Cato and the Clerks: A War On Bureaucracy

Cato stepped into the treasury.

The clerks — rows of them, bent-backed and ink-stained — continued their work as if he weren’t there, their quills scratching across tablets, their murmurs blending into the shuffle of parchment. The air was heavy with the tang of old scrolls, documents copied and recopied so many times their original meaning lay buried beneath layers of amendments and annotations. Wax-sealed ledgers lined the shelves, filled with numbers that told one story to the public and another to those who knew where to look.

He knew their type. Men who never held office but wielded more power than most senators. They had survived not by ruling, not by defying authority, but by outlasting it. Governments changed; they remained.

But not on Cato’s watch.

For years, Rome’s bureaucrats, the scribae, operated with comfortable certainty. No official dared pry too deeply into their affairs. The Republic’s government sprawled vast, its finances entangled in layers of record-keeping that even senators hesitated to untangle. The scribae were the quiet power behind it all. They knew where the money moved, who owed what, and which names to alter in the books when a bribe had been paid.

And yet, here stood this man — unyielding, incorruptible — insisting that the records of the state were sacred, that public service was not a personal enrichment scheme, that every denarius spent should be accounted for.

This was not how things were done.

The Making of an Incorruptible Man

Cato had not come to this fight by accident.

Born in 95 BC, he entered a world where corruption was not only tolerated, it was expected. Rome’s ruling class had grown fat on conquest, its senators using their offices to secure lucrative governorships and financial kickbacks. From his earliest days, young Cato carried the weight of his family name — descended from Cato the Elder, the iron-willed statesman who lived simply and spoke plainly.

As a child, Cato possessed an unnervingly serious demeanor. The great historian Plutarch recounts that when his tutor took him to visit the dictator, Sulla, the boy sat in silence while other children fawned over the warlord. When Sulla, amused, asked why he had nothing to say, the boy did not bow or flatter. Instead, he turned to his tutor and whispered, “Why does no one kill this man?”

It was not a question of impudence. Even as a boy, Cato possessed an uncompromising sense of justice, a conviction that corruption was not simply the way of the world — that it could and must be resisted.

By the time he became quaestor — the Roman official responsible for overseeing state finances — he had already built a reputation for being incorruptible. But no one, not even his allies, expected him to take his role as far as he did.

Cato’s War on the Bureaucrats

The treasury was an ancient institution filled with clerks whose families had served in government for generations. These men, the scribae, were not elected. They were not warriors or orators. But they were indispensable. And they knew it.

They managed the tax records, handled state contracts, and approved payments to Rome’s growing empire of provincial governors and generals. They also knew how to make a little something extra on the side. A falsified receipt here, a delayed tax collection there — it was a system of quiet theft, a slow siphoning of Rome’s wealth into the hands of those who had learned to manipulate the machinery of the state.

Then came Cato.

Unlike his predecessors, who treated the quaestorship as a ceremonial stepping stone, Cato arrived at the treasury on a mission.

His first act was to order all financial records dating back to the dictatorship of Sulla to be copied and meticulously reviewed. It was a move that sent shockwaves through the administrative class. These records contained the entire financial history of Rome’s turbulent recent years — the bribery, the fraudulent contracts, the debts that had mysteriously vanished from the books. By making these records public, Cato was doing something unthinkable: removing the fog of bureaucratic complexity that had allowed corruption to flourish.

He did not stop there.

When clerks delayed in providing information, Cato did not accept excuses. Plutarch describes how he would personally oversee transactions, arriving unannounced at offices to inspect records. He dismissed officials who could not explain discrepancies, cut wasteful expenditures, and enforced strict discipline on tax collectors, many of whom had grown accustomed to extorting extra fees from the provinces.

When one particularly arrogant scriba tried to resist, citing precedent, Cato did something extreme — he had the man publicly flogged. It was an act of theatrical brutality, meant not merely to humiliate but to send a message: the rules would be followed.

The Bureaucratic Counterattack

Cato was winning battles, but he underestimated the enemy.

Bureaucrats do not fight with swords (most of the time). They do not rebel in the streets (usually). They resist through delay, confusion, and inertia.

Suddenly, records were misplaced. Requests took longer to process. Senators who had once been indifferent to financial oversight began to complain that Cato was making things too difficult. The clerks whispered that he was unhinged, a fanatic who did not understand that Rome’s government had always worked this way. 

