well suited to associate with the senate oligarchy because his "dignified outward appearance, his solemn formality, his personal bravery, his decorous private life, his want of all initiative" and his "mediocrity, so characteristic of the genuine Optimate". An "affinity" existed, "subsisted at all times between Pompeius, [the] burgesses and the senate." Pompeius, however, refused to fit in. "[S]eized with giddiness on the height of glory which he had climbed with dangerous rapidity and ease", he began to compare himself to Alexander the Great, and far above any senator. "His political position was utterly perverse." He was conflicted; "deeply indignant when persons and laws did not bend unconditionally before him" he nonetheless "trembled at the mere thought of doing anything unconstitutional." His "much agitated life passed joylessly away in a perpetual inward contradiction." Pompey for Mommsen was the "most tiresome and most starched of all artificial great men." He died before his wife and son, when one of his old soldiers stabbed him from behind as he stepped ashore in Egypt. "Of all pitiful parts there is none more pitiful than that of passing for more than one really is." Cato Uticensis (95–46). His mother's brother was the reformer Livius Drusus. His father's grandfather was the famous censor, Cato the Elder (234–149). Here, Cato (also called 'the Younger') was a rare man among the aristocracy, "a man of the best intentions and of rare devotedness", yet Quixotic and cheerless. Although honourable, steadfast, earnest, and strongly attached "to country and to its hereditary constitution" he possessed little practical understanding. Cato, "dull in intellect and sensuously as well as morally destitute of passion", might have made "a tolerable state accountant." Walking "in the sinful capital as a model citizen and mirror of virtue" he would 'scold' those out of line. His ancestor Cato the Elder worked as a farmer, his anger had made him an orator; wielder of plough and sword, in politics "his narrow, but original and sound common sense ordinarily hit the nail on the head." The younger Cato, however, inspired by the example of his great-grandfather, made a "strange caricature" of him. Formal and philosophical, a follower of the Stoa, the younger Cato would speak in "scholastic wisdom" and appeared as "this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals." Yet like his ancestor, he began "to travel on foot instead of riding, to take no interest, to decline badges of