Caesar is Dead

by Jack Lindsay

  He prayed for deliverance; his life had been righteous. He had no fear of the twisted end. Suddenly the vision of Tullia rose before him. She was cere-wrapped in opaque white, and yet she was naked. She had the wise eyes of his mother, and yet she was his daughter, dying in childbirth, dying for the child of the waster Dolabella who had fallen on his own sword in Laodicea. “Die for me!” That was the cry of the whole world. Tullia would save him.

  He reached out his shaky hands, an old broken man, his face haggard and discoloured.

  The eyes of visionary Tullia grew, burned yellow with a feline ecstasy, terrible eyes of pain.

  The slaves were shouting and trying to run with the litter, stumbling.

  *

  The soldiers had come to the house, led by a centurion and Popilius Laenas, whom Cicero had once defended in the courts and saved from a capital charge. Popilius, a lean, bulgy-eyed man who prided himself on his efficiency, quickly questioned the slaves. They denied that they knew anything, weeping. The soldiers hustled up a lad whom Cicero had been having taught to read. The young slave brushed back his hair and faced the interrogator. He licked his lips. Cicero had been very kind to him — kind as a man was to a slave. Might he be cursed!

  “He’s in a litter. Down that road. Off to the coast.”

  Popilius flung the youth aside and set off with the soldiers down the road at a jog-trot. They caught up the litter as it was turning a clump of beech-trees.

  Cicero heard the grating voices and climbed laboriously out of the litter. His own party outnumbered the soldiers, and were armed.

  “Do not fight,” he said, sternly.

  Then he sat on the litter-edge, stroking his stubbled chin as he was wont to do when thinking out a problem. He was covered with dust, seamed with age, weak; but he felt as if he was about to walk out on the Rostra and deliver the greatest speech of his life.

  He rose and stood with his head thrown back, staring at Popilius. He remembered the man’s face. Where had he seen it before?

  Popilius approached, and, shortening his sword, stabbed him in the throat. Cicero gave a clucking sob and fell backwards. The slaves wailed and threw themselves on the ground. Popilius lost his nerve and stood over the body, hacking at the head. He must sever it. And the hands too. Fulvia had offered a reward for the hands. The head and hands were to be spiked on the Rostra from which Cicero had spoken in abuse of her husbands, and she had sworn to pierce the villainous tongue with her needle. He had defamed three husbands of hers, and she would pierce his tongue.

  Popilius hacked the head off at last, sweating as if he’d run for miles. Harshly he bade a soldier remove the hands.

  Then he tossed the head to another of the soldiers, who tore down the litter-curtain for a wrap. Popilius breathed loudly and wiped his hands on some grass. It wasn’t the reward he wanted. He wanted his name to go down in history. Now he’d claim the right to set up his bust with a wreath on the head, next to Cicero’s full-length statue. He wouldn’t deny that Cicero was the greater man; a bust would suffice, but a bust he must have.

  *

  When Popilius arrived in Rome he found Antonius presiding over an electoral meeting. Antonius looked at the dead face of his enemy, and said, “Now let there be an end of proscribing.”

  But a few words couldn’t stop the slaying.

  Later, hearing the whole story, he ordered that the slave who had betrayed Cicero should be handed over to Pomponia, the widow of Cicero’s brother; and Pomponia, being a bad-tempered woman who had loathed her husband and brother-in-law, saw that the slave died painfully, grilling slices of his own flesh and eating them.

  *

  Gallus flung himself down on the bed. Amos had called at the flat which Gallus had now taken, and informed him that Karni had borne a baby-girl. “Exactly like her,” said Amos, “except that everyone says the eyes and nose and chin are like mine. Never has there been such a successful birth. All the women that came to lend her their amulets said so. I myself bought her at great cost a stone from the Jordan to press into the pit of her stomach. That eased her pain considerably. Never was there a better wife and mother. For the last month she ate nothing but eggs, so that her child’s eyes might be large. And the business is prospering. Father’s bought a small farm for breeding thrushes.”

  His pleasure ended by annoying Gallus, who felt ashamed at being angered by another’s harmless satisfactions. But he got rid of him, and set out to see Cytheris; and passing through the Forum he had been jostled by a noisy band of soldiers who carried a man’s head on a broomstick.

  “The world’s a loathsome place,” he said to Cytheris.

  She looked at him and then went on curling a ringlet round her finger before the mirror. Her plan hadn’t worked out as well as she had thought. Though she had argued it all out again and again, and every time convinced herself more thoroughly that she had a complete right to act as a free woman, yet in practice she found that her conscience ached; and that made her unkind to Gallus, which was unfair. But the more unkind she was to him, the less could she stop doing it. And the more her conscience ached, the more she felt driven to find a momentary solace in someone else’s arms.

  Gallus watched her carefully. He knew that she was unfaithful, but couldn’t face it. There had been too much misery at the outset of the affair. He fought down the knowledge in himself, and said that love without trust was mere wretchedness. She was wayward but not wicked; she loved him; she wasn’t being unfaithful; it was only the queer whims that caught women up in their periods of the moon. Weren’t there weeks when she was all that he could ask of life? Yet he knew all the same; and she knew that he knew; and both lied.

  “I can’t write anything,” he said, with peevish blame. “I haven’t written anything passable for months.”

  Yet his affairs were going so well. He was liked by Octavianus and had been offered a staff position; his future was assured; he had a place in the world, was no longer the weakling whose life had been flattened by a hard word from Cytheris.

  She caught his face reflected in the mirror as he stirred, and she felt overlooked, discovered. The blood flushed in her cheeks, and she was about to speak angrily. Then she saw his face, how dear it was.

