Now I Am My Own Master

The story

After Thapsus in 46 BCE, the republican side in Africa was finished. Cato was at Utica. Caesar was coming. Plutarch’s account of the last night, in Perrin’s 1919 translation, is domestic and slow, which is what makes it strange.

Cato sups, walks with his friends, and embraces his son more carefully than usual. In his room he takes up Plato’s dialogue “On the Soul.” Perrin’s note names that book: the Phaedo, the same dialogue in which Socrates drinks the hemlock. Cato has read most of it when he looks up. The sword that hung above him is gone. His son had taken it during supper. He sends for it, goes back to the book, then demands it louder. He strikes a slave and hurts his own hand. When the sword finally arrives, carried by a little child, he draws it, checks the point, and says, “Now I am my own master.” Then he puts it down and reads the book again. Perrin says he read it through twice.

He sleeps so deeply that people outside the room hear him. Near dawn, after he has been told the harbor is quiet, he sends the servant out, draws the sword, and stabs himself below the breast. The hand he injured makes the thrust weak. He falls, knocks over a geometrical abacus, and the noise brings the house in. The physician pushes the bowels back and sews the wound. Cato comes to, pushes the physician away, tears the wound open with his hands, and dies.

“Now I am my own master” is the sentence when the weapon is returned, not a dying speech. Giordano’s canvas in the Hermitage shows the bed and a book, which is the object he would not put down. The detail Plutarch adds, and paintings usually leave out, is the geometrical abacus hitting the floor. That is the sound that ends the reading.