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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.5
EAN num: 9780887342936
ISBN number: 0887342930
Label: Players Pr
Manufacturer: Players Pr
Page Count: 57
Printing Date: 1996-08
Publishing house: Players Pr
Age index: Young Adult
Sale Popularity Level: 315836
Studio: Players Pr
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Rated by buyers -
Joseph Addison's (1672-1719) Play "Cato: A Tragedy", very first staged in 1713, inspired many enlightened thinkers in the 18th century with its portrayal of the Roman senator Cato the Younger's (95-46 B.C.E.) willingness to commit suicide rather than to live under the tyrannical rule of Julius Caesar. The play takes place during Cato's final hours of resistance to Caesar. George Washington remarked it was his favorite play and had it performed for his men in Valley Forge during the revolution. Washington found in the play a powerful statement on patriotism, liberty, virtue and honor. He quoted from it extensively in his writings. The most famous use of the play was when he met with disgruntled officers in Newburgh, New York right after the war. They had met to contemplate taking over the government by force because the Continental Congress hadn't paid them. Washington got their attention by taking out a pair of glasses to read a letter he had recently sent to congress. As he donned the glasses he quoted a line from the play, "I fear I have grown old in the service of my country." After this remark it is reported that there wasn't a dry eye in the room and after he read the letter the officers dispersed. Nathan Hale echoed another line from the play, right before he was to be hanged by the British as a spy; "I regret, but that I have only one life to give to my country."
In addition, Addison has a great reputation as an essayist admired by none other than Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Franklin. Tories and Whigs in the English Parliament admired him. Joseph Addison studied in Oxford in Latin and Greek Classics. He served as a member of parliament, and became widely known as an essayist, playwright, poet and statesman.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in political philosophy, and history of the founding era of the United States.
Rated by buyers -
I've long been of a mind that the most interesting question in regard to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is the one they never asked us in class : was it
right to kill him? As always in Shakespeare, it's possible to read the play in several ways, but the final verdict seems to be that the assassins were
not justified, not least because in replacing one tyranny they unleashed a worse. This message--the wisdom of erring on the side of
stability--would have been particularly resonant in Shakespeare's own day, when religious conflicts, foreign invasion, and wars of dynastic
succession were still recent memories and/or active concerns. Brutus, then, though in some ways a tragic hero, is ultimately too passive a character
to really command our loyalty and affection. And if Caesar and Marc Anthony don't fare much better, we are left to conclude that things would
have been better had the established order, even an imperfect order, been allowed to endure.
Spring ahead just a few decades from Shakespeare's time though, and the moral of the story becomes problematic. By the middle of the 17th
Century, we are entered upon the Age of Revolutions in the English-Speaking World, and intellectual justification must be found for the series of
events that would see Protestants and Parliaments and Colonists overthrow and even execute their kings. Little wonder then that Joseph Addison's
terrific, but largely forgotten, play Cato was such a favorite of the 18th Century and particularly of the Founding Fathers.
It too tells the story of a tragic hero's resistance to Caesar, but has none of the ambiguity of Shakespeare. Marcus Porcius Cato--variously styled
Cato of Utica or Cato the Younger--was a Stoic, renowned for his incorruptibility and his intractable devotion to republican principals, the very
principals that Caesar trampled upon when he set himself up as a dictator. Having long opposed Caesar's ambitions, and having alienated many by
his inflexibility, Cato was essentially exiled from Rome, along with Pompey. After Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus, Cato went to Africa where he
was allied with Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio. After Caesar defeated Scipio at Thapsus, Cato killed himself, rather than submit to the
man he abhorred.
Where Shakespeare gave us a Brutus who was too ambivalent about his own actions and too much affected by events for us to take him to heart as
a hero, Joseph Addison rendered his Cato as an achingly noble and uncompromising character, one who may not appeal to modern tastes (of
course, we're all moderate in all things now, and a fanaticism, even for freedom, is distasteful in polite society), but who was seized upon as a
paragon of unyielding republican virtue by men like George Washington. In fact, when we consider the nobility of Washington's own action (for
example during the Newburgh conspiracy) and the emphasis he placed on preserving his own honor, it seems fair to speculate that the republic we
have inherited was handed down to us in some measure by Cato and Addison.
The play is filled with quotable lines, like :
A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.
In one passage we hear the foreshadowing of Nathan Hale :
What a pity is it
That we can die but once to save our country!
When Cato determines to kill himself he says :
Justice gives way to force: the conquered world
Is Caesar's: Cato has no business in it.
And Lucius, a Senate colleague pronounces upon Cato's death :
From hence, let fierce contending nations know
What dire effects from civil discord flow.
'Tis this that shakes our country with alarms,
And gives up Rome a prey to Roman arms,
Produces fraud, and cruelty, and strife,
And robs the guilty world of Cato's life.
Sure, it's old-fashioned, both in sentiment and language; how many statesmen still believe in honor at all, let alone in dying to preserve their own.
But it's immensely enjoyable and worth knowing if for no other reason than to understand one of the cultural influences that shaped Washington.
If we wish to comprehend how he, unlike so many other men in similar position, was able to resist the temptations of power and to instead remain
the guarantor of the republic, perhaps it is necessary for us to know Cato.
GRADE : A+
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