Heroes: A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In January 52 BC the first of the storms that had been so long gathering broke. The two urban warlords Clodius and Milo met, apparently by chance, some miles from Rome on the Appian Way. Clodius was attended by thirty slaves carrying swords, Milo by three hundred armed men, including several gladiators. A brawl began. Clodius was injured. He was carried into a tavern. Milo’s men broke in and killed him. As soon as the news reached Rome the city exploded into violence. Clodius the beautiful, Clodius the insolent, was gone and the common people of Rome, to whom he had granted an intoxicating taste of their own power, ran wild. His associates, including two tribunes, displayed his corpse, naked and battered as it was, in the Forum. There were hysterical scenes of rage and grief. Prompted by the tribunes, the mob took over the Senate house, built a pyre of all the furniture and the senatorial records, hoisted Clodius’s corpse on top and set fire to the building. The seat of government, the repository of centuries of tradition, the brain controlling all the vast body of the Roman world, was reduced to charred ruins. The rioting spread as fast as the flames.

  For a month the chaos continued. A hostile mob attacked Milo’s house, to be driven back by the archers of his personal guard. “Every day,” according to Plutarch, “the Forum was occupied by three armies, and the evil had well-nigh become past checking.” The Senate declared a state of emergency, but the previous year’s consular elections had not taken place. There was no one to take control. “The city was left with no government at all, like a ship adrift with no one to steer her.” A mob invaded the sacred grove where the fasces were kept and seized them. Then, as though craving someone who could save them from their own license, they swept on to Pompey’s villa outside the city and clamored for him to make himself dictator. Pompey demurred. He was waiting for the more official invitation that he sensed could not be much longer withheld.

  It came soon enough. Twelve years previously Cato had declared that “while he lived” he would never consent to Pompey’s entering the city at the head of an army. Now, hopeless, he concluded that “any government was better than no government at all.” To the astonishment of his peers he spoke in favor of a motion offering Pompey the post of sole consul.

  Diplomatic and subtle as ever, Pompey invited Cato to work alongside him. Cato, his living opposite, stubbornly refused. He would be of no man’s party. He would give his advice when asked for it, he said, but he would also give his candid opinion whether asked for it or not.

  Pompey ordered his legions into the city. Gradually order was restored, but while the emergency lasted Rome was effectively a military dictatorship. When Milo was put on trial for the murder of Clodius, Pompey’s troops ringing the place of judgment were so numerous and so menacing that even Cicero, who had undertaken Milo’s defense, lost his nerve, failed to deliver the speech he had planned, and saw his client convicted.

  The crisis over, Pompey stepped down, once more amazing the constitutionalists by the propriety of his behavior. But a second storm was imminent. Caesar’s command in Gaul would lapse in the winter of 50 BC. Cato publicly swore that as soon as it did and Caesar therefore became once more subject to the law, he, Cato, would bring charges against him for the illegal acts he had perpetrated as consul in 59 BC, and for his unjustified and unsanctioned assaults on the people of Gaul.

  Caesar had many clients and supporters in the city. Repeatedly tribunes of his party vetoed attempts to rescind his command and appoint a successor to him in Gaul. It looked increasingly probable that he would refuse to surrender his legions. In December the Senate voted by an overwhelming majority that both he and Pompey should give up their commands. Again one of the tribunes vetoed the measure, at which the Senate once more went into mourning. Caesar was in winter quarters at Ravenna. By this time the danger he posed, which Cato had been railing against, largely unheard, for years, had served to greatly enhance the latter’s authority. In the general hysteria Cato was being acclaimed as a prophet, one whose vision was being proved true. Terrified that at any moment Caesar might launch a coup d’état, three senior senators visited Pompey, handed him a sword, and asked him to assume command of all the troops in Italy. Pompey accepted.

