The Cato of Purgatorio 1, I argue here, figures as the embodiment of that paradoxical medieval creation, the “crusade martyr.” My evidence inheres in the relationships that the Commedia forges between Cato, Ulysses, and Moses, and in the circumstances of the Utican's death, by which this pagan suicide achieves salvation. This latter point might seem startling, and will occupy us first: for is suicide really congruent with “martyrdom”? The City of God 1.16-27 and Inferno 13 might suggest not. But thinkers ranging from Augustine himself through Thomas More to Durkheim (even those who do not assent to the eighteenth-century philosopher William Godwin's claim, immediately after considering the instance of Cato, that “martyrs are suicides by the very signification of the term”) have recognized that the two categories are inextricably related.1 Eusebius attributed martyrdom to suicides; 2 and Augustine, who condemned Cato's act ( City of God 1.23), connects pagan suicide and Christian martyrdom: “The Decii devoted themselves to death … so that the anger of the gods might be appeased by the bloodshed as they fell, and the Roman army might be saved. In view of that act, the holy martyrs have no cause for boasting.”3 Dante extended this connection when he referred to “sacratissime victime Deciorum” in the sentence that also praises “illud inenarrabile sacrifitium severissimi vere libertatis auctoris Marci Catonis” ( Monarchia 2.5.15). If Dante is exploiting this fluidity of the borders between “suicide” and “martyrdom,” Purgatorio 1 is intelligible; if not, it remains needlessly obscure. The judgments by Giuseppe Mazzotta and John Scott that the guardian of Dante's Purgatory suffered “a veritable martyrdom” at Utica , then, are reasonable, historically well grounded, and perhaps even necessary for any coherent response to this episode.4

Perhaps more troubling than this martyr's suicide is his homicide . For the one fundamental characteristic of martyrdom as traditionally conceived is its passivity (as in the instance of St. Stephen: Purg . 15.106-14). But, observes Ernst Kantorowicz, “in the thirteenth century the crown of martyrdom began to descend on the war victims of the secular state,” a context within which he places Dante's discussion of Cato in the Monarchia . 5 “Pugna pro patria,” urges a distich attributed in the Middle Ages to Cato, one widely employed in defense of medieval wars, both secular and holy. 6 Furthermore, Cato's roles in the Commedia point particularly to the crusade as the context of Cato's active martyrdom. Dante's description of the pilgrim's arrival on the desert shore in Purgatorio 1.130-33, as is widely recognized, recalls both the original exodus image of the shipwrecked swimmer of Inferno 1 and Ulysses's shipwreck within sight of Mount Purgatory . 7 This combination brings crusading to the fore, drawing upon the pervasive crusade-as-exodus motif and the depiction of Ulysses as an anti-crusader in Inferno 26. 8

The program of contrasts between Ulysses and Cato sharpens our sense of the latter's status as crusade martyr. Cato's wisdom and devotion to civic liberty are manifested in a speech in the Pharsalia that recalls and corrects the Greek warrior's own orazion picciola , that perversion of crusading rhetoric by which he convinced his men to journey away from Jerusalem ( Inf . 26.112-22). 9 More important, Ulysses's vain search for illicit knowledge is a sterile form of impious death—an anti-crusade, as it were, whose wilfulness suggests a relationship to the modes of death punished in Inferno 13. But Cato's “suicide” on behalf of liberty, this contrast between the two suggests, is in effect no such thing, but, rather, a proto-crusading martyrdom.

Mount Purgatory 's guardian is a shade who “must first be conceived as figured in Moses,” 10 a role whose martyrly qualities make good sense in the context of the crusade, but little sense otherwise. Neither the biblical account of the crossing of the Red Sea nor Moses's peaceful death in sight of the Promised Land presents anything in the way of proto-martyrdom. But crusading propaganda retrospectively forged the connection, however tenuous, by invoking as a model Pharaoh's slaughter of the Israelite children (Exod. 1:15-22). 11 More broadly, the prominence of the exodus as the type of the crusade ensured that that ancient event would provide “the general setting in which this martyrdom will be achieved.” 12 Thus, we find Pope Urban invoking St. Stephen as an exemplum for crusaders just before asserting that the Israelites prefigured his listeners in their crossing of the Red Sea .13 After the crusade had taken foot as both a new exodus and a new opportunity for martyrdom, the latter could easily inform the depiction of the former; before then, it seems unlikely that the connection could have occurred.

