Hello and welcome to this episode of Epoch's where I should be continuing my narrative of the declining fall of the Roman Republic and finishing the mini series the three part series on the life of Cato the Younger.

So if you remember last time I left off just about is on the life of Cato the Younger.

So if you remember last time I left off just about when Caesar had crossed the

Rubycon and marched on Rome and Pompey and Cato and Cicero and a lot of the leading optimates of Rome had fled before Caesar's

Legion and so I'll pick up the story there.

Now what it seems like is that Cato was very much a patriot,

you know that's a bit of a modern word,

but he was more of a patriot than he was a partisan. In other words, when it came to the crunch, the actual

final moments, the final political movements and machinations, he decided it would be

best to let Pompey be the first most eminent man in Rome rather than have anarchy.

He also thought, right in the last moments, that it would be best to let Caesar be the undisputed man in Rome

rather than a civil war. It seems that Cato's view was that a civil war, Romans killing other Romans, would be worse than actually giving in to

Caesar.

That even it would be best to be a slave than to allow a civil war to happen.

That's how much he loved the republic or valued Roman lives.

And so when the war did finally break out incidentally Cato himself was absolutely shocked

all the accounts agree that Cato was shocked that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and

actually pulled a sulla. He had always thought that Caesar wouldn't actually do it.

He always thought that he could play the brinkmanship game with Caesar,

because in the final reckoning

Caesar wouldn't do that but he did and that's despite Cato being one of the

leading voices that always said that Caesar would do something like that,

...