‘At another time he asked me whether there were any pressure or action whereby a man might put an end to his life quickly and without bloodshed. I showed him three and I have no doubt that since that day he has regarded me with particular affection and gratitude.
‘I, in turn, have learned much from him. I used to think that eating, sleeping, and the satisfaction of the sexual appetite were best regulated by the formation of habits. I now believe with him that they are best served by responding to them at the first prompting. I have thereby not only lengthened my day, but liberated my spirit.
‘Oh, it is an extraordinary man. These legends have, in their way, a just base; but with one difference. Caesar does not love, nor does he inspire love. He diffuses an equable glow of ordered good will, a passionless energy that creates without fever, and which expends itself without self-examination or self-doubt.
‘Let me whisper to you: I could not love him and I never leave his presence without relief.’
XLVI-B
From a Report of Caesar’s Secret Police.
Subject 496: Artemisia Baccina, midwife, healer, and fortuneteller, resident in the suburb of the Goat. Under interrogation, Subject 496 confessed to having been present at rites celebrated by the Confraternity of the Buried Sun. Said there were ten or twelve chapters in Rome. (See Subjects 371 and 391.) Finally under intensive interrogation said the Confraternity was headed by Amasius Lenter (Subject 297, executed August 12.) Rites open with slow torture and death of a black pig, black cock, etcetera, and concluded with veneration of a vial of blood, said to be the blood of the Dictator. Subject is being deported to Sicily and placed under vigilance of the police there.
XLVI-C
From Notes left by Pliny the Younger.
[Written about a century later.]
Curious. My gardener reported that the following belief is widely held by the common people. On my walks I have questioned vine dressers, hucksters, and others and find this report confirmed.
They believe that the body of Julius Caesar was not burned after his assassination (though we have no doubt of that), but that an organisation or mystery cult seized it and dividing it into many pieces, buried each piece under one of the wards of Rome. They declare that Caesar knew of an old prophecy which affirmed that the survival and greatness of Rome was dependent on his murder and dismemberment.
XLVII
Announcement by the Queen of Egypt.
[October 26.]
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, [etcetera, etcetera] regrets that the Reverend College of the Vestal Virgins will be unable to attend her reception tomorrow evening.
Arrangements have been made, however, to receive the Reverend College at three o’clock on that day.
With the concordance of the Supreme Pontiff and the Reverend President of the College a performance will be given at that time of
The great Coming-Forth of Horus,
The beauty of Osiris,
The attack upon the Neshmet Boat,
The Lord of Abydos comes to his Palace.
The portions of these ceremonies which are unsuitable for presentation in the evening will be rendered in all their solemnity before the dedicated guests in the afternoon.
The Queen of Egypt will graciously receive the Reverend Maids at that time.
XLVIII
Caesar to Cleopatra.
[October 29.]
All Rome talks of the magnificence of the Queen’s reception; the more discriminating return repeatedly to speak of her royal deportment, of her arts as a hostess, of her discretion, and of the spell of her beauty.
I am permitted to speak of my love and admiration which will never grow less.
My visits to the great Queen will be less frequent in the days that lie ahead, but I adjure her never to doubt my love nor my unceasing attention to the welfare of her country.
It would give me great pleasure to receive the Queen more frequently in my home. I am requesting the actress Cytheris to give lessons to my wife in the declamation and gestures that are required of her at the Mysteries of the Good Goddess. As you are to be present at that reunion also, I think you would derive much interest from these lessons – though far be it from me to imply that the Queen has anything to learn in beauty of speech or in dignity of port.
At the close of the lessons I feel certain that Cytheris will not refuse any wish you may express to hear her declaim passages from the Greek and Roman tragedies – a privilege which our descendants will envy us.
The Lady Clodia Pulcher is retiring to her villa in the country for a time. I think it is fitting that you should know that I indicated this move to her some time ago, though she asked permission to remain in the City until the day following your reception. The reason for this withdrawal springs from a matter which I shall recount to you at some time, if you wish to hear it.
The happiness which the Queen’s visit has brought me has occasionally drawn my thoughts away from my work. Were I a younger man this happiness would become one with the work and would furnish new incentives to its prosecution. My lengthening days remind me, however, that I have not that apparently unlimited time for project and execution which I once possessed.
Allow me to combine my work with happiness by calling on the Queen on [Saturday] to show her the plans which I have drawn up for colonial settlements in North Africa. If the weather is favourable then, I should like to take the Queen to Ostia by boat, pointing out to her the measures we have taken for the control of flood and the deceleration of the current. At Ostia we shall be able to see the progress made on the harbour works, concerning which the Queen has already given me such invaluable advice.
There is one more thing I wish to say to the great Queen. I hope she will remain in Italy for an even longer visit than she had first planned. To encourage this decision, may I suggest that she send to Alexandria for her children? I shall place one of my newly finished galleys, which have already proved themselves to be the swiftest on the sea, at the Queen’s disposal for this errand and shall look forward to sharing her joy at their arrival.
