I was explaining democratic participation to my students when I felt the familiar unease return. We were doing everything correctly, we were defining terms, tracing institutions, rehearsing rights, yet something essential felt absent. The language of democracy I was offering them felt expansive but thin, confident but unburdened. It occurred to me, again, that while we teach government through Athens, the generation that founded the United States imagined its future through Rome. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, that distinction feels less academic and more diagnostic.
Rome was never attractive to the founders because it was glorious. It was attractive because it failed. Greek philosophy offered ideals of reason, discourse, and participation; Rome offered a long, unsparing education in power, corruption, restraint, and decline. The founders did not read Roman history to admire it. They read it to understand what happens when virtue erodes more slowly than institutions. Rome was not an origin myth. It was a warning.
That warning reached them less through abstract theory than through lives. Parallel Lives shaped generations of readers by insisting that political outcomes are inseparable from moral character. Plutarch’s method is quietly severe. He does not ask which system is most just in theory, but which kind of person power requires in practice. “The most noble deeds,” he observes, “do not always bring the most brilliant fame.” History, in his hands, becomes a record of character under pressure rather than success rewarded.
Within this moral framework, Cato the Younger stands as a limit case. Paired with Phocion, Cato is not offered as effective, adaptable, or victorious. He is incorruptible and therefore increasingly isolated. Both men resist popularity, distrust the crowd, and refuse expedient compromise. Both are destroyed not by vice but by fidelity to principle in political cultures that have moved beyond them. Athens executes Phocion. Rome survives Cato, but only as empire. Plutarch’s judgment is implicit and devastating: virtue may survive corruption, but it rarely survives once moral consensus dissolves.
Cato’s importance lies not in triumph, but in refusal. When Caesar prevails and the republic collapses into autocracy, Cato chooses death rather than accommodation. Plutarch records his reasoning without sentimentality: Cato believed it “unworthy to live by the favor of a tyrant.” Liberty, in this Roman-Stoic imagination, is not primarily participation or voice. It is moral sovereignty. It is the refusal to live incoherently. When political liberty collapses, moral liberty becomes the final jurisdiction of the self.
This austere vision haunted the revolutionary generation and found its historical counterpart in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in the same year as American independence. Gibbon’s Rome does not fall in spectacle or catastrophe. It erodes. “The decline of Rome,” he writes, “was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” Institutions persist long after seriousness thins. Civic life becomes administrative. Liberty survives as memory rather than practice. The founders read Gibbon not as prophecy, but as diagnosis and resolved to design a republic that would never require heroic virtue simply to endure.
It is precisely this tension that gives The Death of Cato the Younger (of Utica) its quiet, devastating power. Laurens does not paint resistance in action; he paints what follows its failure. The composition is enclosed and compressed. The architecture offers no civic grandeur, no public horizon. Cato lies horizontally, drained of vitality, his body already yielding to gravity. The few witnesses are pushed to the margins, unable to enter the moral space he occupies. There are no standards, no symbols of the republic, no validating crowd. The state has vanished. What remains is a single human being and the coherence he refuses to surrender.
What I most appreciate in this work is that Cato is alone.
Not theatrically abandoned, not dramatically martyred, but simply solitary. Laurens strips Roman virtue of its last consolation: recognition. At the end of republican life, virtue no longer gathers others; it isolates. Cato’s final act is not performed for Rome or even against Caesar. It is performed in the absence of any shared moral language that could still make sense of it. Liberty collapses inward. It survives only as fidelity to the self.
That Laurens painted this scene in 1863, amid the American Civil War, deepens its resonance. Like Plutarch, Laurens is drawn to moments when political structures fracture and conscience becomes private rather than communal. His Cato is not a model to emulate but a warning made visible. He represents the moment when institutions can no longer carry ethical weight and moral seriousness is borne alone.
This is an uncomfortable inheritance for a modern democratic age. We have turned, understandably, toward Athens. We emphasize participation, inclusion, voice, and adaptability. We distrust moral absolutism and recoil from civic virtue that demands sacrifice. Rights are foregrounded; obligations are negotiated. Much of this reflects genuine moral progress. Yet it also raises the question the founders would have recognized immediately: can a republic endure when liberty is understood only as expression, and not as restraint?
Rome, Gibbon reminds us, did not fall because its citizens loved freedom too little, but because they no longer agreed on what freedom required. Liberty became detached from obligation. Power outpaced character. Institutions endured longer than meaning.
Which brings us, uncomfortably, to the present. Two hundred and fifty years after independence, it is tempting to ask whether we are living through our own decline and fall. But that question risks melodrama. Rome did not know it was Rome until after. Decline rarely announces itself as crisis; it appears as normalization. The more honest inquiry is formative rather than prophetic: are we still cultivating citizens capable of restraint, responsibility, and moral seriousness? Do we share a civic language that makes sacrifice intelligible, or has conscience itself become isolating?
Cato should not be revived as a model. A republic that requires Catos to function has already failed. But his solitude remains instructive. It marks the point at which shared civic meaning thins so completely that principle can no longer be spoken in common. Cato is alone because the language he inhabits no longer has an audience.
At 250, the question is not whether we are Rome. It is whether we still understand why Rome frightened those who founded us. They turned to Rome not because they despised democracy, but because they feared what democracy might become without moral seriousness. We turn to Athens because we fear exclusion and rigidity more than decay. Both fears are justified. The tension between them is permanent.
As a teacher, standing between these inheritances, I find no comfort in prediction. What remains is responsibility. To teach government is not merely to explain how democracy works, but to ask how republics fail when character is outsourced to procedure. Rome still matters because it refuses reassurance. It reminds us that the end of civic life is not always collapse, but solitude and that a republic worthy of endurance should never require its citizens to stand alone in order to remain free, even as it quietly depends on the possibility that someone still would.