Caesar i-3

by Allan Massie

  "You haven't given me time, and so I've forgotten now what they were…"

  "Don't be a tease."

  "Very well, Mother. In reverse order: I neither loathed Egypt nor loved it; the Queen of Egypt is having an affair with Caesar, but neither heart will be broken. As for the General, Caesar is Caesar: I'm sure you must have heard him say so."

  "He wrote to me, you know, by the last post, to say how well you had done, and how I should be so very proud of you."

  "Caesar excels at graciousness. You know that too, Mother."

  "I've asked Calpurnia to supper. I hope you don't mind. She is desperate to have word of her hero-husband."

  "What word should I give her? He has sent her presents by me. That's something, I suppose."

  "I leave it to you to decide. There's no doubt, by the way, that she knows all about the Queen."

  "Nobody, Mother, does that."

  I withdrew, sacrificed to our family gods (as it is proper to do after a journey, to honour them and express gratitude for one's safe arrival) and retired to the chamber which had been prepared for me. I could not sleep. My mind was troubled, as it had been for weeks now, by images of Cleopatra. It amused me that my mother had arranged that Calpurnia should be with us; it showed that her capacity for demure mischief-making was not exhausted.

  Calpurnia is more of a puzzle to me than Cleopatra. Of course it's well known that Caesar married her for political reasons — her father, Calpurnius Piso, was consul in 58 and a trusted ally of Pompey's when Caesar and Pompey first came together in friendship. But he remained married long after the political value of the union had expired, and he did so even though Calpurnia was notably lacking in charm or beauty. Thin, angular, with a voice like an Ostia fishwife, and a temper to match, she frequently embarrassed Caesar at dinner-parties. She had the absurd habit of disputing people's observations on matters of which she could not be other than ignorant. Moreover, she didn't hesitate to contradict Caesar himself. I remember once when the talk turned on the question of the transmigration of souls — a theory that had long attracted Caesar — and he spoke of how, visiting Athens for the first time, he had found his way to the house which he was seeking without enquiring directions from any passer-by, but travelling with certainty as if he had already made that journey many times, perhaps even daily, in another life, she interrupted to suggest that he was probably drunk, because it's well-known that drunk men are favoured by fortune…

  "Besides," she said, "I expect it was a brothel you were seeking, and I've never heard of a pig that couldn't find its way to a sty."

  Caesar tried to laugh it off — and indeed Calpurnia made this last comment with a bray like a she-ass, inviting us to share the joke — but he wasn't pleased. I wondered then if he was frightened of Calpurnia.

  It sounds absurd. We all know that Caesar was fearless. He made a point often enough of telling us so. Yet, as my friend Gaius Valerius Catullus was wont to say, "The most mysterious silence in the world is that which surrounds a man and woman when they are alone together."

  Now, naturally enough, she questioned me narrowly concerning Cleopatra — Calpurnia was the sort of woman who always knew the stories that were going the rounds. She didn't trouble to hide her conviction that Caesar was again being unfaithful to her. Most women would conceal such knowledge, on account of their pride. But Calpurnia's pride was of a different order; she delighted in presenting herself to the world as a wronged woman.

  "She's of an age to be his granddaughter," she said. "Not quite."

  "I've done my calculations. She would be under marriageable age if she was a Roman. What does he see in her?"

  "She amuses him. There's nothing more to it. Except this: the relationship is political. The importance of Egypt is well-recognised. Therefore it's a good thing to be on friendly terms with its Queen."

  "Friendly terms! But you men always stick together. The only thing that surprises me is that he preferred her to her brother. He had him put to death, didn't he? Was he very ugly?"

  "I've no idea."

  "You're a rotten liar. You're blushing, your face gives you away."

  I tried to turn the conversation to more general questions. But she kept returning to the matter of Cleopatra.

  At last she said: "He'll have to come home in a couple of months. His dictatorship expires, doesn't it? Will he ask for it to be renewed, or will he be content with more ordinary honours?"

