cato

After the winter battles of 1777-78, George Washington’s troops participated in a Valley Forge production of Joseph Addison’s 1713 Cato, a play that inspired many during the American revolution. It is the source of Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death,” and Nathan Hale’s “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” 

Cato is a battlefield tragedy set in Utica, present-day Tunisia, in 46 BC, as Cato the Younger braces for the approach of self-proclaimed dictator Julius Caesar and the end of the Roman republic. Cato stages the conflict between representative government and virtuous citizenship on the one hand, and empire and greed on the other. This play is in our nation’s bloodstream; what is it doing in there? 

This Constitution Day, we gather to watch this play in the 21st century as descendants and fellow citizens. The play’s closing warning about internal political divisions, which can be exploited by those who use racism, fear, and economic insecurity to undermine democratic institutions, still deserves our attention. We all are a part of this country’s heritage, and we are all part of the ongoing conversation.

In this production, every audience member has a role to play. You are the Roman Senate, listening to the Senators make their bids for peace or war. You are the conspirators who follow the silver-tongued Sempronius. You are the Valley Forge audience, maybe a yeoman farmer or a member of the 1st Rhode Island Black Regiment, wondering if this revolution will lead to your freedom too. But you are also here as a modern American, living the tension between our country’s best ideals and its actual history, which included slavery, the displacement of indigenous people, and the exclusion of women from full citizenship. 

Together, we face the play’s closing question: what is the future of the republic? We’ll ask you to extend your role by staying for 20 minutes to discuss the play with each other, using questions that our talkback panel will guide you through. The goals of this conversation are to consider the responsibilities we have to one another; to model active listening; and to seek to understand our neighbor’s point of view. 

– The following  educational materials were prepared by Misty G. Anderson, Stephen Collins-Elliot, Christopher P. Magra, and David F. Taylor, with additional assistance from Jason Shaffer, Miles Grier, Chelsea Phillips, Tracy C. Davis, and the members of the R/18 Collective.

Cato the Younger – Roman General, Stoic, and leader of the resistance to Caesar
Juba – Prince of Numidia and a follower of Cato
Lucius – Roman senator, loyal to Cato but wants peace with Caesar
Sempronius – Roman senator, secretly working to aid Caesar
Syphax – Numidian general, in league with Sempronius
Marcia – Cato’s daughter, in love with Juba
Portius – Cato’s son, in love with Lucia
Marcus – Cato’s son, also in love with Lucia
Lucia – Lucius’s daughter, in love with Portius

Cato’s sons, the hot-headed Marcus and the more calm and collected Portius, want to help their father defend Roman democracy, but they are unaware of the level of conspiracy around them. Sempronius, a Roman senator who still pretends loyalty to Cato, is in league with Caesar. He hates Cato, who has denied him the hand of his daughter Marcia. The Numidian general Syphax, who chafes at Cato’s Stoic discipline, joins with Sempronius and tries to get Juba, the young Numidian prince, to throw his forces behind Caesar. Juba admires Cato because of his ideals, but also because Cato has become something of a surrogate father to him after Juba’s own father died in battle. 

Addison also wrote a love plot into this history play. Juba and Cato’s daughter Marcia are in love. Cato’s sons Marcus and Portius are both in love with Lucia, but she only loves Portius. Lucia and Portius conclude that they can’t be together because it would break Marcus’s heart and because there is a war raging around them. Marcia and Juba come to a similar conclusion about love during wartime, but they only confess their love to each other after Juba kills Sempronius to prevent him from raping Marcia. The love plot contrasts Cato’s Stoic lack of feeling for most of the play. Cato cries for Rome but not for his son Marcus, killed in battle by Syphax, declaring over his dead body, “How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue,” even as he also admits that Roman democracy is crumbling, and “the conquer’d world / Is Caesar’s.” 

In act five, Cato mourns the fallen republic and then falls on his sword. He blesses the union between Juba and his daughter Marcia, and asks Lucius to bless the marriage between Lucia and Portius. The news that Cato’s ally, Pompey’s son, has just arrived with a fleet of reinforcements comes too late. The play closes with Lucius warning “what dire effects from civil discord flow,” and the audience is left to imagine the political future Marcia, Juba, Lucia, and Portius might yet create in a world of colonies, superpowers, and conspiracies.

