Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-HallettЧитать онлайн книгу.
felt none. A civilian by nature, he once wrote to Cicero: ‘It is a much more splendid thing … that a province should be held and preserved by the mercy and incorruptibility of its commander than by the strength of a military force.’ He loved neither fighting nor the cause for which he fought. He had rejected Pompey’s repeated attempts to annex him to his party. Now he privately told his friends that if Caesar triumphed he would kill himself: if Pompey prevailed, he would at least continue living but would go into exile rather than submit to the dictatorship that he assumed was inevitable.
The first task Pompey assigned him was the defence of Sicily, source of most of Rome’s corn supply. When he realized that his troops were outnumbered by the invading Caesarean force, he avoided a confrontation by abandoning the island, advising the Syracusans to make their peace with whichever party was ultimately victorious. His priority was the prevention of Rome’s self-destruction. He persuaded Pompey to swear that he wouldn’t plunder any city under Rome’s protection, or kill any Roman except on the battlefield. When the Pompeians won a battle everyone rejoiced except Cato, who ‘was weeping for his country … as he saw that many brave citizens had fallen by one another’s hands’. He was not to be trusted with any command that would empower him to turn on his own commander. Pompey considered making him admiral of his fleet but changed his mind, reflecting that ‘the very day of Caesar’s defeat would find Cato demanding that he [Pompey] also lay down his arms and obey the laws’. When Pompey marched on Pharsalus, where he suffered his devastating defeat at Caesar’s hands, he left Cato at Dyrrachium to mind the camp and guard the stores.
At Pharsalus Pompey’s army, though twice as large as Caesar’s, was routed. Pompey escaped by sea, but in the aftermath of the battle few of his supporters knew whether he was dead or alive. Cato found himself the commander of those troops that had straggled back into camp after the battle. He led them out to join up with the still intact Pompeian fleet. A stickler for propriety even in this moment of calamity, he offered to surrender his command to Cicero who was with the ships and who, as a former consul, outranked him. Cicero was appalled – an altogether more flexible and pragmatic character, he was in a hurry to return to Italy and find himself a place on the winning side. Cato helped him get away (Pompey’s son wanted to kill him for his disloyalty) and set sail for Africa with the remnant of the Pompeian army. He had guessed, correctly, that Pompey would seek refuge in Egypt. In Libya he learnt that he was right, and that in Egypt the great man had been murdered. He also heard that another Pompeian army, commanded by Scipio (a sadly inferior descendant of the Scipio who defeated Hannibal), was in Numidia and had the backing of the Numidian King, Juba. Cato, who was proving himself a resourceful and efficient commander, led his troops on an arduous march across the Sahara to join them. When they met Cato, as scrupulous as ever in his observance of proper form, ceded overall command to Scipio – technically his superior – despite the fact that everyone, including Scipio himself, recognized that Cato would have been the better leader.
It took Caesar nearly two years to follow him into Numidia. The new ruler of Rome had business to attend to and battles to fight in Asia Minor, Egypt and back in Italy. Meanwhile, Cato and his fellow Pompeians marched into the Phoenician port-city of Utica and made it their base.
Enclosed on one side by the desert and on the other by the sea, Utica was an isolated place. Under occupation by Cato and his colleagues, its political nature was complicated and volatile. There were some three hundred Roman citizens of no particular allegiance living there, most of them moneylenders or merchants. These people would no doubt be ready to adapt to whatever political situation they found themselves in. But there were also a number of Roman senators who had left Italy with Pompey and come with Cato from Dyrrachium. There was good reason to suppose that should they fall into Caesar’s hands they would all be killed for their obstinate opposition. The African people of Utica were thought to favour Caesar. Scipio and Juba both wished to protect themselves and their followers against possible treachery by slaughtering the entire native population. Cato dissuaded them from this atrocity and took upon himself the responsibility of keeping the city secure, and its diverse inhabitants safe from each other. To do so he employed harsh measures. He forced all the indigenous young men of Utica to give up their arms and interned them in concentration camps outside the city walls. The rest of the population – women, children, and old men – were allowed to remain inside, living uneasily alongside the Roman occupiers while the latter fortified the city and stocked it with grain.
It was a tense and unhappy situation. The commanders bickered. Scipio accused Cato of cowardice. Cato, so observers believed, came profoundly to regret having handed over the command to a man he trusted neither to act competently in battle nor to be wise after it. Yet fractious and deeply divided as the Pompeian force at Utica was, it seemed to contemporary observers and later Roman historians to have a tragic grandeur. To those who rejected Caesar’s rule – whether still fighting for the scattered Pompeian resistance abroad or living resentfully under the new regime – the Senate Cato established in Utica was the one true Senate, and Utica itself, because Cato was there, the one true Rome. Cut off with his fugitive army in what to a Roman was the back of beyond, he loomed up in the Romans’ collective imagination, doomed but resolute, superbly alone, calmly awaiting Caesar’s arrival and his own surely inevitable defeat and death with what Seneca called ‘the unflinching steadiness of a hero who did not totter when the whole state was in ruins’.
At last Caesar, who in the previous year had visited the supposed site of Achilles’ tomb, making a show, as Alexander had done, of his claim to be a successor to that paragon of warriors, finally turned his attention to the man whose claim to Achilles-like integrity was generally and annoyingly perceived to be so much stronger than his own. He landed in Africa. Cato stayed in Utica to safeguard the supplies and keep the road to the sea open while Scipio led out the army. On 6 April 46 BC, at Thapsus, the Pompeians were crushingly defeated, many of them trampled to death by their own stampeding elephants, and the majority of them were slaughtered.
The news reached Utica late at night, brought by a messenger who had been three days on the road. At once the Romans in the city panicked. There were tumultuous scenes in the unlit streets as people dashed from their houses, shouting in terror, only to run back again, unsure where to seek safety. They had no troops to defend them. They were horribly aware of the men of Utica, penned into the prison camp outside the city and no doubt exulting in the news of their oppressors’ defeat, and of those men’s relatives all around them. They were crazy with fear, and they had good cause to be. Only one man remained calm. Once more, as he had so often done in the Roman Forum, Cato made use of his stentorian voice and his powers of self-assertion to still and quieten a frenzied crowd.
Striding through the darkened streets, shouting out in his harsh voice, he arrested the stampede. As soon as it was light, he summoned all the Romans present in Utica to assemble before the Temple of Jupiter. He made his appearance among them with characteristic sangfroid, apparently immersed in a book (it was in fact an inventory of the food supplies and weaponry stockpiled in the city). He spoke serenely, asking them to make up their minds whether they wished to fight or surrender to Caesar. He would not despise them, he said, if they chose the latter course; but if they decided to fight – and here his tone became more fervent – their reward would be a happy life, or a most glorious death. The immediate effect of his oratory was impressive. ‘The majority, in view of his fearlessness, nobility and generosity, almost forgot their present troubles in the conviction that he alone was an invincible leader and superior to every fortune.’
All too soon, though, the mood of exaltation passed. Someone suggested that all those present should be required to free their slaves, thereby providing the city with a defence force. Cato, correct as ever even in this desperate moment, refused to infringe private property rights by making such an action compulsory, but asked those who would give up their slaves of their own free will to do so. The Roman merchants – slave-owners all and probably slave-traders too, for whom business counted for more than politics – began to see the advantages of surrender. The situation was terrifyingly precarious. The merchants began talking about overpowering and interning their fellow Romans, the senators, before handing