Caesar

by Allan Massie

  The boy was Appius Claudius Pulcher, whose father had been consul ten years previously. That father, whom I had known to be proud, corrupt and superstitious (like so many of the clan) had fallen at Pharsalus in the ranks of the Pompeians, though he had despised Pompey himself. He had married his daughter to my cousin, Marcus Brutus, who, disgusted by her infidelity, had put her aside, in order to marry Cato's daughter Porcia, certainly a woman better suited to his priggish nature. This boy must be the fruit of his father's last marriage to a woman half his age whose name I couldn't recall. Appius Claudius Pulcher had hated Caesar. Looking at the boy I couldn't imagine he felt any powerful desire to avenge his father. He probably revelled in his freedom from paternal rebuke, which would certainly have been forthcoming.

  There was a silence in the room. My wife appeared content, happy to enjoy what she had provoked. She wanted a scene. So I determined to deny her that. As for the boy, he had clearly got more than he bargained for. I was travel-stained, grim, returned from the wars, a general of renown, not - he must have thought — a safe man to be discovered cuckolding. I told him to get out of bed and dress himself. He obeyed; in some confusion, made uncomfortable by the gaze I directed at him. Then I escorted him to the door of the bedchamber.

  "We shall say no more of this at present," I said. "You are ' not to be blamed. On the other hand, you must understand that you have insulted me. Before I determine what must be done, I must talk to my wife. Then you and I will have to talk also. For the moment, think yourself fortunate that I am not a man of the same temper as your late father."

  I turned back towards my wife. She had thrown the coverings aside, and lay on her back, her legs spread, her right hand resting between them.

  "How masterful you are, husband," she said.

  Her voice was low. I unbuckled my tunic and leaned towards her. She put her right arm around my neck and drew me down, and giggled again.

  A little later she said:

  "We make a better pair than you thought, don't we?"

  * * *

  She proved this to me repeatedly in the weeks that followed. I began to think that I had got a better bargain in Longina than I had thought to have. Perhaps the young Appius Claudius had woken her up. (I soon resolved that problem, by the way, arranging to have him attached to the staff of the Procurator of Judaea. Since the appointment seemed to come direct from Caesar, he did not dare demur. It was unfortunate, and in no way my fault, that he got a fever and died before the end of the year. To her credit, Longina did not protest when I told her that her lover was being despatched into what was effectively exile. I have reason to suspect that they continued to correspond, however, but by the time I came to that conclusion I had other more important matters to consider.)

  Longina was not well-educated. Indeed she was scarcely educated at all. She wrote in the same tumbling and ungrammatical manner that she talked. But she was no fool; her wits were quick, and she had a liveliness that one would not have looked for in Cassius' daughter.

  My father-in-law viewed the progress of our marriage with an ironic detachment. That was a mood, or air, which he cultivated. Cassius was in reality a man of the most intense passion, proud, jealous and implacable. He had made the marriage in cynical fashion: Caesar had conquered; I was a favourite of the dictator; therefore the alliance was desirable. He looked on me still in those weeks after my return from Spain with an appraising eye. In my company he usually spoke well of Caesar.

  As for my wife, she was eager to make the acquaintance of the dictator. She urged me to invite him to our house: "For dinner, supper, anything."

  "Caesar demands intelligent conversation," I said.

  "And we can't provide it? Well, ask that old bore Cicero if you like."

  "Caesar can scarcely go out to dinner without finding Cicero in the party. People look on the old man as a sort of insurance policy. Actually, though Caesar respects him, he more and more finds his tendency to dominate the conversation irritating. Besides, Cicero suspects I penned the Anti-Cato. He has been cool to me recently."

  * * *

  My objections, which I did not in any case understand myself, were overruled. Caesar was invited, and accepted. At the last minute, my wife added my cousin Marcus Brutus to the party — an invitation which did not please me.

  "Is it true," my wife asked Caesar, "that you have invited the Queen of Egypt to Rome?"

