Marcus Porcius Cato (Uticensis)

Reading notes

• Ad Atticum 1.16 §12 on the proposal of Cato and Domitius

  Two anti-bribery senatus consulta proposed by Cato the Younger and L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, aimed at the consul thought to be shielding the divisores in his house.

• Ad Atticum 4.15 §7 deposited 500,000 sesterces

  The candidates for the tribunate agreed to make Cato Uticensis arbiter of clean canvassing, each depositing HS 500,000 to be forfeited to his rivals if Cato judged him guilty of bribery.

• Ad Atticum 4.17 §4 Cato is unwell

  M. Porcius Cato (Uticensis), the Stoic and uncompromising defender of the old order; his illness means the one truly free voice will be absent from the Senate.

• Ad Atticum 7.1 §7 Cato, on the other hand, both took part in the writing-up

  Cato of Utica helped draft the senatorial decree honouring Cicero yet voted against the thanksgiving itself, praising Cicero's virtue while denying him the formal honour --- a slight Cicero resents (and Caesar exploits).

• Ad Atticum 7.2 §7 this same Cato voted Bibulus twenty days

  The number of days of a supplicatio measured the honour; Cato proposed twenty days' thanksgiving for his son-in-law Bibulus while voting against any for Cicero, the partiality that so stings Cicero here.

• Ad Atticum 10.12 §2 a rush of Sicilians to Cato begging him to make a stand

  M. Porcius Cato, the Stoic and staunchest of Pompey's partisans, held Sicily for the senatorial cause in early 49 BC but withdrew without a fight as Curio's force approached. Cicero doubts the report that the provincials had begged him to resist.

• Ad Atticum 11.7 §2 Cato and Lucius Metellus had come into Italy

  Cato the Younger and the tribune Lucius Caecilius Metellus were diehard opponents of Caesar; their unauthorised return to Italy is what prompted Caesar's order to bar Pompeians, which in turn endangered Cicero's own position.

• Ad Atticum 12.4 §2 But on Cato the case is

  Cicero is composing his Cato, a eulogy of M. Porcius Cato (Uticensis), who took his own life at Utica in 46 BC rather than live under Caesar. The "Archimedean problem" is how to praise Cato's republican constancy without giving fatal offence to the Caesarians.

• Ad Atticum 12.21 §1 He thinks Cato spoke first to the motion on the punishment

  Cicero corrects Brutus's account of the senate debate of 5 December 63 BC on punishing the Catilinarian conspirators. Cato spoke late, not first, but his severe motion for execution carried the day, and the division (discessio) was taken on it.

• Ad Atticum 12.40 §1 What Caesar's attack on Cato is going to look like in answer to my praise of him

  Cicero had written a panegyric, the Cato, praising the younger Cato (Cato Uticensis), who killed himself at Utica in 46 rather than submit to Caesar. Caesar replied with an Anticato attacking the dead man; here Cicero previews its tone from a draft Hirtius sent him.

• Ad Atticum 12.44 §1 The book of his on Cato, which he sent to me

  Cicero had written a laudatory pamphlet, the Cato, praising Cato Uticensis after his suicide at Utica in 46 BC; Hirtius (and later Caesar himself in the Anticato) replied with attacks. Cicero wants Hirtius's hostile book circulated, confident its abuse will only set off the dead Cato's glory the more.

• Ad Atticum 13.6 §2 than Cato's lonely position

  M. Porcius Cato (Uticensis), who died at Utica in 46 BC; "Cato's lonely position" (his isolated, uncompromising stand) is offered as the most honourable possible answer to give Piso.

• Ad Atticum 13.27 §1 to balance my Cato

  Cicero's pamphlet praising the dead Cato the Younger, the Caesarians' bitterest opponent, had given great offence to Caesar's side. Cicero fears the letter of advice would look like a sweetener (Greek meiligma) offered to make up for the Cato.

• Ad Atticum 13.50 §1 the books against Cato

  Caesar's Anticato, a pamphlet attacking the memory of Cato the Younger written in answer to Cicero's own laudatory Cato. Cicero, for political safety, sends Caesar a letter praising it, vetted first by Caesar's agents Oppius and Balbus.

• Ad Atticum 16.1 §6 he will be a Cato

  M. Porcius Cato (Cato the Younger), the Stoic statesman who became the byword for unbending integrity; to promise to "be a Cato" is to promise moral rigour.

