Cato, the Filibuster, and the Death of the Republic

Those who study the ancient past often bemoan the fact that 99% of classical literature has been lost. Whether through purposeful destruction or just disappearing through the centuries, we unfortunately possess only a fraction of the great literary works of Greece and Rome. However, those that have survived remain some of the most influential texts ever written, and it's impossible not to wonder how lost literature and philosophy could not just affect our understanding of the ancient world, but may have altered the development of Western culture itself, had they survived. Countless texts exist today only as fragments or as quotes that were preserved in other literary works. But the relatively recent discovery of the wonderfully preserved Dead Sea Scrolls 80 years ago, and the innovative project employing AI to read the charred scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, fill classicists with hope that we may yet recover some of the wisdom which was lost millennia ago. Everyone has their own favorite text that they hope to see rediscovered, be it Varro's masterwork on the history of Roman religion, the legendary Sibylline Oracles, or the lost works of the Greek poet Sappho. But there is one piece of literature that I would choose to recover above all of them if given the chance. It's not at the top of any classicist's list, but it is one that I feel would have the most significant impact on the modern world were it discovered in a cave somewhere, or in a neglected monastery library. I hope to one day read the Antiquatum, a polemical tract written by Caesar that sought to dispel the overly laudatory myths that were already forming around the staunch conservative in the years following his suicide. Our limited knowledge of the work tells us that it was designed to knock Cato down a peg and highlight the unsavory aspects of his character that made him the great enemy of Caesar and the popular faction. In my ideal world, this would be required reading for anyone who takes the absurd, pro-oligarchic propaganda of Plutarch's Life of Cato at face value. Caesar's elegant Latin prose made his commentaries on the Gallic War an essential text for anyone interested in Roman history, and I would love to read what his caustic pen had to say about Cato the Younger, a true villain of Roman history who is unfortunately much revered down to the present. But alas, we will probably never get that chance. Unlike works of outdated astronomy or unscientific medical treatises, the anti-Cato could actually change the world because we are still haunted by Cato's ghost. A cult has sprung up around one of the least sympathetic Romans that ever existed, and his name is spoken of in reverential terms wherever the wealthy bemoan democracy, equality, and basic human decency. The modern idea of Cato as a principled politician who is dedicated to freedom and liberty bears little resemblance to the truth and has largely been shaped by those who agree with his pro-oligarchic vision of a society where the rich and powerful govern with little input, much less accountability, to the masses. But fortunately, we don't need Caesar's anti-Cato to demystify this enemy of the people and paint him as he truly was. There is an abundance of surviving evidence that highlights how his venal cruelty and petty approach to politics ultimately led to the collapse of the very Senate he claimed he was trying to save. Few men had a greater hand in the fall of the Republic and creation of the Principate regime than this supposed man of principle. For Cato was no principled actor concerned with enlightened notions such as liberty and freedom. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. But before we begin, an important note on definitions. Cato's modern acolytes praise his commitment to the Roman Respublica, typically rendered in English as the Republic. But this is a misnomer as today Republic denotes a state where all citizens have a hand in electing representatives and all in the society can truly be said to belong to the Republic in which they are citizens. In contrast, Cato was never an advocate for anything resembling this. He was instead a consistent voice in favor of greater power and influence for the Roman Senate. His defenders rely on our familiarity with senates of many modern republics to conflate the Roman Senate with the Republic itself. This is highly anachronistic as the Senate was just one component of the Republic and more power for this body necessarily meant that other branches of the Roman state would be weakened. It is also crucial to remember that when discussed in the abstract, the Senate should never be intrinsically viewed as having the best interests of the Roman people at its heart. Often the Senate's priorities were diametrically opposed to the larger mass of Romans and skewed towards the wealthy aristocrats that composed it. With this in mind, it is easy to see how Cato's preference for a strong Senate was not arrived at from a principled analysis of Roman law and precedent, but rather a purely material one. Cato was a wealthy aristocrat and he wanted to become an even wealthier aristocrat. He knew the chances of this became exponentially more likely with each lever of power that the Roman oligarchs controlled and so he worked to heighten the control that this class exercised on every facet of Roman life. Cato is today revered as a champion of tradition, law, and liberty, but as we will discuss later, he was willing to contravene all of these and even the Senate itself if it meant more power for him and the small clique of oligarchs that he represented. There was no great principle or intellect at work here, just another greedy Roman willing to undermine the Republic to line his own pockets. In an age of villains, Cato was their chief, and he has only avoided the judgment of history because his vision of a more unequal society remains useful to so many. One of Cato's primary tools in his war against popular sovereignty was the filibuster, a legislative tactic that involves speaking at length to prolong debate indefinitely and prevent any legislative business from occurring. Viewers in the United States will be intimately familiar with the filibuster as it remains a gigantic obstacle to our Senate passing legislation even when it has overwhelming popular backing. One must remember that the filibuster is by its very nature anti-democratic and is only employed by coalitions that know they are on the less popular side of an issue but have no problem letting a minority speak over a majority. But whereas in the United States it is a traditionally accepted tactic that the minority can use to delay legislation, in Rome there was no precedent for a single senator no matter his prestige, preventing the whole body from taking a vote. There already existed an arcane series of checks and balances that could be used to prevent legislation from passing. The tribunes of the plebs, for example, had veto power on the actions of any magistrates and could also veto senatorial resolutions. However, when it appeared that the constitutional forms would allow popular legislation to pass that he found odious, Cato thumbed his nose at the traditions and precedents of the Republic itself and invented this new form of veto, one that drastically increased his own power but detracted from other elected magistrates. It was shocking behavior at the time and speaks to the unpopularity of Cato's small reactionary clique that this tactic had to be employed at all. In 60 BCE, as the Populare faction grew in power, Cato embraced even more blatant forms of obstruction. To the point that he played a key role in making the Senate entirely ineffective as a governing force. So what were these outrageous legislative proposals that Cato found so unconscionable that he would subvert the very foundations of Republican government? It should come as no surprise that they were all not just moderate and well-reasoned but necessary for the continued functioning of Roman society. Though the legislation of Crassus, Pompey and Caesar is often derided as radical, in reality it was anything but. Though the proposals had the overwhelming support of the Roman masses, they were also evidently popular enough with the majority of the aristocrats that made up the Roman Senate that Cato felt the need to rely on unprecedented obstruction to oppose them as he was never able to build a viable coalition. We will look at each of these pieces of legislation in turn, starting with Cato's efforts to oppose relief for publicani tax farmers operating in Asia Minor who were unable to collect the amount that they owed to the Roman treasury as the region had been devastated by war and picked clean by looting Roman troops during their peacekeeping missions to restore order. Though it is hard to sympathize with these exploitative equestrians who were in reality primarily upset that it was generals like Sulla and not they themselves that were able to pick the provinces clean, the tax farmers did perform a vital role for the Roman Republic as it had no other mechanism for raising funds from its provinces. As such, the tax collectors lobbied for new contracts and with Crassus, perhaps the richest man in Rome, as their advocate, relief seemed a foregone conclusion and the Senate appeared poised to grant this reasonable request. But despite the consensus, Cato refused to allow for renegotiation of the contracts and led a campaign which obstructed all senatorial business for six months so as to prevent the relief bill from passing. Though he claimed his opposition was based on the principle that a contract must always be honored, it is much more likely that he was motivated by a selfish desire to prevent Crassus from securing a significant legislative victory and increasing his own prestige in Rome. It's telling that among the ten tribunes of the plebs, Cato could not convince a single one to veto the proposal. His radical obstruction is a sign not of principle but of extremism and his own isolation from mainstream opinion, even among aristocrats. However, after months of stalling, Crassus withdrew the bill and Cato claimed victory. In reality, though, all he had done was endanger the finances of the Republic by making tax farming a more risky venture and one that fewer would be willing to participate in. Cato also convinced Crassus and men like him that a Senate designed to rule a small city-state was not suited for the governance of an intercontinental empire. Because the publicani still required relief, Crassus would start seeking out new allies and considering new tactics to circumvent a paralyzed Senate. But without the benefit of hindsight, Cato and the small reactionary clique to which he belonged felt that the defeat of Crassus and his large political coalition validated their obstructionist tactics. Now emboldened, he would deploy the filibuster again against an even more popular proposal, the ratification of Pompey's diplomatic settlements in the East Without even pretending to stand on a high-minded pretext, Cato used the filibuster to prevent the veterans who had risked life and limb on behalf of the Republic from receiving the land which was promised to them at the beginning of their enlistment with Pompey. Men who had bled for Rome and added vast swaths of territory to the Republic's domains were denied the meager farms they were promised simply because Cato was hesitant to see Pompey gain the prestige that would accrue to him through the ratification of the law. Despite one man, the incredibly wealthy Cato was willing to let thousands of impoverished legionary veterans languish indefinitely. This is hardly the behavior of a principled statesman. Cato had again showed himself as a venal and cruel ideologue willing to undercut the Republic itself if it served his own narrow interests. The man who had declared that contracts were sacrosanct while opposing tax relief now led efforts to deny Roman soldiers what they had been promised. Cato's success over Pompey here also proved to have consequences far beyond what his simple mind could grasp. For what young man would now enlist if there was no guarantee that the terms of his service would be honored? Furthermore, what legionary would now look to the Senate to secure