  We all knew he had, and that Calpurnia was furious.

  Caesar smiled: "I hope you will make her acquaintance when she arrives."

  "Oh I don't expect she'll want to meet ladies," Longina said. "Not if what I've heard is true." "And what have you heard?"

  My wife screwed up her nose so that she looked like a little girl.

  "Well, that she put her brother to death and that he was also her husband. Is that true?" "Absolutely."

  "And when he was her husband, did they . . . you know?" "Did they what?"

  "Well, you know, you must know, go to bed together, fuck?"

  "That is something only the Queen could tell you."

  "I don't suppose she would though."

  "I am sure you will not be too shy to ask her."

  I had seen it so often before. Perhaps that was why I had attempted to divert Longina from her intended course. Now Caesar exercised his old accustomed charm. His manner was at the same time intimate and perfunctory. He gave the girl the impression that his whole attention was concentrated on her; and yet he remained aware of his performance, aware of his wider audience whom he invited to admire it.

  It was like a play unfolding of which one already knows the conclusion; the chief interest for the audience is therefore to judge the skill with which the dramatist has handled his material. Sometimes, now, especially in these summer evenings, when the mist rising from the valley turns my mood to melancholy (as if there were not already sufficient reasons more substantial than my imaginings to induce such a mood, even a darker one, even despair), then it seems to me that the whole gaudy course of a man's life is indeed no more than such a play, a charade which we enact for the amusement of the indifferent gods. And so I watched the to-and-fro of the conversational dance, saw my wife's lips curve in invitation as she leaned towards him displaying, as if by nature, the rich roundness of a breast, heard her laugh gurgle forth like a stream long dammed-up now breaking free; and all the time, Caesar, the Master, drew her towards him as if there was no more question that she would come than there is that the sun will sink into the western sea.

  "What sort of man are you, son-in-law?" Cassius said.

  The question was rhetorical.

  "If Caesar or any man debauched my wife . . ."

  "Come, Cassius," I replied, "there is no need for this pretence. You know very well what you would do. The same as me: nothing, in the case of Caesar. That sort of virtue is out-of-date. Besides, I have shared women with Caesar before, and on some of them he had a prior claim."

  "You deceive yourself, son-in-law, only when you lay claim to any equality with Caesar."

  "Very well, Cassius. I yield to you on that point, and I acknowledge also that you may have a father's interest in not seeing your daughter disgraced. But then I tell you, she is not disgraced. Longina made the running herself. She is no flower that Caesar has picked."

  "And does that not anger you?"

  "Cassius," I said, "I thought you were a philosopher."

  But if I could not tell the truth to Cassius, I could not hide it from my cousin Casca.

  That was strange, for Casca was not a man whom I could expect to understand noble indignation. I suppose it was because he knew me better than any other man. He knew, for instance, that at any time up to the hour of my return from Spain (when I had surprised young Appius Claudius, himself incidentally an admiration of Casca's) I would have been happy to trade Longina to Caesar in return for the many favours he had done me. But Casca also saw, even while he mocked me, that something more than my vanity was wounded. He saw that I had really believed
that, simply because I had found in myself an

  unexpected tenderness for my wife, she experienced the same feeling for me.

  And now Casca said:

  "So the Senate proposes to grant divine honours to Caesar. It would be appropriate if you were to speak in favour of the motion."

  "In favour?"

  "Naturally, my dear. To lose your wife to a man, however distinguished, may be thought disgraceful; to be cuckolded by a god is no shame."

  "I can see only one objection, cousin," I replied. "While we may indeed grant divine honours to Caesar . . ."

  "Say 'shall', not 'may'."

  "Very well: shall. While we shall do so, nobody will believe that Caesar is in reality a god."

