M. Porcius Cato

Protecting unarmed farmers from having their lands stolen by force of arms, as was done by the Campanian law, was very much a part of the Stoic ideals of liberty and individual rights. I wonder what principles would justify this wholescale confiscation? Maybe, maybe not--it would be up to them. By this point, votes were conducted by secret ballot. Or don't you bother with the history of the constitution you so cavalierly criticize? Nonsense. If Caesar had been brought to trial, his fate would have been decided by the same senate that had previously voted something like 278-22 to resolve matters peacably. It's hard to see that the same group that let Clodius off for the Bona Dea scandal and exiled Milo would have had Caesar's head. After Gaul, Caesar was richer than most of them combined, far more popular, a formidalbe orator and nearly flawless showman. It would have been the best trial in world history, and we'd have much better one-liners than that crap about casting dice around. Nobody asked for an infinity. They asked for another day. It was Caesar's fault the bill was introduced at the last minute. I'd say he was like a lazy school-boy asking for an extension, but in fact, he's even worse: he was offered an extension but he wouldn't take it. Very true. Cato tirelessly prosecuted the boni who supported Sulla, whose creatures in the treasury aided them in the payment of legal penalties, and who sought to renegotiate their tax-farming contracts. If you think Cato was simply a friend of the rich, then you either need to do more reading or to think more critically about simple-minded populare propaganda. The fact is that NO BILL OF SUCH WIDE-RANGING EFFECTS EVER PASSED ON FIRST READING. Caesar, as usual, expected special treatment, and he was upset he didn't get it.

You needn't take my word on the issue that the first bill was insufficient to acheive its objectives. The best evidence for its inability to be carried out is provided by Caesar's own introduction of the supplementary bill, the lex Iulia agraria Campania. The initial bill provided no contingencies in case there were an insufficient number of willing sellers. Because there in fact were not a sufficient number of sellers, the confiscatory Campanian law was needed to ensure that there was enough land to settle Pompey's vets. Moreover, because the Senate had been required to take an oath that they would settle these vets, they could not oppose this second--and completely evil--bill without breaking their oaths. I really do wonder if any of you have any experience in negotiating contracts. The objections I raised to the first bill are really elementary ones, and they would have been obvious to anyone with any experience. This was precisely why an experienced body of legislators SHOULD be deciding what goes to the electorate, who are as generally uninterested in the details of legislation as many historians and amateurs.

The chief problem with this hypothesis is that the triumvirate was a secret pact that was not uncovered until after January 1 or 2, when Cato opposed the lex Iulia agraria. The first evidence for the triumvirate, or any coordinated actions on the part of Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, occurred in the following days, when the three spoke on behalf of the bill in the Forum, which was surrounded by Pompey's armed thugs who smashed the fasces of the opposing consul M. Calpurnius Bibulus and were apparently under Caesar's control. It was on this date that Pompey ominously declared that if anyone "took up the sword" to stop the bill, he would be "ready with his shield and sword." Up until this point, Pompey and Crassus might have been suspected as in alliance with Caesar (Cicero, for example, should have known), but there was no evidence that they had formed a real coalition that needed to be discredited and weakened. Rather, Pompey and Crassus had only spoken in favor of the bill with many others, and this wasn't unusual--Crassus and Caesar had been previously united in their attempts to gain the supporters of Catiline, and Pompey obviously stood to gain from the bill. Thus, until there was violence in the Forum, it did seem like politics as usual. After that, everything changed.

Had the lex Iulia agraria not been submitted at the last possible minute, there would have been plenty of time to discuss the demerits of the bill. It's simply irrational to suppose that any bill of such far-reaching import could be endorsed after a single reading or that any bill of even moderate complexity is beyond reproach. If you've ever drafted a legal contract, you know that the "devil is in the details", and at the very least there could easily be over 10 hours worth of questions to be asked. Do you have any idea how many hours of negotiation go into much less important work? My point is that whether Cato did or did not filisbuster the bill, there was no way the bill could be endorsed by the senate as soon as Caesar liked, and there was also no way that Cato could filibuster the bill to eternity. The senate was the only deliberative body in the republic, and the matter of the bill should have been discussed at length. According to Goldsworthy, this is exactly what Cato proposed--that the bill be re-introduced in the following year so that it could be discusssed properly. Had Caesar really cared about the poor, he would have gladly accepted Cato's proposal. Instead, Caesar was either impatient, incompetent, or unscrupulously attempting to the get the bill blocked on an (important) technical matter so that he could make it out that the Senate had blocked his populare legislation (or all three). Back to your original thesis, you maintained that the only reason that anyone could have opposed the agrarian laws was a personal animosity toward Caesar (poor Caesar! everybody out to get him!). I've given plenty of reasons for opposing the the two lex Iulia agraria, and all of these reasons have nothing to do with hatred of Caesar (though I admit familiarity with that emotion) and everything to do with making sure that the poor are given what they are promised. Had Caesar been so interested in the poor, he too would have taken the time to make sure that his bill could deliver what it promised; but it was Caesar, not Cato, who had no care for the poor, just as he had no care for the law, for morality, for human life, or for the Republic. Even if you want to maintain some admiration for the blackguard, you must admit that the lex agraria were not beyond reasonable criticism. If you do, you're simply a dogmatist.

