Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Younger, was an aristocrat who walked barefoot and slept on the ground with his troops. He was a political heavyweight who cultivated the image of a Stoic philosopher and a hardnosed defender of tradition. Cato was a figure who presented himself as a man out of the sacred Roman past and the last man standing when Rome’s Republic fell to tyranny. His blood feud with Julius Caesar began in the chamber of the Senate, played out on the battlefields of a world war, and ended when he took his own life rather than continuing to live under a dictator.