  There was still a chance of peace. Caesar wanted power, but so long as he was permitted to attain it he was prepared to observe at least the outward forms of republican legitimacy. It was not he but Cato, by his strenuous insistence on refusing any compromise, who made war inevitable. A second Odysseus might have come to some kind of face-saving arrangement, might have bent rules and reinterpreted precedents, remodeling the anachronistic constitution to accommodate modern reality, but Cato was not Odysseus, and it was because he was incapable of Odyssean diplomacy that he has been remembered and revered for millennia. “I would rather have noise and thunder and storm-curses than a cautious, uncertain feline repose,” wrote Nietzsche, meditating on the superman nearly two thousand years after Cato’s death. There was nothing uncertain about Cato. He was neither beautiful, nor especially valorous, nor—so far as we know—fleet of foot, but he was all the same a true successor to Achilles in his abhorrence of anything less than absolute truthfulness, his immovable insistence on every article of his creed, his willingness to see his own cause defeated if the only alternative was a dilution of its purity, his preference for death over dishonor. Caesar offered to hand over Gaul to a governor of the Senate’s choosing and to disband all but one of his legions if he could only be granted the right to stand for election as consul in his absence (and so return to Rome already protected by the privileges of office). It was not an unprecedented proposal, but Cato fulminated furiously against its acceptance. He would rather die, he said, than allow a citizen to dictate conditions to the republic.

  The senators were persuaded. The offer was refused. A measure was proposed declaring Caesar a public enemy. One of the tribunes (Caesar’s creature) vetoed it, whereupon the Senate declared a state of emergency. None of the ancient sources suggest that the two tribunes friendly to Caesar were physically threatened, but they acted as though they had been. Disguised as slaves, they slipped out of Rome, took one of the carriages-for-hire which waited at the city gates, and fled to Caesar’s camp. Their flight provided a pretext for war. Caesar had once dreamed of raping his mother. On January 10, 49 BC, after another troubled night, he led his legions across the Rubicon and marched on his mother city.

  His advance was inexorable and swift. Pompey had boasted that he had only to stamp his foot and all Italy would rise in his support. He was wrong: the people, apparently indifferent to the threat to senatorial rights and their own liberties, let Caesar pass. Despairing of holding the city against him, Pompey, most of the officeholders, and many senators abandoned Rome. After that day Cato never again cut his hair, trimmed his beard, wore a garland, or lay on a couch to eat. In deep mourning for the republic he had tried so hard to maintain, he followed Pompey, who was at least the Senate’s appointed representative, into war.

  His was not a warlike nature. As a young military tribune he had been popular with his soldiers for his refusal to make a show of his dignity and for his readiness to share their work and their hardships. When the time had come for him to leave, his legionaries wept and crowded round to embrace him, kissing his hands and laying down their cloaks in his path. Now, when he joined Pompey at his base in Dyrrhachium, in northern Greece, he again proved his talents as a leader. Before a battle the generals were addressing their troops, who listened to them “sluggishly and in silence.” Then Cato spoke with his usual fervor and a great shout went up. But though he could generate enthusiasm for the fight in others, he himself felt none. A civilian by nature, he once wrote to Cicero, “it is a much more splendid thing … that a province should be held and preserved by the mercy and incorruptibility of its commander than by the strength of a military force.” He loved neither fighting nor the cause for which he fought. When the Pompeians won a battle they all rejoiced except Cato, who “was weeping for his country … as he saw that many brave citizens had fall
en by one another’s hands.” He had rejected Pompey’s repeated attempts to annex him to his party. Now he privately told his friends that if Caesar triumphed he would kill himself: if Pompey did he would at least continue living but he would go into exile rather than submit to the dictatorship that he assumed was inevitable.

  He was not to be trusted with any command which would empower him to turn on his commander. Pompey considered making him admiral of his fleet, but changed his mind, reflecting that “the very day of Caesar’s defeat would find Cato demanding that he also lay down his arms and obey the laws.” When Pompey marched on Pharsalus to suffer his devastating defeat at Caesar’s hands, he left Cato at Dyrrhachium to mind the camp and guard the stores.