  With a flood of pain she foresaw the future, clearly as her own face which now shone alone in the mirror — the face that stared back at her with suddenly strange eyes. Within a few days he would accuse her, and she would deny his accusations, and he would persist, and then she would confess, in misery and resentment; and they would part and hate one another; and they would be unendurably lonely, and they would come together again and taste the old sweetness between the teeth of their kisses; and he would write vital poems again, and she would be joyful and happy. And then it would all start over again.

  It wasn’t the fault of either. And it was worthwhile. Life was endlessly worthwhile. Even when her face was lined and her back was bent, she’d say that.

  Her eyes were filled with the soft violet tenderness that he adored as she turned to him. For tonight they would be entirely happy.

  “Darling, darling,” she said, dropping down beside him, “I love every little hair on the back of your hands and the way you tie the knots in your shoes so that no one can ever undo them again. It’s you I love. Do you understand? You, exactly as you are.”

  *

  Octavianus lay gasping on the couch. It was impossible to live after what he’d done. He was vile. This absolute power had corroded all its three possessors. Antonius was brutalised and coarser, preserving sanity only by drink. Lepidus was shrivelling before one’s eyes, growing furtive, loud-voiced, bullying, and then losing all grip, handing everything over to his slaves and freedmen, sitting blankly in his chair and looking out on any intruder with a dull pomposity of fear.

  Octavianus saw himself — as divided as Lepidus, irritable, bursting out into flares of violence, hungering one minute for more names of doomed men, wanting to kill them all and finish the business, then the next momen
t weeping with Octavia and sending out unavailing messages of mercy.

  But now he couldn’t bear it any longer. The woman had come miserably. She had looked so utterly sad and weak. In her disordered distress she had slipped the stola from her shoulder and shown her young, bony flesh. A wretched tearstained woman. He had ravished her. It was her fault for being so helpless. He loathed her for it. If she had resisted, he would have come to his senses. Her pushes had been so feeble, like weak invitations, and her eyes had stared glassily. She had been so thin, so bonily loose. A man couldn’t remember such things and remain sane. He had wanted to tell the soldiers to carry her out and strangle her, but he had lacked the courage.

  And in three days he was to marry young Clodia, the step-daughter of Antonius, to please the soldiers, who wanted to see a family alliance between their leaders.

  He sat looking at his hands as they trembled in his lap. Why should life make him do such things? It was the stench of blood. It invaded his sleep; it dripped from the curtains of the night. The night was filled with faces, blood in their eyes. He was only able to keep alive because Agrippa slept in the same room, within reach, and soothed him when he woke choking.

  What was to be done?

  Soon he and Antonius must set out to destroy the armies of Cassius and Brutus in the East; but that didn’t disturb him much, frightened as he still was of war. In the last skirmish before Mutina he had been carried into the front rank, fighting furiously in his terror; and the men had cheered him for his courage, little knowing his heart. Agrippa had saved him, covering his retreat. But Antonius would see to the next war. Octavianus had no doubt whatever of the result. Antonius would crush Brutus and Cassius as easily as his drunken elbow knocked a tankard off the table. He was invincible; for he was the spirit of the soldiers incarnate; he seemed to have lost his individuality, to be submerged beneath and raised above it into brutalities and powers that Octavianus could not fathom and that he dreaded. Yes, Antonius was bearing up best against the awful burden of these days of blood. Even when drunk he showed a kind of battered nobility. He was the prow of the ship, leaping through the waves of the storm, carrying forward the thrill and strain of the ship’s timbers.

  But what would be the end? Octavianus asked the question of his heart. What was his own place in this struggle? Was he an ambitious imposter, a mere appendage to the name of Caesar?

  Then he calmed. Caesar had chosen him. He, Octavianus, was no coward; when he had once decided, nothing could shift him. Enlightenment broke on him, gripping his body as a lover’s hand encircling a girl’s wrist. His pulse beat wildly; he felt himself merging impalpably in light. He thought for a moment it was death; but he did not die. Loyalty was the need, the urge that he had recognised in Antonius. The world wanted a shrine, a shrine filled with a human figure that it could know and revere and acknowledge. Antonius was the incarnate spirit of the revolt; but once the crisis passed, he would be as empty of purpose as the victorious legions. No, the future was with Octavianus. He had it in him to give the world what it needed, to draw the baby of life out of the grievous, lengthening birth-pangs of these years. The fanaticism of Caesar-worship must be returned to the sanctities of home; and out of those sanctities must come the service that would transform the Empire. There must be continuity, faith, justice: a man giving his best and sustaining the world. Peace. The world needed peace, and food.

  Not in vain had the men murdered Caesar. Rightly had he died. He had had too much to give, and his pity had become arrogance. Octavianus pitied the world and felt that he could have patience. He would earn his inheritance. He was the Son of Caesar.

  He called, and an attendant entered. “Who was that woman?” He signed fiercely as the man began to speak. “No, I don’t want her name. Write out a pass of freedom in my name for her husband, and send it to her.”

  He put his signature to the paper without looking at the husband’s name. It would haunt him.

  He lay back again, and the trembling-fit returned. He knew he would vomit. He called in a low voice to the slave. “Octavia.”

  She came quickly, and held his head with her cool hand. Dimly he was aware of her gentle presence, her swollen body showing the child that she was bearing to Marcellus. That sight made him feel a faint touch of jealousy and yet a great comfort; he would not have things otherwise. Then the nausea swept over him. Ah! he would retch out his very life. But he wouldn’t die, he mustn’t die.

  “I’ll be all right in a moment,” he gasped.

  She kissed him softly on the brow, over his burning eyes.

  There was love in the world. Peace, and a home and a woman’s hands. Work and food and a sleep untroubled by strange gods. Octavianus drifted into a doze. He had no fear. He was the Son of Caesar.