Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Every few generations—or perhaps, every few centuries—a man is born with an iron constitution that consists of harder stuff than even his hardiest peers. These are the figures who come to us as myths and legends.

My God, we think, how did they do it? Where did that strength come from? Will we ever see a person like that again?

Marcus Porcius Cato was one of these men. Even in his own time it was a common expression: “We can’t all be Catos.”

This superiority was almost in his blood. He was born in 95 BC to a family that, despite its early plebeian origins, was, by his birth, firmly entrenched in Rome’s aristocracy. His great-grandfather, Cato the Elder, began his career as a military tribune and rose through the ranks as quaestor, aedile, praetor, all the way to consul in 195 BC, all the while earning a fortune in agriculture and making his name fighting for the ancestral customs (mos maiorum) against the modernizing influences of an ascendant empire. Ironically, the one influence most important to Cato that his great-grandfather fought most stridently against with his conservative zeal was philosophy. It was he, after all, who had wanted to throw the Athenian philosophers from Diogenes’s diplomatic mission out of Rome in 155 BC.

How perfect it was that his great-grandson, known as Cato the Younger, would become a famous philosopher, though we should note that Cato the Younger was no Carneades or Chrysippus. There would be no clever dialectics for him. He was cut from a different cloth than even a genius like Posidonius. Nearly every Stoic before and after was in part famous for what they said and wrote. Alone among them, Cato would achieve towering fame not for his words, but for what he did and for who he was. It was only on the pages of his life that he laid down his beliefs as a monument for all time, earning fame greater than any of his ancestors or his philosophical influences.

Not that you would have expected it at first.

As with Cleanthes before him and Winston Churchill nearly two thousand years after him, Cato’s early school days were underwhelming. His tutor, Sarpedon, found him obedient and diligent, but thought he “was sluggish of comprehension and slow.” There were flashes of brilliance—what Cato did understand stuck in his mind like it had been carved into stone. He was disruptive—not behaviorally (one struggles to imagine this disciplined boy ever acting out), but with his imperious and intense demeanor. He demanded an explanation for every task that was assigned to him, and luckily, his tutor chose to encourage this commitment to logic rather than beat it out of his young charge.

Physical force would have never worked on Cato anyway. There is a story about a powerful soldier visiting Cato’s home to argue over some citizenship issue during his childhood. When the determined soldier asked Cato to take up his cause with his uncle, who was serving as his guardian as well as tribune of the plebs, Cato ignored him. The soldier, disliking Cato’s lack of deference, attempted to frighten him. Cato, only four years old, stared back, unmoved. Next thing he knew, the soldier was holding him by the feet over a balcony. Cato remained not only unafraid, but wordless and unblinking, and the soldier, realizing he had been beaten, set the boy down, saying that if Rome were filled with such men he’d never convince anyone. It was the first of a lifetime of battles of political will for Cato, and also a preview of the lengths his frustrated opponents would be forced to go to if they were ever to best him.

It was clear that beneath this determination, there was also an intense, almost radical commitment to justice and liberty. He did not stand for bullying, even in childhood games, and would step in to defend younger boys from older ones. Once after visiting the house of Sulla, Cato asked his tutor why so many people were there paying homage and offering favors—was Sulla really this popular? Sarpedon explained that Sulla received these honors not because he was loved but because he was feared. “Why then didn’t you give me a sword,” he said, “so I could free my country from slavery?!”

It was likely this intensity—and a temper that Plutarch described as “inexorable”—that led Sarpedon to introduce Cato to Stoicism, hoping that it would help the young boy to channel his rage and his righteousness properly. Centuries later, inspired by and in fact cribbing from a play about Cato, George Washington would speak often of the work required to view the intrigues of politics and the difficulties of life “in the calm light of mild philosophy.” Washington, born with the same fiery temper, knew of the importance of subsuming his passions beneath a firm constitution.

Most strong-willed leaders have a temper. It’s the truly great ones who manage to conquer it with the same courage and control with which they deal with all of life’s obstacles.

Cato would study under Antipater of Tyre, who taught him the basics of Stoicism. But unlike many Stoics of his time, the young Cato studied not only philosophy, but also oratory. Rutilius Rufus had been quiet in his own defense—that would never be Cato’s way. Still, he did his great-grandfather proud with his circumspection and bluntness.

“I begin to speak,” Cato once explained, “only when I’m certain what I’ll say isn’t better left unsaid.”

