The Inheritance of Virtue

Philokles, tell me this—has there ever lived, in the history of any commonwealth, a man more virtuous than that Cato whom the Romans call the Younger? For everywhere I hear him praised as the incorruptible guardian of liberty, the man who opposed Caesar and in the end gave his very life rather than behold the Republic enslaved.

My dear Lucius, you ask your question in a tone worthy of the orators of the Forum, and indeed many before you have spoken in just such a manner when the name of Cato is raised. Yet I fear that if we are to inquire seriously into the matter, we must begin, not with praise, but with caution. For when men speak too quickly of virtue, they often reveal less about the man they praise than about the hopes and fears of those who remember him.

You ask whether any man has been more virtuous than Cato. But before we can answer such a question, we must first ask a simpler one: what sort of virtue are we speaking of? For among the Romans, virtue—virtus, as they call it—is not merely a matter of moral purity, as philosophers sometimes imagine, but a mixture of courage, discipline, ambition, and devotion to the state. And many men who possessed these qualities in abundance have nevertheless done great harm to the very republic they sought to defend.

Consider therefore the difficulty in which your question places us. For if I were to answer immediately, saying either that Cato was indeed the most virtuous of men or that he was not, I should speak like those sophists who claim knowledge before they have examined the matter. And yet I confess that the figure of Cato is so surrounded by admiration and reproach alike that one scarcely knows where to begin.

But perhaps we may approach the question as physicians approach a difficult illness—by examining the patient’s ancestry and upbringing before attempting a diagnosis of the malady itself.

For Cato did not appear in Rome as an entirely new phenomenon. He belonged to a family whose name already carried with it a certain austere reputation, and whose most famous representative had lived nearly two centuries earlier. I speak, of course, of the elder Cato—Marcus Porcius Cato, whom the Romans called the Censor.

Now this earlier Cato lived in a Rome very different from the one that our Cato inherited. In his youth the Republic was still engaged in its long struggle with Carthage, and the memory of Hannibal’s devastation lay fresh in the minds of the Roman people. It was an age that prized severity, thrift, and relentless discipline—qualities that the elder Cato not only possessed but displayed with such theatrical determination that he became the very symbol of the old Roman character.

You have surely heard the story, Lucius, that he ended nearly every speech in the Senate—whatever the matter under discussion—with the same grim sentence: that Carthage must be destroyed. Whether the senators were debating taxation, provincial administration, or some petty quarrel between magistrates, the old man would eventually rise and conclude with those words, as though the fate of Rome depended upon their repetition.

And in time, as you know, Carthage was indeed destroyed.

Such a figure naturally became a legend among the Romans. He was remembered as the incorruptible censor who scourged luxury from the city, who rebuked the arrogance of the aristocracy, and who reminded the Republic that its greatness had been forged by hard men who slept little, spent little, and feared the gods.

It was therefore no small inheritance that fell upon the shoulders of the younger Cato.

For from his earliest years he was told—by family, by tutors, and by the whole Roman tradition—that he descended from the very embodiment of ancient virtue. And it is a dangerous thing, Lucius, for a young man to grow up under the shadow of so formidable an example. Some men attempt to escape such shadows; others spend their lives attempting to inhabit them.

The younger Cato chose the latter course.

From his youth he cultivated austerity almost as a discipline of the soul. He wore plain clothing when others sought refinement; he despised luxury; he spoke with a harsh frankness that often offended his contemporaries. In short, he seemed determined to live as though the spirit of the old censor had returned to Rome in a new body.

But here we encounter the first of the great questions surrounding his life.

For while the elder Cato had flourished in a Republic that was still expanding and confident in its institutions, the younger one lived in a Rome transformed by conquest, wealth, and fierce competition among ambitious men. The city that had once been governed by austere farmers had become the capital of a vast Mediterranean empire, filled with riches, rivalries, and political intrigues that would have astonished the generation of the Punic Wars.

And so we must ask ourselves—though not yet answer too quickly—whether the younger Cato was truly the perfect guardian of Roman virtue, as many claim, or whether he was instead a man attempting to apply the habits of an earlier age to a political world that had already changed beyond recognition.

