Caesar is Dead

by Jack Lindsay

  She was moving round before the couches, holding out her hand, begging, soliciting, cracking smutty jokes, clasping a shoulder in confidential good-fellowship, then whining and wheezing. Gallus tried to laugh, but failed. When she came back to the couch he would turn to her and make her notice him, at least for half a dozen words. He would say, “I thought it marvellous, the saddest thing I ever saw.” Surely that would startle her, make her want to know more about him, force her to see how different he was.

  “Six of them, sir, and the dirty dogs stole the savings

  I’d hidden in an old shoe; but I’m not complaining —

  that’s all in a night at home.

  But what I do call hard on a working woman

  was them refusing to pay me what they’d agreed.

  It’s against the law. They ought to respect the law ...”

  She halted for a moment in front of Gallus, and he stared back without a smile, striving to show in his deep eyes how much she stirred him. She seemed troubled, and passed on.

  “Splendid!” cried Dolabella. “As Plato would say, the perfected and therefore divine image of whoredom.”

  Gallus realised that the recitation had ended. He braced himself for the effort when he would make his comment to the returning Cytheris. All his life, he felt, depended on his ability to attract her interest.

  But he never made the comment. Dolabella, springing from his couch, caught up Cytheris as she stood with hands hanging loosely open at her sides, bowing gently to the handclaps. He swung her up in his arms and walked out of the room with her, kissing her on the throat. A courageous gesture for such a small man. Gallus saw her head lying back, her eyes closed. Was it the abandonment of despair or happiness? For a moment he was sure she had fainted, and he wanted to call out to Dolabella “Stop!” But what did it matter anyway? She would never be his. Gloom encompassed him, and he hated the world, hated his guffawing companions.

  A slave came with the message that the guests were to call for any wine or amusement, but Dolabella wished to be excused. Gallus rose to go, but felt leashed to the couch. Better stay and drink himself senseless on the wine of the cursed young noble who, ruined debtor as he was, yet took all he wanted from the unresisting earth. Ah, when Gallus was famous, how he would insult the leching pair — filthy beasts both of them, parasites, blind of heart and rutting without comprehension. The world was the poet’s, though no one knew it, least of all the poet.

  “Wine, boy!” he called, and began hotly arguing with his friend Nicias, who had introduced the pet-subject: Was the hen or the egg first-created? A debate on evolution sprang up. Did nature function by working from simple to complex, or by maintaining fixed species? Nicias led on the upholders of either proposition and then refuted both, declaring that they were mixing terms, using egg in the sense of seminal essence.

  “The egg’s only, so to speak, the digested semen. It doesn’t exist in its own right any more than a woman could evacuate without eating.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Gallus, determined to argue. “Push the terms back further still and your argument’s flat.”

  “But we must agree on the given terms.”

  “Why should they be given? Why not others?” Gallus wanted to argue on and on, round the vicious circle; he was pleased to see that he was infuriating Nicias, whom it was most impolitic to alienate. He didn’t care.

  But it was the truth. Give anyone but Cytheris. Save her from the gap in all calculations, the womb of nothingness. She was clutching at Dolabella, her body cloven by the primal error, losing herself in the chaos of heat, all to no purpose. Only to shut out Gallus, to leave him crying on the flaw in all syllogisms, all relationship. But Dolabella — why did Caesar favour such rats. Down with Caesar then. Come to me, Cytheris, and everything will be different.

  *

  Between waking and sleeping Cleopatra came to her decisions.

  She had wanted to have her brother whipped, but a whipping would cause too much of a scandal. There was scandal enough already; and yet no one could have lived more quietly than she had lived at Rome. Never once had she unleashed her impulse to cut a fine figure, to interfere in politics, to gather round her the intellectuals. But this brother of hers was too incongruous in the sarcastic society of Rome. Later she would have to think more about him; meanwhile he must go off somewhere; the bay of Neapolis. If she’d left him in Egypt, someone would have used him to start a rebellion. But he’d be safe at the Campanian seaside; Ammonios would see to the necessary spies, and a girl, a beautiful and brainless girl, to keep him occupied, and a mettlesome horse that might break his neck — he liked riding. Ammonios would see to it all. The boy must set off early tomorrow; she couldn’t bear him in the house any longer.

