he did not scruple to support the unjust measures of the nobles against
Caesar. At the outset of the war he was entrusted with the defence of
Sicily, but finding it impossible to resist the superior forces of C.
Scribonius Curio, who had landed on the island, he joined Pompey at
Dyrrhachium. When his chief followed Caesar to Thessaly he was left
behind in charge of the camp, and thus was not present at the battle of
Pharsalus. After the battle, when Pompey abandoned his party, he
separated himself from the main body of the republicans, and conducted a
small remnant of their forces into Africa. After his famous march
through the Libyan deserts, he shut himself up in Utica, and even after
the decisive defeat at Thapsus (46), in spite of the wishes of his
followers, he determined to keep the gates closed till he had sent off
his adherents by sea. While the embarkation was in progress he continued
calm and dignified; when the last of the transports had left the port he
cheerfully dismissed his attendants, and soon afterwards stabbed
himself.

He had been reading, we are told, in his last moments Plato's dialogue
on the immortality of the soul, but his own philosophy had taught him to
act upon a narrow sense of immediate duty without regard to the future.
He conceived that he was placed in the world to play an active part, and
when disabled from carrying out his principles, to retire gravely from
it. He had lived for the free state, and it now seemed his duty to
perish with it. In politics he was a typical doctrinaire, abhorring
compromise and obstinately blind to the fact that his national ideal was
a hopeless anachronism. From the circumstances of his life and of his
death, he has come to be regarded as one of the most distinguished of
Roman philosophers, but he composed no works, and bequeathed to
posterity no other instruction than that of his example. The only
composition by him which we possess is a letter to Cicero (_Ad Fam._ xv.
5), a polite refusal of the orator's request that he would endeavour to
procure him the honour of a triumph. The school of the Stoics, which
took a leading part in the history of Rome under the earlier emperors,
looked to him as its saint and patron. It continued to wage war against
the empire, hardly less openly than Cato himself had done, for two
centuries, till at last it became actually seated on the imperial throne
in the person of Marcus Aurelius. Immediately after his death Cato's
ch