CATO SILENCED BY CESAR 217 sulship than the triumph, was obliged to quit his legions and enter the city in order to begih his canvass. He was disgusted with the obstructionist orator, and never forgave him. Of all the opponents with whom he clashed during his stormy career, Cato was the only one for whom he nourished a real dislike. He showed it by publishing a very bitter and unfair satire, the "Anti-Cato," against his memory, after he had fallen in the civil war, a deed that contrasts strangely with his usual magnanimity to his adversaries. After the turbulent consulship of Cæsar and Bibulus began, on 1st January B.C. 59, Cato had plenty of occupation provided for him. When the Julian Laws, which were to consolidate the triumvirate, began to be brought forward, he came down to the Forum to oppose every one of them. At the first great riot, when Cæsar illegally refused to listen to his colleague's veto, and went on with his legislative proposals in face of every constitutional hindrance, we find Cato at the side of Bibulus, enduring in his company the storm of stones and blows. When at last the Democrats drove them out of the assembly, it was Cato who brought up the rear, refusing to hurry as he went, and turning every now and then to tell the unheeding rabble of pursuers that they were lunatics as well as bad citizens. When Bibulus had retired to the safety of his house, and contented himself with putting up a daily notice that no legal meetings of the Comitia could be held, as he was intending to "observe the heavens," Cato sought no similar shelter. He came down to oppose the law for distributing the Campanian lands, and spoke so bitterly that Cæsar had him dragged from the rostrum and sent to prison, though he soon allowed him to be released by a friendly tribune. When the question of the Asiatic tax-farmers was brought up in the Senate, he tried to "talk out" the proposal, as he had talked out the question of Cæsar's triumph seven months before. But the consul had him stopped in the midst of his harangue, and no one dared to protest. At the most important assembly of the year, that in which the disreputable tribune Vatinius carried the law which made Cæsar governor of Gaul, Cato again came down to protest. He told the citizens that "they were voting a tyrant into the citadel" when they gave the triumvir the all-important Cisalpine province and the legions that lay in it. But it was to no purpose: Cato had liberated his conscience by making his protest, but he had no other consolation. All that he had succeeded in accomplishing was to make Cæsar use illegal violence in a way that in the eyes of strict constitutionalists vitiated all his legislation. But strict constitutionalists were a negligeable quantity at Rome in those unhappy days. It may have been some consolation to Cato to find that he had at least succeeded in provoking his enemies to the point of expelling him from Rome. In B.C. 58 they let loose upon him the famous demagogue Clodius, then in the first energy of his tribunicial year. The annexation of Cyprus, a very unjust and disreputable piece of work, had just been determined upon. Clodius announced that as there were tempting opportunities for plunder in King Ptolemy's treasury, the most honest man in Rome had better be sent to conduct the business. Cato replied that he had no intention of touching such an iniquitous affair, and should not accept any such post. "It is not your pleasure to go," answered the tribune, "but it is my pleasure that you should be sent." Thereupon he procured a decree which appointed Cato to take charge of Cyprus and its annexation, and also to reconcile two factions at Byzantium which were engaged in civil war. He was to be kept out of Rome as long as the triumvirs and their agent thought necessary. To show that he was CATO IN CYPRUS 219 in disgrace, he was given neither a single soldier, a ship, nor a supply of money, and he had assigned to help him only two secretaries, one of whom was a notorious thief, and the other a client of Clodius—which came to much the same thing. When practical work had to be done, Cato was always at his best, and this unsought-for mission, which took him away from Rome during the time of Cicero's banishment, and of many other troubles, enabled him to do the state good service. He reconciled the Byzantines with no difficulty: the Cypriot matter turned out heart-rending to an honest man, but not otherwise difficult. The unfortunate king committed suicide when he heard that he was to be evicted, though Cato tried to smooth matters for him, by promising him a competent maintenance and the important post of high-priest of the Paphian temple, the chief sanctuary of the island. Ptolemy being removed, there was no hindrance to taking possession of his whole treasure, which amounted to the great sum of 7000 talents. The removal of such a mass of bullion to Rome was no light matter: fearing shipwreck, as we are told, Cato took the curious precaution of sealing up precisely two talents and 500 drachmae in each of several thousand vases. To the lid of each vase he fastened an immensely long cord, with a large cork buoy at the end, his idea being that if the ships miscarried the buoys would float on the surface of the sea, and guide salvage work. What was to be done if the misadventure took place in really deep water, Plutarch does not tell us. Cato came back to Rome late in the summer of B.C. 56, in time to be involved in all the troubles which were caused by the renewal of the triumvirate at Lucca, and the determination of its members that Pompey and Crassus should be made consuls for 55. At first Cato had some personal troubles of his own to distract him. His old enemy Clodius was still reigning over the streets of Rome in all his glory, and thought that it would be a humorous and appropriate thing to indict Cato for embezzlement of some of that very Cypriot treasure over which the latter had taken so much trouble. The charge was too gross, and Cato easily got off, after making his famous bon mot that "what greater disgrace can the age see than Clodius as the accuser and Cato as the accused in a trial for embezzlement?" Yet, curiously enough, Cato was found at the same moment opposing a motion in the Senate to declare the acts of Clodius's tribunate illegal. It had occurred to Cicero, some time after his return from banishment, that the best way to get rid of the slur on himself caused by the decree that the demagogue had passed against him, would be to procure a declaration that the latter had never been legally elected tribune. To stand for the office Clodius had been forced to get himself adopted as a Plebeian, and his adoption had been carried out with the most flagrant disregard of legal formalities. Cato opposed this raking up of events now three years old, by pointing out that many accomplished facts depended for their legality on Clodius having been duly elected; among others, his own commission to Cyprus. If Clodius was no tribune, then he had been no commissioner, and all his doings in Cyprus and Byzantium were vitiated. This settled the matter, and Cicero's ingenious device was rejected-a result which made him as bitterly angry with Cato, as he had been once before over the breaking up of the Concordia Ordinum, and as he was to be once again over the matter of his triumph for his military exploits in Cilicia. It is to the same year, B.C. 56, that belongs the most extraordinary, and to our eyes most objectionable, of Plutarch wrongly the incidents of Cato's private life. |