The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]

CHAPTER XXI. THE CONSPIRACY OF CATILINE

MARCUS PORCIUS CATO

Pompey, in quitting the centre of affairs, could not fail to augur that his removal would be the signal for the revival of party passions, and that a few more years’ experience of the miseries of anarchy would demand his recall with fuller powers for the settlement of affairs. The nobles, on their part, having been compelled to submit to his extraordinary appointment, now cast about for the means of turning his absence to their advantage. They had placed him at their head, and he had betrayed them; they now looked for a stouter and more faithful champion, and prepared themselves, when the time should serve, to strike a blow for ascendency, the shock of which should be felt on the Euphrates, and daunt the conqueror of Syria and Pontus.

The chiefs whom they had hitherto consulted had mortified them by their conciliatory temper, their timidity or their languor. Catulus they respected, but they distrusted his firmness: Lucullus, whose aid they next invoked, disregarded their solicitations. Hortensius was sunk in pride and indolence. There were among them many personages of inferior fame and influence, the Silani, the Scribonii, the Marcii, the Domitii, the Scipios and Marcelli, who might make good officers, but wanted the genius for command. But there was one man, still in their ranks, young in years, a plebeian by extraction, unknown in civil or military affairs, in whose unflinching zeal and dauntless courage they felt they could securely confide. Judgment, indeed, and tact he sorely needed; but these were qualities which the nobles held in little regard, and neither he nor they were sensible of this grievous deficiency.

This man was Marcus Porcius Cato, the heir of the venerable name of the censor Cato, his great-grandfather, a name long revered by the Romans for probity and simplicity. The slave of national prejudices Cato believed, like his illustrious ancestor, in the mission of a superior caste to govern the Roman state, in the natural right of the lords of the human race to hold the world in bondage, in the absolute authority of the husband over the wife, the parent over the child, the master over the servant. In his principles Cato was the most bigoted of tyrants. Yet never were these awful dogmas held by a man whose natural temper was more averse to the violence and cruelty by which alone they can be maintained, and in vain did Cato strive to fortify himself against the instincts of humanity within him by abstract speculation and severe self-discipline. Born in the year 95, he had witnessed the termination of the Social War, and resented, as a mere boy, the compromise in which that mighty struggle resulted. Nevertheless his feelings had revolted from the atrocious measures with which Sulla had avenged it, and alone of his party, he sighed over their most brilliant victories and lamented the bloody execution they did upon their enemies.

From the early days of his boyhood Cato had unremittingly trained himself in the austere pattern of the ancient manners, already becoming obsolete in the time of the censor. Inured to frugality and the simplest tastes, he raised himself above the temptations of his class to rapine and extortion. Enrolling himself in the priesthood of the god Apollo, he acknowledged perhaps a divine call to the practice of bodily self-denial, in which, in the view of the ancients, the religious life mainly consisted. He imbibed the doctrines of the stoic philosophy, the rigidity of which was congenial to his temper, and strove under their guidance to square his public conduct by the strictest rules of private integrity. If he failed, it was through the infirmity of nature, not the inconsistency of vanity or caprice; but, doubtless, the exigencies of public affairs drove him, as well as other men of less eminent pretensions, to many a sordid compromise with his own principles, while in private life the strength to which he aspired became the source of manifold weakness. It made him proud of his own virtues, confident in his judgments, inaccessible to generous impulses, caustic in his remarks on others, a blind observer of forms, and a slave to prejudices. A party composed of such men as Cato would have been ill-matched with the ranks of crafty intriguers opposed to them on every side; but when the selfish, indolent, and unprincipled chose themselves a champion of a character so alien from their own, the hollowness of the alliance and the hopelessness of the cause became sufficiently manifest.