Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [27]
Early in December, Caesar was to sail across to the province of Africa, where Cato and ten Pompeian legions were at large. The dictator hoped it would be his final campaign. Now in his seventeenth year, Octavius asked permission to accompany his great-uncle so that he could gain military experience. Atia opposed the idea. He said nothing by way of argument and dutifully agreed to remain at home. Caesar, too, was unwilling for him to take the field. He was worried about his great-nephew’s physical fitness and feared that “he might bring on illness to a weak body through such a sharp change of life-style and so permanently injure his health.”
The African campaign was by no means a walkover. Caesar quickly got into trouble, but fought his way out of it, decisively defeating the enemy near the port of Thapsus. Cato, standard-bearer of the Republic but no military man, had played little direct part in the campaign. Realizing the hopelessness of the situation, he now decided to take his own life. In this way he would avoid the humiliation of falling into Caesar’s hands and, worse, having to endure a pardon. After spending the night reading the Phaedo, Plato’s great dialogue about the last days of Socrates, he stabbed himself.
For all his intransigence and incompetence when alive, Cato’s death had an enormous impact on public opinion. People remembered his principled incorruptibility, not his blunders. His shining example unforgivingly illuminated Caesar’s selfishness and ambition, which threatened to destroy the centuries-old Republic.
The modern reader may be intrigued by the elite Roman’s propensity to kill himself in adverse circumstances, and indeed, despite undercurrents of popular and religious disapproval, the classical world’s attitude toward suicide was very different from today’s.
People killed themselves in many different ways and for many different reasons, as they have done throughout history. But there was, at least among the upper classes and in military circles, what could be called a culture of suicide. In certain circumstances it was the honorable thing to do, and had about it a certain gloomy glamour.
The two main justifications for a “noble” suicide were desperata salus (no hope of rescue or deliverance) and pudor (shame). Julius Caesar in his account of his wars in Gaul gives a spectacular example of the former. Roman survivors of an ambush “had hard work to withstand the enemy’s onslaught till nightfall; in the night, seeing that all hope was gone, every single man committed suicide.”
In feeling pudor, a Roman meditating self-destruction did not so much suffer from guilt at some bad thing he had done (although this could be the case) as recognize a catastrophic collapse in his social or political standing. Such reversals of fortune happened from time to time, and for a senior politician suicide was a recognized professional hazard. It was pudor that did for Cato.
In July of 46 B.C., Caesar returned to Rome. Most people—including critics such as Cicero—were relieved that peace and, above all, certainty had returned. There was a widespread expectation that, if they had won, the republicans would have massacred their opponents, and even those who had been neutral in the civil war. Caesar’s famous clemency, although regarded with some suspicion, contributed to an atmosphere of calm.
The Senate offered the victor new, extravagant, and unprecedented honors, which he accepted. In return Caesar followed a policy of reconciliation. According to Dio, he promised not to “take any cruel action simply because I have conquered, and am able to say exactly what I like without being called to account, and have complete freedom to do whatever I choose.” He needed the cooperation of the surviving optimates to help him run the empire. He could not undertake this task singlehanded, but many of his leading followers were inexperienced and unreliable. That Antony was the best of them indicates the abilities of the rest.
In fact, Caesar felt impatient