Caesar is Dead

by Jack Lindsay

  Now there was another pause. Antonius saw that he must say something.

  “Romans,” he said, his tall, noble figure drawing every eye of the crowd admiringly. “My heart is grieving like yours. You have heard the deeds and honours of Caesar recited. I have nothing to add to that list. I have only my personal grief, as you have. He was my friend, and now he lies there, taken from me.”

  He pointed to the bier in its chapel of gold, and the uproar broke out afresh. Now there was no order about the noise. Everyone was shouting different advices, abuse of the murderers, praise of Caesar, wild prayers and wordless ullulations. The magistrates lifted the bier again; but the press this time did not part. Why should the people march out to the Fields, vacating the city and leaving it to the murderers? Caesar had been lord and protector of Rome. Let Rome have his ashes — yes, even though the whole city burned as his pyre. What did laws against pyres or interments within the walls matter? Caesar was the law embodied. He was Rome.

  “Burn him here!” cried Clodia; and the man next to her took up the cry.

  “Burn him here like we burned Clodius!”

  Clodia was startled to hear the name of her brother shouted so loudly against her ear. It frightened her, as if she had been recognised, as if every member of that vast assembly would turn to gaze at her.

  “Yes, yes,” she sobbed, and clasped the man who had shouted. “Burn him here.”

  The man turned and saw that she was not unpleasing, though over-old for his tastes; but there was something striking about her, an aroma of fine cosmetics that he couldn’t place. Anyhow, her heart was sound. He clasped her back, and kissed her, and then shouted louder than ever.

  “Burn him here!”

  The demand had arisen on all sides. Some shouted that the corpse should be burned in the Temple of Iuppiter the Best and Greatest, the most sacred spot in Rome. Others suggested the Curia where he had been killed, but that was too far away. Why not in the Forum, the busy centre of daily life? What could suit Caesar better than the Forum?

  “Burn him here!” resounded the cry.

  Men tore at the shutters of the houses around the square, broke into the temples and basilicas for benches, tribunals, and desks, raided the offices and shops, searching for anything flammable. Somehow a space had been cleared in the centre of the Forum and the bier placed there. Most of the crowd remembered the day when they had burned their dead champion Clodius, and they longed to see the flames again rise heavenwards from the stones of the Forum, carrying aloft in their chariot the spirit of an even greater champion. Soon beneath and around the bier was piled a mountainous collection of wooden objects, broken furniture, batons, doors. Torches appeared and were handed from man to man, until they were dashed into the mass. Flames crackled and spread crawling up toward the crest of the heap where lay Caesar on his ivory bier.

  Veterans, inspired by the mounting blaze, snatched out their weapons and flung them towards the pyre, watching the gleaming whizz through the air, the hiss as the metal stabbed into the vicious beasts of quarreling flame. A few weapons missed and wounded spectators, but no one cared, not even the wounded. They sucked the blood and danced wildly round. The musicians and players caught up their instruments and threw them after the swords; tore off the robes which had once been part of Caesar’s triumphal displays, and fed the blaze. Women, seeing the sacrificed robes, dragged off their outer garments and added them to the fuel. Dancing, screaming, the mob rushed round the pyre, catching hands, leaping, embracing, tumbling over.

  Antonius had withdrawn and gone off behind the Graecostasis. For a few moments he had exulted in the tumult, and then had hated it. Moreover, he would be blamed, since he had been the presiding magistrate. Gathering as many as possible of the more sober-minded veterans he retired by sidestreets towards the Carinae.

  Dusk was coming on, and the flames were brighter. Now the fire had reached to the bier, and the ivory was cracking. Men dashed up with jars of ointment plundered from shops nearby. The jars were hurled on the pyre, where they burst against the wood, splashing and rippling alight. A great gust leapt upwards, over the bier, sweeping away the bloodied toga from its trophy-stand, flapping and consuming it. The cloth bellied out like a flag for a moment, then tore and fluttered in rags of flame. Fragments were tossed about in the thick coil of smoke that swung and wrenched overhead. The sound of the fire was of a pounding cataract that poured upwards.