  "How can I answer a question if his wife is ignorant of the matter?"

  Then, to divert her, I sent a slave to fetch the presents which Caesar had entrusted to me.

  "There's something inescapably vulgar about all Oriental workmanship," she said.

  Nevertheless she took them with her when she left, though I later heard that, when Caesar eventually came home, he found that some of the jewels which he had had his quartermaster so carefully select had been passed on to Calpurnia's favoured freedwomen. As a loan, of course; if she dismissed a servant she took care to retrieve anything she had lent her.

  When Calpurnia left, I said good night to my mother, and went out into the streets, saying I required fresh air, to blow away memories of Calpurnia's spite.

  "You won't find that in Rome, nothing but filth. Behave yourself," and she held out her cheek for me to kiss.

  I felt, as I knew I would, the excitement of return, the strange sense of liberation that the city's nocturnal life offered. I passed through the Suburra, stopping to admire the filthy shows outside the brothels. My ears were assailed by the babble of countless tongues, as if all the languages of the world sought to express their vices in the stew of Rome. My poor dead friend Catullus had often insisted that filth and beauty were two sides of the same coin. And, thinking of Catullus, I admitted where I was heading, in a roundabout fashion.

  He had loved Clodia to distraction; I myself only knew him after he had broken away, with tears and in trembling. His voice shook when he spoke of her. He could escape neither the memory of her love — the beauty of those great dark ox-eyes — nor the horror with which she had filled him. "We are drawn to what terrifies and disgusts us," he said. "She demands adoration, like the goddess Cybele, and then slays her admirers. Her lusts are insatiable. She exhausts her lovers, and unmans them. I trust, Mouse, that you will never find yourself in the clutches of so terrible a woman."

  That was the warning he gave me, and since then, Clodia's reputation had been utterly destroyed. Who does not remember the lawsuit she brought against Caelius Rufus, himself a close friend of Catullus? (They were the same age — I am some years younger.) When Caelius left her, she accused him of all sorts of crimes: he had tried to poison her, he had defrauded her of money she had lent him, he had plotted the assassination of an Egyptian diplomat, he had tried to raise a riot in Naples; and so on. It was a collection of absurdities. Men said the woman had taken leave of her senses.

  Caelius got Cicero to defend him. I was in court. It would be, people promised, better than the gladiators. "Cicero hates Clodia, on account of the way her brother persecuted him. You know, of course, she was her brother's lover. Fact." That was the way people talked.

  Cicero's speech was masterly. Whatever doubts — generally well-founded — people have expressed about his character, no one has ever denied his genius for forensic oratory. And I doubt if he has ever displayed it to more effect than in his defence of Caelius.

  He began quietly, in subdued fashion, remarking that the case against Caelius scarcely needed a defence. It was enough to draw attention to the beauties of his friend's character and the honourable nature of his career. It would be a pity, he observed, as if in an aside, if such a career should be besmirched "by the influence of a prostitute". Surely, he asked, the wantonness of women ought to be controlled?

  This appeal to the solidarity of our sex had the court nodding in approval.

  Then he turned on Clodia, though without even glancing in her direction. He would hesitate, he said, to mention a Roman lady, the mother of a
family, in a law-court, without due respect, if she had not herself launched such an attack on his worthy friend Caelius. There was another reason for him to hold back; he couldn't confess to be unprejudiced, not only on account of his friendship with Caelius, but also because "I have in the past had grave personal disagreements with the lady's husband — I beg your pardon, I mean of course her brother — I always make that mistake."

  And he turned to the jury, spreading his hands wide in simulated apology, while, behind him, Caelius and his friends, who may have known the gibe was coming, rocked with laughter.

  Cicero knew, however, that he had to walk warily. Clodia belonged to one of our greatest families, while he himself was a new man from the unimportant town of Arpinum. So, rather than attack Clodia directly in his own person, he summoned up the memory of her greatest ancestor, Appius Claudius the Censor. He had his imaginary figure (for all reconstructions of dead men must be only imaginary) describe his own achievements, praise the virtue of the great ladies of the Claudian family, and then deplore the manner in which Clodia had disgraced them: her choice of a plebeian form of the family name was itself disgraceful, and yet her conduct disgraced even the plebeians.

