The Woman of Andros / the Ides of March

by Thornton Wilder

  Caesar to Pompeia.

  [September 13. From his offices, at eight in the morning.]

  I hope, my dear wife, that you have thought over the injustice of your charges against me this morning. I ask your pardon for having left the house this morning without answering your last question.

  It makes me very unhappy to refuse you anything. It makes me doubly unhappy to refuse you the same request over and over again, refurnishing reasons which on earlier occasions you have told me you understood, you agreed with, and you accepted. Since it is these repetitions which try my patience and do an injustice to your intelligence, let me put some of them down in writing.

  I can do nothing for your cousin. The record of his cruelty and corruption on the Island of Corsica becomes more widely known every day. It may develop into an enormous public scandal; my enemies may finally render me responsible and it may take a great deal of time which I should be giving to other things. As I told you, I can give him any post, within reason, in the Army; I will not appoint him within five years to any administrative position.

  I repeat that it is most unsuitable that you attend the ceremonies at the Temple of Serapis. I know that many remarkable things take place there for which it is not easy to furnish an explanation, and I know that the Egyptian rites arouse strong emotion and send the votaries away in states of mind which they and you describe as ‘happier’ and ‘better.’ Believe me, my dear wife, I have studied them closely. Those Egyptian cults offer particular dangers to our Roman natures. We are active; we believe that even the smaller decisions of the daily life have a moral importance; that our relation to the Gods is strictly related to our conduct. I have known women of your position in Egypt. From time to time they visit their temples in order to prepare their souls for immortality after death; they roll on the floor and howl; they take long imagined journeys during which they are ‘washing their souls’ and passing from stage to stage of divinity. The next day they return to their homes and are again cruel to their servants, deceitful to their husbands, avaricious, noisy and quarrelsome, self-indulgent, and totally indifferent to the misery in which the mass of the people of their country live. We Romans know that our souls are engaged in this life, and the journeys they make and the washing we give them are nothing more than our duties, our friendships, and our sufferings if we have them.

  As to Clodia’s dinner I ask you to trust my judgment. In these other matters I am willing to furnish arguments; I could do it in this case also, but this letter is already long and we both have more profitable things to do than to rehearse the history of that couple. They might have become outstanding friends of the Roman good, as their ancestors were, instead of laughingstocks to the people and a consternation to patriots. This they know well. They do not expect us to accept their invitations.

  You tell me that my appointees are everywhere enriching themselves at the expense of the State. I was surprised this morning to hear you say this. I do not think, my dear Pompeia, that it is a wife’s business to taunt her husband with inefficiency or reprehensible neglect on the basis of rumours she has picked up in general conversation. It is more suitable that she ask him for an explanation of charges which affect her honour as much as they affect his. If you lay before me an example of such profiteering I shall give you an answer. It could not be a short one, for I would have to open your eyes to the difficulties inherent in administering a world, the extent to which one must compromise with the greed of capable men, to the antagonism always present in one’s subordinates, to the differences that distinguish conquered lands from those long incorporated in the Republic, and to the methods one employs in assisting headstrong men to plunge to their own ruin.

  Your frequent charge that I do not love you cannot be repeatedly answered without humiliating us both. No amount of protestation could assure you of my love, if you were not aware of it in every moment of our life. I return to you daily from my work with the most affectionate expectation; I pass with you all the time that is not devoted to my official duties; the very refusal of your requests is evidence of my concern for your dignity and greater happiness.

  Finally, you ask me, my dear Pompeia: Are we to have no enjoyment in our life? I beg you not to ask me that question lightly. All wives inevitably marry also the situation in which their husbands find themselves. Mine does not admit of the leisure and freedom that many enjoy; yet your position is one which many women envy. I shall do what I can to afford you a greater diversity of recreation; but the situation is not easily alterable.

  XII

  Cornelius Nepos: Commonplace Book.

  [The great historian and biographer appears to have kept an account of the events of his own time, information gathered from the most varied sources, as material toward some future work.]

  The sister of Caius Oppius tells my wife that at dinner Caesar discussed with Balbus, Hirtius, and Oppius the possible transfer of government to Byzantium or Troy. Rome: inadequate port, floods, extremes of climate, disease from the now uncorrectable overcrowding. Possibility of campaign into India?

  Dinner again with Catullus at the Aemilian Draughts and Swimming Club. Very pleasant company, young noblemen, representatives of the most illustrious houses of Rome. My chagrin in questioning them about their ancestors – their ignorance concerning them and, I must add, their indifference.

  They have elected Catullus to be their honorary secretary, I think out of tactful consideration for his poverty. Thus he is provided with an attractive apartment overhanging the river.

  He seems to be their adviser and confidant. They bring him their quarrels with their fathers, their mistresses, and their money lenders. Three times during dinner the clubhouse door was flung open and a distraught member rushed in shouting ‘Where’s Sirmio?’ (this nickname seems to be derived from his summer lodge on Lake Garda) and the two retired to a corner for a whispered consultation. His popularity does not appear to be based, however, on any indulgence toward them; he is as severe as their fathers and, although extremely licentious in conversation, is little short of austere in his life and attempts to inculcate ‘the Old Roman Way’ in them also. Curious.