  The body of Caesar was wrapped in flame, then the mantle and the cerecloths tattered away. The flame writhed and hissed about the limbs like a host of bright serpents, eating hungrily of the flesh. The body seemed to lift, to twist, to be making an effort to stand upright. Then another gust obscured it with a pall of fiery smoke, and the bier crashed into the white-gold heart of flame.

  A flurry of white smoke rushed out, curling and sweeping upwards like a flock of white birds. Doves of Venus, the maternal goddess of Caesar, fluttered around the dark eagle, the great wings heavenwards beating.

  O the glory of a storm of fire. Fire that purifies, ravaging away all rust and dampness of decay, all the blights and insects, the flies of evil, the witches and their plagues. Fire that strengthens and feeds, softening from the cruel beaks into the gentle drift of fostering sunlight. Warmth of the breast, warmth of the mating-bed. Fire into which victims had to be flung at the sacred moments, the fire-festivals of spring and midsummer and autumn, or when special attacks of pest and malignity called for a need-fire.

  Dance, all you worshippers of Caesar. You and your fathers have known the sacred fire in the fields, into which the victims were consigned, and across the embers of which you yourselves leaped, to be cleaned and strengthened in womb or testicles, to leave behind your fleas and your sins. You burned the witch, the wicked sower, the green wolf, the old man of the straw, the goat-redeemer, the serpents of dark earth that, burning, become the forked serpents of stinging flame. You watched in awe the great pyres of Sandan or the monstrous wickerwork-idols in which the prisoners burned in Gaul. You burned the reaper of the last swathe or the man who drew the blackened piece of oat-cake; or you roasted a cat alive, an offering, an organic representation of the clawing cat of fire, the fever-beast, the colic-cat that tears the belly.

  O great and glorious are the memories.

  Dance about the giant of flame. For now Caesar is the flame itself, not merely a god burning. He is all that burns and fructifies. He has passed into elemental power.

  *

  They danced and clung to one another, breaking into the taverns for wine, hugging one another under the porticoes where the shadows of the pillars danced and gibbered in flickering silence, as if parodying the huddled human gestures. Luridly the flames lighted the square. Caesar’s body was consumed, but still the worshippers sought for wood to keep the blaze going. The sweat ran streaming down their bodies. So many pulled off the last of their clothes and threw them after the wood. The world was being reborn. It had already died the death of water. Now it must die the death of fire. Man had died and been saved out of the womb of water, the drowning spaces of birth. Now he must die through flame and be reborn in the consuming chamber of the Sun, the cherishing power of the Father.

  They chanted ribald songs, dancing in rings round the pyre, lords of the earth and its fullness for this evening of apotheosis.

  *

  Clodia drew herself up painfully from the ground. Suddenly she was tired and knew herself for the old woman she was. She would be ill, very ill and bruised. Yet it had been worth it, though she could not understand what had happened. She felt her shoulder sting where the man had bitten it. She was soiled beyond the ugliest dream of debauch, and yet elated. She had become one with her dead brother, and somehow that quieted the uneasy ghost who lived in her flesh, Catullus.

  Staggering and clutching at the poor remnants of her dress, she was glad of the darkness outside the glare cast by the fire of the Forum. After much effort she remembered where she was and where she had left the litter. Probably the sla
ves would have run away, and her young niece would be terrified out of her wits. A thought stabbed her. If the girl was lost or injured, she would never forgive herself. The earth belonged to the young, not to aching bones.

  At last she found the litter. Two of the slaves were gone and the other two were drinking from a stolen jar of wine. They lolled up on to their feet as they recognised Clodia, grinning weakly; but she could not see their faces in the gloom.

  Fumbling furiously at the curtains, she looked inside and saw with a passionate sense of gratitude that her niece was there — crying too, as Clodia had expected.

  “Don’t cry, my dear,” said Clodia. “I’m so sorry, but I’m back after all.”