XLVIII-A
Cleopatra to Caesar.
[By return messenger.]
A misunderstanding, great Caesar, has arisen between us.
I realise that no protests of mine can clear away the misapprehension under which you are laboring. In my suffering I can only hope that time and events will convince you of my devotion and loyalty.
Once more I must say, however, that the situation in which I found myself – with an astonishment no less than yours – was contrived by malicious persons.
Marc Antony had persuaded me to accompany him to that portion of the gardens to see what he called ‘the greatest feat of daring ever seen in Rome.’ He assured me that it would be undertaken by himself in association with some five or six of his companions. As the moment had come for me to make another tour of the grounds I acceded to his request, taking Charmian with me. The rest you know.
I shall not rest until I have obtained proofs of the complicity of others in what then took place. I know that proofs will not convince you of my innocence unless I can also furnish you evidence of my tireless concern with all that has to do with you and your interest and with your happiness. This ambition alone leads me to accept your invitation to prolong my stay in the City. I gratefully accept also your invitation to attend the sessions directed by Cytheris in your home.
I do not wish at this time, however, to send for my dear children, though I thank you for the opportunity you have extended.
Great friend, great Caesar, my lover, the thing which is uppermost in my mind is that you have unjustly been made to suffer. I cry out in anguish against those forces of destiny which by an infernal device that no mere humans could compound have made me an instrument for your disappointment. Oh, do not believe it. Do not permit yourself to be the victim of so transparent a mischance. Remember my love. Do not now begin to doubt the glance in my eyes and the joy in my surrender. I am still a young woman; I do not k
now what form a more experienced woman would give to the protestations of innocence. Should I be indignant that you distrust me? Should I be proud and angry? I do not know; I can only be candid, even at the expense of modesty. Never have I loved, never shall I love, as I have loved you. Who can have known what I have known – a delight that was not separable from gratitude, a passion that was none the less for being all homage? Such was the love suitable to the difference between our ages; it need fear no comparison with any other. Oh, remember, remember! Trust! Do not now separate me as by a curtain from that divinity within you. Blackest of curtains that is made up of a belief in my treachery. I treacherous! I unloving!
These words are not royal. They are sincere. I have expressed myself in this manner for the last time, until you permit me to resume it. I now adopt that of a visitor of state, for conformity with your wishes is the rule of my love.
XLIX
Alina, wife of Cornelius Nepos, to her sister Postumia, wife of Publius Ceccinius of Verona.
[October 30.]
You will have seen all the letters we sent concerning this matter by the Dictator’s courier to you and to the poet’s family. Here are a few details I shall add for your eyes alone. My husband is grieving as though he had lost a son (avert the omen! our boys are very well, thanks be to the Gods). I loved Gaius [Catullus], also, and have loved him since we all played together as children. But affection should not blind our eyes – I can speak frankly to you – to the lessons of this deplorable mistaken life. I did not like his friends; of course, I did not like that wicked woman; I did not like the verses he wrote during these last years; and I shall never like nor praise the Dictator who has been in and out of our house these days as though he were an old family friend.
We had often asked Gaius to stay with us, but you know his brusque independence. So when he appeared at our door one morning, followed by old Fusco carrying his bedding, and asked to live in our garden house, then I knew he was really ill. My husband reported this move at once to the Dictator. The Dictator promptly sent over his physician, a Greek named Sosthenes, the most conceited pig-headed young man I have ever met. I have no hesitation in saying that I am an excellent physician myself. I think it’s a gift which the Immortal Gods confer on all mothers, but this Sosthenes kept brushing away remedies which have proved their efficacy since time immemorial. But that’s a long story.
Now, Postumia, there’s not the slightest doubt that that woman killed him. After leading him through every avenue of hell for three years, she suddenly became all kindness and that’s how she killed him. She never appeared herself, but every day came letters, gifts of food – and what food! – Greek manuscripts, and messages of inquiry twice a day. All this made Gaius very happy, but there are all kinds of happiness; this was that puzzled bodiless happiness which, I suppose, deceived husbands feel when their wives are suddenly very kind to them. As the days went by and she did not appear herself we could see that he was resigning all hope of health and letting himself drift into death. At about three o’clock on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh his servant Fusco – you remember him; he used to tend boats on Lake Garda – came running to the house. He said that his master was delirious and was dressing himself to go to the Queen of Egypt’s reception. I hurried out to the garden house and found him lying unconscious in a great pool of bile which he had vomited up. My husband sent at once for Sosthenes who came and sat with Gaius until his death an hour before dawn. I was not permitted entrance to the sickroom, but who should appear at about ten o’clock but the Dictator himself. He was splendidly dressed and must have slipped away from the Queen’s reception which, after all, was less than a mile away. All night we could hear the orchestras and see the sky lit up by her bonfires. I overheard Fusco telling my husband that when the Dictator first came into the room, Gaius raised himself on one elbow and shouted to him wildly to go away. He called him ‘thief of liberty,’ ‘monster of greed,’ ‘murderer of the Republic’ and many more names, all of which are, of course, absolutely true. My husband joined them at about that time – he had been away hunting for our old balsam-burner. He tells me that the Dictator was receiving all this in silence, but that he was as white as a ghost. It had probably been some time since Caesar had been ordered to leave a room, but he left.