  He seems to have chosen his best friends among the less cultivated members or, as he calls them to their faces, the Barbarians. One of these members told me that he never talks literature, except when drunk.

  He appears to be both stronger than he looks, and more frail. On the one hand he can outdo almost any member of the Club in those feats of strength and balance that arise so naturally toward the end of drinking parties – crossing the ceiling by swinging from rafter to rafter, or swimming the Tiber with a cat upheld in one hand, the cat howling but dry. It was he who stole the golden porpoise from the roof of the Tiburtine Rowing Club which figures so largely in the song he wrote for his own fraternity. On the other hand his health is undoubtedly frail. He seems to suffer from some weakness of the spleen or bowels.

  His love affair with Clodia Pulcher. Surprise to all. Inquire into it.

  Marina, a sister of our second cook, is a servant at the Dictator’s house. She talked freely to me. There have been no attacks of the Sacred Malady for some time. The Dictator spends every evening at home with his wife. He often rises in the middle of the night and goes into his study overhanging the cliff and works. He has an army pallet there and often falls asleep in the open air.

  Marina denies he has fits of temper. ‘Everybody says he has rages, sir, but it must be in the Senate and the Courts. I’ve only seen him in a rage three times in all five years, and never at servants, even when they make enormous mistakes. My mistress is often in a temper and wants us whipped, but he only laughs. We all tremble like mice in his presence, sir, but I don’t know why because he is the kindest master in the world. I think it’s because he looks at us all the time and really sees us. Mostly his eyes are smiling as though he knew what a servant’s life is and what we talk about in the kitchen. We all understand very well that cook who killed himself when the stove caught fire. There
were important guests and the Housemaster did not want to tell the Dictator so he made the cook go in and tell him. So the cook went in and told him the dinner was spoiled and the Dictator only laughed and said ‘have we some dates and salad?’ and the cook went and killed himself with the vegetable knife in the garden. He was angry, oh, it was terrible, when he discovered that Philemon who was his most favourite amanuensis and had been with him years, tried to poison him. It wasn’t like anger it was like weight, sir, just weight. You remember he wouldn’t let him be tortured, but directed that he be killed quickly. And the Chief of Police was very angry because he wanted to torture him to find out who was behind it. But what he did was worse than torture, I think. He called us all into the room, about thirty of us, and for a long time he looked at Philemon in silence and you could hear an ant walk. And then he talked about how we are all in the world together and how bits of trust begin to grow up between people, between husband and wife, and general and soldier, and master and servant; and I think it was the worst rebuke anybody ever got in the world, and while it was going on two girls fainted. It was like as though there were a God in the room, and afterwards my mistress vomited.

  Octavius is home from school at Appolonium. He’s a very silent boy and never talks to anybody.

  The secretary from Crete was heard saying to the secretary from Rimini that maybe the Queen of Egypt is coming to Rome, that’s Cleopatra the witch.

  My mistress can do anything with him. Whenever she weeps, he becomes like a distraught person. We cannot understand that, because he is always right and she is always wrong.

  Cicero to dinner. Much coquetry: his life is over; the ingratitude of the public, et cetera. On Caesar: ‘Caesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity. This is the vice of military leaders for whom every defeat is a triumph and every triumph almost a defeat.

  ‘Caesar has cultivated this immediacy in everything that he does. He seeks to eliminate any intermediary stage between impulse and execution. He carries a secretary with him wherever he goes and dictates letters, edicts, laws, at the moment they occur to him. Similarly he obeys any impulse of nature at the moment he is aware of it. He eats when he is hungry and he sleeps when he is sleepy. Time after time in the weightiest councils and in the presence of the consuls and the proconsuls who have crossed the world to confer with him he has left the meeting with a smiling apology and withdrawn briefly into the next room; but which of the calls of nature it was we could not know, perhaps it was to fall asleep, to eat a stew, or to embrace one of the three child-mistresses he keeps always at hand. I will say on his behalf that he accords these liberties to others as well as to himself. I shall never forget his consternation at one such reunion when he learned that an ambassador had foregone his dinner and was hungry. And yet – for there is no end to that man – in the siege of Dyrrhachium he starved with his soldiers, refusing the rations that had been reserved for the commanders. His unusual cruelty against the enemy when the siege was lifted was, I think, merely the delayed irritation of his hunger. He elevates these practices into a theory and declares that to deny that one is an animal is to reduce oneself to half a man.’

  Cicero does not enjoy discussing Caesar for long at a time; but he is not averse to retouching a portrait of himself with materials from that of Caesar. I was able to bring him back to the subject once more.

