soon allowed himself to be lured into a battle, and the disaster of Thapsus followed. Once more Cato found himself at the head of the mere wreck of an army, and encompassed with a campful of dispirited politicians who were thinking of making their submission to Cæsar. At first he resolved to resist to the end, and made every preparation to fight; but he found that the Roman residents of Utica were intriguing to surrender the place to the enemy, while the troops refused to shut themselves. up in a city where there was a large population which might turn against them and admit Cæsar. Some of the soldiery informed Cato that they would only stand a siege if they were first allowed to put to death or expel every one whom they suspected of treachery within the walls. But he refused to listen to any proposals for a massacre, whereupon they told him that they should march off into the interior, and leave him to shift for himself.

Abandoned by his troops, and quite conscious that the Utican senate was prepared to admit Cæsar the moment that he appeared, Cato thought that he had reached the limits of his responsibility. It was still open to him to escape by sea, and join the last desperate levies which the two young Pompeys were collecting in Baetica. But it seemed to him that the cause of the Republic was so hopelessly lost that any further struggle was useless. He knew the two reckless and violent young men in Spain too well to believe that if, by some strange turn of luck, they were to beat off Cæsar, they would ever restore the old constitution of the state. Rome would merely get two tyrants instead of one; it was not for him to protract the war for such an end. All that remained was that he should seek the last refuge of the just man in the day of hopeless adversity, a voluntary death. The Stoic creed, of which he had always been such a firm adherent, supplied him with the advice which was necessary in such a crisis.

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To fight was useless, perhaps even harmful; to surrender was dishonourable; it only remained to die.

There was still a day or more at his disposition before Cæsar could arrive, and this time he devoted to setting his house in order. He procured shipping for all those who chose to fly to Spain, and saw them quit the harbour. There remained with him none save his young son, his friend Statilius, and two philosophers, Apollonides the Stoic and Demetrius the Peripatetic, who had accompanied him from Cyprus. After bathing he went to dinner; he had invited the magistrates of Utica to join him, though he knew that they intended to surrender to Cæsar next day. Throughout the meal he showed himself cheerful beyond his wont, and led the conversation through many fields of philosophy. In particular, he dwelt long on the old Stoic paradox that "the good man only is free, the bad man, even in success, a slave." It was quite true, he maintained: he himself had done. his duty, and was therefore happy. Cæsar had become the enemy of his country, and so was the most miserable of all men. He looked upon himself as the victor, and the dictator as the vanquished. To his son he left one legacy of advice-to keep clear of politics. In the Rome of the immediate future, he said, "you cannot fill any place in a way that would be worthy of your father; to do it otherwise would be unworthy of yourself."

After the dinner was over, he took a short walk in the dark with his son and his friends, and retired to his chamber. Then he said farewell to all in such words that none could fail to guess his purpose. When left alone, he lay down on his bed and began to read Plato concerning the Immortality of the Soul; but he had not gone far before he missed his sword from its usual neg at the head of his couch. His son had removed it when he guessed

his father's intent. With some displeasure he summoned the young man, and asked him whether he desired to surrender him to Cæsar. If this was his wish, why had he not bound him and fettered his hands, for a brave man did not need a sword; if that was missing, there were other, if more painful, ways to die. Then, turning to the two philosophers, he inquired whether they thought it likely that they could convince him that it would be wise or honourable to submit to Cæsar. If not, what course did they intend to propose to him?

The son and the philosophers withdrew in tears, and seeing that nothing else was left, sent in the sword by the hands of a slave. Cato tried its edge. "Now, at least, I am master of myself," he said; and, lying down again, he twice read through the book on which he had been intent. Then he lay down for a short snatch of slumber; but at dawn he woke, and without further lingering stabbed himself as deeply as he could below the right breast. The noise of his fall roused his friends, who had been listening all night for some such noise. With cruel kindness they bandaged his wound, which was not necessarily mortal, and laid him on his couch again. But the moment that he came to himself he pulled away the bandages, tore open the hurt, and died in a few minutes.

Cæsar came up next day. At first he tried to play the magnanimous part: "How could Cato envy me the glory of pardoning him and saving his life?" he cried. But his real feelings for the one man whom he could not bend were shown when, not long afterwards, he published his satire, the "Anti-Cato." In this discreditable work he heaped together all the stories, true or untrue, which placed his enemy in a ludicrous light: he did not shrink from saying that Cato had passed the ashes of his brother's funeral pyre through a sieve, in search of melted gold, and that he had lent his wife to Hortensius for valuable

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consideration. But such slanders did more harm to the writer than to the subject of his libel.

Cæsar's pamphlet has long been forgotten, and Cato's life, in spite of the sneers of Mommsen and other blind worshippers of the dictator, will long continue to appeal to all who love an honest man. We no longer write tragedies to his glory; we grant that he was a little impracticable, a little grotesque-in short, a magnificent anachronism. Yet we feel that it is well with the state which has such men. Ten Catos might have saved the Roman Republic; one could only be a voice crying in the wilderness, prophesying the inevitable ill, which, unaided, he could not ward off. Like the Persian noble in Herodotus, he could exclaim, "What the gods have decreed it is not possible to avert, but surely the direst of all human ills is to abound in knowledge, yet to have no power to hold back the evil day."

CHAPTER VIII

POMPEY

IN Cato we have had to deal with a man who should have been born in an earlier age, who knew it, and who went through life with his eyes open, fighting against the inevitable, though he knew that it must come in spite of all his striving. Now we have to survey a still more unhappy and pathetic career, that of a man who did not even know the signs of the times, and went on blindly seeking he did not quite know what, and doing infinite mischief just because he did not know what he wanted.

There have been, alike in ancient and in modern history, great generals who were also great statesmen, for good or for evil, like Cæsar, or Frederick the Great, or Napoleon. There have also been great generals to whom all insight into the verities of contemporary politics was denied, and who yet insisted upon interfering in them, and found it easy to do so. For the multitude is always prone to credit great generals with universal genius in statecraft, just as it is equally prone to credit great orators with the same faculty. For it seems to be easy to forget that excellence in strategy and in oratory are about equally remote in character from excellence in statesmanship. Cicero or Burke, not to mention more modern names, cut poor figures as practical politicians, but even more pathetically futile are the great men of war who have been put at the head of the state by their admirers, and have gone astray in the Forum. The best example in modern times is probably our own Wellington, whose mismanagement had no