Rereading Joseph Addison's Cato: The Meaning and Function of Syphax as the Other

Abstract

When I first started reading Joseph Addison's Cato without any previous background knowledge and scholarship on Cato, I was interested and impressed more by the two Oriental dramatis personae─especially Syphax─than by Cato and his Roman followers. After that I reviewed several critical essays on Cato from Addison's age to our time, and, to my disappointment, I found that most Addisonians had the different or almost opposite view of Cato. Syphax, not juba, as the Other, seems to have been ignored and undervalued without exception in any critical discourse. Syphax has always been described as "evil," "villainous," "traitorous," "perfidious," or "native [Numidian]" in a derogatory sense.