his future when it potentially stood in the way of promises made by his commander? Thanks to Cato, the shifting loyalty of the legionary from the Senate to the generals only accelerated. Like Crassus before him, Pompey was left searching for political allies that could outmaneuver Cato and break the deadlock to deliver on legislation that each was just as committed to passing as Cato was to obstructing. Though Pompey and Crassus had been staunch foes their desperate need to carry their signature bills would present a rising politician named Julius Caesar with the opening he needed to reconcile the two most influential men in Rome and form a powerful alliance which is today known as the First Triumvirate. Caesar and Cato had been enemies for years and unlike the personal vendettas that fueled Cato's opposition to Pompey and Crassus his bad blood with Caesar was motivated by something entirely different actual political ideology and competing visions for the future of Rome as well as the degree to which its citizens should be involved in participating in that future. Cato's latest provocation of Caesar was his use of the filibuster to deny passage of a dispensation that would have allowed Caesar to stand for the consulship without entering the city to formally declare his candidacy as doing so meant giving up his active military command and therefore right to a triumph which he had earned for successful military campaigns in Spain. The triumph was the culmination of a Roman officer's military career and brought great honor to the commander and his family for generations. For no reason but petty hatred Cato countered the will of the Senate and forced Caesar to choose between the honor of a triumph and the consulship. The pragmatic Caesar chose real political power over the symbolic prestige of the triumph and he would prove a deft political operator during his year in office securing passage of Pompey's legionary land grants and Crassus's tax relief by taking the proposals directly to the popular assembly and circumventing the Senate entirely when Cato's obstruction prevented the body from voting on the bills. Unorthodox as this approach was Caesar's reliance on the popular assemblies to pass these laws was entirely constitutional and though a popular theory it is a willful misinterpretation of the facts to claim that he acted in an authoritarian manner as consul. Yes, taking proposals to the assembly without senatorial approval ran counter to norms and precedents that were typically respected by Roman magistrates but there was no legal obligation to receive the Senate's approval. What's more, the Senate never voted against his proposals rather, it never voted at all thanks to the obstruction of Cato's faction. Cato was the first to breach precedent and Caesar simply outmaneuvered him by refusing to fight on terms that favored Cato. For this reason, and this reason alone, he is vilified when in reality, Cato deserves the lion's share of the blame. Cato had sought to empower the Senate with his obstruction as he believed this was the arm of the Roman state that was best equipped to protect his oligarchic interests. He may have believed that no legislation was better than legislation that benefited his foes but by making the Senate unworkable all he did was guarantee that Roman politicians would increasingly circumvent it in the crafting and execution of policy. The neutered, powerless Senate of the Empire is Cato's lasting legacy and during the Principate, few Romans mourned the decline of a body that they saw as completely ineffective in solving the real problems they dealt with on a daily basis. The man who sought to elevate the Senate in reality only accelerated its decline and he would even play a critical role in fomenting the civil war that would kill it. Though different in many respects, the United States Senate today operates with the filibuster as one of its core features albeit one that is not enshrined in the Constitution. But gone are the days when a senator needed to hold the floor as Cato did and speak at length to obstruct legislation. Now, it is much easier to obstruct as all that need be done is register the intent to filibuster. The ease with which a filibuster may be conducted means that there is effectively a permanent 60-vote threshold in the Senate for any legislation instead of the 51 that should be required under the Constitution. In our increasingly divided political landscape achieving alignment by 60 of the 100 senators is nearly impossible. Especially considering the arcane system of equal state representation that can allow for senators representing just 20% of the population to stymie those representing the other 80%. As a result, America's Senate and therefore its entire legislative branch is increasingly unable to pass any landmark laws that significantly alter the status quo. Surprisingly, this is viewed as a virtue by some. Often those that revere Cato himself because they believe that a powerless legislative branch prevents governmental overreach. But like Cato, those holding to this opinion are operating under a delusion. Cicero said of Cato that he gives his opinion as if he were in Plato's Republic not in Romulus's cesspool. Like Cato, these modern proponents of the filibuster seem unaware that state power is a thing unto itself and that it will perform the functions necessary to its survival with or without popular feedback. One must only look at the accelerating power of the executive branch to conduct war with little congressional oversight or the significant expansion of the judicial branch's willingness to reshape law to understand that if the legislative bodies will not act then that power will flow through other, less accountable channels. I do not mean to imply that America is on the verge of a Caesar but rather that those who idolize Cato and those who despise him can only learn from him and use his example to shape modern politics if we truly understand him as the failure that he was and treat his selfish obstruction as a cautionary tale. Cato's Republic is dead but ours can still be preserved by looking at what Cato did and always doing the opposite.