The Ides of March

by Thornton Wilder

  Rufus, who is pure gold, begged me not to repeat any of this to anyone but you. He’s a very remarkable old African and seems to respect something in the invalid’s wish to be forgotten. I’m going to do as he wishes and I know you will. I’m horrified by the length of this letter.

  Come as soon as you can.

  VI Clodia, at Capua, to her brother Publius Clodius Pulcher in Rome.

  [September 8.]

  [From the villa of Quintus Lentulus Spinther and his wife Cassia.]

  Brainless:

  S. T. E. Q. V. M. E. [Clodia ironically employs an epistolary convention of the day meaning “If you and your army are enjoying good health, it is well”; by changing two letters she says “If you and your riffraff are well, it is bad.”]

  Plucked again. [Caesar’s secret police had again gained access to a letter passing between them. The brother and sister arranged, however, that innocuous letters were carried in superficial concealment by their messengers as a screen for their real letters which were more thoroughly concealed.]

  Your letter was insane nonsense. You say: They will not live forever. How do you know? Neither he nor you nor anyone else knows how long he will live. You should make your plans as though he were to die tomorrow or live thirty years more. Only children, political orators, and poets talk of the future as though it were a thing one could know; fortunately for us we know nothing about it. You say: There have been convulsions weekly. [Caesar’s attacks of epilepsy.] I tell you you are wrong and you know my source of information. [Caesar’s wife’s maid, A bra, had been recommended to that position by Clodia and was paid by Clodia to keep her informed of all that passed in Caesar’s house.] You say: Under this Cyclops there is nothing we can do. Listen, you are no longer a boy. You are forty. When will you learn not to wait for chance but to build on what you have and to use each day to consolidate your position? Why have you never been anything more than Tribune? Because your plans always begin with next month. The gulf between today and next month you always try to overleap by the use of violence and your troops of bullies. Ship’s-Snout [in Greek: this is Caesar] rules the world and will continue to rule it for one day or for thirty years. You have no career, you are nothing, unless you accept that fact and work in and around it. And I tell you solemnly, any attempt to work against it would lead to your destruction.

  You must regain your old favor with him. Never let him forget that you were once of powerful assistance to him. I know you hate him; that is of no importance. Hate and love have nothing to do with anything, as he knows well. Where would he have got, if he had hated Pompey?

  Watch him, Brainless. You could learn a great deal.

  You know his weak side: that indifference, that absence which people call his magnanimity. I’ll wager that he really likes you, because he likes what is spontaneous and uncomplicated, and that he’s practically forgotten that you were an idiotic trouble maker. And I’ll wager that he was secretly amused that for twenty years you kept Cicero trembling like a field mouse.

  Watch him. You might begin by imitating his diligence. I believe it when they tell me that he writes seventy letters and documents a day. They fall over Italy like snow, every day—what am I saying, they fall over the world from Britain to Lebanon. Even at the Senate, even at dinner parties there’s a secretary behind him; the very second that the idea of a letter occurs to him he turns and dictates it in a whisper. One moment he’s telling a village in Belgium that it can change its name to his and he sends them a flute for the town band, the next moment he’s thought out a way of harmonizing the Jewish dowry laws with Roman usage. He gave a water clock to a city in Algeria and wrote a fascinating letter in the Arab mode. Work, Publius, work.

  And remember: this is the year we conform.

  All I ask of you is one year.

  I’m going to be the most conservative woman in Rome. By next summer I mean to be an Honorary Votary of Vesta and a Directress of the Mysteries of the Good Goddess.

  You can get a province.

  From now on we spell our name Claudius. Grandfather curried a few votes by adopting the Plebeian spelling. Tiresome.

  Our dinner’s a failure. Ship’s Snout and the Little Lentil [again in Greek; this is Caesar’s wife] have refused. Hecuba has not replied. When he hears this, Cicero will probably send a last-minute refusal. Asinius Pollio will be there and I’ll fill up the table somehow.

  Catullus. I want you to behave nicely to him. I’m gradually getting rid of that. Let me do it in my own way. You wouldn’t believe it: what goes on! I have as high an opinion of myself as the next woman, but I never pretended to be all the goddesses rolled in one, nor Penelope, to boot. I’m not afraid of anything, Publius, except those horrifying epigrams. Look at those he’s hurled at Caesar; everyone’s repeating them; they remain on him, like personal disfigurements. I don’t want any of those, so let me manage this in my own way.

  Do you realize, then, that our dinner’s a failure? Put that in your head. No one will come to our house but your Green Mustaches and the roe of Catiline. Yet we are what we are. Our family laid down the pavements of this city and I don’t intend that anyone shall forget it.