Thanks to our sponsors, I just happen to have a copy of Goldsworthy's Caesar, and I'm very glad of it too, because Goldsworthy's coverage of Caesar's agrarian laws easily lends itself to FC's misinterpretation (perhaps deliberately so on Goldsworthy's part, though if carelessly so--so much the worse). First, let's be clear about the laws under question. There were two. The first was the lex Iulia agraria. The second was the lex Iulia agraria Campania. To understand the relation between the two bills, imagine that I ask you to sign a contract accepting an ostensibly free lunch (who would refuse it?), and then I demand to sleep with your wife in payment. That's the essence of the two bills, but now to the details. The lex Iulia agraria was introduced to the senate on 1 or 2 January, the last day when Caesar could have had any bills sanctioned by the senate in time for the vote by the Tribal Assemblies. The bill--while needing approval almost immediately--had been crafted with care. The chief problem with most agrarian bills is that they contained hidden costs that were unacceptable, but Caesar's bill seemed to avoid all these: the land to be distributed to Pompey's veterans and 20,000 families were to be purchased with Pompey's largesse, and (more importantly) private property was to be respected--farmers weren't to be forcibly hauled off their plots of land and subjected to violence and starvation. Moreover, so that these deals didn't provide massive clientele for just one man, the bill provided for 20 commissioners (though an inner circle of 5 made most of the decisions), and Caesar specifically excluded himself from participating lest he be accused of graft and kickbacks. According to Goldsworthy (who has an apparent distaste for such "cumbersome and tortuous legal prose"), "little or nothing within it could be reasonably criticized". Nothing??? In the history of republics, I know of no comparably far-reaching legislation--however reasonable--that have been passed on first reading simply because EVERYTHING can be reasonably criticized and improved, even the legislation of (dare I say it?) some darling of Venus. Consider just a few problems with the bill. Which of the eligible 20,000 families were to receive this unexpected largesse? Shall it be first-come-first-served, or shall they be chosen by lottery, or are they to be selected by the consuls themselves? And what prices shall be paid to those willing to sell to the land commissioners? Shall there be a set price, no matter what the land is worth--whether it was been carefully preserved through conscientious steps and back-breaking labor or left to neglect or rendered infertile by carelessness? And if the price is not fixed, shall the commission be licensed to pay any price, no matter how exorbinant? And--this is most important--what if there isn't enough money or enough willing sellers to settle all of Pompey's vets and these 20,000 families that are chosen by who-knows-what method? What then? Although we have no record of Cato's "filibuster", no doubt he raised all these questions--as these are exactly the questions that any responsible statesman would ask. And for his questions, the ex-quaestor was not thanked, but hauled off to jail by that oh-so-reasonable Caesar! Let's be clear: if there is one thing that reason abhors, it is the silencing of questions. And this was too much for the senate, that one deliberative body of the republic, who walked out en masse, following the old grizzled veteran Marcus Petreius--who had by then seen more years of military service than Caesar had spent out of his diapers: "I'd rather be in jail with Cato", he shot at Caesar, "than in the Senate with you!" As it turns out, Cato's concerns with the bill were entirely justified. After the bill was illegally passed through physical violence (including the smashing of the consul's fasces) and over the vetoes of three tribunes, the senators were forced to swear an oath that they would uphold the law no matter what. No matter what? What if the bill proved impossible to enforce for all the reasons I listed? What if no one was willing to sell their land to the commission? What then? After one senator heroically went into exile rather than take this Oath of the Impossible, the answer to "What then?" came into sharp relief: the lex Iulia agraria Campania, which contradicted all the provisions of the first law that it seem reasonable. By the bill, private property was not respected. Instead, the Campanian lands--lands that were settled by the heroes of the Punic Wars, that had been in families for generations, that provided Rome with nearly one-fourth of her income, that had been expressly excluded by the first law precisely to gain passage of it--were to be confiscated from their rightful owners, who were to be left starving in the streets of Rome for the sake of Caesar's ambition. What a lover of the poor! What a champion of the people! What a friend of the dispossessed--that now dispossessed so many! As for Goldsworthy's verdict, the Campanian law is barely mentioned. He admits, of course, that "perhaps Caesar had always thought that its [Campanian lands'] distribution would also be necessary at some point, or maybe the realisation that his first law was on its own inadequate came more gradually. If we knew this, we would certainly have a clearer idea of whether he genuinely hoped to win over the Senate to support his first land law, or whether he had merely wanted to put them in the wrong in the eyes of the electorate." In other words, it isn't clear whether Caesar was a fool or a scoundrel. Well, in my opinion, Caesar was no fool. Rather, the summative verdict of this Campanian law was best put forward by that titan of Roman history, George Long (1864), "This monstrous, this abominable crime was committed to serve a party purpose; and the criminal was a Roman consul ... too intelligent not to know what he was doing, and unscrupulous enough to do anything that would serve his own ends." They just don't write 'em like they used to.