  Young Clodia threw herself on her aunt’s bosom. “I’ve been trying to sneeze for an hour,” she said, “and I can’t. O please do help me.”

  *

  Night deepened, its stars veiled in the smoke of earth.

  In the mysteries, after fasting and flagellations, many men saw the figures of the gods moving in a great light, dazzling and changing before the blinded eye of worship. Many who had thus seen God were among the dancers in the Forum. God was no faraway thought to them. When initiated, they knew that they were gods in embryo themselves, only separated by a thin bar of flesh from birth into eternity. They had seen God face to face — God that was man in his suffering and his passion, man that was God in the resurrection. They had all hearkened to the good-tidings.

  Was it strange then that they saw in Caesar a protector become divine by the stroke of death?

  Men fell down on the paving-stones and were filled with the gift of tongues and spoke alarming prophecies and evangels. One man threw himself into the flames. Image and interpretation of Caesar’s death was all that they had learned of the suffering god, the god terribly put to death, the god resurrected and bearing away the burden of the flesh.

  They saw him enthroned in the fire, a merciful judge and father; and they sank babbling on their knees.

  *

  Through the darkness were walking two men, arm-in-arm, attended each by a sturdy slave. They were two patricians who had come out, dressed in cheap cloaks, to watch the riot. They were sad, for they felt that their world was at an end; and they discussed the frightening inrush of oriental ideas and practices into the State.

  The lean man threw back his head and looked up at the skies. A few stars could be seen at the thinning edge of the smoke-pall, southwards. He thought of the scene in the Forum, and quoted a line from the poet Lucretius, the great poet, barely ten years dead.

  “To such enormities religion leads.”

  “It isn’t religion,” persisted his friend. “It’s the slave’s craving for a master and a patron. Lack of food produces dreams of everlasting life.”

  “It’s vileness. All emotion is vile, and religion stirs the depths of emotion.”

  “But what of patriotism, friendship, love of parents and children — aren’t they emotion?”

  “They are emotion, but in them we see the self trying to escape emotion and live by the justice and mercy of understanding. In perfect understanding there is no emotion.”

  “God is nature. Why these people are vile is because they seek a good beyond nature. They wish to destroy the balance and economy of the universe.”

  “If God is nature, we do not need the word God. Nature will suffice.”

  “But what on earth has this lust for immortality and redemption to do with religion? Isn’t religion the need to preserve the State intact, to live a good life? How can either of these needs function in purity if man is troubled by nightmares and ecstasies from the vacuum of the beyond?”

  “We agree that the spectacle is vile. The discipline of family life cannot survive this pandering to such souls. Well, my friend, we witness the end of civilisation. Let us go home and sleep peacefully as befits men that know everything is divine — sleeping as well as waking, evil as well as good.”

  “It will all come right in the end. All things tend towards the good.”

  “Good and evil are eternal — and eternally the same. Good night.”

  *

  At first the populace were absorbed by the rapture of dancing about the flames, as they had danced in the mystery-rites about the worshipper on his throne of initiation; but knots of them now broke away, talking angrily in the lanes. Then, shouting, these groups swept off through the city, looking for victims to offer to the god of their deliverance. They met a tribune named Cinna and tore him to pieces without waiting to distinguish him from Cinna the praetor. They sought out the houses of the conspirators and launched attacks. But the attacks were without plan or organisation, and the barricaded houses were successfully defended. Other groups began looting. Before dawn Antonius set to work with his band of reliable soldiers, sent round detachments, arrested rioters who were disturbing the peace, and summarily flung them over the Tarpeian Rock. Something must be done to clear him from the charge of complicity.

  But he made no effort to interfere with the throng of worshippers in the Forum. The pyre was still burning. It burned all the next day.

  THE DIVINE CAESAR

  VII — THERE IS A LULL

  On the day after the funeral, while the pyre was still burning, Gallus walked through the Forum. He was interested in the events going on about him but without seeking to evaluate them. He gave his blessing to the rioters as he would have given it to a police-force stamping out the riot. It was sufficient that men were active, carried away frankly by their needs. All their needs were equally fantastic to him; for only the body of Cytheris was real — her body and the strange delightful things that were part of her body, her gay smile with its touch of pathos, her lazy grace, her beautifully modulated voice, the small curls of her hidden hair.

