Note 416 — WAS THE ROMAN ARMY PROVIDED WITH MEDICAL OFFICERS?

Thus when Cato the younger, after the battle of Thapsus, committed suicide at Utica, by stabbing himself in the abdomen, his friends rushed into his room, on hearing him fall, and among them his attendant physician, Cleanthes, who replaced the uninjured bowels, and began to staunch and sew up the gash. But on recovering from his state of syncope, Cato thrust aside the surgeon, tore asunder the wound, pulled out the entrails, and speedily expired.—(See Plutarch’s Life of him, and Hirtius’ Commentar. De Bell. Africano, cap. 88.) Cicero and Seneca have written applaudingly of Cato’s suicide. Lucan invests him with all godlike virtues; and various modern writers have spoken in enthusiastic terms of his unbending moral dignity and magnanimity of character. But one anecdote, mentioned by Plutarch, seems calculated to detract not a little from our modern estimate of the mental character of this “the last and greatest of the Romans.” In stabbing himself, Cato could not, according to Plutarch, strike sufficiently hard to produce an immediately fatal wound, in consequence of inflammation in his hand, which had required to be dressed by Cleanthes; for a few hours before death, Cato,—that alleged “paragon of Roman virtue,”—had severely injured his fist by striking one of his slaves in the mouth with it.