  Alone in her bed she lay, and between waking and sleeping thought of Caesar. There had been little enjoyment in his arms, save during those days on the Nile; and yet she longed for him, no one else. Slowly the lotus of sleep closed petals about her, closed on her limbs the flower-cosmetics of her fine breeding, her glistening will. Is it the man or the power in the man? But how separate them?

  The lotus-body opened petals, restlessly dreaming the coming of Caesar.

  *

  Caesar was sleeping. Once his body twitched and he muttered incoherent words of sleep. Calpurnia raised herself on her elbows and watching him irresolutely. How frail he looked, despite his unfailing strength, this Perpetual Dictator endowed with tribunician inviolability, Prefect of Morals, Consul, Chief Priest, and Imperator. He was her husband, and she felt stranger with him every day. She knew nothing about him, except that he was master of the world, and it frightened her to be the wife of such a man. They had been married some fourteen years, and he had spent only a few months of that time with her. How was it fair to blame her then that she had borne him no son?

  She felt resentful, but did not dare do more than savour a few dim thoughts of anger. If he were to awake and stare at her with those calm, pitiless, blue-grey eyes, she knew that he would read her mind. Then he would surely divorce her at last. She expected to be divorced daily, and yet he had never made the slightest complaint. And he was so kind sometimes, so thoughtful. He shouldn’t have married her. Was it her fault that fourteen years ago politics had advised an alliance with the Calpurnians? She would have preferred someone with a large villa in the country, a moderate income, and no ambitions. She was sure that then she would have borne child after child. She needed to feel the summer throbbing in the earth, swelling sweetly in berry and fruit, before her body could respond. But she didn’t care if she were divorced after all — as long as he didn’t marry Cleopatra, that Greek harlot from Egypt, whom he had made her receive. That had been his only cruelty.

  Calpurnia rose quietly, moving with stealth, and pausing to make sure that she wasn’t disturbing Caesar. But he was sleeping so deeply. She sighed. She would have liked to soothe him and sing him a lullaby on her breast, but she feared. He had taken her tonight, and she was oppressed. She felt that he was expecting her to become with child, blaming her. How then could she find pleasure in her body, how could she relax even now that he slept, his large head laid loosely on the pillow?

  She went to the window and looked out on the street below. No one was passing. Rome was silent. But she felt as if there was a pulse in the bed that she had left, the life of Caesar, and it shook the night like a wind, like the snake of wind that wrestles with banners. Her body too was shaken by the alien enveloping pulse. She gripped the windowsill. Was it a child conceived at last, the first leap in her blood? She brushed away the hopeless thought and stood there, bare-footed, waiting.

  Caesar had looked so weary as he slept. Indeed he was weary. People had repeated to her that he once said he had lived long enough; and he was not a man to say things idly. What had he meant? He had spoken to her more intimately tonight than ever before, embracing her, softened briefly out of his tension. He had said: “It all lies in the will of a man, in my will, and yet it can’t be hu
rried. It has to grow. It has to come out of the earth like a tree, biding its seasons of growth and renewal. Ah, Calpurnia, the life of a people must grow into new shapes. It can’t be hurried, and yet when that new life is there, nothing can stop it. Those that hate me and those that look to me, alike forget the truth. I forget it. It can’t be hurried. And yet it all comes out of the will of a man, and I am that man, and yet I cannot see the end. If only one could die and return to see the roots of one’s work finding their grip in the soil! But that is not granted. One must die and not know. Death is the end, and yet life goes on, and that is the bitterness.”

  Calpurnia felt her body contracting with fear and doubt. She couldn’t understand him. His words hurt her mind. How could her body open to a man who spoke such words in her bed? Yet the harlot Cleopatra had borne him a son, Caesarion. Calpurnia’s damp body chilled with the breath of the night. Cleopatra was a harlot. It was someone else’s child. Cleopatra had lied and won Caesar’s smile; and Calpurnia had paid the price of fidelity in barrenness that made her frightened and ashamed.