When Cato did choose to break his silence, he was compelling. “Cato practiced the kind of public speech capable of moving the masses,” Plutarch tells us. The rage and fury that had frightened Sarpedon was channeled through his training in Stoic philosophy and rhetoric into a fierce advocacy for justice that would stand out as a defining feature of his personal and political character. As Plutarch put it, “Above all, he pursued the form of goodness which consists in rigid justice that will not bend to clemency or favor.” Armed with a resolute and fearless character, Stoic ethical principles, and a powerful proficiency in public speaking, Cato would become a formidable political figure—and a rare one, in that all knew his vote could never be bought.

But before he made his name as a politician, Cato was a soldier. In 72 BC, he volunteered for service in the Third Servile War, against Spartacus. It would have been unconscionable to let someone else serve in his place. To Cato, it was the actions one took, the sacrifices one was willing to make—especially at arms defending one’s country—that made you a philosopher. And so in that war, as in the battles he fought in, he was fearless and committed, as he believed every citizen was obligated to be.

Fresh from this crucible, he was ready in 68 BC, at age twenty-seven, to stand for military tribune—the same position his father had served in before him. In fact, the Basilica Porcia, the public forum where the tribunes conducted their business, was named after its builder, his great-grandfather. Pregnant with respect for this legacy and always deeply committed to what he felt was proper, Cato would be the only candidate who actually adhered to the canvassing restrictions and campaign laws. Corruption may have been endemic in Rome, but Cato was never one to buy the argument that “everyone else is doing it.” It was a strategy that won him respect—at the very least, it made him stand out. As Plutarch recounts, “The harshness of his sentiments, and the mingling of his character with them, gave their austerity a smiling graciousness that won men’s hearts.”

That included the troops he led over the next three years as his military service took him across the empire, exposing him to the provinces. Some thought visits to these exotic locations might soften the man, or his iron grip on himself, but they were mistaken. And this in part is why he was so well liked—because he carried himself like a common soldier.

War, although it began as a grand adventure, would soon break Cato’s heart. In 67 BC, a letter brought word that his beloved brother, Caepio, was ill. Cato and Caepio had always been different, Caepio favoring luxuries and perfumes that Cato would have never allowed himself. But sometimes when it’s your brother you look the other way. Cato did more than that—he idolized Caepio and, hearing that he was near death, rushed to his side, braving wild and dangerous seas that nearly killed him, in a tiny boat with the only captain he could convince to take him.

Life is not fair and it cares little for our feelings or our plans. Cato had seen this wisdom written countless ways in the books of the philosophy he loved, but he landed in Thrace after a perilous journey to discover that he had missed, by hours, his brother’s death. It was a crushing blow, and Cato mourned almost without restraint. “There are times,” his biographers Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman would write of Cato at his brother’s deathbed, “when the mask will slip, when our resolve will fail, when our attachments will get the better of us.” Yet much closer to Cato’s time, Plutarch believed that those who found inconsistency in Cato’s grief missed “how much tenderness and affection was mingled with the man’s inflexibility and firmness.” Historians too seem to have overlooked how the loss of his parents and then his cherished brother—without an opportunity to say goodbye—might have hardened an already hard man.

Certainly it didn’t soften his incorruptibility and commitment to his ideals. Even as Cato grieved, he politely declined expensive gifts that friends sent for the funeral rites and repaid, out of his own pocket, what others sent in the form of incense and ornaments. The inheritance went to Caepio’s daughter without a penny deducted for funeral costs. Cato covered the expenses himself.

Emerging from his grief, Cato was ready at age thirty—firm and without illusions—to stand for the office of quaestor. It was his first entrance into the Senate and, more important, a larger platform for his intractable dedication to eliminating corruption and returning Rome to its core values. He used his term as quaestor to overhaul the treasury, ousting corrupt clerks and scribes, and seeking to redress the ill-gotten gains under Sullan proscriptions and to track down deadbeat debtors. He was the first to show up for work each morning and the last to leave, and seemed to relish saying no to the pet projects of politicians, to needless diversions, and to state-funded luxuries. His commitment was so legendary that it became almost political cover for his less stringent colleagues, Plutarch tells us. “It’s impossible,” shrugging politicians would tell constituents lobbying for handouts. “Cato will not consent.”