In performance, Cato blurred the lines between audience and performer. It compelled spectators to respond, to make decisions, to vote through applause. Tories, Whigs, and American revolutionaries all felt the play vindicated their values and cast them as underdog heroes fighting on behalf of a lost cause. Its prologue exhorted theatre goers to “be what they behold”. But what exactly did they behold? Addison thought that tragedy achieved its highest uses in inspiring patriotism, but as Lisa Freeman has discussed, that approach is at odds with the fact that tragedies are about a fall or demise, so idealization is never fully possible. What is it, then, that we are supposed to feel for and about Cato? In the wake of Covid-19, BLM, and theatres’ attempts to re-assemble the public, the direct address this play makes to the audience reminds us that we are all in one room—and one country–together.

Bust of Cato the Younger, Rabat Museum of History and Civilizations, Rabat, Morocco Photo by Ángel M. Felicísimo from Mérida, España – Catón.

Marcus Porcius Cato (95-45 BCE) is known as either “Cato the Younger”, to distinguish him from his famous great-grandfather, or “Cato Uticensis”, after Utica, the location of his suicide. Cato came of political age at the same time as Julius Caesar, his lifelong political enemy who was later declared the Roman “dictator for life.” They both were born into the violence and civil war that had characterized internal Roman politics since 133 BCE. The conflicts centered largely on the distribution of land and the acquisition of citizenship on the part of Rome’s Italian allies.

Later Romans would look back on these internal problems as a moral crisis stemming financial corruption and insatiable greed. In creating this historical perception of Rome’s moral decline, ancient authors also created a mythologized vision of what traditional Roman values should be (simple living, moderation, honesty, integrity, and justice) synonymous with the virtues that Cato came to represent. According to the late first-century BCE Roman historian Sallust, Cato “preferred to be, rather than to seem, a good man” (Catiline’s War 54.6).

Cato and Caesar had long been at opposite ends of public life. Caesar held onto a prolonged military command in Gaul (modern France) in order to evade prosecution for crimes he had committed running for and serving as consul in 59 BCE (the consulship was the chief executive office of the Roman state; two were elected annually). Back in Rome, Cato supported Caesar’s rival, Pompey, who also sought power unchecked by elected consuls. When Caesar famously defied the Senate by refusing to disband the army and then invaded Italy in January of 49 BCE, Cato, Pompey, and other senators fled Rome. In north Africa (modern Tunisia), Cato allied with Juba, the king of Numidia, whose royal family had enjoyed a friendly relationship with the Roman state since the late third century BCE. Following Caesar’s victory over the last of Pompey’s followers at Thapsus in 46 BCE, Cato died by suicide at Utica, the seat of Roman administration in the province. Plutarch, Cato’s biographer, records that the inhabitants of Utica performed his funeral on the beach and set up a statue in his memory on that spot. Caesar would be assassinated a little under two years later, on March 15, 44 BCE.

John Kemble as Cato, 1811, by Sir Thomas Lawrence

Cato was a famous adherent of Stoicism, a strict ethic of self-sufficiency, calmness, virtue, and wisdom that held itself indifferent to poverty, pain, and death. Cato’s Stoic disposition and stubbornness provoked consternation in his fellow senators. His friend Cicero, one of the two consuls of 63 BCE, wrote to his friend Atticus, saying, “Now I like Cato more than you, but often enough his high-mindedness and uprightness does political damage. He speaks like he’s in Plato’s Republic, not in Romulus’ gutter” (Letters to Atticus 1.8) – a phrase explicitly quoted by John Adams in a letter to Abigail complaining about greed in early America. While Cato’s reputation for virtue has been cemented in subsequent literature, ancient sources equally characterize his behavior as rash, obstructionist, and unyielding, to the point of literal self-destruction.

Cato the play uses mythologies about Rome and Roman crises of virtue that live on in literature and performance. Shakespeare used Rome as an ideal that failed because of individual greed, revenge, or lust: consider Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus. Addison’s Cato further idealized republican Rome (before Julius Caesar’s dictatorship), but it also could not hide the conflict between the ideal of Roman democracy and the reality of Roman leaders’ rapacity. More recent representations in film, including Gladiator, Ben Hur, and Sparticus, blend myth and history, creating stories that feel true even as they play with the facts.

Joseph Addison’s Cato was a sensation when it premiered in London in 1713. Britain was a new nation, the union between England and Scotland just 6 years old. It was also a deeply divided nation. 

Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs, was sickly and had no surviving children. In 1701, Parliament had passed the Act of Settlement, which mandated that only a Protestant royal could ascend to the throne after Anne’s death. So, when Anne died in 1714, the throne passed to the House of Hanover. The new king, George I, was German and spoke almost no English. 

Against this tumultuous backdrop, party politics raged. The Whigs were the architects of the Act of Settlement. They believed in the power of parliament over the king and they celebrated the possibilities of a new world of trade. The Tories, meanwhile, were loyal to the traditional authority of kings. Some Tories – Jacobites – went so far as to support the claim to the throne of Queen Anne’s Catholic half-brother. 

These circumstances made Cato – a play in which the word “liberty” is repeated over and over –  an immediate hit and a political Rorschach test. Addison, a prominent Whig, was desperately worried about the dangers of political division and inflammatory rhetoric and feared civil war. From 1711 on, he was most famous for his periodical The Spectator, which used essays from the point of view of different characters to discuss society, morality, and promote polite sociability that included different points of view. Addison hoped his play might transcend partisan rivalries.

Such hope was not to be realized. At Cato’s premiere, Whigs and Tories competed to out-clap or out-hiss one another. Each party insisted that the play support their own version of liberty.  Some even created “keys” to the play that aligned the classical characters with contemporary politicians, determined to read in secret messages that were not actually there. 

1713 was a momentous year in other ways, too, for England got the asiento, or rights to sell slaves to the Spanish New World colonies, as a part of the Peace of Utrecht. Britain quickly became the largest conveyor of enslaved people. Over 60% of the 12 million Black Africans who were forced to endure the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic – from the west coast of Africa to the Americas – were shipped between 1713 and 1800. 

Addison’s play would have raised serious questions about the future of an English commonwealth that was founded on classical republican ideals, yet was economically dependent on slavery and exploitation. It is currently impossible to ignore the place of Africa, of racial terrorism and slavery in the play; it would have been even harder to ignore this in 1778, as Black soldiers fought on behalf of Washington for the promise of their own manumission.

Cato electrified audiences in revolutionary America, first in Charleston, SC, a key embarkation point for the Atlantic slave trade and proximate to large rice plantations. The slave auction block survives to this day, as does the Dock Street Theatre, where Cato was performed in 1735. As Emma Christopher argues, those sailors in closest proximity to the slave trade had a near hysterical attachment to “liberty.”

Cato’s Letters, a series of essays originally printed in London to decry political corruption, wealthy corporations, and advocate for free speech, were also very popular in the American colonies. The letters, written from the persona of “Cato,” were a response to the debacle of the 1720 “South Sea Bubble,” the first stock market crash. Thousands of small investors lost money invested in the slave-trading company, while big investors and government leaders managed to sell their shares just before the crash. These essays were widely reprinted and had an influence on the construction of the First Amendment. The contemporary “Cato Institute” is another offspring of Cato’s Letters.

Cato became a mainstay of the fledgling American theatre scene in the 1760s, whe producer David Douglass made Cato a staple of the American Company’s repertoire. These performances very likely shaped public debate about the Stamp Act of 1765, an unpopular measure that led to the rise of the Sons of Liberty, riots up and down the eastern seaboard, and the tarring and feathering of tax collectors. Performances of Cato in Charleston, Philadelphia, Portsmouth NH, and New York in 1766-67 may have influenced the repeal of the Act by stirring white colonists to identify as a nation under siege. 

From November 1771 to April 1775, the masthead for Massachusetts Spy featured Cato’s address to liberty in Act III: 

     Do thou, great Liberty, inspire our Souls,
     And make our Lives in thy Possession happy,
     Or our Deaths glorious in thy just Defence’ (III.i.319-21).”  

By 1776, recent Yale BA and aspiring amateur actor Nathan Hale had read it and memorized a few of its speeches while sitting in the Linonian Society library in New Haven. His famous last words, “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,”  spoken just before the British hanged him as a spy, paraphrases Cato’s speech as he gazes upon the body of his son Marcus, who has died in battle: “What pity is it that we can die but once to save our country” (Act 4.4.81–82). Patrick Henry appropriated Cato’s trademark phrase, “It is not now a time to talk of aught / But chains, or conquest; liberty, or death” (Act 2.4.79–80) and sanitized the implications of the traitorous Sempronius’s speech: “God, can a Roman senate long debate / Which of the two to choose, slavery or death!” (Act 2.1.25–26) when he uttered his condensed version: “give me liberty, or give me death.” Alexander Hamilton, writing to his wife Eliza, repurposed Marcus’s “Thou best of Brothers, and thou best of Friends!” in a letter that would then reappear almost 250 years later in Hamilton’s “Best of Wives and Best of Women.” 

