cato Review: Lowercase, and a Roman Who Would Have Hated It

Cato the Younger drank heavily, hated luxury, and killed himself rather than accept a pardon from Caesar

cato. Lowercase. Seventy-eight reviews, a 4.9, twenty to thirty pounds.

Seventy-eight is a small sample and we will not build on it. But 4.9 is 4.9, and it puts this room in the small group we have been tracking across both surveys – Stables, Amaro, Ricco, Lillie’s, Bedford Street Wines, Kioku – and every single one of those turned out to be the same kind of place.

The Roman

Cato the Younger was a Stoic, a senator, and the most intransigent man in the late Roman Republic.

He was famous for absolute incorruptibility, for wearing plain clothes when everybody else was in silk, for walking when everybody else was carried, and for opposing Julius Caesar at every possible opportunity on the grounds that Caesar would destroy the Republic.

He was right about that, and he was insufferable about it, and both of those things are agreed by essentially every source.

He also drank

Heavily, and it is well attested, and his enemies used it against him constantly.

He would sit up all night with philosophers, drinking, arguing, and he did not regard it as a contradiction – because the Stoic objection is not to pleasure but to being controlled by it, and Cato’s position was that he could drink all night and it did not own him.

Which is, we would gently observe, exactly what everybody says.

The Prat’s philosophical desk regards this as the most human detail in Roman history: the most austere man in Rome, the incorruptible one, the one who lectured everybody about luxury, was up until dawn with a jug.

How he died

At Utica, in 46 BC, after Caesar had won.

Caesar was famous for clemency – he pardoned his enemies, publicly, and it was both genuine and an enormously effective political instrument, because a pardoned man owes you his life.

Cato would not accept it. He read Plato’s dialogue on the immortality of the soul, twice, and then stabbed himself.

The wound was not immediately fatal. His household found him and a doctor stitched him up. When he woke, he tore the stitches open with his own hands.

He would not be forgiven, because being forgiven would have made Caesar his master, and that was the one thing he would not permit.

The bar

Twenty to thirty pounds, which is honest, and a 4.9 across seventy-eight people.

Small room. Short list. Somebody who knows. It is the formula, it has never failed, and we have now written that sentence in something like forty articles.

Verdict

Excellent. Go, and drink well, and raise one to Cato – who despised luxury, drank until dawn, and tore his own stitches out rather than be grateful.

What happened to his name

It became a byword for republican virtue, and it travelled.

Addison wrote a play about him in 1713 which was enormously popular in the American colonies, and George Washington had it performed for the Continental Army at Valley Forge.

Nathan Hale’s line about regretting that he had only one life to lose is very probably lifted from it. So is Patrick Henry’s about liberty or death.

A Roman senator who lost, killed himself, and achieved nothing he set out to achieve became, seventeen centuries later, the moral vocabulary of the American Revolution – and none of the men quoting him appear to have dwelt on the fact that he failed completely.

Judi Online

Staff Writer at The London Prat