But perhaps I speak too long before hearing your thoughts. Tell me, Lucius: when you praise Cato’s virtue, do you admire him chiefly for his character—or for the cause in whose name he fought?

Then perhaps, Philokles, we ought not to hurry so quickly past the figure of this elder Cato whose name the younger one carried almost like a banner. For if the reputation of the son rests so heavily upon the memory of the ancestor, it would seem reasonable that we first examine that earlier man more carefully. Tell me, therefore, whether this Cato the Censor was indeed as virtuous as Roman tradition later claimed.

For I find myself recalling another scene from those same wars against Carthage. When the city was finally destroyed in the Third Punic War, the great general Scipio—he whom the Romans called Africanus—looked upon the flames of the fallen city and, as the historians tell us, wept. Some say he even quoted verses from Homer, reflecting that the same fate must one day befall Rome herself. Such a reaction seems to suggest that even Rome’s greatest conqueror felt a certain shame, or at least a solemn foreboding, at the total ruin of an enemy.

And if that is so, we must ask ourselves something rather uncomfortable. Was the relentless call for Carthage’s destruction—so famously repeated by Cato the Elder in the Senate—truly the voice of Roman virtue? Or might it reveal in that austere old censor something less admirable: a hardness of spirit, perhaps, that later generations preferred to mistake for moral strength?

Tell me, therefore, Philokles when we examine the life of Cato the Censor more closely, do we truly find the model of Roman virtue—or the beginnings of that severe and uncompromising spirit which his descendant would later imitate so faithfully?

You lead us, Lucius, into deeper water, and rightly so. For it is the habit of most men, when they hear an illustrious name often enough repeated by their fathers, their schoolmasters, and the public monuments of the city, to suppose that fame and virtue are one and the same thing. Yet these two are no more identical than noise and music. Many men are famous because they conquered; some because they flattered; others because they perished nobly; but few are famous because they were in truth just, prudent, and beneficial to their commonwealth. And so, if we are to speak soberly of Cato the Censor, we must not ask first what the Romans said of him, but what sort of man his deeds reveal him to have been.

Now I do not deny that the elder Cato possessed qualities which the Romans, especially of the old school, valued above almost everything. He was frugal, laborious, severe toward himself, severe toward others, suspicious of luxury, contemptuous of softness, and possessed of that grim tenacity which in times of danger often passes for the highest civic virtue. He came not from the most ancient and ornamented nobility of the city, but from that harder Italian stock which had not yet been softened by Greek refinements or by the easy wealth of empire. In such men Rome long believed its strength to reside. And perhaps not without reason. For a state that rises from narrow beginnings and survives by endurance naturally learns to honour those qualities that preserve it under hardship.

Thus in the memory of later generations Cato became almost the embodied conscience of the early Republic: the stern censor, the enemy of corruption, the scourge of extravagance, the man who rebuked the great as readily as the low, and who seemed to stand in the Senate like some last rough pillar of an older and simpler order. This, at least, is the image that Rome preferred to carve in marble.

But if we look more closely, as you have urged us to do, the matter becomes less simple.

For virtue, Lucius, is not proved merely by austerity. A man may eat coarse bread, wear rough clothing, sleep on a hard bed, and yet be vain of his very roughness. Indeed, there is a kind of pride more subtle than the pride of jewels and purple robes: I mean the pride that glories in appearing harsher, purer, and less corruptible than all other men. Such pride clothes itself in plain wool instead of silk, but it remains pride nonetheless.

And this suspicion, I think, cannot easily be dismissed in the case of Cato.

For consider how often his severity seems almost theatrical in the stories told of him. He did not merely dislike luxury; he made a public spectacle of despising it. He did not merely uphold old manners; he stood forth as their accuser, their guardian, almost their priest. One begins to wonder whether he loved virtue alone, or whether he also loved being seen as the man of virtue in an age that increasingly admired display. And if the latter was even partly true, then his famous austerity becomes more ambiguous. It ceases to be merely moral discipline and begins to partake of performance.

Yet even that would not in itself condemn him. For many statesmen possess vanity; and some use it in the service of admirable ends. The graver question concerns the spirit with which he regarded power, enemies, and the destiny of Rome.

