Caesar is Dead

by Jack Lindsay

  Clodia saw his far-away gaze and rose to go. He awoke from his musing and felt something precious escaping out of his grasp; he didn’t want Clodia to stay and yet he couldn’t bear her to go.

  “Here,” he said, and picked up the first object that met his hand: a little ivory casket sculptured with birds, once Tullia’s. He handed it to young Clodia. “Something to remember an old man by. Your father and I said hard things of one another. But hate has no meaning after death. It makes me hopeful to know that now. As if all our struggles worked together for some final aim — realised only in death.” His death was a shrine to his dear.

  “O thank you ever so much,” said the girl, peering excitedly into the empty box and shaking it.

  “Good-bye,” said Cicero to Clodia, and he seemed to be farewelling the whole of his past life, with its hatreds and baser elements purged away. Surely the State would settle down now, and he would be allowed to pass the rest of his days in peaceful retirement? Watching Clodia go, he felt like a dead man standing on the threshold of the grave and watching with uncomprehending despair the mourners depart.

  As Clodia stood in the Clivus Victoriae waiting for her niece to enter the litter, she saw the huge crowd collected in the Forum and the streets below. A burst of interest invaded her mind, and she told the litter-men to go down as near to the Forum as they could.

  As they descended the slope, the girl at her side became talkative, snuggling against her at the jolts. “I wonder if Bhebeo has got out of the privy yet?”

  “But you said she was in the kitchen.”

  “Of course I did, but I didn’t expect you to believe me. Where else could I have shut her in except that privy with the bolt outside the door? But there’s something more important I wanted to ask you. Do you know what a girl told me? I bet you couldn’t guess, though I suppose you know all about it. She said it was safe to go with a man if one sneezed afterwards.”

  Clodia stroked the girl’s hair, drawn back from the forehead under a fillet. “It’s never safe to go with a man, my child.”

  The girl snuggled closer. “But I think that’s right about the sneezing, don’t you? It sounds right.”

  Clodia made no answer, absorbed in listening to the mutter of the mob.

  *

  The Forum was thronged every balcony, statue-pedestal, temple-base was packed with clinging figures. The people were talking of nothing but the Will, the great loving-kindness of Caesar: 300 sesterces each and those magnificent gardens. Each man felt that the gardens had been left specially for the outings of himself and his family.

  The important members of the procession had already filled Caesar’s house; outside, sections were forming and taking up all the space between the door and the Rostra, where the Eulogy was to be delivered. After that the body was to be carried amid dirges to the Field of Mars, and there burned. Large bands, bearing trophies and the material for oblations, had been sent on ahead, to relieve the crush. Even so, it seemed to the harassed organisers impossible ever to make a passage for the bier through the heaving mass. Plays had been staged, tragedies calculated to work on the feelings of the people; and the arias for flute and voice had evoked a hushed religious response.

  Antonius was standing beside the bier in the Regia. On him had devolved the task of delivering the Eulogy, and he was cursing his luck, sorry that he hadn’t abetted the attempt to veto the funeral. Nobody had wanted the invidious task. Anything but complete praise of Caesar would infuriate the mob; any attack on the murderers would mean complication and loss of prestige in the Senate. But Antonius could hardly escape the honour, and he now saw the disadvantages of having a foot in both camps. Outside the ranks of the murderers he had been the greatest friend of the dead man; and he alone had anything like a standing with both reactionaries and populace. He realised to the full the difficulties into which he had been landed by his manoeuvring; he would be ruined if he wasn’t careful. Yesterday he had been very respectful in the Senate, reporting that there was nothing serious in Caesar’s papers; and the Senate had responded with benevolent thanks. Everything had been going nicely till he had been saddled with this Eulogy.

  The corpse lay on its ivory bier, covered with a purple pall embroidered with gold. At its head on a trophy was hung the bloodied toga in which Caesar had been slain. Around the bier, fidgeting, stood the magistrates chosen to bear it on their shoulders.

  When would the signal to move be made? Thicker and more eagerly exasperated grew the mob.

