and the legal immunity it gave him—before entering the city. When in Rome, all Romans were civilians and subject to the law. Sulla had breached that rule, with terrible consequences for the republic. There was a real prospect that Pompey, Sulla’s protégé, might follow his lead.

  In October there was an uprising in Etruria. In November an armed gang attempted to force its way into Cicero’s house before dawn, apparently to assassinate him, but were driven off by his guards. In an atmosphere of mounting panic, rumors circulated that the conspirators intended to burn the city to the ground. The Senate declared a state of emergency, but still there was no concrete evidence against anyone. Catiline defiantly took his seat in the Senate. No one would sit next to him. Shortly afterwards he left to join the rebels in the countryside. At last a letter was intercepted naming the leading conspirators. On December 3 the five who were still in Rome were arrested.

  What was to be done with them? Two days later the Senate met in a temple on the edge of the Forum. Outside were crowds whose shouts and murmurs could be heard from within the chamber, crowds which included many of Catiline’s supporters. Around the building, and in all the other temples in the Forum, were stationed Cicero’s armed guard. It was a dangerous and solemn occasion. The first speakers all demanded “the extreme penalty,” clearly meaning death. Then came the turn of Julius Caesar.

  Caesar’s speech on that momentous December day was elegant, tightly argued, and—given that he himself was widely suspected of having instigated the earlier plot and of complicity in the current one—coolly audacious. Summary execution was illegal, he argued. The conspirators deserved punishment but to kill them without legal sanction would be to set a dangerous precedent. He advocated life imprisonment “under the severest terms” instead. So persuasive was he (and so intimidating) that all the following speakers endorsed his opinion, and of those who had spoken earlier several abjectly claimed that by “extreme penalty” they had meant not execution, but precisely the kind of sentence Caesar was now recommending. The outcome of the debate seemed certain. At this point, very late in the proceedings because senators spoke in order of seniority and he was one of the youngest and lowest-ranking, Cato intervened.

  His speech was electrifying. Caesar had been suave; Cato was enraged. With the furious probity of a Saint-Just he denounced the pusillanimous senators. Sarcastic and passionate by turn, he sneered at them—“You, who have always valued your houses, villas, statues and paintings more highly than our country”—and fiercely drove them on. “Now in the name of the immortal gods I call upon you…. Wake up at last and lay hold of the reins of the state!” He mocked, he ranted, he painted a luridly dramatic picture of the dangers besetting the commonwealth. Finally, with awful solemnity, he demanded that the conspirators be put to death. The potency of his performance was demonstrated by its effect. When he had finished the senators, one after another, rose and went to stand beside him to signal their agreement. Caesar, who only minutes before had held the assembly in his hand, was left isolated. For once losing his famous imperturbability, Caesar protested furiously. There was a fracas, during which (according to some sources) Cato accused Caesar of complicity with the conspirators. Cicero’s guard intervened, drawing their swords. Caesar was nearly killed in the ensuing mêlée. Some kind of order was restored. Caesar left. The Senate stood firm behind Cato. The conspirators were led, one by one, across the Forum, through the agitated crowd, which included some of their confederates, to the place of punishment. There, in an underground chamber “hideous and fearsome to behold,” they were strangled. A few weeks later Catiline himself was killed in battle.

  So began the essential drama of Cato’s life. “For a long time,” wrote Sallust, “no one at all appeared in Rome who was great. But within my own memory there have been two men of towering merit, Cato and Caesar.” Two thousand years on Caesar is by far the more celebrated of the two, thanks in part to his skillful fostering of his own fame, in part to our culture’s infatuation with military conquest. But to those who knew them the two looked evenly matched: a comparable pair of brilliantly gifted men. They clashed for the first time in the debate over the conspirators’ sentence. From that day until his death seventeen years later Cato was to remain Caesar’s most inveterate political opponent.

  Each of them was the prime representative of one of two tendencies in Roman political life. (To call them parties would be to suggest a degree of cohesiveness notably absent from the political scene.) Cato was to become the most eloquent spokesman of the optimates, Caesar the most successful of the populares. Optimates and populares alike were oligarchs drawn from the same exclusive group of rich and well-descended Romans, but they differed in the ways in which they played the complicated political system of the republic. The populares were soldiers and empire builders, or their clients and admirers, who tended to bypass the Senate, to enlist the support of tribunes and through them of the elector
ate at large. Like Alcibiades, they were aristocratic populists, distrusted by their peers but adored by an electorate to whom they offered the violent excitements and huge potential profits of warfare. The optimates—civilians at heart—were the defenders of the power of the Senate, sticklers for the rules designed to uphold the senators’ dignity and, most importantly, to ensure that military commanders were prevented from using their armies to seize personal power.

