CATO, BRUTUS, AND PORCIA.
"From his earliest years," so runs the character that has come down to
us of Cato, "he was resolute to obstinacy. Flattery met with a rough
repulse, and threats with resistance. He never laughed, and his smile
was of the slightest. Not easily provoked, his anger, once roused, was
implacable. He learned but slowly, but never forgot a thing once
acquired; he was obedient to his teachers, but wanted to know the reason
of every thing." The stories told of his boyhood bear out this
character. Here is one of them. His tutor took him to Sulla's house. It
was in the evil days of the Proscription, and there were signs of the
bloody work that was going on. "Why does no one kill this man?" he asked
his teacher. "Because, my son, they fear him more than they hate him,"
was the answer. "Why then," was the rejoinder, "have you not given me a
sword that I may set my country free?" The tutor, as it may be supposed,
carried him off in haste.
Like most young Romans he began life as a soldier, and won golden
opinions not only by his courage, which indeed was common enough in a
nation that conquered the world, but by his temperance and diligent
performance of duty. His time of service ended, he set out on his
travels, accepting an invitation from the tributary king of Galatia,
who happened to be an old friend of the family, to visit him. We get an
interesting little picture of a Roman of the upper class on a tour. "At
dawn he would send on a baker and a cook to the place which he intended
to visit. These would enter the town in a most unpretending fashion, and
if their master did not happen to have a friend or acquaintance in the
place, would betake themselves to an inn, and there prepare for their
master's accommodation without troubling any one. It was only when there
was no inn that they went to the magistrates and asked for
entertainment; and they were always content with what was assigned.
Often they met with but scanty welcome and attention, not enforcing
their demands with the customary threats, so that Cato on his arrival
found nothing prepared. Nor did their master create a more favorable
impression, sitting as he did quietly on his luggage, and seeming to
accept the situation. Sometimes, however, he would send for the town
authorities and say, "You had best give up these mean ways, my
inhospitable friends; you won't find that all your visitors are Catos."
Once at least he found himself, as he thought, magnificently received.
Approaching Antioch, he found the road lined on either side with troops
of spectators. The men stood in one company, the boys in another. Every
body was in holiday dress. Some--these were the magistrates and
priests--wore white robes and garlands of flowers. Cato, supposing that
all these preparations were intended for himself, was annoyed that his
servants had not prevented them. But he was soon undeceived. An old man
ran out from the crowd, and without so much as greeting the new comer,
cried, "Where did you leave Demetrius? When will he come?" Demetrius was
Pompey's freedman, and had some of his master's greatness reflected on
him. Cato could only turn away muttering, "Wretched place!"
Returning to Rome he went through the usual course of honors, always
discharging his duties with the utmost zeal and integrity, and probably,
as long as he filled a subordinate place, with great success. It was
when statesmanship was wanted that he began to fail.
In the affair of the conspiracy of Catiline Cato stood firmly by
Cicero, supporting the proposition to put the conspirators to death in a
powerful speech, the only speech of all that he made that was preserved.
This preservation was due to the forethought of Cicero, who put the
fastest writers whom he could find to relieve each other in taking down
the oration. This, it is interesting to be told, was the beginning of
shorthand.
Cato, like Cicero, loved and believed in the republic; but he was much
more uncompromising, more honest perhaps we may say, but certainly less
discreet in putting his principles into action. He set himself to oppose
the accumulation of power in the hands of Pompey and Caesar; but he
lacked both dignity and prudence, and he accomplished nothing. When, for
instance, Caesar, returning from Spain, petitioned the Senate for
permission to become a candidate for the consulship without entering the
city--to enter the city would have been to abandon his hopes of a
triumph--Cato condescended to use the arts of obstruction in opposing
him. He spoke till sunset against the proposition, and it failed by
sheer lapse of time. Yet the opposition was fruitless. Caesar of course
abandoned the empty honor, and secured the reality, all the more
certainly because people felt that he had been hardly used. And so he
continued to act, always seeking to do right, but always choosing the
very worst way of doing it; anxious to serve his country, but always
contriving to injure it. Even in that which, we may say, best became him
in his life, in the leaving of it (if we accept for the moment the Roman
view of the morality of suicide), he was not doing his best for Rome.
Had he been willing to live (for Caesar was ready to spare him, as he
was always ready to spare enemies who could not harm him), there was yet
good for him to do; in his hasty impatience of what he disapproved, he
preferred to deprive his country of its most honest citizen.
