Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni
Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni is literally become Latin sentence from Lucan Pharsalia ( Bellum Civile - "The Civil War"), Book I, 128: "The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated Cato."
context
The "victorious cause" is that of Caesar , who in the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC. BC had beaten his opponent Pompey and thereby came a decisive step closer to sole rule . The "defeated cause" is that of the republican constitution, to which Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger adhered with high idealism.
For Lukan, the sentence is not an utterance of Cato, but a reflection of the chronicler, who ironically contrasts the fateful power of the gods with Cato's moral authority.
Impact history
In the quotation, the sentence is usually understood as a self-statement: The loser in a matter refuses to recognize the chance outcome as a qualitative judgment and insists on the correctness of his (failed) concern.
“The course of time, I think, deserves the Latin saying of the victorious cause that the gods - and the conquered, that appealed to Cato as a motto. I do not deny that for a long time I have felt the most sympathy for the verse - because of the serene composure with which reason salvages its dignity in it against the decision of blind fate. This is the rarest thing on earth; what is mean is a shameless infidelity to the causa victa and a capitulation to the success that embittered me like nothing in the world! "
The philosopher Hannah Arendt was one of the followers of the idea . This is how she cited it in her correspondence with Karl Jaspers , and the sentence was also found in the typewriter manuscript, which she died while editing in 1975.
Individual evidence
- ↑ in the quote mostly "diis"
- ↑ Latin text with English translation by James D. Duff , Lucan with an English translation , London etc. 1928, Reprint 1962, pp. 12-13