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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2014
Joseph Addison's 1713 play, Cato: A Tragedy, dramatizes the final days of Cato the Younger's resistance to Julius Caesar before his eventual suicide at Utica in 46 BC. Although Addison initially seems to present Cato as a model for emulation, we argue that Addison is ultimately critical of both Cato and the Stoicism he embodies. Via the play's romantic subplot and via his work as an essayist, Addison offers a revision of the Catonic model, reworking it into a gentler model that elevates qualities such as love, friendship, and sympathy and that is more appropriate to the type of peaceful civil and commercial society he wishes to promote.
1 Cited in Walker, David, “Addison's Cato and the Transformation of Republican Discourse in the Early Eighteenth Century,” British Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies 26 (2003): 105Google Scholar. Despite his own Whig affiliation, Addison maintained the play was nonpartisan, even going so far as to have the prologue written by a Tory and the epilogue by a Whig. In a reading with which we largely agree, however, Lawrence Klein casts such nonpartisanship and the related ideas of moderation and toleration/sociability as inherently Whiggish (Klein, Lawrence E., “Joseph Addison's Whiggism,” in “Cultures of Whiggism”: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Womersley, David [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005], 108–26Google Scholar, esp. 110).
2 For more complete discussions of Cato in early America, see McDonald, Forrest, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), esp. 195–99Google Scholar; Wills, Garry, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), esp. 133–38Google Scholar; Richard, Carl, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 3; Pangle, Lorraine Smith and Pangle, Thomas L., “George Washington and the Life of Honor” in The Noblest Minds: Fame, Honor, and the American Founding, ed. McNamara, Peter (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 59–71Google Scholar.
3 Cato explicitly offers himself as a model, as well (II.4). For one discussion of the eighteenth-century perspectives on Cato and Cato within a political context, see Browning, Reed, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), esp. 5–10Google Scholar; for a discussion of Addison's work—including Cato—within the political context of his time, see Walker “Transformation,” 91–108.
4 References to Cato are by act and scene. The edition used here is Addison, Joseph, Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays, ed. Henderson, Christine Dunn and Yellin, Mark E. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004)Google Scholar.
5 The romance of Cato's daughter and the Numidian prince is interesting for many reasons, including its opening themes of race and cultural identity within the play and its eighteenth-century British context. (See, for example, Ellison, Julie, “Cato's Tears,” English Literary History 63 [1996]: 571–601CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenthal, Laura J., “Cato and Enlightened Cosmopolitanism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 2 [1999]: 63–76.Google Scholar) Also worthy of mention is that the youthful George Washington identified himself with Juba.
6 Klein, “Whiggism,” offers an extensive discussion of Addison as a moralist.
7 Brown, Laura, English Dramatic Form, 1660–1760: An Essay in Dramatic History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 155Google Scholar; Kelsall, M. M., “The Meaning of Addison's Cato,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 17, no. 66 (1966): 150Google Scholar. See also Smithers, Peter, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 260–62Google Scholar, though Smithers describes Cato as the embodiment of political virtue only.
8 Pope is among those who held this view. See Smithers, Life of Joseph Addison, 262.
9 Although not penned by Addison, Garth's epilogue also focuses on the romantic subplot, concluding with the hope that “Virtue again to its bright station climb … And every Lucia find a Cato's son.” With J. M. Armistead, we suggest that “Cato has, in reality, a double plot … a politico-military plot ending in tragic death, and a socio-civil plot ending in imminent marriage” (Armistead, J. M., “Drama of Renewal: Cato and Moral Empiricism,” PLL 17, no. 3 [1981]: 277Google Scholar). We are grateful to Michelle Zerba for initially drawing our attention to the love plots, by observing that it is a very odd tragedy which ends in a double marriage.
10 Armistead, too, connects Cato with Addison's project in The Spectator, but he does not develop the substantive connections between the works (Armistead, “Drama,” 271–72).