Did this strictness create enemies? Yes. It was inevitable. Like Cicero, he was at odds with Catiline and other powerful figures vying for control in an increasingly kleptocratic state. Biographers tell us that powerful people were hostile to Cato nearly all his life, because his very essence seemed to shame them.

Even when Cicero aligned with Cato there was a distinction, for there was never a sense that Cato was benefiting from these reforms or that he was quietly accumulating his own wealth through them. In fact, despite his public positions and his wealthy family, Cato often looked like he had no money at all. He rejected the extravagant, brilliantly colored purple robes that were fashionable in the Senate and wore only a plain, ordinary dark robe. He never put on perfume. He walked Rome’s streets barefoot and wore nothing underneath his toga. While his friends rode horses, he declined, and enjoyed walking alongside them. He never left Rome while the Senate was in session. He threw no lavish parties and declined to gorge himself at feasts—and was strict about reserving the choicest portions for others. He lent his friends money without interest. He declined armed guards or an entourage, and in the army he slept in the trenches with his troops.

He was a man, Cicero would say, who acted as if he lived in Plato’s Republic, not “among the dregs of Romulus.”

Cato’s iron constitution may have been partly given to him at birth, but it’s unquestionable that his choices forged additional armor plating and prepared him for the ordeals he was to face in the future. Plutarch says that Cato was “accustoming himself to be ashamed only of what was really shameful and to ignore men’s low opinion of other things.”

We naturally care what people think of us; we don’t want to seem too different, so we acquire the same tastes as everyone else. We accept what the crowd does so the crowd will accept us. But in doing this, we weaken ourselves. We compromise, often without knowing it; we allow ourselves to be bought—without even the benefit of getting paid for it.

Of all the Stoics, it was Cato who most actively practiced Aristo’s ideas about being indifferent to everything but virtue. Public opinion? Keeping up with appearances? His “brand”? Cato could have lived in great luxury, but he chose the Spartan life. And while there might have been a sliver of haughtiness to his demeanor, we are also told that his walks through the streets of Rome were filled with polite salutes to everyone he met and many unsolicited offers to help those in need. Reputation didn’t matter. Doing right did.

This might be difficult, it might be exhausting, he said, but soon enough we forget about the hard labor. The results of doing well, though, “will not disappear as long as you live,” he said. And conversely, even though taking a shortcut or doing something bad may bring a few seconds of relief, “the pleasure will quickly disappear, but the wicked thing will stay with you forever.”

His job, Cato believed, in a tradition begun by Diogenes, was to serve the public good. Not himself. Not expediency. Not his family. But the nation. That’s what real philosophy was about, whether his skeptical great-grandfather or fame-chasing friend Cicero understood it or not.

When Cato was sent on a mission to supervise the annexation of Cyprus—precisely the kind of opportunity Roman politicians liked to use to fill up their personal bank accounts—his conduct was irreproachable. His scrupulous sale of Cypriot treasures showed zero irregularities and raised some seven thousand talents for Roman coffers. The only thing he left unsold was a statue of Zeno, the founder of the philosophy to which he was so committed. There was one loss: his friendship with a man, Munatius Rufus, who resented that Cato refused to let Munatius enrich himself.

These were powerful gestures—countersignals—in an empire obsessed with status and demonstrations of power. In Cato’s case, they were sincere. He was not playacting. He was practicing. His studies of Stoicism had taught him the importance of training, of actively resisting temptation and inoculating oneself from the need for comforts and externals. His forefathers had set down a firm example, and he intended to follow it—from the beginning to the end.

Not all Romans could be Catos, but Cato could represent them. In 63 BC, this austere man was named tribune of the plebs, now a powerful position he was eligible for because of his family’s ancient plebeian origins—giving him the chance to balance the interests of the disenfranchised with those of the elites. Cicero was consul, and though they quickly joined forces in calling for the death penalty for the Catilinarian conspirators, they were not always in agreement. The trial of Murena—an officer in the Third Mithridatic War and later a consul—became a study in contrast between Cato and Cicero, the inflexible Stoic on one side, the more fluid and ambidextrous Academic on the other. Cicero on the defense, Cato for the prosecution. More bluntly, Cicero was defending an obviously guilty man, who had gained his offices through bribery.

Defending the guilty was inconceivable to Cato, even if earlier Stoics like Diogenes had supported it. Murena had done wrong, he had not played fair, and he must be driven from public life. It was the Stoic argument: What’s right is right. Nothing else matters.