Cato was excerpted in Noah Webster’s American Selections in Reading and Speaking (1787) and Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator (1817), a formative text for the young Frederick Douglass, published the same year Ira Aldridge began playing Othello. It opens with the epigram “Cato cultivated eloquence, as a necessary means for defending THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE and for enforcing good Counsels.” The Columbian Orator included Cato’s speech before the senate and Jonathan Mitchell Sewell’s epilogue from the 1778 Bow Street Theatre production in New Hampshire:

     Our senate too the same bold deed have done,
     And for a Cato, arm’d a Washington;
     A chief, in all the ways of battle skilled,
     Great in the council, mighty in the field.
     His martial arm, and steady soul alone,
     Have made thy legions shake, thy navy groan.
     And thy proud empire totter to the throne.

The Valley Forge Cato happened in spite of the Continental Congress’s prohibition on theatrical productions. ‘For the ragged soldiers in Washington’s camp,’ writes Randall Fuller, “Addison’s tragedy offered a salient version of national destiny characterized by self-sacrifice, republican virtue, and an almost boundless devotion to the principles of liberty” (128).] So embedded in the mythology of the American Revolution did this performance become that the Valley Forge Park Commission organized an open-air staging of Cato in the Park in May 1928. 

After the Valley Forge production, the Bow Street Theatre in New Hampshire added an epilogue that compared Cato to Washington; Decius (Caesar’s ambassador) to the British naval commander and peace commissioner Lord Howe; and Juba to the Marquis de Lafayette. The epilogue’s circulation, as Jason Shaffer notes, through editions of the play published at Portsmouth (1778), Providence (1779), Worcester, Massachusetts (1782), Boston (1793), is a testament to how important Addison’s Cato was to the construction of American identity and the mythologization of the revolution during and after the war. The epilogue declared Washington our Cato, but not suicidal, and  “unconfined,” with all the American continent before him.

Photograph compliments of Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and George Washington’s Mount. Vernon. George Washington, by James Reid Lambdin, after John Trumbull, 1854, Gift of James Reid Lambdin, 1872.

The American Cato turned on the ways that Washington was like but also unlike Cato. The historical and theatrical Cato commits suicide just before the news of the arrival of reinforcements from Pompey; the historical Washington had just learned of the new influx of support from Lafayette and the French government as the May 1778 production happened. Cato was doomed, but Washington was winning.

George Washington borrowed from Cato’s closing speech about this “partisan fighting” in his farewell message, written mostly by Alexander Hamilton. He argued that if those who focus on and exploit “the triumphs of different parties” over the good of the whole nation take power, the United States would be in peril: “cunning, ambitious, & unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people & to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” Hamilton and Washington also drew on Cato’s recommendation that Portius retreat to his “Paternal seat” to farm in rural life and pray for the peace of Rome, bolstered with scripture from Isaiah, as he stepped down from the presidency to sit under his own vine and fig tree. 

African American school children facing the Horatio Greenough statue of George Washington at the U.S. Capitol; Library of Congress, used by permission cph 3a24897 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ cph.3a24897

Washington’s self-identification with Cato was career-long, but it wasn’t just with the character of Cato. Young, lovesick Washington chose to identify with Juba. In a flirtatious letter of September 25, 1758 to his unrequited love Sally Fairfax, the wife of his friend George, he wrote “I should think our time more agreeably spent believe me, in playing a part in Cato, with the company you mention, and myself doubly happy in being the Juba to such a Marcia, as you must make.” 

Washington, like the play and the American experiment itself, contained contradictions. Though he endorsed the Fairfax Resolves, which condemned slavery, and eventually wrote that he thought the practice was wrong, he owned human beings for all of his life. He inherited ten enslaved people at the age of 11 and owned, with his wife Martha, 317 enslaved people, who worked his Virginia plantation and were subject to recapture when they tried to escape. Martha Washington’s manager posted a reward for  a young man named Marcus, a servant with “long black hair and dark blue eyes,” who had escaped from  the Washington household in 1824. You can also read more on the Mt. Vernon website about Washington and as a slave owner and how, in 1766, Washington sold a young man named Tom to a plantation in the Caribbean as a form of punishment. Enslaved people working in the sugar plantations were subject to burns, lost limbs, and other miserable conditions that made the average lifespan once arrived on a Caribbean plantation a mere seven years. The most glaring contradiction of our country’s history is that our modern discourses of individual and human rights were propped up by an economy built on kidnapping, torturing, and abusing the labor of millions of African people, who would not have access to the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for hundreds of years. The resolution of this contradiction is the ongoing work of our times.