Finally, medieval readers who recognized Cato as proto-crusade martyr might well have read his exchange with Virgil concerning the delights of earthly familial ties in this context (among others, to be sure). Virgil explains that he is from the realm where Cato's wife Marcia still prays, “o santo petto, che per tua la tegni” ( Purg . 1.80); but love of wife cannot keep the wise martyr from his charge of leading souls' pursuit of liberty ( 1.85-90) . Cato here provides a corrective to the Ulysses's own abandonment of son and wife in a vain pursuit away from Jerusalem ( Inf . 26.94-99), which, as I have argued elsewhere, perverts Jesus's command to the crusader to forsake all familial ties for his name's sake (Matt. 19:29). 14Purgatorio 1 distinguishes such “anti-familial” devotion to the way of the cross from the ideal paternity that inheres in true crusaders: Cato is “ degno di tanta reverenza in vista, / che più non dee a padre alcun figliuolo” (32-33). Thus does the Roman suicide both correct Ulysses's false image of the father and anticipate the appearance of “the definitive edition of the father image, which is one of the persistent archetypes of the poem,” in Thomas Bergin's phrase: 15 Cacciaguida, Dante's great-great-grandfather, the poem's exemplary martyr — and, of course, crusader ( Par . 14-18). “Read all the lives and passions of the holy martyrs and you will not find any martyr who wished to kill his persecutor,” claims a Benedictine treatise on the religious life (c. 1190) about recent developments in Palistine: "It is a new kind of martyr" -- the kind made manifest in Dante's Cato -- "who wishes to kill another." 16

1) Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, II: The Curse on Self-Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104-10 on Augustine; Paul D. Green, “Suicide, Martyrdom, and Thomas More,” Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972), 135-55; Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology , trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, ed. George Simpson (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951), 42-43, defining suicide so as to include martyrdom; and William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice , ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 1:139.

2) See History of the Early Church , trans. G. A. Williamson, rev. and ed. Andrew Louth (London: Penguin, 1989), 8.6 (p. 262); 8.12 (p. 269).

3) The City of God , trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 5.18 (p. 209). Theodore Silverstein adduces Augustine's preceding discussion of Curtius as a background to Dante's Cato: for the bishop, “self-destruction among the pagans is evidently sometimes to be viewed in the light of a parallel to Christian martyrdom”: “On the Genesis of De Monarchia , II, v,” Speculum 13 (1938), 343.

4) Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert : History and Allegory in the “Divine Comedy” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 64; John A. Scott, Dante's Political Purgatory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 72 (“virtual martyrdom”).

5) The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 243-45 (quotation, 244).

6) Ibid., 245, and Gaines Post, “Two Notes on Nationalism in the Middle Ages. 1: Pugna Pro Patria,” Traditio 9 (1953), 282.

7) Benvenuto and nearly every commentator after him have recognized the reference to Ulysses; Charles S. Singleton comments on the revision of both the Prologue Scene and the Exodus (“‘In Exitu Israel de Aegypto',” now in Dante Studies 118 [2000], 172-73).

8) Lawrence Warner, “Dante's Ulysses and the Erotics of Crusading,” Dante Studies 116 (1998), 81-82.

9) On the opposition of Cato and Ulysses, see William Stull and Robert Hollander, “The Lucanian Source of Dante's Ulysses,” Studi Danteschi 63 (1997 for 1991), 28-33.

10) Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 124-25; also Mazzotta, 62-65.

11) D. H. Green, The Millstätter Exodus: A Crusading Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 307-25.

12) Ibid., 324; see also 319.

13) “The Speech of Urban: The Version of Baldric of Dol,” trans. A. C. Krey, in The First Crusade , 2 nd ed., ed. Edward Peters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 31.

14) See Warner, 67-68 and 85-86n, and my EBDSA note, “The Sign of the Son: Crusading Imagery in the Cacciaguida Episode,” 16 September 2002.

15) A Diversity of Dante (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 162.