  The woman, Cicero suggested, was not only bad. She was also silly. She was frivolous, without any sense of dignity. She behaved like a woman in a comedy; she might have been created by Terence or Plautus. Since we all knew that the women in these comedies were heartless and impudent tarts, Clodia shrivelled before our eyes. She had, Cicero implied, the morals and manners of a whore, whose word cannot even be weighed.

  Finally, he turned to the charge of poisoning which Clodia had laid against Caelius, and laughed it out of court, exposing its improbability, even impossibility. It was the product of nothing but spite. "This is not the final scene of a comedy," he said, "it is the end of a farce"; and which of us, hearing these words, did not glance at the ox-eyed beauty and see her aristocratic splendour fall away to reveal the naked showgirls who prance, cavort and gesture obscenely in these degraded spectacles. "You will not convict a virtuous nobleman on the word of a vile trollop"; that was his message.

  Clodia did not move during this terrible attack. If she felt the faces of the crowd turn towards her, she gave no sign. If she was aware that the young men who had accompanied her to court were drawing away from her, dissociating themselves from her disgrace, she paid no heed. And at that moment something appalling happened. I fell hopelessly, overwhelmingly in love. I was seized with the most intense desire.

  Even as I trembled, I asked myself why this should be. "Know thyself " — that is the sum of wisdom offered by the philosophers, and few of us know ourselves but slightly. Perhaps that is the greater wisdom. For, in this revelation now vouchsafed me of the form of union I desired, I knew, even as I throbbed with impatient lust, that I was surrendering to a part of myself, perhaps my profoundest nature, which would render me an object of scorn and contempt to all virtuous men. I was horrified by what I learned of my own character, and yet it was inescapable that, with loins aching, I presented myself at her house that evening.

  She was alone. I could not believe that she had passed an evening alone in her life. The great saloon into which a stammering slave ushered me was cold as a winter morning. I waited a long time. I wanted to run away. Reason prompted me to make my escape while there was still time. I remembered the awful words Catullus had spoken. I remembered how he had told me that she would sleep with a squinting Spaniard who polished his cheeks with his own urine, how he himself had waited in her antechamber while she pleasured herself with ignoble wretches she had picked up in filthy taverns or sleazy streets.

  I recalled his lines:

  Give her my goodbye, her and all her lovers,

  Whom she hugs so close to her in their hundreds,

  Loving not one, yet with her constant lusting,

  Leaving their loins limp…

  I remembered the poem written on the myth of Cybele and Attis. (Do you know the myth, Artixes? Let me tell it you.) Attis loved the goddess Cybele, with passionate terror, such as the old gods demand. Either in obedience to her will, or to keep himself pure for her service (there are different versions of the story), he castrated himself with a stone knife, and lived as her worshipper, far from cities, in the forest, with a group of other youths who had submitted in like fashion to the goddess. Well, my friend Catullus took this story, and translated it to the present day. The voice in his poem is that of a Greek youth who has joined her cult, abiding in the wild region where alone she reigns now, and has mutilated himself to do her pleasure and honour. But then, in the poem, he recovers from his madness, and looks back with bitter pain and sorrow on all that he has lost. Learning of his remorse, the goddess lets lions loose on him, so that he flees, in terror and renewed madness, to the heart of the forest darkness.

  And when Catullus read these verses to me, he laid his hand on my shoulder and said, "I pray, Mouse, that you never know the like."

  "Have you come in mockery or in pity?"

  She was standing before me, and, immersed in these memories, I had not seen her approach. Her hair hung loose, and she wore a white gown, like a virgin. It was very simple and fell in folds to the ground. How did I know at once that it was all she wore? Her huge dark eyes were even darker, being in shadow from the candle which she held in a golden holder in her right hand, raised aloft.

