Cato's legacy

Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (95-46 BCE), sometimes referred to as Cato of Utica or Cato the Younger (to distinguish him from his great-grandfather Marcus Porcius Cato Censorius, 'Cato the Elder', (234-149 BCE)), was a committed Stoic, a staunch defender of republican ideals, and a lifelong opponent of Julius Caesar, whose ambition and unprecedented acquisition of power threatened the institutions of the Roman Republic. After Caesar's decisive victory at the battle of Thapsus in 46 BCE, Cato, then governor of the city of Utica in North Africa, chose to commit suicide rather than compromise his Stoic principles and surrender to him.

• Cato's commitment to Stoic principles and his decision to die by his own hand rather than compromise them made him a hero with later generations of Roman Stoics. He is, for example, often cited as a moral example by the Stoic philosopher, statesman and dramatist Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) (e.g., in De ira (On Anger), De constantia sapientis (On the Firmness of the Wise Man) and De providentia (On Providence)) and is included by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE) in a list of Stoic heroes and martyrs (Meditations 1.17).

In more recent centuries Cato has sometimes been accorded iconic status by defenders of republican ideals or champions of individual liberty against the power of the state.

• The final days of Cato's life were the subject of Cato, A Tragedy by Joseph Addison (1672-1719), the writer, Whig politician, and, with Richard Steele (1672-1729), co-founder of The Spectator. The play, which was written in 1712 and first performed in 1713, owed at least some of its success to the presumed political motivation of its author.

• Between 1720 and 1723 a series of letters by John Trenchard (1662-1723) and Thomas Gordon (1691-1750), were published under the pseudonym Cato in the London Journal and the British Journal. These letters, known as Cato's Letters, argued for the ideal of a society free from the excessive power of government, and were one of the influences on the leaders of the American War of Independence later in the eighteenth century.

• The Cato Institute, an American public policy research institute or 'think-tank', has taken its name from Cato's Letters. The institute, founded in Washington DC in 1977, describes itself as ‘dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace'.

The Disticha Catonis (Distichs of Cato), a collection of conventional moral wisdom, consisting of about 150 dactylic hexameter couplets (distichs) and widely used as a schoolbook in the Middle Ages, was once thought to be the work of Cato the Younger but is nowadays generally attributed to Dionysius Cato, an otherwise unknown author of the 3rd or 4th century CE.

There is no connection between the Cato Street Conspiracy and Cato the Younger - apart from the name. Cato Street (near the Edgware Road in Marylebone in London) was where the conspirators met in 1820 to plot the assassination of the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and members of his cabinet, as a first step to bringing about revolution in Britain. The conspirators, who were influenced not by Cato, but by Thomas Spence (1750-1814), an English Radical, (and hence were known as the Spencean Philanthropists), were arrested and savagely punished before they could put their plan into effect.