We must not omit a picture so characteristic of Roman life as the story
of his last hours. The last army of the republic had been destroyed at
Thapsus, and Caesar was undisputed master of the world. Cato vainly
endeavored to stir up the people of Utica, a town near Carthage, in
which he had taken up his quarters; when they refused, he resolved to
put an end to his life. A kinsman of Caesar, who was preparing to
intercede with the conqueror for the lives of the vanquished leaders,
begged Cato's help in revising his speech. "For you," he said, "I should
think it no shame to clasp his hands and fall at his knees." "Were I
willing to take my life at his hands," replied Cato, "I should go alone
to ask it. But I refuse to live by the favor of a tyrant. Still, as
there are three hundred others for whom you are to intercede, let us see
what can be done with the speech." This business finished, he took an
affectionate leave of his friend, commending to his good offices his son
and his friends. On his son he laid a strict injunction not to meddle
with public life. Such a part as was worthy of the name of Cato no man
could take again; to take any other would be shameful. Then followed the
bath, and after the bath, dinner, to which he had invited a number of
friends, magistrates of the town. He sat at the meal, instead of
reclining. This had been his custom ever since the fated day of
Pharsalia. After dinner, over the wine, there was much learned talk,
and this not other than cheerful in tone. But when the conversation
happened to turn on one of the favorite maxims of the Stoics, "Only the
good man is free; the bad are slaves," Cato expressed himself with an
energy and even a fierceness that made the company suspect some terrible
resolve. The melancholy silence that ensued warned the speaker that he
had betrayed himself, and he hastened to remove the suspicion by talking
on other topics. After dinner he took his customary walk, gave the
necessary orders to the officers on guard, and then sought his chamber.
Here he took up the Phaedo, the famous dialogue in which Socrates, on
the day when he is to drink the poison, discusses the immortality of the
soul. He had almost finished the book, when, chancing to turn his eyes
upwards, he perceived that his sword had been removed. His son had
removed it while he sat at dinner. He called a slave and asked, "Who has
taken my sword?" As the man said nothing, he resumed his book; but in
the course of a few minutes, finding that search was not being made, he
asked for the sword again. Another interval followed; and still it was
not forthcoming. His anger was now roused. He vehemently reproached the
slaves, and even struck one of them with his fist, which he injured by
the blow. "My son and my slaves," he said, "are betraying me to the
enemy." He would listen to no entreaties, "Am I a madman," he said,
"that I am stripped of my arms? Are you going to bind my hands and give
me up to Caesar? As for the sword I can do without it; I need but hold
my breath or dash my head against the wall. It is idle to think that you
can keep a man of my years alive against his will." It was felt to be
impossible to persist in the face of this determination, and a young
slave-boy brought back the sword. Cato felt the weapon, and finding that
the blade was straight and the edge perfect, said, "Now I am my own
master." He then read the Phaedo again from beginning to end, and
afterwards fell into so profound a sleep that persons standing outside
the chamber heard his breathing. About midnight he sent for his
physician and one of his freedmen. The freedman was commissioned to
inquire whether his friends had set sail. The physician he asked to bind
up his wounded hand, a request which his attendants heard with delight,
as it seemed to indicate a resolve to live. He again sent to inquire
about his friends and expressed his regret at the rough weather which
they seemed likely to have. The birds were now beginning to twitter at
the approach of dawn, and he fell into a short sleep. The freedman now
returned with news that the harbor was quiet. When he found himself
again alone, he stabbed himself with the sword, but the blow, dealt as
it was by the wounded hand, was not fatal. He fell fainting on the
couch, knocking down a counting board which stood near, and groaning.
His son with others rushed into the chamber, and the physician, finding
that the wound was not mortal, proceeded to bind it up. Cato, recovering
his consciousness, thrust the attendants aside, and tearing open the
wound, expired.
If the end of Cato's life was its noblest part it is still more true
that the fame of Brutus rests on one memorable deed. He was known,
indeed, as a young man of promise, with whose education special pains
had been taken, and who had a genuine love for letters and learning. He
was free, it would seem, from some of the vices of his age, but he had
serious faults. Indeed the one transaction of his earlier life with
which we happen to be well acquainted is very little to his credit. And
this, again, is so characteristic of one side of Roman life that it
should be told in some detail.
Brutus had married the daughter of a certain Appius Claudius, a kinsman
of the notorious Clodius, and had accompanied his father-in-law to his
province, Cilicia. He took the opportunity of increasing his means by
lending money to the provincials. Lending money, it must be remembered,
was not thought a discreditable occupation even for the very noblest. To
lend money upon interest was, indeed, the only way of making an
investment, besides the buying of land, that was available to the Roman
capitalist. But Brutus was more than a money-lender, he was an usurer;
that is, he sought to extract an extravagantly high rate of interest
from his debtors. And this greed brought him into collision with Cicero.
