Hello and

welcome to this episode of Epoch's where I shall be continuing my narrative of the career

and achievements or failures of Cato the Younger and of course the grandest

story of the decline of fall of the Roman Republic.

I think what I'm going to have to do is make Cato a three-parter, if Kras has got three parts,

I feel like Cato really should. So what I'll do is in this episode take us through a lot of Cato's political

career in Rome all the way up to the actual breakout of hostilities of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar and maybe a few details at the very beginning of that war and then leave it there this time and then in the third episode go into all sorts of detail all about Cato's involvement in the Civil War.

Okay, so let's jump in.

So a little bit of a recap if anyone's forgotten or haven't watched the first episode

yet, just to remind everyone that the headline about Cato's

career is that he's extremely unbending in his principles to the point where he will

damage himself or his own career, sometimes the career of his friends and

family and even damage Rome itself rather than compromise on things.

And politics is the art of compromise in all sorts of ways.

If you're too unyielding in politics, it will at some point damage you.

One example springs to mind is the Duke of Wellington, the victor of

vermiro and Waterloo after he'd beaten Napoleon and become world famous really he was

prime minister but not for very long about two years for recall rightly, and in the end he was ousted from power,

his own party sort of cooed him because he wouldn't bend on certain things.

There's a few certain political ideas and principles he had and he would just refuse to countenance anything else.

He just refused point blank and so in the end it meant the collapse of his government and the end of his political career,

but the end of his time as Prime Minister.

...