• Ad Atticum 16.7 §4 which I could not justify to Cato

  Cato the Younger, the Stoic statesman who died at Utica in 46 BC resisting Caesar, had become the moral touchstone of the senatorial cause; Cicero measures his own near-flight against the standard of unflinching duty that Cato embodied.

• Ad Familiares 7.24 §2 Cato

  Gallus had written a laudatory pamphlet on Cato of Utica, one of many 'Catos' produced after his suicide in 46 BC (Cicero and Brutus wrote their own; Caesar replied with an Anticato). Cicero is embarrassed not yet to have read his friend's.

• Ad Familiares 7.25 §1 our Cato-men get a hoisting

  A pun on 'in catomum' (a schoolboy flogging given while hoisted on another's shoulders) and 'Catonianos' (the writers of pamphlets praising Cato of Utica): the would-be eulogists risk a schoolmaster's beating.

• Ad Familiares 9.18 §2 Pompey, your Lentulus, Scipio, Afranius --- perished foully enough. ``But Cato gloriously.''

  The roll-call of Pompeian dead after the defeat at Pharsalus (48 BC) and Thapsus (46 BC): Pompey murdered in Egypt, Lentulus Crus (cos. 49) killed there too, Metellus Scipio and Afranius dead in the African war. Against their squalid ends Cicero sets the noble suicide of Cato at Utica in 46 BC --- the recent event that gave Caesar's clemency its great rival in glory.

• Ad Familiares 15.3 §1 in view of our close tie

  The 'necessitudo' Cicero invokes with Cato is the bond of mutual political obligation; he writes privately to a leading senator the news he is, for the moment, withholding from an official dispatch.

• Ad Familiares 15.4 §15 your two greatest clients in particular --- the island of Cyprus and the kingdom of Cappadocia

  Cato had annexed and organized Cyprus as a Roman province in 58-56 BC, and had championed Cappadocia's king in the Senate; Cicero invokes these as Cato's 'clients' whose testimony will vouch for Cicero's just provincial administration.

• Ad Familiares 16.22 §1 on the four-year-old Cato

  A famously obscure crux ('de quadrimo Catone'); the words probably point to a passage Cicero had drafted, perhaps for his eulogistic 'Cato' on Cato Uticensis, the reading of which his own hand made hard to decipher.

• Ad Quintum Fratrem 2.14 §4 depositing 500,000 sesterces apiece with Marcus Cato

  M. Porcius Cato (Cato the Younger), byword for incorruptibility, was made stakeholder for the tribunician candidates: each lodged a forfeit with him, to be paid to him if convicted of bribery, so that Cato alone policed the election.

• On the Ends of Good and Evil §3.7 M. Cato

  Marcus Porcius Cato (Uticensis), the younger Cato (95-46 BC), here the dialogue's Stoic spokesman who delivers the entire exposition of Stoic ethics in Book 3. A staunch republican and Brutus's uncle, he was the most prominent Roman adherent of Stoicism in his generation.

• On the Ends of Good and Evil §5.21 about honour, in which alone all good was placed, with Cato

  A back-reference to Books 3-4, where Cato the Younger set out the Stoic doctrine that the honourable alone is good. Piso recalls these earlier debates to locate the present discussion.

• On Duties §1.112 Was Marcus Cato in any different situation

  Cato of Utica (the Younger), the Stoic statesman who killed himself at Utica in 46 BC rather than live under Caesar. Cicero argues that his lifelong consistency made suicide fitting for him though it would not have been for others.

• On Duties §3.66 the Cato who is ours

  Marcus Porcius Cato of Utica (95-46 BC), the Stoic statesman and Cicero's contemporary, son of the judge in this case. Cicero distinguishes him from his great-grandfather Cato the Elder, who pronounced the verdict.

• Stoic Paradoxes §2 a perfect Stoic

  Cato the Younger (Cato Uticensis), Brutus's uncle, was the most rigorous Roman adherent of Stoicism. Cicero frames the whole work around Cato's feat of making austere Stoic paradoxes plausible even to the people in senatorial debate.

• Tusculan Disputations §1.74 while Cato departed from life rejoicing that he had found a cause for dying

  M. Porcius Cato of Utica, who took his own life in 46 BC rather than submit to Caesar; Cicero pairs his death with Socrates's as a divinely sanctioned departure 'at god's command,' not a forbidden breaking of life's bonds.