What it is
The Life of Cato the Younger is Plutarch's biography of Marcus Porcius Cato (95–46 BCE), the Stoic senator who became the moral conscience of the dying Roman Republic and chose suicide at Utica rather than live under Caesar's victory. Plutarch pairs him with the Athenian Phocion, another incorruptible statesman destroyed by his age. The platform reads the Life as its central study of integrity as virtue and as liability — the noblest of characters in a constitution it could not save.
Its purpose and method
Plutarch's Cato is the very type of the unbending man. From boyhood, in Plutarch's telling, his nature was rigid, earnest, immovable; as a man he made his incorruptibility a public fact, refusing the bribery, flattery and compromise that were the currency of late-Republican politics. The platform reads the Life under virtue in public life: Plutarch presents Cato's integrity as wholly genuine and wholly admirable, and at the same time shows, with real subtlety, how an inflexibility that would not bend even where bending might have served the Republic became, in practice, part of the tragedy.
What it argues about Cato and the Republic
Cato's life is, in Plutarch, the Republic's conscience in its last act. He opposed the ambitions of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus alike; he defended the old constitution past the point of its survivability; and when Caesar won, he refused to accept the clemency that would have made him a living proof of the dictator's mercy, and killed himself rather than acknowledge the new order. The platform reads this under character and power and decline: Cato's death made him, for the whole imperial tradition, the eternal symbol of republican liberty — admired by men who would never have wanted him to win. His Stoic constancy is read more fully in the platform's Cato figure entry.
Influence and citation
The Life of Cato shaped the European image of the principled republican martyr — from Lucan's Pharsalia through Addison's eighteenth-century tragedy Cato, which the American founders revered. The platform reads it with the standard discipline and develops the interpretation in the decline of republics through character, where Cato's rigidity is read as one of the ways virtue, untempered by judgement, fails to save a free state.