  Within a week of the executions of Catilinarian conspirators the new tribunes, Cato and Metellus Nepos among them, took office, and so did Caesar as praetor. At once Nepos fulfilled Cato’s worst fears by proposing that Pompey, his patron, be recalled to Rome with his legions “to restore order.” When Nepos’s proposal was discussed in the Senate, Caesar supported it, but Cato raged against it with such vehemence that some observers thought he was out of his mind. As a tribune he had the right to veto the measure and he announced that he would do so, swearing passionately “that while he lived Pompey should not enter the city with an armed force.”

  This was no empty piece of rhetoric. It was widely believed that the populares would prevent Cato by whatever means were necessary, up to and including murder, from blocking their way. He would have to declare his veto formally the following day when the people were asked to vote on the measure in the Forum. That night he slept deeply, but he was alone in his household in doing so. According to Plutarch “great dejection and fear reigned, his friends took no food and watched all night with one another in futile discussion on his behalf, while his wife and sisters wailed and wept.”

  It was customary for friends and political allies to call for an officeholder at his house in the morning and escort him down to the Forum as a public demonstration of support. But on the day of the vote, so effectively had Nepos and Caesar cowed their opponents, Cato had only one companion of note, another tribune by the name of Thermus. As the two of them, attended only by a handful of servants, made their way towards the place of assembly they met well-wishers who exhorted them to be on their guard but who fearfully declined to accompany them. Arriving, they found the Forum packed with people whom Nepos had succeeded in rousing to his cause and surrounded by his and Caesar’s armed slaves. (Caesar owned several gladiatorial training schools and had brought a unprecedented number of gladiators to Rome for the games he staged in 65 BC. The games over, he kept the surviving slaves around him as an armed guard.)

  Nepos and Caesar were already seated in a commanding position on the exceptionally high and steep podium of the Temple of Castor. On the temple steps a troop of gladiators were massed. Seeing them, Cato exclaimed, “What a bold man, and what a coward, to levy such an army against a single unarmed and defenceless person!” Accompanied only by Thermus he pushed through the hostile crowd. The gladiators, disconcerted by his courage, made way for him. Climbing onto the podium, he brusquely positioned himself between Nepos and Caesar.

  A law upon which the people were to vote had first to be read out loud to them. A herald prepared to declaim Nepos’s proposed measure. Cato, announcing his veto, stopped him. Nepos, in defiance of law and custom, attempted to override the veto. Snatching the document from the herald he began to read it himself. Cato ripped it from him. Nepos continued to recite it from memory. Thermus, Cato’s sole supporter, clapped a hand over his mouth.

  The tussle was taking place in full view of an excited and increasingly volatile crowd. People were yelling out encouragement for one side or another as though watching a gladiatorial show, and increasing numbers were shouting for Cato. “They urged one another to stay and band themselves together and not betray their liberty and the man who was striving to defend it.” Furious at being so thwarted Nepos signaled to his guards, who charged into the mob with fearsome yells, precipitating a riot which lasted for several hours. It was a day of brutal mayhem. At one point Nepos, having temporarily regained control of the Forum, attempted to force what would have been an entirely illegal vote. At another, Cato, standing dangerously exposed on the tribunal, was stoned by the crowd and only saved from perhaps fatal injury by the intervention of the consul Murena (the man he had accused of bribery), who wrapped him in his own toga and dragged him into the shelter of a temple.

  Nepos’s followers were eventually driven out. Cato addressed the people and, battered and exhausted as he must have been, he spoke with such fervor he managed to win them over entirely. The Senate assembled again and rallied behind him, condemning Nepos’s law. Nepos, according to Plutarch, saw “that his followers were completely terrified before Cato and thought him utterly invincible.” In defiance of the rule that no tribune might leave the city during his term of office, he fled, “crying out that he was fleeing from Cato’s tyranny,” and made his way to Pompey’s camp in Asia. Caesar’s praetorship was temporarily suspended. The episode was a great political victory for Cato. Characteristically he contrived to make it a moral one as well when he opposed a motion to deprive Nepos of his office: the tribunate must remain inviolable, however flawed the tribune might be.

  In 61 BC Pompey returned from the east and celebrated his triumph. He had conquered fifteen countries and taken nine hundred cities, eight hundred ships, and a thousand fortresses. For two whole days the celebrations engulfed Rome as the entire populace turned out to see the show. Captured monarchs and their children were led in procession along with manacled pirate chiefs. Huge placards proclaimed Pompey’s victories. There were bands playing; there were military trophies; there were wagonloads of weaponry and precious metal. Finally there came Pompey himself wreathed with bay, his face painted to resemble Jupiter, his purple toga spangled with gold stars. He wore a cloak which had purportedly belonged to Alexander the Great. Beside him in his gem-encrusted chariot rode a slave whose task it was to whisper ceaselessly “Remember you are human” in his ear while all about the noisy, gaudy, amazing spectacle proclaimed the opposite. Behind the godlike victor marched lines of soldiers, all hymning his glory.