  At Pharsalus Pompey’s army, though twice as large as Caesar’s, was routed. Pompey escaped by sea, but few of his supporters knew in the aftermath of the battle whether he was dead or alive, let alone where he had gone. Cato found himself the commander of those troops which had straggled back into camp after the battle. He led them out to join up with the still intact Pompeian fleet. A stickler for propriety even in this moment of calamity, he offered to surrender his command to Cicero, who was with the ships and who, as a former consul, outranked him. Cicero was appalled; an altogether more flexible and pragmatic character, he was in a hurry to return to Italy and find himself a place on the winning side. Cato helped him get away and set sail for Africa with the remnant of the Pompeian army. He had guessed, correctly, that Pompey would seek refuge in Egypt. In Libya he learned that he was right, and that in Egypt the great man had been murdered. He also heard that another Pompeian army, commanded by Scipio (a sadly inferior descendant of the Scipio who defeated Hannibal), was in Numidia and had the backing of the Numidian King Juba. Cato, who was proving himself a resourceful and efficient if not a bellicose commander, led his troops on an arduous march across the Sahara to join them. When they met, Cato, as scrupulous as ever in his observance of proper form, ceded overall command to Scipio—technically his superior—despite the fact that everyone, including Scipio himself, recognized that Cato would have been the better man to lead.

  It took Caesar nearly two years to follow him into Numidia. The new ruler of Rome had business to attend to and battles to fight in Asia Minor, in Egypt, and back in Italy. Meanwhile Cato and his colleagues marched into the Phoenician port city of Utica and made it their base.

  Enclosed on one side by the desert, on the other by the sea, Utica was an isolated place. Under occupation by Cato and his colleagues its political nature was complicated and volatile. There were some three hundred Roman citizens of no particular allegiance living there, most of them moneylenders or merchants of one kind or another. These people would no doubt be ready to adapt to whatever political situation they found themselves in. But there were also a number of Roman senators who had left Italy with Pompey and then, unlike Cicero and those numerous others who had thrown themselves on Caesar’s mercy after Pharsalus, had come with Cato from Dyrrhachium. There was good reason to suppose that should they fall into Caesar’s hands they would all be killed for their obstinate opposition. The African people of Utica were thought to favor Caesar. Scipio and Juba both wished to protect themselves and their followers against possible treachery by slaughtering the entire population. Cato dissuaded them from this atrocity and took upon himself the responsibility of keeping the city secure and its diverse inhabitants safe from each other. To do so he employed harsh measures. He forced all the indigenous young men of Utica to give up their arms and interned them in palisaded concentration camps outside the city walls. The rest of the population—women, children, and old men—were allowed to remain inside, living uneasily alongside the Roman occupiers while the latter fortified the city and stocked it with grain.

  It was a tense and unhappy situation. The commanders bickered. Scipio accused Cato of cowardice. Cato, so observers believed, came profoundly to regret having handed over the command to a man he trusted neither to act competently in battle nor to be wise after it. Yet fractious and deeply divided as the Pompeian force at Utica might be, it seemed to contemporary observers and later Roman historians to have a tragic grandeur. To those who rejected Caesar’s rule, whether still fighting for the scattered Pompeian resistance abroad or living resentfully under the new regime, the Senate Cato established in Utica was the one true Senate, and Utica itself, because Cato was there, was the one true Rome. Cut off with his fugitive army in what to a Roman was the back of beyond, he loomed up in the Romans’ collective imagination, doomed but resolute, superbly alone, calmly awaiting Caesar’s arrival and his own surely inevitable defeat and death with what Seneca called “the unflinching steadiness of a hero who did not totter when the whole state was in ruins.”

  At last Caesar, who in the previous year had visited the supposed site of Achilles’ tomb, making a show, as Alexander had done, of his claim to be a successor to that paragon of warriors, got around to tackling the man whose claim to Achilles-like integrity was generally and annoyingly perceived to be so very much stronger than his own. He landed in Africa. Cato stayed in Utica to safeguard the supplies and keep the road to the sea open while Scipio led out the army. On April 6, 46 BC, at Thapsus the Pompeians were crushingly defeated, many of them trampled to death by their own stampeding elephants, and the majority of them were slaughtered.