  "I wish neither, Decimus Brutus."

  "I was in court today."

  "With all Rome."

  Her left hand was laid on my cheek, cool, dry and with a tender touch.

  "And you thought… what?" I could not speak.

  Perhaps my silence maddened her, for she tore her nails the length of my cheek, and the blood ran.

  "How many men were there, ranged against one woman? And you were among them and you have the impertinence to come here. Was it to see if I feel shame?"

  I sat still, like a dog that has been whipped, and fears to move, lest he invite more trouble.

  Then she gave way to rage. She threw the candlestick across the room. (Fortunately, it fell in such a way as to extinguish the flame.) She delivered a tirade that would have inflamed the mob. She cursed Cicero in words that a lady is not supposed to know, let alone utter. She reviled the male sex, hypocrites, brutes, and deceivers. She denounced Caelius as an invert incapable of pleasing a woman; she had found better lovers among slaves and freedmen. She returned to Cicero. Did I know she had years before had him in thrall? He had adored her, sworn he would leave his wife and marry her, and she had laughed at him. That was why he hated her so. It was not his sense of morality that had been outraged — "Cicero's sense of morality, the man who defended the murderer of my brother — what claim has that sack of dung to morality?" — No, today he had taken the revenge which his own wounded vanity had demanded and long nursed the desire to achieve. She paused.

  "Your cheek's bleeding."

  She rang a bell, sent the slave for water mixed with myrrh and hyssop, and bathed my wound.

  "You will have had worse wounds in battle." "None sharper."

  "It was a shame to make a pretty boy like you a surrogate for that old impotent lecher. He couldn't do it, you know. Not like Caesar. Or you, I'm sure."

  She let her robe fall away, and drew me down on top of her on a gold rug made from lionskins. Her tongue licked the last blood that still seeped from my cheek. That was how it began.

  It could not finish. It has never been able to finish. It was like nothing else I have known. Like everyone I have had many lovers — the first indeed was her brother Publius Clodius Pulcher, whom Cicero derided as "the pretty boy". He was even more beautiful than his sister, and it was no wonder, I have often thought, that they should have had an incestuous relationship, as everyone asserts, for in both the sexes were strangely mixed. The Roman people adored Clodius as if he had been a lovely girl, and many feared Clodia as a virile destroyer. In bed with her, I discovered more of myself than I had ever imagined, and yet rem
ained confused. She felt no tenderness, except for the memory of her brother, and yet no one, at certain moments and in certain moods, so filled one with tenderness. She terrified me, and I adored her.

  She was ill that evening when I left my mother's house and made my way to hers on the Palatine. The house was dark. For a moment I thought it deserted, and knew both relief and heartache. I never approached her chamber without trepidation, dreading to learn who or what I might discover there. But this night again she was alone, as that first time. She had been suffering from fever. Her beauty, so well preserved by art, was disturbed by nature. She looked her age.

  When we had made love, performed our sexual acts, achieved a short-lived escape from the desert into which we were abruptly returned, she told me she was dying.

  I wept, I remember that; yet even as I did so, felt my heart lift at the prospect of escape. It was an illusion; I have never escaped, any more than poor Catullus did. The only persons who were unaffected by her — the only ones who enjoyed her and maintained equanimity — were her brother, who as a child of Eros knew delight without the sense of waste, and Caesar.

  She was fascinated by Caesar for that reason. He had escaped her, and yet she felt no anger against him. This puzzled her.

  "When he first told me — in this very bed — that he was a god, I laughed at him. I thought he was inviting me to share a joke. But he meant it. He is descended as everyone knows from Venus, but he believes he is also inhabited by the goddess. They tell me he fucks the Queen of Egypt now. Is she as beautiful as they say?"

  "She does not compare with you, Clodia."

  "But…"

  "She is a child, an adolescent. What fascinates Caesar is that she is no more capable of love than he is."

  "Then they are well-matched. Does Caesar know you fucked her?"