He returned at about two hours after midnight, having changed from his fine clothes. Gaius was sleeping; when he awoke he seemed to be reconciled to his visitor. My husband said he even smiled and said, ‘What, no fringes, great Caesar?’ Well, as you know, my husband worships the man. (For the most part we’ve arranged in our house simply not to discuss him.) Cornelius says that Caesar was quite wonderful from then on, wonderful in his silences and in his replies. He says that, of course, Caesar had been present at more deathbeds than anyone else. You know all those stories about Gaul, of how the wounded soldiers used to refuse to die until their General had made his nightly rounds. Oh, I confess, Postumia, that – wicked ruler though he is – there is something very impressive and yet unforced about his presence. My husband says that he himself stayed in one corner of the room with Sosthenes and that he could hear very little of what the two were saying. Apparently at one point, Gaius, the tears streaming down his face, almost flung himself out of bed crying that he had wasted his life and his song for the favours of a harlot. I would not have known how to answer that, but it seems that the Dictator could. My husband says that he talked in even lower tones, but he gathered that Caesar was praising Clodia Pulcher as though she were some Goddess. Gaius was not in pain, but he was growing weaker. He lay with his eyes on the ceiling, listening to Caesar’s words. From time to time Caesar fell silent, but when the silence had lasted too long for him, Gaius touched his wrist with his fingers, as though to say ‘go on, go on.’ And all Caesar was doing was talking about Sophocles! Gaius died to a chorus from Oedipus at Coloneus. Caesar placed the coins on his eyes, embraced Cornelius and the wretched physician, and went home, without guards, through the first light of dawn.
You may wish to repeat some of this to his mother and father, though it seems to me that it would only distress them further. I should feel no small responsibility if either of my boys were to succumb to such an infatuation as we have witnessed here. I think I may say that their upbringing will have spared them that!
[The letter continues with the discussion of the sale of some real estate.]
XLIX-A
Caesar’s Journal – Letter to Lucius Mamilius Turrinus on the Island of Capri.
[Night of October 27 – 28.]
1013. [On the death of Catullus.] I am watching beside the bed of a dying friend, the poet Catullus. From time to time he falls asleep; I then take to my pen, as always, perhaps to avoid reflection. (Though I should have learned by now that to write to you is to invoke from the depths of my mind those questions which I have spent my life evading.)
He just opened his eyes, gave the names of six of the Pleiades, and asked me that of the seventh.
Even as a young man, Lucius, you possessed an unerring eye for the Inevitable Occasion and the Inevitable Consequence. You wasted no time in wishing that things were otherwise. From you I learned, but slowly, that there are large fields of experience which our longing cannot alter and which our fears cannot forfend. I clung for years to a host of self-delusions, to the belief that burning intensity in the mind can bring a message from an indifferent loved one and that sheer indignation can halt the triumphs of an enemy. The universe goes its mighty way and there is very little we can do to modify it. You remember how shocked I was when you let fall so lightly the words: ‘Hope has never changed tomorrow’s weather.’ Adulation is continually assuring me that I have ‘accomplished the impossible’ and ‘reversed the order of nature’; I receive these tributes with a grave inclination of the head, but not without a wish that the best of my friends were present to share with me the derision they deserve.
I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it. The achievements of men are more remark
able when one contemplates the limitations under which they labor.
The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I knew that I was mortal; and now I regard those years as wasted, as unproductive, in which I was not aware that my death was certain, nay, momently possible. I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savour of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight. I will have no part in the doctrine of the stoics that the contemplation of death teaches us the vanity of human endeavor and the insubstantiality of life’s joys. Each year I say farewell to the spring with a more intense passion and every day I am more bent on harnessing the course of the Tiber, even though my successors may permit it to expend itself senselessly in the sea.
He has opened his eyes again. We have had a paroxysm of grief. Clodia! Every moment as I watch this I understand more clearly her ruined greatness.
Oh, there are laws operating in the world whose import we can scarcely guess. How often we have seen a lofty greatness set off a train of evil, and virtue engendered by wickedness. Clodia is no ordinary woman and colliding with her Catullus has struck off poems which are not ordinary. At the closer range we say good and evil, but what the world profits by is intensity. There is a law hidden in this, but we are not present long enough to glimpse more than two links in the chain. There lies the regret at the brevity of life.
The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March Page 25