What a jolly bunch of epicures we have here! A belated happy birthday Pantagathus.

source?

Huh? Why would they keep books at the lighthouse of Alexandria when there was a well-known library of Alexandria nearby?

Yes, I agree that there was no grand stoic scheme in this particular action. It was an expedient.

Is this offered in the same spirit as, "Maybe Antinous was really Hadrian's prospective heir?" Otherwise, I'm somewhat at a loss to know what exactly would constitute effective opposition from nearly total political annihilation than what Cato did. In any case, we're trailing back again into the hypothetical quicksands of "What could the optimates have done to avert civil war?" Since I'm not on the premise that "it was they who would have had it so" ("they" offered peace repeatedly, "they" voted overwhelmingly for Caesar and Pompey to lay down their arms, and "they" asked nothing but that Caesar lay down his arms before returning to Rome), I think Caesar and only Caesar could have averted civil war--and Caesar would not have it so.

This is quite beyond this thread, but I'm working on an article on Cato, and the influence of Stoicism on Cato's politics is very much the theme of the piece. Bad situtation worse? From whose perspective? I'd call it almost a complete victory--Cato managed to turn almost the whole Pompeian camp against the triumvirate, ultimately including Pompey himself. Between the consulship of Caesar and his march on Rome, some member of the new anti-triumviral party won a consulship in almost every election. By the time Caesar was declared hostis, the three-headed beast was left with only two heads attempting to bite each other off. Anyone looking forward from the time when dung was dumped on Bibulus' head would have said that the triumvirs had made political violence a permanent fixture of Roman politics and would henceforth have their way in all things--yet Cato's opposition changed all that. Now I'd call that political marksmanship. Alas, it wasn't enough.

I loved the first half of this book, then it didn't know what to do. Look forward to the movie just the same.

What land are you talking about? The land that was ALREADY occupied but that Caesar wanted to seize for Pompey's vets???

Then I don't think you know what Cato stood for either as a man or as a politician. To me the key insight into Cato comes from the doctrines of Stoicism itself, which Cato studied (paraphrasing Cicero) 'as a guide to life rather than as an object of study itself'. If you study Stoicism with an eye to understanding Cato, everything makes sense, including why an obstinate conservative enjoyed such a great reputation among even his adversaries (such as Sallust and--according to Dio Cassius--Caesar himself) while also irritating the hell out of his allies as well (Cicero included). This idealistic (and perhaps quixotic) devotion to Greek Stoicism was the essence of Cato the Younger, and it set him off markedly from his crabby, anti-Hellenic, anti-intellectual, uber-pragmatic ancestor Cato the Elder. Aside from this also being the universal contemporary opinion of Cato, there was plenty of evidence for the same opinion from the facts we have, including his energetic reform of the treasury (where he refused to play along with the "fat cats" that held sway there), his lifelong and constant entourage of Stoic philosophers from Greece, his reputed habits of reading Stoic philosophy in the Senate (arriving early, he spent his time reading while awaiting for the other senators to arrive), the correspondence between Cato and Cicero, and Cicero's side of the argument in pro Murena, which is mostly devoted to Cato's interpretation of Stoic doctrine. To my mind, it is the height of anachronism and simple-mindedness to attempt to shoe-horn Cato and all the opponents of the triumvirate into the Gracchi-vs-the-Senate template. Believe it or not, over a period of nearly 100 years, politics in Rome changed quite a bit, and there was much much more to poltical disputes than the grain dole. Many of the "land grants" that were being proposed in later years--including the ones opposed by Cato and others--involved forcibly evicting poor and middle income farmers from lands that they had been leasing for generations--not to help "the poor", but to further enrich booty-engorged veterans of foreign wars who wouldn't be satisfied by non-Italian lands. EDIT: I should also add that while Cato was a somewhat quixotic Stoic, Cicero's charge that he acted 'as if were living in Plato's republic rather than among the dregs of Romulus' (paraphrase) misses the fact that Cato apparently learned to pick his battles more carefully than Don Quixote. Cato efforts against Catiline show this in two ways. First, he accurately predicted that by killing the conspirators, most of Catiline's adherents would desert him (which indeed they did once the conspirators were slain). Second, he realized that what the rank-and-file really wanted was relief rather than revolution, which he successfully pacified by means of the dole. This strikes me as sound, prudential judgment rather than wild-eyed idealism, or--more exactly--it puts the lie to the myth that its impossible to be idealistic *and* practical. If your ideals are just, practical goods do follow: as any Stoic would be happy to tell you.