Again, sound familiar?

Plutarch records that many of Rome’s officials resented Cato’s relentless scrutiny, claiming that he “treated them like servants rather than colleagues” and that his reforms were “overly severe, out of step with the times.” Unable to oppose him outright, the bureaucrats did what they do when threatened — they waited. They delayed. They complained to sympathetic senators that the system could not function under such rigid discipline. 

Cato had exposed the rot, but he could not excise it completely. The system was too vast, too entrenched. And there were too many who benefited from the way things were.

The Necessary Evil: The Origins of Roman Bureaucracy

Before condemning Rome’s administrative class entirely, we must understand its origins. Rome began as a modest republic governed by part-time officials and citizen assemblies — institutions designed for a city-state, not an empire. As Rome conquered the Mediterranean world, its governance needs expanded exponentially.

By the time of Cato, Rome administered territories from Spain to Syria. Tax collection alone required a vast apparatus, as did the maintenance of roads, aqueducts, and public buildings. The Republic’s elected officials — consuls, praetors, aediles — served only one year, which was insufficient time to master the administration's complexities. Into this vacuum stepped the scribae — permanent officials who provided continuity amid political turnover.

What began as a practical necessity transformed into a self-perpetuating system. Polybius observed in his Histories, “The Romans created offices to handle their affairs, but in time, the offices created affairs to justify their existence.” This pattern — the expansion of administrative functions beyond their original purpose — would repeat throughout history.

The specific mechanisms of corruption were often ingenious. We know from Cicero’s prosecution of Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily, that bureaucrats maintained “double books” — one set for public review, another recording the actual movement of money. Tax farmers (private contractors who collected taxes for Rome) routinely inflated assessments, keeping the difference for themselves and sharing profits with the treasury officials who approved their accounts. The scribae also controlled public contracts, ensuring that roads, temples, and aqueducts went to builders who paid the largest bribes, not those who offered the best quality or price.

Rome’s Bureaucracy vs. Our Own

It would be comforting to believe that Cato’s fight was unique to his time. That Rome’s bureaucratic class was a relic of the past, an outgrowth of an ancient empire too large to sustain itself.

But the reality is that bureaucratic self-preservation is a fundamental law of governance.

What would Cato make of our modern administrative state? In his day, the entire Roman financial system could be documented on scrolls stored in a single treasury building. Today, the U.S. Code has expanded from 16,500 pages in 1970 to over 180,000 pages — a corpus of law so vast that legal scholars debate whether anyone could read it in a lifetime. The tax code that Cato sought to enforce fairly has, in our era, mutated from 400 pages in 1913 to more than 75,000 pages of arcane provisions and exceptions to exceptions.

The Roman scribae could delay a financial inquiry for weeks; our bureaucracy can stall investigations for years behind procedural barriers, all while generating what the Office of Management and Budget estimates as 3.2 billion hours of annual paperwork for citizens and businesses — a tax of time more burdensome than any monetary levy Cato faced.

Yet the essence remains unchanged. The mechanisms have evolved, the scale has grown exponentially, but the fundamental dynamic persists: systems designed to administer governance inevitably develop their gravity, pulling more resources and authority into their orbit while resisting external controls.

The clerks of Rome did not wear suits or use Microsoft Office. They didn’t establish sub-committees to study the feasibility of forming exploratory task forces. But in their manipulation of procedure to preserve their position, they would recognize their modern descendants immediately.

The Limits of Reform: How the Story Ends

Cato did not stop Rome’s bureaucratic decay. His war against corruption was, at best, a temporary victory. The clerks and bureaucrats he disciplined returned to their old habits after his departure. The Senate, exhausted by his relentless demands for accountability, resumed its indifference. His reforms did not outlast him.

And yet, Rome remembered.

Plutarch tells us that after Cato left his financial post, the next quaestor found himself constantly compared to his predecessor. “They asked not what was being done, but how it would have been done under Cato.” He had set a standard — not just for the treasury but for how a statesman ought to conduct himself. And for a time, the memory of his rigor was enough to force others to act with integrity.