Cicero’s argument, which comes to us through his published oratory Pro Murena, is more complex. As always with Cicero, there was both self-interest and ego involved. But mostly, he believed that Murena’s defense was for the good of the state. With Catiline threatening violence against the state, could they really afford to tear themselves apart at the same time? If Murena was convicted and ousted from office, wouldn’t the consulship fall into worse hands? Cicero respected Cato immensely, but it’s impossible to read his arguments and not get the sense that he found the man’s unflinching idealism to be naive. Stoicism was well and good, but not if it was so rigid and inflexible that it put the survival of the government at risk.

Indeed, this would be the continual knock on Cato and on Stoicism to this day: Where does commitment end and obstinance begin? Doesn’t government—and life—require compromise? Aren’t there times when we have to pick the lesser of two evils?

Cato seemed not to be so sure. Or rather, he was sure, and this black-and-whiteness presaged the battles and the destruction that were to come.

As a young boy, Cato had shut down the entreaties of that visiting soldier with quiet, unbreakable defiance. As a politician, he would deploy that same tenacity in a similar fashion. Believing himself to be an essential check on Rome’s accelerating collapse and the abandonment of that mos maiorum beloved by his ancestors, he pioneered a political trick that remains in use: the filibuster. Using his voice and willpower as weapons, Cato effectively preserved the positions of his party by talking, talking, and talking. He was able to single-handedly prevent the delivery of tax collection contracts to corrupt parties and prevent laws that violated the spirit of Rome’s old ways.

At the same time, his inherent conservatism also meant that he resisted necessary change. It is not extreme to say that Cato’s one-man resistance fueled a sense in others that similarly unilateral moves would be necessary. When Caesar became consul, he would imprison Cato so as not to hear his marathon ramblings and so that the business of the state could resume.

If the contrast between Cato and Cicero was between personality types, between commitment and compromise, the contrast between Cato and Caesar was more ideological—between Republicanism and Caesarism. It was a battle of wills and a battle of philosophies.

The two were, each with his own excesses, incredible men. The historian Sallust, himself a Caesar supporter, highlighted both:

But within my own memory there were two men of towering merit, though of opposite character, Marcus Cato and Gaius Caesar. . . . In ancestry, age and eloquence, they were almost equal; on a par was their greatness of soul, likewise their renown, but each of a different sort. Caesar was considered great because of his benefactions and lavish generosity, Cato for the uprightness of his life. The former became famous for his gentleness and compassion; to the latter sternness had imparted prestige. Caesar gained renown by giving, by relieving difficulties, by forgiving; Cato by no conferral of lavish gifts. In the one was refuge for the unfortunate, in the other destruction for the wicked. The former’s easygoing nature was praised, the latter’s steadfastness. Finally, Caesar had made up his mind to work hard, to be alert; he devoted himself to the affairs of his friends at the neglect of his own; he refused nothing that was worthy of being given; he craved a major command, an army, a fresh war in which his merit might be able to shine forth. Cato, on the contrary, cultivated self-control, propriety, but above all sternness. He did not vie in riches with the rich, nor in intrigue with intriguers, but with the energetic in merit, with the self-restrained in moderation, with the blameless in integrity. He preferred to be, rather than merely to seem, virtuous; hence the less he sought renown the more it overtook him.

Caesar was motivated by power and control and change. Cato wanted things to go back to how they were in Rome’s golden age, before the decadence, before the strongmen and the corruption. If he could not have that, he at least wanted them to stay as they were now—he would do his best to prevent them from getting worse. And so the unstoppable force met the immovable object, and the crash was, over a period of several years, explosive.

History can sometimes seem, especially from a distance, like a Manichean struggle between good and evil. In truth, there is always gray—and the good, even the Catos, are not always blameless. Cato’s inflexibility did not always serve well the public good. For instance, after Pompey returned to Rome from his foreign conquests, he felt out potential alliances with Cato, a man whom he respected but often tangled with. It is said that Pompey proposed a marriage alliance with either Cato’s niece or daughter. The women, we are told, were excited at the prospect of tying the two families together. Cato dismissed it, and did so rudely. “Go and tell Pompey,” he instructed the go-between, that “Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.”

Bravo.

But in so rejecting the alliance, Cato drove the powerful Pompey into an alliance with Caesar instead, who promptly married his daughter, Julia, to Pompey. United and unstoppable, the two men would soon overturn centuries of constitutional precedent. “None of these things perhaps would have happened,” Plutarch reminds us, “had not Cato been so afraid of the slight transgressions of Pompey as to allow him to commit the greatest of all, and add his power to that of another.”