  The news reached Utica late at night, brought by a messenger who had been three days on the road. At once the Romans in the city panicked. There were tumultuous scenes in the unlit streets as people dashed from their houses, shouting in terror, only to run back again, unsure where to seek safety. They had no troops to defend them. They were horribly aware of the men of Utica, penned into the prison camp alongside the city and no doubt exulting in the news of their oppressors’ defeat. They could see those men’s relatives all around them. They were crazy with fear, and they had good cause to be. Only one man remained calm: Cato himself. Once more, as he had so often done in the Roman Forum, he made use of his stentorian voice and his powers of self-assertion to still a frenzied crowd.

  Striding through the darkened streets, shouting out in his harsh voice, grabbing hold of his compatriots as they ran past babbling in terror, he arrested the stampede. As soon as it was light he summoned all the Romans present in Utica to assemble before the temple of Jupiter, he himself making his appearance among them with characteristic sangfroid, apparently immersed in a book (it was an inventory of the food supplies and weaponry stockpiled in the city). He spoke serenely, asking them to make up their minds whether they wished to fight or surrender to Caesar. He would not despise them, he said, if they chose the latter, but if they decided to fight—and here his tone became more fervent—their reward would be a happy life, or a most glorious death. The immediate effect of his oratory was impressive. “The majority, in view of his fearlessness, nobility and generosity, almost forgot their present troubles in the conviction that he alone was an invincible leader and superior to every fortune.”

  All too soon, though the mood of exaltation passed. Someone suggested that all present should be required to free their slaves, thereby providing the city with a defense force. Cato, correct as ever even in this desperate moment, refused to infringe private property rights by making such an action compulsory, but asked those who would give up their slaves of their own free will to do so. The Roman merchants—slave owners all and probably slave traders too, for whom business counted for more than politics—began to see the advantages of surrender. The situation was terrifyingly precarious. The merchants began talking about overpowering and interning their fellow Romans, the senators, ready to hand them over as a peace offering to the victorious Caesar.

  A troop of horsemen, survivors from Scipio’s defeated army, appeared out of the desert. At last Cato had the manpower that he needed so urgently. Accompanied by the senators, leaving the Roman merchants in the city, he hurried out through the city’s gates to welcome the newcomers and enlist their help in defending the city. But the sold
iers had already endured a traumatic battle; they were demoralized and exhausted. They could not be persuaded to make a stand against Caesar, who was now perhaps only hours away. There were angry scenes both in the city, where the merchants were working themselves into a state of self-justifying indignation against anyone who might suggest they should risk opposing Caesar, and outside, where the senators and their families, now doubly threatened, wept and wailed. Eventually the horsemen issued their ultimatum. They would stay and help defend Utica against Caesar but only on condition that they first be permitted to slaughter all the Uticans. Cato refused. They began to ride away, taking with them any remaining hope of survival, let alone of saving the republic. Cato went after them. For once showing emotion, he wept as he grasped at their horses’ bridles in a futile attempt to drag them back. For all his passion, the most he could get them to agree to was that they would guard the landward gates for one day while the senators made their escape by sea. Cato accepted.

  They took up their positions. The Roman merchants meanwhile announced their intention of surrendering forthwith. They were not Cato, they said, “and could not carry the large thoughts of Cato.” Petty as most mortals, they had resolved to take the safest and probably most profitable course. They offered to intercede with Caesar for Cato. He told them to do no such thing. “Prayer belonged to the conquered and the craving of grace to those who had done wrong.” It was Caesar who was defeated, because since he had made war on his own country his guilt was exposed for all to see. He, Cato, was the true victor. It was as though he was already leaving this world: mundane definitions of success and failure no longer held any validity for him. Simply to be right was to prevail.