distinction as a soldier", and like the legendary king Romulus to appear shirtless. In "an utterly wretched and cowardly age his courage and his negative virtues told powerfully with the multitude." As "the only conservative of note who possessed if not talent and insight, at any rate integrity and courage... he soon became the champion of the Optimate party." He never missed a senate meeting, and "as long as he lived he checked the details of the public budget." Yet unfortunately in politics he simply lacked common sense. Cato's tactics seemed to consist of nothing more than "setting his face against every one who deviated" from the traditional catechism of the aristocracy, which of course worked as much against the Optimates as for them. By his character and his actions this "Don Quixote of the aristocracy" proved the exhaustion of senate politics. After Caesar's victory at Thapsus ending the civil war, Cato tended to the welfare of the republican remnant at Utica, then took his own life by the sword. "Cato was anything but a great man." Yet he was the only man who "honourably and courageously championed in the last struggle the great republican system doomed to destruction." "Cato has played a greater part in history than many men far superior to him in intellect. It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death that he was himself a fool; in truth it is just because Don Quixote is a fool that he is a tragic figure." Yet Cato inspired the republican protest against Caesar's victory, which "tore asunder like gossamer all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar invested his monarchy", and exposed as hypocritical "the reconciliation of all parties" under the Empire. "The unrelenting warfare which the ghost of the legitimate republic waged for centuries" against the Empire, from Cassius and Brutus to Thrasea and Tacitus, "a warfare of plots and of literature" was Cato's legacy. Soon after his death this "republican opposition" began to "revere as a saint" Cato who in life was frequently a "laughing-stock" and a "scandal". "But the greatest of these marks of respect was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made an exception in the contemptuous clemency" he offered defeated opponents. Cato alone he pursued even beyond the grave "with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel toward antagonists opposing them from a