But Cato was at least consistent in his obstinacy. As Caesar ruled Rome in the Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, Cato resisted them at every turn. While they campaigned for co-consul in 55 BC, he was the perpetual thorn in their side, championing the ancestral tradition of the Senate against the dangerous new forces that Caesar unleashed. He accused Caesar of war crimes in Gaul. He cleaned up electoral corruption and designed corruption courts. He insisted on his antibribery policy in elections, which encouraged the fraudsters to whip up votes against him. As Seneca beautifully described:

In an age when the old credulity had long been thrown aside, and knowledge had by time attained its highest development, [Cato] came into conflict with ambition, a monster of many shapes, with the boundless greed for power which the division of the whole world among three men could not satisfy. He stood alone against the vices of a degenerate state that was sinking to destruction beneath its very weight, and he stayed the fall of the republic to the utmost that one man’s hand could do to draw it back.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that Cato was incapable of compromise or collaboration. Plutarch tells us that he was incapable of enmity. Yes, he was “stubborn and immovable . . . when it came to protecting the public welfare,” but when it came to personal disagreements, he was always calm and friendly. Within him there was “an equal blend . . . of severity and kindness, of caution and bravery, of solicitude for others and fearlessness for themselves, of the careful avoidance of baseness and, in like degree, the eager pursuit of justice.”

Cato was kind. Cato was tough. He was, in a way, the embodiment of an expression that a stoic in modern times, General James Mattis, would adapt as a motto of the 1st Marine Division: No better friend, no worse enemy. Where Rutilius had been a quiet paragon of political virtue, Cato was aggressive and would not be easy to beat. He would invite, only on a far greater scale, a martyr’s fate as well. And unlike that of Rutilius, this fate would affect not just him, but the Republic itself.

After Cato lost his bid for consul in 52 BC—no doubt due to the machinations of his political enemies—he decided to push his hand. It was time, he felt, for the Senate to recall Caesar from Gaul. It was certainly the right thing to do, in the sense that Caesar had accumulated incredible power and his wealthy legions menaced the state with their undying loyalty to their master. But Cicero, more pragmatic, dreaded the implications. In 49 BC, Caesar did come up . . . and the 13th Legion followed him home, across the Rubicon, carrying civil war with them.

As with the failed potential alliance with Pompey, it’s worth asking: Did it have to be this way? Could a less intransigent politician have navigated the crisis better? Or not forced it to the breaking point? Possibly. But it was not Cato’s way to meditate on whether his insistence on the right thing had precipitated a much worse thing than the current status quo. Those questions were for the Ciceros of the world, of the theorists and sophists whom his great-grandfather had so despised.

For Cato, to compromise—to play politics with the bedrock laws of his nation at stake—would have been moral capitulation.

In protecting the Roman Republic, Cato may have hastened its destruction. Or perhaps he was drawing a line that should have been drawn by others long before. In any case, he was ready to go down fighting, as we all must be—if we are true philosophers—at some point in our lives.

After a long antagonism, and having spurned Pompey’s entreaties years earlier, Cato and Pompey were suddenly on the same team, and both now bore arms in protection of their country. Cato had been a brave soldier early in life and he was again.

He was a selfless solider too. Pompey placed him in command of the military fleet—a massive armada of more than five hundred ships. But quickly, Pompey, thinking about the political situation after the war, reconsidered giving his former enemy so much power. Within days of Cato’s appointment, Pompey revoked it. Yet Cato remained undaunted. Without a hint of bitterness, Plutarch tells us, he handed the command over. Indeed, on the eve of the next great battle, it was Cato—so recently demoted and betrayed—who stepped up to inspire Rome’s troops in defense of their homeland. As Cato spoke of freedom and virtue and death and flame, Plutarch tells us, “there was such a shouting and so great a stir among the soldiers thus aroused that all the commanders were full of hope as they hastened to confront the peril.”

A Stoic does the job that needs to be done. They don’t care about credit.

Seneca observed that all ages produce men like Clodius and Caesar and Pompey, “but not all ages men like Cato.” Few politicians would have risked their lives for something as abstract as principle, few would have kept going even when the cause spit in their face, few had the combined genius at arms, at leadership, at strategy to have brought his people so close to success.