  "Oh," Casca said, "when you introduce the word 'reality', you lose me, and I lose interest. Who is to say what constitutes 'reality' in this fool's world? Are my debts reality? On which subject, by the way, I am distressed that Caesar has betrayed those who trusted him, and declined to cancel debts as we were told he would; not, of course, that I believed that assurance. Certainly my creditors think them real; as for me, I dismiss them from my mind. And as for passion, which some call reality, you are aware — how could you fail to be? - of my passion for Diosippus, when the moon is waxing, and Nicander when it is on the wane, but you also know that if it was in my interest I would have either of the brats crucified — which I mention only as the nastiest death I can envisage. So where is the reality of my passion? I would weep for either lad, naturally, and my tears would be copious and impressive, but they would not prevent me from acting in my own interest."

  "So your self-interest is reality."

  "Is it? Is it? I wish I knew."

  He leaned back and stroked his belly. We were in the hot room of the baths, I remember. He brushed the palm of his hand across the folds of flesh and flicked a stream of sweat and vapour on to the tiled floor.

  "Is it? There are times, cousin, when it seems to me that there are only two realities I recognise: the first is physical. The body is real, I can't deny that."

  "Many have."

  "They have less flesh than I. The body is real and so, as a consequence, are its demands." "And the mind?"

  "Belongs to the body . . . part of the body." "It controls the body."

  Casca laughed: "How can you, an old soldier, say so! You have known fear in battle. Which is in the ascendant then? Mind or body? Or does fear force itself on you from without?"

  "If so, fear is real."

  "We think it is. And as for the mind controlling the body, let us return to where we started. There is a part of the body" — he fondled it - "which sometimes displays an intelligence of its own. I may wish to stimulate it, and it says 'no' and remains limp. At other times it moves on its own without my permission. In short, it does as it pleases whether I am awake or asleep. Sometimes I am awake and it sleeps. Sometimes I sleep and the dear little thing dances and sweats. So where is the reality of the controlling mind?"

  "You said you recognised two realities. What is the other?"

  "Boredom."

  "That is not a philosophical answer."

  "Boredom," he repeated, "which forces one to seek reality in action. Which reality will, of course, be an illusion."

  He called on the slave to drench him with cold water, and then waved him away.

  "Disappointing," he said. "The dear little thing took no interest. It is only your vanity which is wounded by your wife's adultery."

  "Men have killed for that reason."

  "What? Kill Caesar? My dear Mouse, that is an interesting idea. That might release me from boredom. How shall we set about it? All the same, Mouse, you will never kill Caesar on account of a chit like your wife."

  It will seem strange to anyone who reads this apology for my life that when I have such a short time before me (as I fear) I should spend part of it extracting trivialities from my memory. But if this arouses incomprehension, it will be because such a reader is incapable of imagining the complexity of things. The truth is that we do not know the springs of conduct; we do not know which particular circumstance or feeling drives a man to any particular action. When now I think of Casca arguing for the autonomy of sexual desire, I find that his arguments have an application that may be pushed much further. If we do not know why we experience desire, if this is something which escapes our control, then can we pretend to know why we are driven to still more obscure courses?

  It seems to me now that I had never questioned my attachment to Caesar. When the civil war broke out, I was on his side, one of his favoured generals. It was natural that I continued so. I never argued the case, and not only because I was inspired by Caesar's own confidence of victory.

  My imagination drifts back to that moment when we crossed the little stream called the Rubicon, and to that strange figure which rose out of the mist, playing the pipes, on the further bank. The image is vivid: perhaps my imagination has enriched or perverted it: was there really, for instance, that suggestion of goat's legs? Were the limbs even covered, as memory insists, in goatskin? Some of the soldiers, you will recall, cried out that the god Pan welcomed us to Italy. We all felt that something rarely mysterious presented itself to us; it gave an aura of incomprehensibility to what was in reality a militarily commonplace action. Had the sun been up, the figure would have appeared absurd.

  Yet the memory will not leave me; surely, memory insists, there was some significance to that moment which the mind refuses to grasp. Or is perhaps incapable of grasping.

