Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays, edited by Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004. xxviii + 282 pp.

Joseph Addison’s Cato: A Tragedy (1713) captured the imagination of Revolutionary Whigs in colonial North America in much the way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) would shape the understanding of a later generation of Yankees. In addition, the style Addison honed in scores of topical newspaper essays had an enormous influence on the writing of his Anglophone contemporaries. Too, it was in those essays that Addison developed some of the themes that would provide the scaffolding of his great tragedy of Caesar’s noble enemy. Thus, Liberty Fund’s new, characteristically affordable and finely wrought edition of the play and the related essays is most welcome.

In Joseph Addison’s day—the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—the Protestant Succession to the throne of the United Kingdom remained disputed. Twice in the first half of the eighteenth century, Catholics would attempt to restore the old Stuart dynasty, and state-supported Catholicism in place of Protestantism along with it. As the essays included in this collection make clear, part of the allure of Cato of Utica for Addison was that the lessons of the great Roman’s life could be applied to Addison’s own day; if a good constitution was at risk, a worthy citizen must defend it. The pro-Stuart uprisings of the eighteenth century, then, echoed Caesar’s quest to overthrow Rome’s ancient republic.

The didactic purpose of Addison’s Cato is made clear by Alexander Pope’s prologue to the play. Here, avers the Augustan age’s leading poet, is a portrait of man as “Plato thought, and godlike Cato was.” Addison intends to move his audience with no saccharine love story, but:

Here tears shall flow from a more generous cause,
Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws.

In the dying throes of Roman glory, Addison promises, Britons will witness

A brave man struggling in the storms of fate, And greatly falling with a falling state!

The play is set on the very precipice of Cato’s decision for suicide. Caesar, victorious over Pompey the Great’s republican forces and ascendant over all the Mediterranean world, approaches the forlorn republican outpost of Utica. The subplot of the play concerns Cato’s sons’ love for a republican senator’s daughter; one son laments that he should have fallen in love at such a time, while the other, with whom the girl is secretly smitten, commiserates with him. Meanwhile, Cato’s girl is also the object of unrequited love—this time from Juba, the prince of Numidia, Cato’s lone surviving ally. Through the play wind the stories of these loves, both destined to go unfulfilled because of the great republican steadfastness of the enamored characters.

The tale of Juba affords Addison the opportunity to characterize Cato as the most Roman of Romans. Son of a prince instructed in nobility by Cato’s example, Juba has been left in Cato’s charge. Although his chief advisor highlights the futility of remaining with Cato to the end, and in fact flees to save his own life, Juba cleaves to Cato. Better to be that kind of a man in death, Juba insists, than to live after rejecting Cato’s shining example.

Why is it that Cato refuses to accept Caesar’s new status, certain though he is that the dictator would reward him handsomely? At one point, Cato calls upon his followers to sacrifice to liberty, which has been handed down to them by their fathers and must be left to their sons. This Roman virtue, known by the Latin noun pietas, runs through the play; Addison depicts the virtuous as possessing it and the others—whether treacherous or simply self-serving—as lacking it. It is what makes men noble in “Cato.”

In the end, Cato admits to himself that his little outpost for freedom must fall to the all-conquering Caesar, and the moment evokes some of Addison’s finest lines. As Cato says, dolefully,

’Tis Rome requires our tears,
The mistress of the world, the seat of empire,
The nurse of heroes, the delight of gods,
That humbled the proud tyrants of the earth,
And set the nations free, Rome is no more.
Oh liberty! Oh virtue! Oh my country!

Act V opens with Cato reading Plato’s Phaedo and noting the power of the philosopher’s reasoning on the immortality of souls. At the scene’s end, he dies the rather nobler-than-life death of one who has fallen on his sword. (To stage the real mode of Cato the Younger’s death in an uplifting way must have struck Addison as impossible.)

Here we have, then, the story that inspired George Washington to give his all for republicanism. Phrases familiar to Americans as borrowed and rewrought by Nathan Hale and Patrick Henry pepper the play. Its dramatic tension is acute, the interest of the characters, as well as their verisimilitude, is great, and the message the playwright hopes to convey is ever timely. There is, indeed, something greater in the world than oneself, and there are many things worse than death.

In addition to this dramatic master-work, Henderson and Yellin include in their new edition a number of Addison’s topical essays. These pieces appeared in various publications, and their forms vary from one to the next. Addison had rather a free hand in deciding which type of prose he would use, and his personality in print is most engaging. Benjamin Franklin is quoted in the foreword recommending Addison’s as the model of good English style, and while style is a matter of taste, I have to concur in Franklin’s appraisal of the essays included here.

The subjects Addison addresses in these essays all relate directly to themes of Cato: A Tragedy. Thus, for example, Addison instructed his audience during the ’15 that a good man must be willing to give his all for a happy constitution; Addison opined that the distinction between Whigs and Tories, novel at the time, threatened to divide patriotic men—thus weakening the constitution; and Addison decried the quest for fame, newly (he thought) divorced from a desire that one’s repute should be positive. A reader of this volume must come away from it rededicated to some timeless veri-ties easily overlooked.