April, 46 BC. Utica, on the African coast. The war is over. Caesar has won at Thapsus. In a house at night a man reads Plato’s Phaedo, checks that the sword is where he left it, and discovers that principle is harder to finish than it looks.
He is the great-grandson of the Censor, the uncle of Brutus, a Stoic who treated the treasury like a moral test and the Senate like a place where compromise was a kind of dirt. He is not a plaster saint. He is stubborn, performative, sometimes the only adult in the room, and sometimes the man who makes a coalition impossible.
The film follows the Catilinarian debate of 63, the obstruction of Caesar in 59, the Cyprus mission that got him out of town, the civil war he wanted to fight, Pharsalus, Africa, and the second attempt at Utica. Caesar writes him short. Lucan and later republicans write him huge. The American Cato is a costume the film names and then puts back.
Utica is the point. By then the Republic exists only in one man’s refusal. That is not nothing. It is also not a constitution.
Chapters
The spine of the film
- 00The night at Utica
- 01The Censor’s shadow
- 02The Catilinarian vote
- 03Against Caesar
- 04Cyprus
- 05Civil war
- 06Africa
- 07The Phaedo
- 08What Caesar writes
- 09Liberty as a later language
Further reading
Start here
- Plutarch, Life of Cato Minor
- Sallust, Catiline; Cicero’s letters; Caesar, Civil War
- Alexei Zadorojnyi; modern essays on Cato and Stoic politics
Stills
From the production package
Maps
Atlas plates
Schematic maps drawn for the documentary. Political fills and routes are interpretive.