George Washington by Horatio Greenough, 1840; Courtesy the Smithsonian Museum, Creative Commons License; https://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/george-washington-sculpture

One of the odder legacies of the play is Horatio Greenough’s bare-chested, sandaled statue of Washington as Cato that once scandalized onlookers in the Capitol rotunda. Critics claimed it looked as though this shirtless Washington was calling for his clothes. It was moved outdoors at the other end of the Mall as the Lincoln Memorial was being constructed. It then moved to the Smithsonian in 1908, and has resided at the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian, since 1964.

Bronze Bust of Juba II. Rabat Archaeological Museum, Morocco. Photograph by Françoise Foliot. Creative Commons license. https://www.worldhistory.org/ image/12639/bronze-bust-of-juba-ii/

Juba is prince and presumptive king of Numidia, the ancient kingdom located across Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. It was primarily composed of Berbers, the north African ethnic group with a range of skin tones. The play’s references to color go beyond the categories of white and black that form during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Syphax invokes a Numidian racial identity in contrast to a Roman one. Syphax tells Juba he might forget “the pale, unripened beauties of the north” (Marcia) if he would notice the “glowing” and more “exalted” charms of the women at the Tunisian court. Juba idealizes Cato, but Syphax critiques the arrangements of power along racial lines. Syphax points out to Juba that Numidian leaders were at least as self-denying and heroic as the Romans; that the origins of Rome are in the rape of the Sabine women; and cautions Juba against listening to people who don’t respect him, even as he attempts to win Juba over so that he can promise Caesar an alliance with Numidia. 

Ira Aldridge as Othello. Image courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Photographs of Prominent African Americans. James Weldon Johnson Collection.
https://collections.library.yale.edu/ catalog/16195293

In the eighteenth-century, Juba and Syphax were played by white actors who likely wore blackface. White actors used “corking,” the practice of rubbing burned cork on their faces and using sheer black gloves for hands and arms. Racist attitudes toward black Africans contributed to the exclusion of people of color from leading roles on the stage. There were, however, many Black characters written in the period. Oroonoko (in Southerne’s Oroonoko), Zanga in Hill’s The Revenge, and Mungo in Dibdin’s The Padlock were all major hits with leading Black characters. The first two were heroic characters who take their revenge on their white enslavers; the last was a source of racial stereotyping using a West Indian/Jamaican accent still recognizable in late examples of blackface, like Jar-Jar Binks from Star Wars. Even when plays like Oroonoko were used for abolitionist causes or, like The Revenge, created characters like Zanga who fought back against their enslavers, they unfolded in the context of these overtly racist conditions.  

There are no known performances of principal roles played by Black actors until James Hewlett started the African Grove Theatre with West Indian playwright William Alexander Brown in New York in 1816. One of their first stars was a young Ira Aldridge, shown here in this 1826 portrait by James Northcote. Aldridge joined the African Grove Theatre in 1817 and played Othello in their production that year; James Hewlitt played Richard III. Aldridge developed his repertoire as Romeo, Aaron, Zanga, Oroonoko, King Lear, and Juba. His experience of acting in America was one of racist harassment, so he emigrated to Europe in 1824, where he continually toured until his death in 1867.

• What values and practices sustain democratic government within the play? Are they still relevant as we face present forms of autocracy and dictatorship?
• Former president John F. Kennedy challenged a nation with “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” What responsibilities do we have to “promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” as the preamble to the U.S. Constitution claims is the goal of setting out the constitution? 
• Is citizenship a matter of where we are  born or of the values we hold to? How do Juba’s aspirations to Roman citizenship compare to current debates about immigration?
• How do we grapple with the contradiction that the American republic’s founders were remarkable men who put forward a vision from which we benefit, and, at the same time, did unconscionable things, from which we still suffer in unequal and deleterious ways? 
• Does “we, the people” always imply that some “other people” are not included in that circle? 
• What did liberty mean for Cato and for George Washington? What does it mean now, for modern Americans?  
• Was the tyranny Cato faced the same as what George Washington faced? What forms of tyranny face modern Americans?  
• What lessons do we learn from Cato and George Washington about battling political corruption in a democratic society?  
• What conditions or values lead to slavery?  What lessons do we learn about how slavery arose from the history of Rome, Great Britain, and the U.S.?