  A deep throe of religion had seized the motley populace of Rome. Something was stirring strangely in them, welding them finally to a unity of aspiration. All the races around the middle sea had gone to make that populace, feeding the city in emancipated slaves. With the Italian stock were now mingled Greeks, Spaniards, Gauls, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Jews, Dacians, Syrians, Persians ... There was no numbering the breeds; and it had been the despairing cry of the reformers that nothing could acclimatise this mob which had grown up at the heart of empire, fighting the upper classes who were still basically Italian in blood.

  In the clash of peoples that Rome was dominating there had been many dispersions; and each race, torn from its familiar ways and forced into a rough standardisation, yet clung to disordered fragments of belief, praying to unfaithful gods, finding a new fervour in wooing the unknown faces. The Jews with tenacious and jealous worship of their tribal god Yahwe; the Persians and the peoples of Pontus and Commagene with their unconquered Mithras; the Babylonians with their astrology; the Greeks with their inquiry into the elements, their clean-limbed gods of light, their darker search for a redemption from the flesh; the Syrians with their star-gods; the Egyptians with Lord Osiris and tender Queen Isis, and their involved intense creed of immortality — these were some of the ingredients that had gone to make up the emotions that swayed and babbled in the Roman mob.

  The nourishing source of those emotions were the Mysteries, religious groups with private chapels. They were everywhere, promising redemption. They offered saviour-gods who would comfort in life and raise up aloft after death. Oldest was the Orphic cult of the Greeks, luring with hope of freedom from the weary wheel of reincarnation and picturing for the unbeliever ghastly hells of bubbling mud. Similar emotions were roused in kindlier symbols of corn-harvests by the Eleusinian Shrine: the birth of the babe of might, and Venus arising from the sea-shell of her own genitals, and Dionysos the terrible redeemer of ecstasy, who gave his bleeding flesh to the saved. From farther east came the worship of the Great Mother and Attis; the Egyptian Trinity; the Syrian Baal and Adonis, the Son Lord; the Kabiri of Samothrace; Mithras of fire; Sabazios, a savage Dionysos of Phrygia; Atargatis of Syria, the horned moon.

  And mingled with these were garbled and twilight versions of philosophy, dreams of demiurges and lords of creation, sole sustaining gods and mediating sons, the begetting word of the Father and the Shining Son who led the pure of heart out of the night of flesh and temptation — while above the wriggling mass Stoicism tried to subdue mankind to a reasonable love of light and virtuous self-reliance.

  But the mysteries were the core of this revolt of terror, this search for a new principle of self. They promised freedom from fate, from the stars in their ascensions and declensions, from the seven dread planetary world-rulers, the seven Women Fates, and the seven Other Gods with the faces of black bulls wearing golden crowns. They gave sacraments of communion with the divine, quieted uneasy consciences with words of balm and with indulgences, baptized in water and in blood, and gave the great release and binding fear of the confessional. To the shrines of Fortuna, the birth-goddess, and Asclepios, the loving Healer, great hosts of pilgrims, anxious, suffering, diseased, managed to roam despite the troubled social conditions.

  Now all the emotions of hope and thwarted love in the hearts of the Roman populace, narrowing the needs of their fellows throughout the Empire, had turned with yearning towards the corpse of Caesar; for he had died that they might live. The world was looking for a Messiah, a S
aviour, Ta’eb, Christos, or Soter; and all felt that they had found him in Caesar. Broken memories of ancient rites recalled them to the knowledge that the King must die for his people and that it is imperative he should die not of sickness or of age, but violently, bestially. Memories of rites when the human scapegoat was forced to take the King’s part and act his rule through a short festival, even to the enjoying of his wives and concubines (for thus he entered finally into the blood-role of the King), feasted and adored, and then cruelly put to death. Memories of eastern versions derived from the Babylonian Sacaea; the Jewish crucifixion of Jesus Bar-Abbas, the Son of God, the mock-king; the Jewish hanging of Haman at the Purim, in place of redeemed Mordecai; the slave-king of the Saturnalia, still sometimes slain in remoter country districts.