But memory fades, and institutions do not reform themselves. Rome continued its descent into bureaucratic dysfunction, its government swelling with each decade until administration became indistinguishable from empire. What Cato could not stop, history did: within a century, Rome’s republic collapsed under the weight of its own inefficiencies.

Yet Cato did not live to see this.

Cato’s Final Stand

If Cato’s war against bureaucracy was a battle of ledgers and ink, his final war was against Rome’s most dangerous force: Julius Caesar. The two men represented irreconcilable visions of power — Cato, the Stoic guardian of republican virtue, and Caesar, the pragmatic populist.

For years, Cato had warned that Caesar’s ambition would unravel Rome. He fought him in the Senate, he resisted him in the courts, and when the civil war finally erupted, he sided with Pompey, choosing the uncertain struggle for the Republic over the certainty of dictatorship.

Caesar, of course, won.

Cato, refusing to live under tyranny, chose his own end. Trapped in the North African city of Utica after the final defeat, he sat in contemplation, reading Plato’s Phaedo — the dialogue on the immortality of the soul. Then, having resolved that he would not live to see Rome fall into the hands of an emperor, he took his own life.

Plutarch tells us that when Caesar heard of Cato’s death, he remarked bitterly that Cato had robbed him of the chance to show mercy. That was the final insult — the republic might have died, but Cato had ensured that he would never be a subject in its replacement.

Can Bureaucracy Ever Be Rolled Back?

Cato’s story forces an uncomfortable question: is it possible to win against bureaucracy?

Reforming a bloated system is not the same as cutting down an army. Bureaucracies do not die from a single blow. Every government that grows large enough to require a vast administrative class eventually finds itself ruled by that very class.

This raises another question: how should bureaucracy be confronted? Should reform be slow and methodical, forcing gradual improvements over time? Or must it be swift and unrelenting, striking before the system can resist?

Cato, ever the Stoic, believed in principle over strategy. He fought corruption because it was the right thing to do, not because he thought he would win. However, history suggests that bureaucracy does not yield to patient moral appeals.

And so we must ask: Are we more like Cato or the bureaucrats who outlived him?

Do we believe in principles only when they are convenient? Do we fight corruption only when it does not cost us? Are we willing to stand against the slow creep of state expansion, or do we resign ourselves to it, justifying each new layer of inefficiency as inevitable?

The Ethics of Resistance in Failure

Cato’s example raises profound questions that extend beyond bureaucracy to the very nature of ethical action in an imperfect world. His struggle somewhat resembles what philosopher Albert Camus would later call “the absurd hero,” who persists in meaningful action despite knowing the outcome.

In his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus writes of the condemned king eternally rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Cato’s battle against bureaucratic corruption represents a similar choice — to act with integrity even when the systems of power render such action seemingly futile.

The Stoics themselves viewed virtuous action as its own reward, independent of results. Epictetus, writing after Cato’s time, taught that we cannot control outcomes, only our own conduct. In this light, Cato’s resistance was neither tragic nor futile but the only rational choice for a person of principle.

This philosophy stands in stark contrast to modern pragmatism, which often measures ethical actions solely by their outcomes. Bureaucratic systems thrive on such logic, dismissing principled objections as impractical idealism. “This is how things work,” they tell us, as if description were justification.

Rome Fell, But Not All at Once

Rome did not fall in a day. No barbarian horde suddenly extinguished the light of the Republic. Rather, it dimmed gradually — institutional decay preceding political collapse. The Roman Senate continued to meet long after it had surrendered its effective power. Elections were held even as their outcomes grew meaningless. The bureaucracy expanded as the empire’s actual capacity to govern contracted.

What died first was not Rome’s institutions but the will to defend them — the conviction that some principles matter more than comfort, that self-governance demands vigilance, that liberty is worth its inconveniences. When Romans began to view corruption not with outrage but resignation when they accepted that “this is simply how things are done,” the Republic was already lost. 

Cato knew that resistance carries meaning beyond victory or defeat. The Stoic sees virtue not in outcome but in action itself — in the choice to stand, even when standing alone. History may not repeat, but it does offer us archetypes of human courage that transcend their time. In Cato’s unflinching resistance against a system too vast to defeat, we find a model of citizenship that remains as vital today as it was two millennia ago.

The bureaucrats outlived Cato. They always do. But it is not the clerks whom we remember.