The Lives of Cato the Younger from Ancient Rome to Modern America by Thomas E. Strunk, is a close study of Cato the Younger and his impact on later writers. It soon becomes apparent that the idea of the defiant figure of Cato Uticensis has outraced the history of Cato.
In brief, I very much like each chapter individually. They are thoroughly cited and argued and each chapter is internally compelling. The book itself, I think, does not hold together as well as an integral whole, though it succeeds at contributing “substantive chapters on several noteworthy contributors to our understanding” (p. 4). Though Strunk points out the frequent potential confusion of Cato the Elder and Younger, he does not do so systematically.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus upon the life of the historical Cato and his reception among his contemporaries. Here, a family tree would have been welcome, for this Cato was related to seemingly half of the senate. This point would be trivial except that Strunk astutely observes Cato’s propensity to rank familial loyalty as a greater good relative to the official responsibilities of magistrates. We might fairly wonder whether this is truly an exception to Cato’s famously rigid sense of proper behavior or simply in harmony with his sense of pietas. For such a famous character, the younger Cato’s political career was relatively short: elected quaestor in 64 BCE, tribune in 62, quaestor pro praetore in 58, praetor in 54, a failed run for consul in 52, and death in Utica in 46.
Strunk then argues Cato’s contemporaries cast him in one of three ways: as philosopher, as traitor, or as statesman. Cato’s Stoicism, as seen through Cicero’s account, overrode his political inclinations. Sallust and (Cato’s nephew) Brutus present Cato as less motivated by Stoic virtue in itself but rather in pragmatic statesmanship. Caesar, by contrast, hinted consistently that Cato always had ulterior motives. We should also be wary at assuming Cato, for all his connections, had the same gravitas in the mid-sixties BCE as in the late fifties.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine Cato’s reception during the Empire. Early imperial writers shy away from direct address of Cato’s situation, preferring to allude vaguely to Cato’s noble but unrealistic idealism. Strunk pivots in turn to Cato’s life as represented in Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus, and Plutarch. Strunk presents each as finding a balance between Cato’s Stoicism and statesmanship as articulated in chapter 2, and often wrestling over how Cato should be regarded. Seneca strives to make him a noble philosopher, Lucan a doomed statesman, Tacitus a dangerous figure to emulate. Plutarch’s Life of Cato is almost certainly the key source for all later writers, and Strunk’s clear analysis of Plutarch’s tweaks in portraying Cato’s vita is welcome. Plutarch was prone to write his biographies as narrative tragedies, which would influence drama later. Strunk does not address the motives of later historians in the same way (Appian, Cassius Dio, Ammianus Marcellinus), nor really the excerpters (Aulus Gellius, Valerius Maximus, Velleius Paterculus). It would have been nice to see Strunk address Appian’s and Dio’s accounts, at the least, both of whom provide a substantial amount of detail. Or, if he excludes them for repeating details, to explicitly make the case that their accounts were derivative.
(As a technical note, I would also point out Cato was also related to the empress Livia, for Cato’s uncle M. Livius Drusus adopted a cousin/nephew who was the M. Livius Drusus who was Livia’s father, though I am unaware of her ever mentioning Cato. Whether this familial relationship chilled some criticisms of Cato cannot be determined. Admittedly, the senatorial elite were often related in unexpected ways.)
Strunk argues Christian authors took a different approach to Cato, as we see in chapter 5. Catonian severity and Stoicism both appealed to early Christian writers in various degrees, but Cato’s obvious lack of Christianity and his death by suicide presented barriers against forming too laudatory a tale. Christian writers largely omit Cato from lists of the virtuous type of pagan. The difference becomes a question upon which rationales Christian writings will pose opposition to Cato, though most focus upon suicide as an unforgivable sin. Tertullian lands upon Cato’s marriages, while Lactantius focuses blame upon his suicide and imputes a traditional desire for glory. Jerome and Augustine both praise his general severity and austerity and condemn his suicide, though, as Strunk points out, their rationales differ a bit. The Distichs preserve a more positive Cato, but to Strunk, his rehabilitation was due rather to Dante, who not only placed the legendary Uticensis in his Purgatory, but praised him fulsomely in his other works. More discussion of Stoicism in the church might have been fruitful, especially since the theologians’ arguments against Cato seem designed to thread the needle for a character generally seen as praiseworthy. The chapter seems to imply that Plutarch’s Cato was forgotten.