11 Amistead, “Drama,” 271–83; Malek, James S., “The Fifth Act of Addison's Cato,” Neuphilologischer Verein 74 (1973): 515–19Google Scholar; Terry, Richard “Revolt in Utica: Reading Cato against Cato,” Philological Quarterly 85, nos. 1–2 (2006): 121–39Google Scholar, and Freeman, Lisa A., “What's Love Got to Do with Addison's Cato?,” Studies in English Literature 39, no. 3 (1999): 463–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brown's brief (3-page) discussion of Cato is interesting, for although she ascribes significance to the love plots, she does not see any undermining of Cato's stature as moral exemplar (Brown, English Drama).
12 Socrates is Seneca's other exemplar. See Seneca, Epistulae morales, letter 104. For a provocative reading of Seneca's De providentia account of Cato's death in terms of self-command and self-making, see Star, Christopher, The Empire of the Self: Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronius (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 50–52Google Scholar.
13 Cicero, Pro Murena 74; Plutarch, Life of Phocion.
14 Armistead draws attention to the fact that Cato counsels moderation to his family and friends, but takes the extreme course himself (Armistead, “Drama,” 273).
15 Or, of course, gentlewomanliness.
16 Klein, Lawrence E., “Property and politeness in the early eighteenth-century Whig moralists: The case of the Spectator,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. Brewer, John and Staves, Susan (London: Routledge, 1996), 299Google Scholar. See also Klein, Lawrence E., Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 See, for example, Portius's exhortation to Marcus to conquer his love for Lucia. “To quell the tyrant Love, and guard thy heart / … Would be a conquest worthy Cato's son” (I.1).
18 Marcia as a gendered reworking of Cato also invites discussion. Julie Ellison observes that Marcia-Cato is at once the example Juba seeks to emulate and his reward for that emulation (Ellison, Julie, Cato's Tears [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999], 60Google Scholar).
19 See Cato at IV.4: “Why mourn you thus? let not a private loss / Afflict your hearts. ‘Tis Rome requires our tears.”
20 Cf. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.35–46. Quentin Skinner discusses how the ancient connection between political virtue and military virtue was picked up again in the Renaissance (Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978], chap. 4Google Scholar).
21 Spectator 185's condemnation of religious zeal links it with pride. See Bloom, Edward D. and Bloom, Lillian D., Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal: In the Market Place, on the Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence: Brown University Press, 1971), 173Google Scholar.
22 Ellison also focuses on the Syphaxic critiques of Cato, but she reads them very differently (Ellison, “Cato's Tears,” 577–70).
23 See the speech in its entirety and a brief discussion of it, pp. 230–31, above.
24 Syphax praises the hunter's qualities, but he does not argue that natural virtue embodied by the African makes one “good, and just, and anxious for his friends,” as Juba asserts Cato's virtue has made him.
25 Terry, “Revolt,” 126. Terry observes that Addison could not “have been blind to the way that Syphax rhetorically worsts his opponent, his every rejoinder trumping a prior one by Juba” (ibid., 127).
26 See, for example, Spectator nos. 114, 125, 143, 185, 206.
27 The eight-year gap between the completion of the fourth and fifth acts as well as the fact that Addison invited a fellow contributor to The Spectator, John Hughes, to write the final act before he finally penned it himself indicate that Addison found the tragedy's ending challenging (Smithers, Life of Joseph Addison, 252).
28 Just at the moment of Cato's suicide, Portius announces that Pompey's son is offering reinforcements to Cato's forces (V.4.55). Although Addison does not suggest that Cato knew of Pompey's son's offer, the audience's awareness of it underlines that Cato chose suicide without full knowledge of his situation (Malek, “Fifth,” 517).