You have very properly recalled Scipio Africanus and the destruction of Carthage, though here we must distinguish carefully among the Scipios, for it was Scipio Aemilianus, the destroyer of Carthage, who, as tradition says, wept at the sight of the burning city and reflected upon the mortality of all human greatness. Whether every word attributed to him was spoken exactly as later authors report is not the central issue. What matters is that Roman memory preserved in him the image of a conqueror who, even in triumph, retained a sense of measure, of tragedy, of the common fate that hangs over victor and vanquished alike.

Now set beside this image the relentless insistence of Cato that Carthage must be destroyed. Here we see two very different moral tempers. In Scipio there is greatness touched by pity and foresight; in Cato there is resolution sharpened into a single fixed idea. Scipio looks upon the fallen enemy and sees the fragility of all empires; Cato looks upon the rival city and sees only a danger that must not be permitted to survive.

Which of the two is more virtuous? That is not a question to be answered lightly.

For the defenders of Cato will say, and not without force, that states are not preserved by tears. They will remind us that Carthage had once nearly destroyed Rome, that memory of Hannibal’s invasion still haunted Roman minds, and that prudent statesmanship does not wait for danger to ripen into catastrophe. They will say that Scipio’s tears were noble, but that Cato’s hardness was useful; and that in the councils of empire usefulness has often been mistaken for cruelty only by those who live later in security purchased by the harsh decisions of others.

This argument deserves respect. Yet it does not settle the matter. For the question is not whether Cato was effective in perceiving the strategic danger posed by Carthage, but whether the spirit in which he pursued its destruction was that of a virtuous statesman or that of a man whose soul had become so attached to severity that he could no longer distinguish prudence from implacability.

And here, Lucius, we touch upon a problem not only of the elder Cato but of Roman virtue itself. The Romans greatly admired constancy, hardness, domination of the self, and the subordination of private feeling to public necessity. These are real virtues in their proper measure. But when carried beyond measure, they become something else. Constancy becomes obstinacy. Hardness becomes cruelty. Self-command becomes contempt for the weakness of others. Public necessity becomes the universal excuse by which conscience is silenced.

It may be, therefore, that Cato the Censor was not a hypocrite, nor a villain, nor even a foolish man, but rather the purest expression of a Roman ideal that was itself double-edged. He represented, in an unusually concentrated form, those old republican qualities that had raised Rome to greatness. Yet those same qualities, unsoftened by breadth of mind or by tragic imagination, contained within them the seeds of a harsher and less humane imperial spirit.

You see then why I hesitate either to praise him too quickly or to condemn him too boldly. For he was no common demagogue, no frivolous seeker of applause, no man dissolved in luxury or bribery. He was in earnest; and earnest men are always dangerous, whether for good or ill. He believed that Rome must remain hard if she were to remain great. He believed that moral discipline and political supremacy stood or fell together. He believed, perhaps sincerely, that to spare Carthage was to endanger the future of his own city.

But there is a difference, Lucius, between loving one’s country and worshipping its severity. The first may produce noble sacrifice; the second may produce a kind of civic fanaticism, all the more formidable because it is draped in the language of duty.

And so, if you ask me whether Cato the Censor was virtuous, I would answer in this way: he possessed virtue of a certain Roman kind, and in great abundance. But he also showed how easily that virtue, when joined to pride, rigidity, and an unyielding conception of the state, could harden into something less admirable. He was perhaps not the simple model of virtue that later Romans imagined, but rather an austere and troubling exemplar of the strengths and dangers contained in the old Republic itself.

This, I think, is why he matters so much for understanding his descendant. For the younger Cato did not merely inherit a famous name. He inherited an ideal already sharpened almost to excess. And the tragedy of the younger man may well have been that he tried to revive, in an age of civil corruption and imperial ambition, a moral type that had always contained within itself something hard, narrow, and potentially destructive.

But tell me, Lucius: when you reflect on such men, do you think a republic is preserved more securely by sternness—or by wisdom tempered with mercy? For upon the answer to that question much of Roman history seems to turn.