Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays: A Tragedy, and Selected by Joseph Addison

"A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worthy a complete eternity in bondage."

-Joseph Addison, Cato 1713

Joseph Addison used to be born in 1672 in Milston, Wiltshire, England. He
was expert within the classics at Oxford and have become widely recognized as an
essayist, playwright, poet, and statesman. First produced in 1713, Cato,
A Tragedy encouraged generations towards a pursuit of liberty. Liberty Fund’s
new version of Cato: A Tragedy, and chosen Essays brings together
Addison’s dramatic masterpiece besides a variety of his essays that
develop key issues within the play.

Cato, A Tragedy is the account of the ultimate hours of Marcus Porcius
Cato (95–46 B.C.), a Stoic whose deeds, rhetoric, and resistance to the
tyranny of Caesar made him an icon of republicanism, advantage, and liberty.
By all bills, Cato was once an uncompromisingly principled guy, deeply
committed to liberty. He antagonistic Caesar’s tyrannical statement of power
and took palms opposed to him. As Caesar’s forces closed in on Cato, he chose
to take his existence, who prefer dying via his personal hand to a lifetime of submission
to Caesar.

Addison’s theatrical depiction of Cato enlivened the wonderful picture of a
citizen able to sacrifice every thing within the reason behind freedom, and it influenced
friends of liberty on each side of the Atlantic. Captain Nathan
Hale’s final phrases earlier than being hanged have been, “I in simple terms remorse that i've got but
one lifestyles to lose for my country,” an in depth paraphrase of Addison’s “What pity
is it that we will die yet as soon as to serve our country!” George Washington
found Cato this kind of robust assertion of liberty, honor, advantage, and patriotism
that he had it played for his males at Valley Forge. And Forrest
McDonald says in his Foreword that “Patrick Henry tailored his famous
‘Give me liberty or provide me loss of life’ speech at once from traces in Cato.”

Despite Cato’s huge, immense luck, Addison was once might be best-known as
an essayist. In periodicals just like the Spectator, Guardian, Tatler, and Freeholder,
he sought to coach England’s constructing center type within the habits,
morals, and manners he believed useful for the renovation of a free
society. Addison’s paintings in those periodicals helped to outline the modern
English essay shape. Samuel Johnson stated of his writing, “Whoever wishes
to reach an English kind, commonly used yet now not coarse, and chic yet not
ostentatious, needs to provide his days and nights to the research of Addison.”

Christine Dunn Henderson is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund. ahead of becoming a member of Liberty Fund in 2000, she was once assistant professor of political technological know-how at Marshall University.

Mark E. Yellin, additionally a Fellow at Liberty Fund, bought his Ph.D. from
Rutgers college, has taught at North Carolina country collage, and edited
Douglass Adair’s Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy.

Click the following for a pdf of the Cato: A Tragedy brochure