  She looked out of the window at the few stars frosted on the sky, and again the sharp breath of the night invaded the room, a sigh from the city swallowed in the dark cavern of slumber. Millions of lives uttered their prayer to form that sigh. The world was sighing towards Caesar, and only the woman who shared his bed did not feel part of him. All these others looked to him for guidance, for the meaning that alone gave life value; they were part of him, partaking of the flesh of his bounty in their feasts of thanksgiving, sustained by his existence daily renewed; but Calpurnia, who had lain under his embrace, felt only a dark solitude, an earth turned into barren stone, the vast necropolis of sleep.

  II — THE VICTIM

  The dawn-sky was a frail pearl-grey wash, and the populace were pleased; for it was a festal day, the day of Anna Perenna. Out into the Field of Mars tramped the families and the lovers, carrying food in baskets, knapsacks, or kerchiefs; and the huxters went with them, the shumbler with a barrow or tray on straps, the lordlier with an ass and slave or two to set up a stall where cakes and wine and bran-pies might be sold. This was the feast of the returning year, eternally the same, yet patterning new destinies for men.

  The meeting of the Senate had also been fixed outside the walls, in the same area as that to which the holidaying folk betook themselves. Brutus set out a little before dawn. He was glad to get into action at once, and as chief praetor had arranged to hear some minor cases. The Senate was to meet in the Curia on the southern side of the large Portico and Theatre of Pompeius; and the attendants had the tribunal erected ready for him as he entered with his lictors. The litigants sat waiting on their bench. Important cases were kept for the Comitium within the walls; and so Brutus, not needing his group of assessors, set to work to clear away the matters of routine before him and to block from his mind all other thoughts.

  He was haunted by the look on his mother’s face as they had parted last night. Cassius was to blame; he had made some biting remarks about Caesar’s immoral relations with women, and Brutus had chanced to look at Servilia. She had coloured and dropped her eyes, and the memory of the things said years ago about her and Caesar had sunk Brutus in depths of shame. There was no truth in the scandal; and yet there he had seen his mother’s face pleading, accusing, saying, “You told me about the conspiracy only to try me, you have done it all only because of me, I realise it at last.” That was incredible. Deeds like the slaying of Caesar did not spring from such darkly trivial motives. The godhead of life was rationality, and he that deviated from the rule threw himself under the hooves of mad horses. Caesar was to be trampled.

  Brutus settled down to the cases of property-transference, bleaching his mind dry of thought, concentrating on the formulae. Yes, the Roman instinct was right. The formula saved. The letter saved, the spirit slew. The spirit was mad, shiftless, capable of endless evasions and analyses and explanations. Brutus was killing Caesar because he was haunted by his mother’s face, because the Salaminian senators perversely starved themselves to death; Brutus was enslaved by dark voices of cruelty from the past, voices crying for the purifying victim. “Kill and cleanse the world. Kill that the one may die for the many. Kill that infinite maggots may breed from the single body.” Mad images. But the formula, the letter of legality, saved. The tyrant is the slayer of his fatherland: let him be slain.

  A man came forward. He was emancipating a slave. The ceremony, a fictitious form based on the old idea of property as something captured, expressed the emancipation as a recovery of rights. A “claimant” stood forth and declared that the slave was no slave but a free man, while the master made no protest. Brutus signed to the lictor, who laid a wand on the slave’s head. The master slapped the slave on the cheek, and turned him round, repeating and reversing the birth-screw, leaving him reborn in freedom.

  Brutus saw the look of kindling joy in the slave’s face. The poor wretch thought that all his problems were solved, and yet within an hour life would twine a fresh anxiety round his heart, and he would forget that he was slave or free; he would know only that he was once more hunted.

  Hunted off the earth. Hunted by faces.

  Brutus refused to think of Servilia. Let Caesar be slain, for he slew his fatherland. Looking up, Brutus saw the statue of Pompeius staring with marble-gravity down at him. His thoughts grew confused. Pompeius was the man who had actually put to death the father of Brutus in the disturbed days after Sulla’s death. Yet Brutus had fought for him against Caesar. He tried to recall his father’s face, and failed, though he had been eight years at the time of his death. The world was blind. Death heaped on death, and no one knew why. Again the blood cried out despairingly, and again Brutus silenced it. The voices of the spirit were infinite in discord and deception. The word of the law was sufficient. I abide by my deed.

