Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 favour 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 Rome – while the emergency lasted – was effectually 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 defence, 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 behaviour. 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 would bring charges against Caesar 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. Tribunes of his party repeatedly vetoed attempts to rescind his command and appoint a successor to him in Gaul. It began to look 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. By this time the danger posed by Caesar, which Cato had been railing against, largely unheard, for years, had served greatly to enhance the latter’s authority. In the general hysteria Cato was acclaimed as a prophet whose vision was being proved true. Terrified that Caesar might launch a coup d’état at any moment from his winter quarters in Ravenna, 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 he was prepared at least to observe 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, remodelling the anachronistic constitution to accommodate modern reality; but Cato was no 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, in his immovable insistence on every article of his creed, in his willingness to see his own cause defeated if the only alternative was a dilution of its purity, and in his preference for death over dishonour. 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 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. Caesar’s 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 suggests 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 and fled to Caesar’s camp. Their flight provided a pretext for war. Caesar had once dreamed of raping his mother. On 10 January 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 and most of the officeholders, as well as 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 Dyrrachium, 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 fervour 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. 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 prevailed, he would at least continue living but would go into exile rather than submit to the dictatorship that he assumed was inevitable.

      The first task Pompey assigned him was the defence of Sicily, source of most of Rome’s corn supply. When he realized that his troops were outnumbered by the invading Caesarean force, he avoided a confrontation by abandoning the island, advising the Syracusans to make their peace with whichever party was ultimately victorious. His priority was the prevention of Rome’s self-destruction. He persuaded Pompey to swear that he wouldn’t plunder any city under Rome’s protection, or kill any Roman except on the battlefield. When the Pompeians won a battle everyone rejoiced except Cato, who ‘was weeping for his country … as he saw that many brave citizens had fallen by one another’s hands’. He was not to be trusted with any command that would empower him to turn on his own 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 [Pompey] also lay down his arms and obey the laws’. When Pompey marched on Pharsalus, where he suffered his devastating defeat at Caesar’s hands, he left Cato at Dyrrachium 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 in the aftermath of the battle few of his supporters knew whether he was dead or alive. Cato found himself the commander of those troops that 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 СКАЧАТЬ