(As a second technical note, pagan writers sometimes also seem ambivalent on Cato – we might consider Julian’s somewhat negative assessment in the letter to Themistius – but Arnobius (3.16) certainly suggests that Cato and Cicero were generally seen in a similar, positive light even as he argues against that general impression.)
Chapter 6 now leaps to Cato’s appearance in early modern drama and its impact in Europe. Strunk focuses upon the immensely popular play Cato by Addison in 1713, which inspired fifteen others over the next century. Now, Plutarch’s Lives were frequently mined by playwrights for familiar, yet distant play material, but something different had happened with this play, set in Cato’s last days in Utica. Strunk intuits that Cato’s devotion to liberty and republicanism were the cause of its sudden popularity while also suggesting Addison had had no intention of writing an overtly political work. Addison’s later French and German translators and imitators sometimes were more explicit in making it an anti-monarchical story, while Addison’s play continued to be performed in England for decades.
Chapter 7 backtracks to Addison’s play and its impact across the Atlantic, where it was likewise popular, particularly to George Washington, not usually taken as a classics enthusiast. On the one hand the drama around Cato standing up for republicanism against Caesar’s nascent monarchy does accord with the movement, but particularly striking is the observation that the American revolutionaries intentionally associated themselves with the fall of the Republic, that is, with the losing side. Influential figures often quoted Addison’s play to each other rather than Plutarch’s Life. Cato’s reputation underwent a peculiar shift in the nineteenth century, invoked by abolitionists before the Civil War and with Lost Cause rhetoric in the South after it. The memory of Cato thus was reified in the United States as an example analogous to any steadfast and defiant stand, rather irrespective of Cato’s actual beliefs, such as the anti-monarchical stance that was so relevant in the 1770s.
I went into the final chapters, those on modern America, with great interest and minimal expertise. I found myself surprised by the scope of these chapters, which emphasizes Cato’s depiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then leaps to his depiction in 21st century cinema without truly discussing Cato’s importance in late 20th century political philosophy or how Cato has been conscripted as standard-bearer for 21st century libertarians. (Just as in the medieval period, Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger sometimes get conflated into the same person.) A surprising – to me – and rather important observation Strunk makes is that Cato is normally depicted in modern film and theater as the literally older representative of the old guard rather than a younger idealist: the historic Cato was fully a decade younger than Cicero and Pompey. This appears not to have been the case in the eighteenth-century drama productions.
Strunk asserts at the beginning that he would avoid Cato’s Letters, Rousseau’s Cato, and most depictions of Cato in art. (For clarity, and for those unaware, Cato’s Letters refer to a set of eighteenth-century essays on government, not to the actual correspondence between Cato and Cicero – which is discussed in some detail in chapter 1.) Fully half the book is devoted to Roman reception of Cato, and Strunk leaps from the fifth-century Distichs to Dante to eighteenth-century drama. Yet Plutarch’s Lives – translated into Latin – was one of the most popular secular texts in medieval Europe, and Cato’s reception by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and other thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century are omitted. This gives the strange impression that the eighteenth-century playwrights and American revolutionaries were rediscovering Cato straight from the classical languages with minimal awareness of his use by (small-R) republican philosophers and centuries of moral exempla in schools. Cato’s importance as model in the French Revolution is barely mentioned; his role in the South American independence movements not at all. I myself cannot draw a link from Cato’s reception to the many popular uprisings of early nineteenth century Germany, but it would be surprising if the German tragedies discussed at the end of chapter 6 had no effect.
Yet aside from my really desiring a chapter between 5 and 6 to draw more links between the first and second half, and questioning a selective focus in the final chapters, this is indeed a very useful book to understand how Cato has been perceived over the years. Each chapter is thoroughly referenced, and Strunk explains his material well. Yet this is a short book (216 pages) that could and should have been longer.