  *

  Other senators arrived. They looked into the hall, laid down their cloaks — leaving slaves to watch against thieves — and stood round in groups or went to pace along the Portico. A few, connoisseurs, took their seats, and, chin on palm, gave themselves up to the contemplation of the paintings; for some famous works by old masters hung on the walls: Cadmus sowing the dragons-teeth, and Europa carried off on her bull, by Antiphilos; a sacrifice of oxen, by Pausias, the still-life specialist, the first master to exploit foreshortening. Most of the senators, however, preferred to warm themselves after the litter-ride by a stroll in the Portico.

  Two long covered colonnades ran parallel, leaving a grassy length between. In the courtyard were avenues of plane-trees, lighted by tumbling fountains and decorated by statues of wild beasts in marble and bronze. The crowd were pressing along the road between the Portico and the huge Theatre opposite, mostly interested only in gaining the open ground beyond, where they could play, dance, drink, and sing. But others, attracted vacantly by the gathering of their rulers, stood round to watch the arriving litters and to walk up and down the colonnades, alternately awed into respectful silence or suddenly bursting into noise and clumsy games. Acrobats, musicians, and buffoons were giving vaudeville turns on the stage of the Theatre, and there was a continuous flow of tittering people passing up the road through the door at the back of the scaena. The pillared façade of the Theatre that faced the road was the stage-end; and the rows of seats, curving round and rising to a great height, were on the other side, towards the river.

  Amos stood at the marble gateway of the Portico and bit his nails. He wanted to enter the Theatre, but his father had forbidden him; he wanted to join the throng in the Field, but that also as a Gentile rite of abomination was forbidden, though he had heard lads of the street talking about the ease with which girls were picked up on Anna’s day. The rite of building a little hut of greenery made things too easy; one could get a girl under the very eyes of her family. But Amos remembered Karni and decided to obey his father. The rite somewhat resembled the Feast of the Tabernacles; but at the Synagogue they preached that this was because daemo
ns had taught the uncircumcised a parody of Yahwe’s rite.

  He stood watching the litters. That was paying homage to the Senate; it was patriotism without offending the Synagogue, and it might bring some business advantage. Suppose some great gentleman fell in the mud. Amos would dart forward, raise him up with tact and apologies for daring to offer aid, while insinuating a remark on the special dirt-destroying lye of the firm of Fabullus and Ezra on the Aventine.

  *

  Out in the field a man with one ear was getting free drinks. He was a survivor of the expedition against the Parthians which had been routed ten years before.

  “Their heavy horsemen ride in full armour,” he told the gaping listeners. “Long coats of mail, helmets, and all. They’re terrible to look at when they come charging with their long spears. Barge-poles the Greeks call them. But if they fall off the horses, they’re helpless. They’re jammed in the armour like in a tomb, and you can stick a sword up between their legs. They haven’t any armour there, for they ride without stirrups and have to grip the horse’s ribs. But the worst thing of all is the archers. We thought they’d run out of arrows, but up came camel after camel with fresh supplies. By Hercules, if you looked up, you got one in your eye, for they shot up, to come down over our shields. That’s the kind of people the Parthians are. Has anyone got another flask?”

  More wine was purchased, and the man squinted into his cup.

  “I’ll tell you some more. They come marching up with goatskins over their armour. Then as they get near, they whip off the skins, and there’s a terrific blurt from all the cornets and trumpets and a sort of bellowing howling kettledrum of theirs. So it’s like a dazzle of lightning followed by a horrid blast of thunder. It takes a brave man to face that.”

  He screwed up his eyes and pushed out his jaw. The listeners were dumb with horror. So these were the villainous Parthians that Caesar was going off to conquer. A hopeless job — for anyone but Caesar. Their hearts lifted up. Caesar would have better tricks. Hadn’t he built in a day bridges a mile long and siege-works higher than mountains? Hadn’t he turned aside torrents and stormed cities on nights of tempest? Hadn’t his enemies in vain tried to bewitch him in Thessaly where all the worst witches lived?