CATO, MARCUS PORCIUS (95-46 B.c.), Roman philos opher, called Uticensis. On the death of his parents he was brought up in the house of his uncle, M. Livius Drusus. After serving in the ranks against Spartacus (72 B.e.) he acted as military tribune (67) in Macedonia. On his return he became quaestor, and showed so much zeal and integrity in the management of the public accounts that he obtained a provincial appointment in Asia,* where he strengthened his reputation. He admired the discipline which Lucullus had enforced in his own eastern command, and supported his claims to a triumph, while he opposed the preten sions of Pompey. As tribune in 62 he prosecuted L. Licinius Murena, consul-elect, for bribery. Cato supported Cicero at the time of the conspiracy of Catiline and voted for the execution of the conspirators, thus incurring the resentment of Julius Caesar, who did his utmost to save them.
Cato was now regarded as one of the leaders of the senatorial nobility. He vainly opposed Caesar's candidature for the con sulship in 59, and his attempt, in conjunction with Bibulus, to prevent the passing of Caesar's agrarian law proved unsuccessful. Yet he was still an obstacle of sufficient importance for the triumvirs to desire to get rid of him. At the instigation of Caesar he was sent with a mission to settle the affairs of Cyprus (58). On his return two years later he continued to struggle against the combined powers of the triumvirs in the city, and became involved in scenes of violence and riot. He obtained the praetor ship in 54, and endeavoured to suppress bribery, in which all parties were equally interested. He failed to attain the consul ship, and had made up his mind to retire from public life when the civil war broke out in 49. He realized that the sole chance for the free state lay in supporting Pompey, whom he had formerly opposed. At the outset of the war he was entrusted with the defence of Sicily, but finding it impossible to hold the island he joined Pompey at Dyrrhachium. He was not present at the battle of Pharsalus, and after the battle, when Pompey abandoned his party, Cato led a small remnant of their forces into Africa. After his famous march through the Libyan deserts, he shut himself up in Utica, and even after the decisive cseteat at tnapsus k40), in spite of the wishes of his followers, he determined to keep the gates closed till he had sent off his adherents by sea. When the last of the transports had left the port he cheerfully dismissed his attendants, and soon afterwards stabbed himself.
He had been reading, we are told, in his last moments Plato's dialogue on the immortality of the soul, but his own philosophy had taught him to act upon a narrow sense of immediate duty without regard to the future. He conceived that he was placed in the world to play an active part, and when disabled from carrying out his principles, to retire gravely from it. He had lived for the free state, and it now seemed his duty to perish with it. In politics he was a typical doctrinaire, blind to the fact that his national ideal was an anachronism. The only composition by him which we possess is a letter to Cicero (Ad. Fam. xv. 5). The school of the Stoics, which took a leading part in the history of Rome under the earlier emperors, looked to him as its saint and patron. Immedi ately after his death Cato's character became the subject of dis cussion; Cicero's panegyric Cato was answered by Caesar in his Anticato. Brutus, dissatisfied with Cicero's work, produced an other on the same subject; in Lucan Cato is represented as a model of virtue and disinterestedness.