With Cato dead at Utica in the manner we know, laudationes of the republican martyr and model Stoic followed one upon another. It was Cicero, with his innate imprudence, who inaugurated the series of posthumous commemorations whose political significance as ‘opposition’ is plain. At the request of Marcus Junius Brutus, Caesar's favourite, but Cato's nephew and admirer, Cicero began writing a Laus Catonis as early as April 46 bc, as soon as the news reached Rome of Cato's suicide in Africa. In the Orator (which followed shortly after), he stresses that the impulse for this came from Brutus: ‘I would never have written it through fear of this age so unfriendly to virtus, had I not considered it base not to yield when you urged so strongly and kindled the memory of one so dear to me.’ And he goes on: