exception; it was
Marcus Porcius Cato (born in 659), a man of the best intentions
and of rare devotedness, and yet one of the most Quixotic
and one of the most cheerless phenomena in this age so abounding
in political caricatures. Honourable and steadfast, earnest in purpose
and in action, full of attachment to his country and to its hereditary
constitution, but dull in intellect and sensuously as well as
morally destitute of passion, he might certainly have made
a tolerable state-accountant. But unfortunately he fell early
under the power of formalism, and swayed partly by the phrases
of the Stoa, which in their abstract baldness and spiritless
isolation were current among the genteel world of that day, partly
by the example of his great-grandfather whom he deemed it his especial
task to reproduce, he began to walk about in the sinful capital
as a model burgess and mirror of virtue, to scold at the times
like the old Cato, to travel on foot instead of riding, to take
no interest, to decline badges of distinction as a soldier,
and to introduce the restoration of the good old days by going after
the precedent of king Romulus without a shirt. A strange caricature
of his ancestor--the gray-haired farmer whom hatred and anger made
an orator, who wielded in masterly style the plough as well as
the sword, who with his narrow, but original and sound common sense
ordinarily hit the nail on the head--was this young unimpassioned
pedant from whose lips dropped scholastic wisdom and who was
everywhere seen sitting book in hand, this philosopher
who understood neither the art of war nor any other art whatever,
this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals. Yet he attained
to moral and thereby even to political importance. In an utterly
wretched and cowardly age his courage and his negative virtues told
powerfully on the multitude; he even formed a school, and there were
individuals--it is true they were but few--who in their turn
copied and caricatured afresh the living pattern of a philosopher.
On the same cause depended also his political influence.
As he was the only conservative of note who possessed if not talent
and insight, at any rate integrity and courage, and was always ready
to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so
or not, he soon became the recognized champion of the Optimate party,
although neither his age nor his rank nor his intellect entitled
him to be so. Where the perseverance