As Caesar and the Triumvirate tried to corrupt and change Rome’s Republic to accommodate their needs, it was Cato who stood strong against them. Almost entirely alone, Cato resisted, filibustering to block their laws. They offered him both the carrot and the stick, and he rejected both, insisting upon living by the mos maiorum—the ways. The ways of his ancestors.
It was a noble fight. One not dissimilar from the noble fights taken up before and since by patriots and pastors alike, who sought to protect society’s core values from a cascade of decadence. You could argue that this is the core fight of Stoic philosophy. It was the battle waged by Thrasea and Musonius against Nero, of Marcus against the decline and fall in his times.
And yet it’s important that we don’t overstate its importance or allow it to lead us astray. It’s ironic, for instance, that just as Cato fought for the mos maiorum, it was his own great-grandfather, Cato the Elder, who tried to have the early Stoic philosophers thrown out of Rome two generations before for corrupting those same old ways. Cato looks admirable fighting to resist the tyranny of Caesar, yet it’s also undeniable that the liberty he was trying to protect consisted of even worse tyranny over Rome’s slaves.
We must be careful, as we pursue this philosophy, not to become reactionary conservatives or to accept, without question, the status quo. The Founding Fathers didn’t—compared to the Royalists in colonial America, it was the Stoic-inspired George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were overturning centuries of the “old way.” Later, it would be a stain on the Percy family—those great Southern Stoics—that they could not question the racist structures and beliefs of their long regional traditions. There’s no question that in the future, we will find ourselves looking back at our own recent past this way and that those future generations will be appalled at some of the institutions and practices we tolerated.
Are there things worth protecting? Absolutely. But we should be sure that we are protecting virtues—Justice. Courage. Wisdom. Temperance—and not simply precedent and familiarity and the institutions that are built on them. The old way is not always better. The way we’ve long done things is not always right. We must be willing to change. We must be willing to probe and evaluate.
We must do the right thing, as Marcus Aurelius said, the rest doesn’t matter.
P.S. This was originally sent on July 1, 2021. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.