Works Consulted

Chiles, Katherine. Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America. London: Oxford UP, 2014.

Christopher, Emma. Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Freeman, Lisa. Character’s Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage. U Pennsylvania P, 2002. 

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning. Avalon Publishing Group, 2016.

O’Quinn, Daniel. Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780-1800.  U Pennsylvania P., 2022.  

Schaffer, Jason. “Great Cato’s Descendants: The Genealogy of Colonial Performance.” Theatre Survey 44.1 (May 2003) 5-28. 

Sewall, Jonathan M. ‘Epilogue to Cato’, in Occasional Addresses, ed. Laurence Hutton and William Carey (New York: Dunlap Society, 1890), 4-6.

Taylor, David Francis, (ed.). “Introduction to Cato“, in The Dramatic Works of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Cato the Younger:

Marcus Porcius Cato (95-45 BCE) is known as either “Cato the Younger”, to distinguish him from his famous great-grandfather, or “Cato Uticensis”, after Utica, the location of his suicide. Cato came of political age at the same time as Julius Caesar, his lifelong political enemy who was later declared the Roman “dictator for life.” They both were born into the violence and civil war that had characterized internal Roman politics since 133 BCE. The conflicts centered largely on the distribution of land and the acquisition of citizenship on the part of Rome’s Italian allies. 

Later Romans would look back on these internal problems as a moral crisis stemming financial corruption and insatiable greed. In creating this historical perception of Rome’s moral decline, ancient authors also created a mythologized vision of what traditional Roman values should be (simple living, moderation, honesty, integrity, and justice) synonymous with the virtues that Cato came to represent. According to the late first-century BCE Roman historian Sallust, Cato “preferred to be, rather than to seem, a good man” (Catiline’s War 54.6).

Cato and Caesar had long been at opposite ends of public life. Caesar held onto a prolonged military command in Gaul (modern France) in order to evade prosecution for crimes he had committed running for and serving as consul in 59 BCE (the consulship was the chief executive office of the Roman state; two were elected annually). Back in Rome, Cato supported Caesar’s rival, Pompey, who also sought power unchecked by elected consuls. When Caesar famously defied the Senate by refusing to disband the army and then invaded Italy in January of 49 BCE, Cato, Pompey, and other senators fled Rome. In north Africa (modern Tunisia), Cato allied with Juba, the king of Numidia, whose royal family had enjoyed a friendly relationship with the Roman state since the late third century BCE. Following Caesar’s victory over the last of Pompey’s followers at Thapsus in 46 BCE, Cato died by suicide at Utica, the seat of Roman administration in the province. Plutarch, Cato’s biographer, records that the inhabitants of Utica performed his funeral on the beach and set up a statue in his memory on that spot. Caesar would be assassinated a little under two years later, on March 15, 44 BCE.

Cato was a famous adherent of Stoicism, a strict ethic of self-sufficiency, calmness, virtue, and wisdom that held itself indifferent to poverty, pain, and death. Cato’s Stoic disposition and stubbornness provoked consternation in his fellow senators. His friend Cicero, one of the two consuls of 63 BCE, wrote to his friend Atticus, saying, “Now I like Cato more than you, but often enough his high-mindedness and uprightness does political damage. He speaks like he’s in Plato’sRepublic, not in Romulus’ gutter” (Letters to Atticus 1.8) – a phrase explicitly quoted by John Adams in a letter to Abigail complaining about greed in early America. While Cato’s reputation for virtue has been cemented in subsequent literature, ancient sources equally characterize his behavior as rash, obstructionist, and unyielding, to the point of literal self-destruction. 

Cato the play uses mythologies about Rome and Roman crises of virtue that live on in literature and performance. Shakespeare used Rome as an ideal that failed because of individual greed, revenge, or lust: consider Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus. Addison’s Cato further idealized republican Rome (before Julius Caesar’s dictatorship), but it also could not hide the conflict between the ideal of Roman democracy and the reality of Roman leaders’ rapacity. More recent representations in film, including Gladiator, Ben Hur, and Sparticus, blend myth and history, creating stories that feel true even as they play with the facts.