  In the Forum the crowd did not diminish; for more people came to take the place of those who went. Women came leading their children, to cast ornaments into the fire. The children, bidden by their mothers, cast in their bullae, the charms worn round the neck by both girl and boy — a tiny phallic image inside a capsule of gold or wood. Some freedmen of Caesar’s had arrived and were trying to salvage Caesar’s remains from the bonfire, raking away some ashes from the flame-heart to place in a funeral urn. There was a large group of Jews at the corner where Gallus stood, and they were chattering loudly in Greek and Aramaic. Caesar they looked on as a special benefactor because he had restored to Iudaea the port of Ioppa.

  Gallus felt a touch on his arm and found Amos at his side. “What are they talking about?” he asked.

  “Some say that Caesar was the Redeemer,” answered Amos, at once assuming a voice of loud disputatiousness. “But Nachum, him that you see there with the spittle on his beard, he says that the Redeemer will be called Ben Joseph and will, moreover, lie unburied in the streets of Jerusalem. But Ephraim, that’s the one with the hair growing out of his ears, he says that the Messiah will be known only by one sign — that he will be an iron broom to sweep the corruption from Israel and the world, and therefore why shouldn’t he be Caesar? But Amran, the one with his front teeth missing, says that the Messiah died long ago, coming as King Hiskia.”

  Amos stared round with wild eyes, ready for a challenge. “But they’re all wrong. Would you believe they could be so cross-grained when the truth is written by Isaiah who says that butter and honey shall he eat, whereby he may know how to refuse the evil and choose the good.”

  Gallus shrugged his shoulders, for he knew no need of saviours, being in love. “Come and have a drink with me, and tell me more about your Karni.”

  Amos screwed up his eyes and pursed his lips in warning that secrets must not be spoken lightly in earshot of possible betrayers; and together they walked off to a wine-bar. Finding Gallus a sympathetic audience, Amos began to weep over his wine and assert that his life was blighted; for he loved Karni and would never be able to marry her. For the girl was a slave, a superior and talented slave, the slave of a Queen, but still a slave; and Ezra would never buy
her for Amos, which would be the most satisfactory arrangement all round.

  Gallus was touched, and offered to speak to Ezra on the subject, at which Amos became panicked and extorted a promise of silence both in this life and the next. No, he would have to acquiesce in losing Karni, although she had dove’s eyes in her tresses, and lips like a thread of scarlet.

  “But,” he remarked, in consolation, “a woman eats her fill, and wipes her lips with the back of her hand, and says that she has not sinned. So the man that puts his happiness in the care of one of them is like him that tries to stick out the eye of a raven on the wing.”

  Nevertheless Amos suggested that he would greatly appreciate a small loan, because the cost of renting a room for his beloved was fast ruining him; and a few days ago he had been waylaid by a brutal Ethiopian who had robbed him of nine denars and then swallowed them out of mere spite.

  *

  Surely Cytheris couldn’t object to having the lent toga and sachel returned. Gallus, leaving Amos, went hopefully on his way. She was at home; and the janitor, still somewhat distrustful, admitted him after a pause.

  “O but I meant you to keep those things,” said Cytheris, so calm and self-possessed that it seemed impossible a kiss had ever disordered her braided hair.

  Her words sounded as if she hadn’t meant him to come back, and he blushed and stammered. But she hadn’t meant to hurt him; and feeling more secure in herself now that he had left the house, she went on to say how glad she was to see him. So he blushed and stammered more than ever, but happily this time, though he had quite forgotten his plan of taking her resolutely in his arms as soon as they were alone. Then they had nothing to say to one another; and she sat patiently waiting for him to go; and he wondered how a woman could preserve such a blissful calm, a repose that did not need to utter itself in words, while the need to say something was tugging at his mind with such wretched distraction that, having a world of things to say, he could say nothing.