  A hubbub, a deep growling note overlaid by a thin piercing bird-note, filled the city. Never had such menace sounded in a mob-tumult. The burghers shrank in their houses and wandered from room to room inspecting the bolts and shutters.

  *

  Clodia felt the emotion of the mob penetrating her like a strong sickly drug, covering her with goose-flesh. She wanted to go back to the lane where she had left the litter after bidding her niece not to stir out of its cushions. But she could not retreat; she had to go on. Standing still, with her hand grasping her left breast, she listened to the voices, the infinitely interwoven threads of emotion: the human mass given the god-voice of a beast.

  She was in an alien land, not in the Rome that her proud Claudian forefathers had devoted themselves to create. For the first time she realised that all these people had existences in their own right, that they weren’t merely menials caught in a huge process working only to satisfy her requirements. Somewhere in this repellent mob-emotion there was the wail of a new-born individuality.

  Yet why should she fear? It was for this mob that her brother Clodius had struggled. They had loved him; and when he had been killed on the highroad they had burned his body here in the Forum, eight years ago. She had been out of Rome at the time and had not seen the pyre, which ended by burning down the Senate House. Suddenly she was carried away by the mob-emotion, laughing gleefully, chuckling in her throat in an insane way. She wanted the mob to burn Caesar in the Forum too, to make an even greater blaze.

  That would somehow glorify her also; for she was the sister of Clodius, the forerunner of Caesar in creating this dark intense mob-exultation, this new focalising of power.

  *

  There was a way out after all. Antonius called to an attendant and demanded feverishly that he should somehow make his way back to the Carinae and return with the papers he would find on the top of the cupboard in the study. In these papers were copies of the decrees passed in January by the Senate to confirm all Caesar’s dignity and to add more; the decrees in which the Senate affirmed its loyalty by oath and recited at length Caesar’s services to the State. No one could object if Antonius had those decrees read from the Rostra. The wording was not his, but the Senate’s. It was the perfect way to escape from the responsibility of eulogising Caesar before this dangerously roused mob. The mob would be pleased by the high-sounding array of titles; they would be enraged by having once more brought to their notice the treason of the conspirators; yet the Senate could hardly censure Antonius for having had its own unrepealed decrees read aloud.

  Antonius had been looking at the decrees as he sorted out some of Caesar’s papers before leaving the house. They had passed out of his head, and then the inspiration had come as he looked at Caesar’s dead face.

  But would the man get through in time? Antonius waited with sinking heart.

  The signal came for the procession to start. The magistrates raised the bier. Antonius strode out at their head. As he emerged into the open, greeted by a stupendous shout from the people, he felt something thrust into his hand. It was the roll, offered by the sweating attendant. Grasping the papyrus Antonius moved on with easy confidence, his handsome face grave and imperious; and behind him came the body of Caesar.

  *

  After the shout there rose a low keening cry, sustained till Clodia felt her eardrums would break. It was a frightful cry, more frightful than any shrieks could have been. Slowly the bier passed on, rocking slightly at the ceremoniously regular tread of the bearers. Flutes piped a shrill monotone; and over the low tautening keen there came screams and thin wails. Clodia was trembling. She felt as she had felt when deep at night in her Palatine house she had woken to hear plangent cries and music from the Temple of the Great Goddess nearby. The hymnal rhythm of the poem Attis by Catullus throbbed wildly in her head. O great poet, and you died because I could not give you my body.

  Rejoice, for our troubles are over. Come bow to her will.

  Toss off the rags of delay, and run on her hill —

  Cybele’s Phrygian home, her Phrygian glooms,

  where the cymbal clangs and the timbrel shivers and booms,

  and the Phrygian blows on his heavy curved pipes of reed,

  and the ivy-crowned maenads, tossing their heads, pay heed,

  and they shake the holy things with a piercing cry,

  and still the devoted host goes driven by ...

  And the band moaned glory with trembling lips and sang —

  Truly there was a joy behind the keening wail, a hope too finely drawn out of anguish to distinguish itself as yet, an ecstasy of deliverance.