29 Browning details Cato's popularity in Addison's Britain (Browning, Political, 4–10).
30 In I.4, Cato advises his fellow senators not to let a “torrent of impetuous zeal” move them beyond reason's bounds, exhorting the exiled Senate to steer a middle course between rash opposition and diffidence to Caesar. Faced with compromising his own principles or reputation, he finds himself unable to follow the advice he had given, and he prefers to cling to principles at all costs.
31 Plutarch believed that Cato's inflexibility caused him to reject Pompey's repeated overtures—including Pompey's attempts to ally their families by marriage—thus alienating Pompey and driving him into an alliance with Caesar that facilitated Caesar's consolidation of power (Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, in Plutarch's Lives, ed. Clough, A. H. [Boston: Little, Brown, 1907], 4:400–401, 408–10Google Scholar). See also Goldman, Rob and Soni, Jimmy, Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012), 110–13Google Scholar.
32 Both Freeman and Terry offer similar readings of this scene, with Freeman also astutely commenting on Cato's complete unawareness that Marcus seems to have thrown himself into battle and death less out of patriotism than out of broken-heartedness at Lucia's not returning his love (Freeman, “Love,” 471; Terry, “Reading,” 133–34). Given the dramatic prominence of the Marcus-Lucia-Portius subplot, this is something that would have been abundantly clear to the play's audience, yet Cato is oblivious to his son's motives. Kelsall, however, casts this moment as “the proof of Cato's natural virtue,” with virtue understood à la Sparta, as public spiritedness (Kelsall, “Meaning,” 158). For Spartan virtue in an identical context, see Plutarch's Sayings of Spartan Women, in Moralia, vol. 3, trans. Babbitt, Frank Cole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 241aGoogle Scholar.
33 For an account of the historical Cato's marital situation, see Plutarch's Life of Cato: “And, indeed, it seems Cato had but ill-fortune in women” (Plutarch, Lives, vol. 4, trans. Dryden, rev. A. H. Clough [Boston: Little, Brown, 1859], 394Google ScholarPubMed).
34 See also Portius's characterization of love as a “tyrant” and a weakness (I.1).
35 See Cato I.6, though the suggestion seems to be that giving in to love during this critical political moment would be untimely. On the other hand, might not all political moments be critical for Cato, given the vigilance required for the maintenance of republican virtue?
36 Armistead emphasizes the centrality of sympathy to the Addisonian virtues, citing Cato's inability to sympathize as evidence that “Addison could hardly have wished us to emulate a man whose moral code allowed only the narrowest range for human sympathy” (Armistead, “Drama,” 273). Cf. Rousseau on pity's pivotal role in creating the social virtues.
37 1 Cor. 13:12. In the play, however, Portius attributes a similar understanding to Cato: “Remember what our father oft has told us: / The ways of heaven are dark and intricate, / Puzzled in mazes, and perplexed with errors: / Our understanding traces them in vain, / Lost and bewildered in the fruitless search; / Nor sees with how much art the windings run, / Nor where the regular confusion ends” (I.1). Compare with our earlier discussion of Cato's suicide and hubris (pp. 235–36, above).
38 Klein, “Property,” 229. Klein cites Spectator nos. 432, 438, and 445, of which only the final paper was penned by Addison. Curiously, he neglects Spectator 243.
39 Browning reads this through the politics of Addison's own day, describing what could be termed a “Catonic Whiggism,” in contrast with a more moderate and prudential “Ciceronian Whiggism” (Browning, Political, 18–20).
40 See p. 237, above.
41 While Spectator 397's criticism focuses on Stoicism in noting, “As the Stoick philosophers discard all Passions in general, they will not allow the Wise Man so much as to pity the Afflictions of another. … The more rigid of this Sect would not comply so far as to shew even an outward Appearance of Grief,” Addison would presumably also be critical of any doctrine or sect requiring the extreme course of complete renunciation of the passions.
42 Spectator 243.
43 In Spectator 169, Addison follows Sallust in describing Cato's character as “awful rather than amiable.” By contrast, Caesar's character is said to be “chiefly made up of Good-nature.”