  ‘Every man must have an audience: our ancestors felt that the Gods were watching them; our fathers lived to be admired of men; for Caesar there are no Gods and he is indifferent to the opinion of his fellow men. He lives for the opinion of aftertime; you biographers, Cornelius, are his audience. You are the mainspring of his life. Caesar is trying to live a great book; he has not even enough of the artist in him to see that living and literary composition cannot furnish analogies to one another.’ Here Cicero began to shake with laughter. ‘He has gone so far as to introduce into life that practice inseparable from art which is erasure. He has erased his youth. Oh, yes, he has. His youth as he thinks it was, as everyone thinks it was, is a pure creation of his later years. And now he is beginning to erase the Gallic and the Civil Wars. I once reviewed five pages of the Commentaries in minute detail with my brother, Quintus, who was in closest association with Caesar during the events he is describing. There is not a single untruth, no – but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple’s corridors; she does not know herself. “I can endure lies,” she cries. “I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude.” ’

  [Here follows the passage in which Cicero discusses the possibility that Marcus Junius Brutus may be Caesar’s son. It is given in the document which opens Book IV.]

  ‘. . . Never forget that throughout the twenty most critical years of his life Caesar was penniless. Caesar and money! Caesar and money! Who will ever write that story? In all the myths of the Greeks there is no story to equal it, however fantastic – spendthrift without income and lavish with another’s gold. There is no time to go into that now, but to put it in a word: Caesar could never conceive of money as money when it was at rest. He could never think of it as a safeguard against the future, or as a thing of ostentation, as an evidence of one’s dignity, or power, or influence. For Caesar, money is only money at the moment of its doing something. Caesar felt that money is for those who know what to do with it. Now it is obvious that multimillionaires do not know what to do with their money except to hug it or to brandish it; Caesar, indifferent to money – an attitude which is of course most impressive and bewildering and even frightening to the rich – could always find plenty to do with money. He could always activate another’s gold. He could sing gold out of the strong-boxes of his friends.

  ‘But doesn’t his attitude go deeper than indifference? Doesn’t it mean that he is not afraid, not afraid of this world about us, not afraid of the future, not afraid of that Potential Predicament in the shadow of which so many people live? Now isn’t a large part of fear the memory of past fright and of past predicament? To a young child who has never seen his guardian frightened by thunder and lightning, it does not occur to be frightened by them. Caesar’s mother and aunt were very remarkable women. Greater terrors than thunder and lightning could not discompose their features. I can imagine that through all the terrors of the proscriptions and massacres – with flights by night through a burning country-side, hiding in caves – they never allowed the growing boy to see anything in them but a confident serenity. Could that be it, or does it go farther and deeper still? Does he believe himself to be a God, descendant of the Julian clan, born of Venus? – and hence beyond the reach of this world’s evil as he is beyond receiving any satisfaction from this world’s gifts?

  ‘At all events, he lived all those years without money of his own, in that little house down among the working people, with Cornelia and his little daughter; and yet the patrician of all patricians, wearing as wide a purple band as Lucullus’s, contradicting Crassus, contradicting me – oh, there’s no end to him!

  ‘But – and there is a subtle point here – Caesar is delighted to enrich others. The chief charge laid against him now by his enemies is that he permits his intimates to amass unconscionable fortunes, and the majority of his intimates are scoundrels. Yet isn’t that a sign that he despises them, for he identifies the p
ossession and accumulation of money with weakness – what am I saying? – with fright?’

  Asinius Pollio to dinner. He talked of Catullus and the poet’s bitter epigrams against the Dictator. ‘Strangest thing in the world. In conversation the poet defends Caesar against the constant contempt of his fellow club members; yet in his work releases that unbounded virulence. To observe: Catullus, most licentious in his verses, is astonishingly strict in his life and in his judgments on the lives of others. He apparently regards his relations with Clodia Pulcher – relations which he never mentions in conversation – as a pure and lofty love which no one could confuse with the ephemeral loves in which his friends are continuously involved. His epigrams against the Dictator though superficially political are uniformly couched in terms of obscenity. His hatred of Caesar seems to spring from two sources – his disapproval of the Dictator’s notorious immorality and his disapproval of the type of men with whom the Dictator surrounds himself and whom he permits to enrich themselves at the public expense. Again it is possible that he fears the Dictator as a rival for the affection of Clodia Pulcher or feels for him a jealousy, as it were retrospectively.

  XIII

  Catullus to Clodia.

  [September 14.]

  [Catullus on the 11th and 13th wrote two drafts for this letter. They were never sent to Clodia, but were read by Caesar among papers found in Catullus’s room and transcribed for the Dictator by his secret police. These drafts can be found in Book II as Document XXVIII.]

  I do not wish to be spared any knowledge that this world is a place of night and horror.

  The door you closed on me at Capua had that to say.

  You and your Caesar came into it to teach us this: You, that love and beauty of form are a deception; he, that in the farthest reaches of the mind one finds only the lust of the self.

  I have always known that you were drowning. You have told me so. Your arms and your face still struggle above the surface of the water. I cannot drown with you. The very door you closed upon me was a last appeal, for cruelty is the only cry that is left you to utter.