Porcius Cato

A hardline senator and staunch republican, Cato is one of the most vocal defenders of Rome's old constitutional order against the ambitions of men like Caesar and Pompey. Rigid, moralistic, and incorruptible, he speaks in the Senate with the certainty of a man who believes principle matters more than compromise or survival.

Karl Johnson plays Cato with a dry, brittle severity that makes him funny and formidable at once — a man so devoted to ideals that he's almost comic, except the stakes around him are lethal. The show uses him as the voice of a dying order, and Johnson never lets that voice sound naive.