A certain Scaptius had been agent for Brutus in lending money to the
town of Salamis in Cyprus. Under the government of Claudius, Scaptius
had had every thing his own way. He had been appointed to a command in
the town, had some cavalry at his disposal, and extorted from the
inhabitants what terms he pleased, shutting up, it is told us, the
Senate in their council-room till five of them perished of hunger.
Cicero heard of this monstrous deed as he was on his way to his
province; he peremptorily refused the request of Scaptius for a renewal
of his command, saying that he had resolved not to grant such posts to
any person engaged in trading or money-lending. Still, for Brutus'
sake--and it was not for some time that it came out that Brutus was the
principal--he would take care that the money should be paid. This the
town was ready to do; but then came in the question of interest. An
edict had been published that this should never exceed twelve per cent.,
or one per cent, monthly, that being the customary way of payment. But
Scaptius pleaded his bond, which provided for four per cent, monthly,
and pleaded also a special edict that regulations restraining interest
were not to apply to Salamis. The town protested that they could not
pay if such terms were exacted--terms which would double the principal.
They could not, they said, have met even the smaller claim, if it had
not been for the liberality of the governor, who had declined the
customary presents. Brutus was much vexed.
"Even when he asks me a favor," writes Cicero to Atticus, "there is
always something arrogant and churlish: still he moves laughter more
than anger."
When the civil war broke out between Caesar and Pompey, it was expected
that Brutus would attach himself to the former. Pompey, who had put his
father to death, he had no reason to love. But if he was unscrupulous in
some things, in politics he had principles which he would not abandon,
the strongest of these, perhaps, being that the side of which Cato
approved was the side of the right. Pompey received his new adherent
with astonishment and delight, rising from his chair to greet him. He
spent most of his time in camp in study, being ingrossed on the very eve
of the battle in making an epitome of Polybius, the Greek historian of
the Second Punic War. He passed through the disastrous day of Pharsalia
unhurt, Caesar having given special orders that his life was to be
spared. After the battle, the conqueror not only pardoned him but
treated him with the greatest kindness, a kindness for which, for a time
at least, he seems not to have been ungrateful. But there were
influences at work which he could not resist. There was his friendship
with Cassius, who had a passionate hatred against usurpers, the
remembrance of how Cato had died sooner than submit himself to Caesar,
and, not least, the association of his name, which he was not permitted
to forget. The statue of the old patriot who had driven out the Tarquins
was covered with such inscriptions as, "Brutus, would thou wert alive!"
and Brutus' own chair of office--he was praetor at the time--was found
covered with papers on which were scribbled, "Brutus, thou sleepest,"
or, "A true Brutus art thou," and the like. How he slew Caesar I have
told already; how he killed himself in despair after the second battle
of Philippi may be read elsewhere.
Porcia, the daughter of Cato, was left a widow in 48 B.C., and married
three years afterwards her cousin Brutus, who divorced his first wife
Claudia in order to marry her. She inherited both the literary tastes
and the opinions of her father, and she thought herself aggrieved when
her husband seemed unwilling to confide his plans to her. Plutarch thus
tells her story, his authority seeming to be a little biography which
one of her sons by her first husband afterwards wrote of his
step-father. "She wounded herself in the thigh with a knife such as
barbers use for cutting the nails. The wound was deep, the loss of blood
great, and the pain and fever that followed acute. Her husband was in
the greatest distress, when his wife thus addressed him: 'Brutus, it was
a daughter of Cato who became your wife, not merely to share your bed
and board, but to be the partner of your adversity and your prosperity.
_You_ give me no cause to complain, but what proof can I give you of my
affection if I may not bear with you your secret troubles. Women, I
know, are weak creatures, ill fitted to keep secrets. Yet a good
training and honest company may do much, and this, as Cato's daughter
and wife to Brutus, I have had.' She then showed him the wound, and told
him that she had inflicted it upon herself to prove her courage and
constancy." For all this resolution she had something of a woman's
weakness. When her husband had left the house on the day fixed for the
assassination, she could not conceal her agitation. She eagerly inquired
of all who entered how Brutus fared, and at last fainted in the hall of
her house. In the midst of the business of the senate-house Brutus heard
that his wife was dying.
Porcia was not with her husband during the campaigns that ended at
Philippi, but remained in Rome. She is said to have killed herself by
swallowing the live coals from a brazier, when her friends kept from her
all the means of self-destruction. This story is scarcely credible;
possibly it means that she suffocated herself with the fumes of
charcoal. That she should commit suicide suited all the traditions of
her life.