  It was a spectacle which boded ill for republican liberty, but for the time being Cato’s dark forebodings of civil war and dictatorship were not realized. Pompey, for all his magnificence, was still a republican. In Asia he had repudiated Nepos. Now he dismissed his army and reentered Rome as a private citizen, apparently intent on seeking a legitimate channel for his power. It was not his ambition but Cato’s absolute refusal to allow any compromise or concession to be made to him that rendered that impossible.

  Doggedly disobliging, implacably opposed to the slightest modification of a political system which, like Sophocles’ tree, looked doomed to break if it would not bend, Cato watched and obstructed Pompey’s every maneuver. It was Cato who persuaded the Senate not to grant Pompey’s request that the consular elections be postponed so that he might stand for office. It was Cato who vociferously opposed the ratification of Pompey’s settlements in the east. And it was Cato who spoke loudest against the bill whereby Pompey sought to reward his veterans for their victories with plots carved out of the publicly owned land controlled by the Senate. Pompey patiently endured Cato’s relentless obstructiveness. He attempted to dissolve this thorn in his flesh by proposing a double marriage, with himself and his son as bridegrooms to Cato’s nieces (or perhaps his daughters), further evidence of the astonishingly high regard in which this still comparatively junior politician was held. Cato refused, saying, “Tell Pompey that Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.” Once again, in rejecting an opportunity to bind Pompey to the constitutionalist faction, he had done his own cause a grave disservice.

  He did it another one when he antagonized Crassus. A consortium of tax farmers had paid too high for the right to raise money in Asia Minor. Unable to make a profit, they attempted to renegotiate their contract with the Senate. Crassus backed them. Cato opposed them with manic obduracy. Talking indefatigably for day after day he succeeded in blocking the measure for months on end, effectively paralyzing the Senate by the sheer power of his obstinate will.

  In 6
0 BC Julius Caesar, who had been campaigning in Spain, also returned to Rome. He had been granted a triumph for his Iberian conquests. In order to celebrate it he was obliged to remain outside the sacrosanct bounds of the city, but he wished (as Pompey had) to be elected consul for the following year, and in order to declare his candidacy he had to be in Rome. He asked the Senate’s permission to stand for office in absentia. Cato opposed him. A decision had to be reached before nightfall on a certain day. Once more Cato filibustered, haranguing his colleagues in his powerful, rasping voice until the sun went down. The next morning Caesar laid aside his command, thus giving up his triumph, and entered the city to seek election.

  Rome’s three most powerful men had each found that, thanks to Cato’s intransigence, they were unable to impose their will on the Senate. They resolved instead to ignore it. In 60 BC Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus arrived at a secret agreement. Their alliance (known as the First Triumvirate) made them the effective though unacknowledged rulers of Rome, their combined wealth, manpower, and political influence allowing them to bypass or overrule all the institutions of government.

  Cato was outraged. Over the next four years, in the face of political intimidation that frequently escalated into violence, he unswervingly opposed the incremental growth of the power of Rome’s inordinately great men. Every time a rule was bent, a precedent ignored, an extraordinary privilege granted, he was there to oppose the innovation. Tireless and tiresome in equal measure, “always ready,” as Theodor Mommsen wrote, “to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so or not,” he let nothing pass. Caesar was consul in 59 BC. Cato obstructed and opposed his every move. Caesar proposed another bill making grants of land to Pompey’s soldiers. Pompey brought his veterans, the very men who would benefit from the measure, into the city, a tacit threat to anyone inclined to oppose its passage. A time limit was set for the Senate’s discussion. Nervously aware of the armed men thronging the streets around them, few dared speak at all, but when it came to Cato’s turn he rose and, employing his favorite tactic, attempted to block the measure by speaking for hours on end. This time, though, he had an opponent with scant respect for senatorial procedure. Caesar set his gang of gladiators to drag him from the rostrum and haul him off to the prison cells where Catiline’s co-conspirators had been done to death. As Cato was hustled away he continued to harangue the senators. Several followed him “with downcast looks.” Caesar called them back, demanding they finish the business in hand. One bravely replied, “I prefer to be with Cato in prison rather than here with you.” Cato was marched across the Forum, still talking at the top of his powerful voice to the shocked and fearful crowd. He was released almost immediately, but his imprisonment was a crucial turning point in the history of the republic, the moment when Caesar demonstrated that he would have his way, with or without the law.