But Cato did. Pompey hesitated and Caesar won the field in central Greece at Pharsalus in 48 BC. Cato would slip away to North Africa with the hope of fighting on, leading his army on a grueling thirty-day foot march across the hot desert to Utica where they prepared to make a last stand. It was desperate. It was violent.

Victory was not his to win.

Now, the Republic obviously lost, Cato stood and addressed the senators and officers who had so nobly resisted with him. It was time for them to make their way to Caesar and beg for clemency, he said. He asked only one last thing of them. Do not pray for me, he said, do not ask for my grace. Such pleas belonged to the conquered, and Cato had not lost. Where it mattered, he believed, in all that was honorable and just, he had beaten Caesar. He had defended his country. He had, for all his flaws, shown his true character.

So too, he believed, had Rome’s enemies.

It is obvious in retrospect that Cato had already decided how the end would come. All that was left were the arrangements. He attempted to persuade his son to flee on a ship. He got many of his friends off to safety. And then he sat down to dinner with everyone who remained. It was, by all accounts, a wonderful meal. Wine was poured. Dice were rolled for the first cuts. Plates were passed. Philosophy was discussed, as it always was at Cato’s table. Were only good men free? Were bad men, like Caesar, slaves?

It was one of those evenings where time passed quickly, where everyone present was present. With the specter of death looming, more than a few of them must have hoped the meal might go on forever. Cato, on the other hand, knew that it could not. So as the meal closed, he began to discuss the final travel arrangements and, quite out of character, expressed his worry for his friends embarking by sea. Then he hugged his son and friends and bade them good night.

In his chamber, Cato sat down with a dialogue of Socrates and read it leisurely. Then he called for his sword, which he noticed had been removed from his room, likely by a friend hoping to forestall what could not be forestalled.

It was time.

His son, knowing what his father wanted to do, sobbed, begging him to fight on, to live. Apollonides the Stoic was begged to convince Cato of the philosophical reasons against suicide, but words failed him, only tears came. Restored to his sword, Cato checked its razor edge with his finger. “Now I am my own master,” he said, and then sat back down to read his book once more from cover to cover.

He awoke sometime in the early morning after dozing. Alone and ready, he thrust his sword into his breast. It was not quite a mortal blow, but Roman steel had pierced Rome’s Iron Man. Still, he could not go quietly into that good night. Writhing, Cato fell, awakening his weeping and mourning friends as he raged against the dying of the light. A doctor rushed in and attempted to sew the wound shut while Cato drifted in and out of consciousness. In his final moments, Cato came to, and with the fierce and almost inhuman determination he had first exhibited as a young boy, he died at forty-nine years old, pulling his own wound open so that life could escape him more quickly.

He had lost his final battle—with Caesar, with the trends of his time, with mortality itself—but not before, as Plutarch would conclude, “he nevertheless gave Fortune a hard contest.”

Why suicide? Montaigne would write admiringly that with Cato’s unfailing constancy and commitment to principles, “he had to die rather than look on the face of a tyrant.” Napoleon, who once displayed a bust of Cato in his “hall of heroes,” and in the end faced defeat and lost all that he had striven for and considered suicide himself, would write of Cato’s death much more disparagingly. He believed that Cato should have fought on, or waited, rather than seal his fate with his own hand.

“The conduct of Cato was applauded by his contemporaries,” Napoleon said, “and has been admired by history; but who benefited from his death? Caesar. Who was pleased by it? Caesar. And to whom was it a tragedy? To Rome and to his party. . . . No, he killed himself out of spleen and despair. His death was the weakness of a great soul, the error of a stoic, a blot on his life.”

But then again, in Napoleon’s mind, Caesar was the great hero of the ancient world. He could not understand—not in the way that the true greats of the Enlightenment like Washington and Thomas Paine did—that there was more to this world than just power and accomplishment and winning. Who benefited from Cato’s death? Generations that remain inspired by his conduct, which was true and consistent all the way to the end.

You will not find many statues of Cato in Rome or many books about him. For some reason, the honors go to the conquering generals and the tyrants instead. His great-grandfather had once said that it was better to have people ask why there wasn’t a statue in your honor than why there was. In the case of Cato the Younger, it’s even simpler: His character was the monument; his commitments to justice and liberty and courage and virtue are the pillars of the temple that stands to this day.

He was a living statue in his own time, Rome’s Last Citizen and Rome’s Iron Man, and, now as then, on these pages and in memory, his finger points directly at us.