What Cato Did Cannot Be Wrong: The Splendid Vices of Addison’s Cato

Abstract

In 1737, Eustace Budgell reportedly left a suicide note reading, “What Cato did and Addison approv’d cannot be wrong.” The note referred to his cousin Joseph Addison’s popular play Cato, which dramatized the Roman hero’s last stand against Caesar and his eventual suicide. Budgell’s suicide draws attention to a problem in the play, since the suicide of the play’s hero is in tension both with Addison’s Christian commitment to moral reform and the praise the play received from the Anglican clergy. By foregrounding the neglected homiletic context for Addison’s play and Cato’s suicide, this essay attempts to reconcile contemporary scholarship’s conflicting interpretations of Cato as a moral tragedy, in which the relationship between Addison’s Christianity and Cato’s Stoicism remains disputed and imprecise. In dramatizing Cato’s suicide, Addison was engaging in a current religious debate about the Christian status of ancient virtue. This problem dates back to Augustine’s theory of the “splendid vices,” and it became newly important during the eighteenth century. In the play, Addison sides with latitudinarian theologians who speculated it was possible for “virtuous pagans” such as Cato and Socrates to be saved, and he carefully orchestrates the suicide scene to allow for the possibility that God could “infuse faith” into the non-Christian Cato “after an extraordinary manner,” while also not condoning his suicide. However, Budgell’s suicide and the mixed reception of the play suggest just how treacherous the latitudinarian stance on ancient virtue could be for an eighteenth-century Christian audience.