  Now, considering it, it seems to me at the very least, part of a vaster mystery: why we subdued our wills to Caesar.

  My cousin Marcus Brutus once spoke in terms of fatalism: we were doomed to submit to Caesar. My father-in-law Cassius rebuked him. The fault, he said, lay not in our stars. The fault was in our natures. No impersonal force, only our own weak- " ness, determined that we should be underlings.

  Artixes has just left me. We have been drinking wine, thin, sour stuff such as they make in these barbarian parts, but wine nevertheless, and I think I am a little drunk.

  No matter. There is truth in wine, or, as the proverb has it, wine releases the voice of truth.

  Caesar: did I submit my will to him that morning when he emerged from my mother's bedchamber and I responded to his smile with a smile? And when I found Longina's door barred against me, and knew Caesar was within, and so left the house, and descended to the Suburra to a brothel where I paid for an African girl, was that merely yet another acknowledgment of my inferiority?

  That was the trouble, wasn't it? Caesar diminished me. He diminished all of us. And we could never understand how or why.

  There were times - I have recounted some - when I myself, by my words or actions, saved Caesar from the disaster for which he appeared to be heading - in Egypt and in Spain, for example. There were times when he set me tasks which I accomplished better than he could have performed them himself.

  It made no difference.

  As my mother said: "Of course we all adore Caesar but at the same time we know he cares nothing for us."

  "That," some might say, "was because he was truly a god."

  I have never seen Caesar afraid. I admit that. Gods are never afraid.

  That proves nothing. There was a centurion from Aricia, I remember, a sour, bilious man who was never afraid. But Caesar had the imagination to sense fear. Did he? There were times when I have thought he lacked imagination. Certainly his literary style was peculiarly deficient in that quality. He once showed me a poem he had written. It was embarrassing. Catullus said that to me also.

  Caesar . . . Suppose I had joined Pompey. I might have been killed at Pharsalus, but I would have died a free man.

  Perhaps I should set myself to try to understand Labienus. We never made that attempt. It was simpler to condemn him.

  But Labienus was my precursor. I see that now.

  So: Labienus . . .

  We spoke of him with bitterness, of course. He was a trait
or. No man had been more richly rewarded by Caesar. Had things turned out otherwise, he would have shared the consulate with Caesar in 48, both supported by the authority of Pompey. Well, that was not to be, and in the crisis Labienus proved more mindful of old family loyalties to Pompey than of his long association with Caesar. When he departed, he did so scrupulously, not attempting to carry other of Caesar's officers with him. Later he regretted this failure, though at the time he considered his behaviour honourable. He wrote to me once on this matter. I still have the letter, which I recovered from the place of concealment I had thought fit for it, shortly before the disaster that landed me where I now find myself. It was in my travelling bureau when I was captured, and since my documents were recently restored to me, I think it proper to publish it now.

  It is dated some months after Pharsalus, from Africa whither Labienus had fled, and directed to me at my mother's house in Rome.

  Decimus Brutus,

  An old colleague fallen into adversity greets you. I beg you not to yield to what I suppose may be your initial impulse which might lead you to destroy this letter without perusing it.

  I write not to excuse myself, for in my opinion my conduct does not require exculpation. Nor do I write to seduce you from your loyalties, which would in any case — I have no doubt - be a vain effort.

  You know of course that I was torn between two loyalties, and there is no need therefore to expatiate on the conflict of loyalties which engaged me. Suffice to repeat that I had obligations to both Caesar and Pompey, and that I chose to honour the latter.

  It would be easy to maintain that that was all there was to my decision: that, since I recognised my loyalty to Pompey as being superior, and also anterior, to my loyalty to Caesar — a deeper thing altogether - this was the sole cause of my decision to adhere to Pompey. And I have sufficient confidence in your virtue to be assured that you would not question such an assertion, but would indeed honour me for my candour and for my recognition that certain loyalties should properly outweigh others, even when the latter appear more likely to bring personal advantage, and even greater glory.