Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni

Author:Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni [Goodman, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-10-15T21:00:00+00:00

When the Germans heard a noise behind them and saw that their families were being slain, they fled out of the camp, throwing away their arms and abandoning their standards, and when they had arrived at the confluence of the Meuse and the Rhine, the survivors despairing of further escape, as a great number of their countrymen had been killed, threw themselves into the river and there perished, overcome by fear, fatigue, and the violence of the stream.

In Caesar’s telling, the tribes were utterly wiped out. Accounts of the dead run as high as three hundred thousand, and though the figure was likely exaggerated for effect, it was certainly among the greatest slaughters of the Gallic Wars. On the Roman side, in Caesar’s dubious claim, not a single man lost his life. As for Caesar’s captives, they were now chieftains without a people. Caesar informed them of what had been done that day, and “granted those whom he had detained in camp the liberty of departing. But dreading revenge and torture from the Gauls, whose lands they had harassed, they said that they desired to remain with him. Caesar granted them permission.”

Carried down from the Rhine and over the Alps, news of this crushing victory raised Caesar’s name to new heights and set off a Roman celebration. There were demands for a festival of thanksgiving and public sacrifices in gratitude to the gods. As the Senate prepared to vote Caesar these new honors, Cato rose to announce that a public sacrifice had his full support: “Let us sacrifice to the gods—because they do not turn the punishment for the general’s folly and madness upon his soldiers, but spare the city.”

Was Rome really about to honor Caesar—for a war crime? Because beneath Caesar’s bluster about Germanic treachery, Cato insisted, a war crime was exactly what had occurred. Envoys were sacred. Truces were sacred. Yet Caesar had violated a truce, rounded up ambassadors like common criminals, used the confusion to run down and slaughter tens of thousands of women and children—and bragged about it!

Before the Senate could vote on a thanksgiving, Cato raised an alternative proposal: Arrest Caesar and surrender him to what was left of the tribes to punish as they saw fit.

There was, of course, no chance that anyone would dump a Roman general in chains beside a German campfire any time soon. Cato’s call to hand over Caesar was of a piece with his crying “Thunder!” in the crowded Forum—another one of the hopeless, exaggerated gestures that were coming to define his role in Roman politics. But it showed in addition an intriguing concern for the rights of the conquered and the barbarian, claims that most of Cato’s colleagues were ready to gloss right over. Cato shared the prejudices of his time, but he also held to a philosophy that urged him, at least in theory, to “look upon all people in general to be our fellow-countryfolk and -citizens.” Cato’s was not the cosmopolitanism of Marcus Aurelius, a later

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