FWIW, here is a photo of the pre-Bellamy salute used in the same pledge.

Oooo--well done! Yes, I think the Trajan salute is more like the Tennis Court Oath more than the Oath of the Horatii. In any case, it's much less spine-crawling than the awful Bellamy salute.

It's a brand new appellation--haven't you heard it's the new thing? Actually, you're right--the Hammer was my bad memory for manu ad ferrum. I knew it was something cool...

In a republic that is governed by laws, it is important to distinguish between opposition based on the content of legislation and opposition based on the means by which legislation is passed. Cato the Younger did not constantly block land grants to the poor. Quite the opposite, as tribune, Cato sponsored a decree in the senate wherein state funds would be used to make an annual purchase of grain that would be distributed to the populace. (1, 2). What made this an "optimate" as opposed to "populare" move was that Cato Uticensis had proposed the bill in the senate, which had traditionarl jurisdiction over state funds (3). Unlike his maternal grandfather, who had proposed rival demogogic laws to contest Gaius Gracchus, Cato Uticensis saw the role of tribune as being primarily to obstruct bills that were against the interest of the people; as a senator, however, he could also sponsor decrees in the senate that could alleviate suffering while simultaneously upholding the constitution (4). 1. Plut, Cat. Min., 26.1 2. Plut, Caes, 8.4 3. Lintott, A. (1999). The Constitution of the Roman Republic. New York: Oxford University Press. 4. Taylor, L. R. (1971). Party Politics in the Age of Caesar. University of California Press.

I don't understand this argument at all. Are you saying that Egypt should or should not be considered part of Africa? Are you saying it should or should not be considered part of the East?

Cato the Elder, like many Romans, was proud of making money, which he did by improving land, by investing in shipping (though illegal for a senator), and by teaching uneducated slave boys . From Plutarch (Cato Major, 21): With Romans like this, is it a wonder that Italy came to rule the Mediterranean in unprecedented prosperity?

If there were a law declaring that old coins would not be accepted for tax payments and the new coins were made available at an official exchange rate, there would be no need for coin collectors. Currency changes obviously don't require a vast bureaucracy of "coin collectors." Or didn't you know that? Also, I included a link to an article on Gresham's Law when I introduced the topic. That's what the underlining is there for.

The great Oath of the Horatii by David portrays what is commonly called the "Roman salute," but which otherwise sends shivers down one's spine as redolent of the seig-heiling robots that followed Hitler. What is the evidence that the Romans really used this salute? I've read the salute is to be found on the column of Trajan, but I don't see it anywhere (even here). Is the "Roman salute" really Roman or is it simply the invention of the neo-classical admirers of Rome? (BTW, this image of the old Bellamy salute is really scary.)

What is the evidence that makes it certain? We know a few picked troops had hoplite armor, but what's the evidence that enough had the armor and training to use hoplite tactics?

I'm sympathetic to this concern, but only so far. I don't fault Diocletian for attempting to combat inflation, but I do fault him for not going about it in a more conservative fashion--trying out new approaches on a small scale and examining what does and doesn't work. The wage and price controls were very difficult to enforce, which he must have known to have instituted such draconian punishments. I agree that this is would be the smoking gun, and I've been racking my brain to come up with examples of inflationary periods that had been dealt with successfully in the past, but to no avail.

To address, FC's query: there seem to have been a rash of "Roman values" expulsions in the mid-Republic. In 161, the Senate authorized the expulsion of philosophers and rhetors, but in 155 B.C.E., at least Greek philosophers were again in Rome. Also, in 139, Jews, Chaldeans and worshippers of Sabazius were expelled, and again at least the Jews returned judging by Cicero's Pro Flacco. Gruen has argued that alll these expulsions were rather like the sumptuary laws that were passed from time to time--completely unenforceable and almost certainly not universally popular. EDIT: Also, Domitian's expulsion of philosophers prompted this mock-epic complaint by Sulpicia