  Clodia, who had borne a child, felt her body at that moment of absolute weakness which was triumph, which was the birth of the alien hidden self, the new life.

  Deliver mc, O Mother.

  Clodia sobbed. She felt the beat of Catullus against her body, his lips blindly seeking for her breasts. He was blind and still hungry for her body, and he had died because of her. She shrieked in her pain and misery, her fear of the hungry dead; and her shriek was swallowed up in the ocean of noise hemming her round. She wanted to beat her breast, but the crush was too strong. The crowd rocked and swayed with every movement of the bier: as if the bier was a cradle, as if the same great hand rested upon the bier and every member of the crowd. A cradling hand.

  Clodia was fainting. She would fall to the ground and be trodden to death, for the crowd was exalted beyond all human considerations. In its agony of pity it would tread upon her and never know that she had fallen. The world circled blackly overhead and sweat started out on her brow, hot with thorns and then icy, but she was saved by the close pressure. She was held upright by the men who pushed unawares against her, their hearts uplifted by the spectacle of the passing bier.

  O to put time back, to feel the lips of Catullus again on hers. Why had she been so futilely cruel? Till now she had hidden from herself. All those insulting poems that he had written after their quarrel had made her take a cool, hard attitude towards his memory; she had needed to protect herself against the pricking comments of friends. But her heart had hungered. Before this huge revelation of yearning she could not keep up pretences.

  She wanted to cry out: O people, why are we all so cruel? Why do we kill those we love? Why can we only know love through loss? But it would have been no use. The cry of suffering obliterated all voices and defeated any words that wisdom could utter. She knew at last the agony of an overflowing heart that amid thousands can turn to no one. There is only one pain, she knew now, and that is not to be able to give oneself, not to be able to share one’s heart; and the richest hearts of all die choked by their own overbrimming wealth, for no one can take what they offer. So Catullus had died, ravished with bitterness. So Caesar had died, forsaken. What then kept her alive, an aging woman who fought to cling to a body that no longer had meaning? She could give it to no one, not though a thousand men took it. She had lost her mate, the only man who could take what she had to offer; and she would die with a curse on her lips.

  She cursed and blasphemed foully, racking her brains for every obscene phrase she had ever heard; but her blasphemous cries were lost in the great sob of noise, lost as her words of wisdom would h
ave been lost.

  *

  On went the bier. The crowd had difficulty in drawing back, but somehow they cleared sufficient way for the reverenced dead. Into the Forum went the procession, under the Arch of Fabius at the head of the Sacred Way, past the Temple of the Twin Brothers and the line of Tabernae Veteres, towards the Rostra. A verse from one of the plays just acted, a tragedy by Pacuvius, had imprinted itself on the mob’s fancy: “The men he saved were those who murdered him.” Now it came vehemently back to their minds, it rustled from their mouths in spreading whispers, it roared into a chorus.

  “The men he saved were those who murdered him.”

  Caesar had trusted. A few months ago he had disbanded his Spanish guard, saying that it was better to die without fear than to live afraid. He had trusted, and his corpse showed what reply his mercy had brought.

  Antonius ascended the Rostra. There was a sighing hush as all strained forward to hear him. Without a word he indicated the Crier who stood at his side, and the man stepped to the opening in the rail and began reading. “Decree of the Senate ...”

  The crowd could not follow for a moment, then they grasped the point. Nothing could have come better as a commentary on the verse they had been shouting. Here were the very words decreed and sworn to by the men who had murdered Caesar and who now wished to destroy his work. They punctuated every pause with groans and yells; and when the catalogue of titles and the oaths of the Senators were ended, they sang again.

  “The men he saved were those who murdered him.”

  It was like a response in a liturgical service, a mass recited over the present body of the god. The carriers had placed the bier inside a gilded tabernacle raised in front of the Rostra, a model of Caesar’s Temple to Mothering Venus; and the utterances of the Crier and the responses of the crowd surged and ebbed over this chapel of death.