  One more thing, Brainless.

  The Little Lentil is not for you. I forbid it. Put it out of your mind. I forbid it. There is where you and I have always made our greatest mistakes. Think of what I’m saying. [Clodia is alluding to her brother’s seduction of a Vestal Virgin; and perhaps to her unseemly pursuit through the law courts of the brilliant Caelius, a former lover whom she charged with having stolen her jewelry. He was successfully defended by Cicero in an oration which ransacked the lives of both brother and sister and rendered them notorious and ridiculous in the eyes of the Roman populace.]

  So keep saying to yourself: respectable for one year.

  I, your Ox-eyed, adore you. Send me some thoughts on this by return messenger. I shall be staying here four or five days, though on my arriving this afternoon, one look at Quintus and Cassia made me want to hurry north. I shall agitate their complacency, have no fear. Verus and Mela are with me. Catullus will join me here the day after tomorrow.

  Send me an answer by this messenger.

  VI-A Clodius to Clodia.

  [For answer, the messenger was carefully rehearsed in an obscene expletive.]

  VII Clodia, at Capua, to Caesar’s Wife, in Rome.

  [September 8.]

  Darling:

  Your husband is a very great man, but he is a very rude man too. He has sent me a very short word that he cannot come to my dinner. I know that you can persuade him to come. Do not be discouraged if he refuses the first three or four times.

  Asinius Pollio is coming and that new poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. Remind the Dictator that I sent him every scrap I had of the young man’s verses and that he has neither returned the originals nor sent me copies of them.

  You ask me, darling, what I think of the cult of Isis and Osiris. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. Of course, it’s very beautiful to the eye, but it’s really all nonsense. It’s for servant girls and porters. I’m sorry I started taking people of our kind to it. Baiae’s so boring that going to the Egyptian cults was just one of those things one does to pass the time. If I were you, I wouldn’t urge your husband to let you attend them; it will only vex him and make you both unhappy.

  I have a present for you. At Sorrento I found the most wonderful weaver. He makes a gauze so light that you can blow yards of it up to the ceiling and then grow old waiting for it to drift down again. And it’s not made of fishes’ gills like that shiny material the dancing girls wear. You and I will wear it at my dinner; we’ll dress as twins! I’ve made a design and Mopsa can start work on it the moment I arrive in town.

  Do send me a word back by this messenger.

  And do drag the ungracious man to my dinner.

  I kiss you squarely at the corners of each of your beautiful eyes. Twins! Though you are so much younger than I am!

  VII-A Caesar’s wife t
o Clodia, by return messenger.

  Dearest Mousie:

  I cannot wait to see you. I am wretched. I cannot go on living as I am. You must advise me. He says we cannot come to your dinner. Every request I put to him he refuses. I cannot go to Baiae. I cannot go to the theater. I cannot go to the Temple of Isis and Osiris.

  I want to have a long long talk with you. How can I get a little more freedom? Every morning we quarrel and every night he apologizes; but I never make the least real progress, and I never get what I want.

  Of course, I love him very very much, because he’s my husband; but, oh dear, I wish I could get some pleasure out of life some time. I weep so much that I have grown very ugly and you will hate me.

  Of course, I shall keep asking him to come to your dinner, but oh!—I know him. The gauze sounds marvelous. Hurry.

  VIII Caesar’s Journal—Letter to Lucius Mamilius Turrinus.

  [Probably between September 4 and 20.]

  970. [On the laws of primogeniture and a passage in Herodotus.]

  971. [On the poetry of Catullus.] Many thanks for the six comedies of Menander. I have not been able to read them yet. I am having them copied and shall return the originals and perhaps some comments of my own before long.

  You must, indeed, have a rich library. Are there some gaps that I could help you fill? I am ransacking the world now for a correct text of Aeschylus’s Lycurgeia. It took me six years to put my hand on The Banqueters and The Babylonians of Aristophanes, which I sent you last spring. The latter as you noticed was a poor copy; some customs-house clerks in Alexandria had covered it with the inventories of cargoes.

  I am putting into this week’s packet a sheaf of poems. Old masterpieces disappear; new ones, under Apollo, arrive to take their place. These are by a young man, Gaius Valerius Catullus, son of an old acquaintance of mine who lives near Verona. On the way north in [50] I spent the night at their house and remember the sons and the daughter. In fact, I remember appraising the poet’s brother—who has since died—more highly!

  You will be astonished to know that the woman addressed in the poems under the name of Lesbia is no other than Clodia Pulcher to whom you and I have written poems in our day. Clodia Pulcher! By what strange chain of significances has it come about that this woman who has lost intelligible meaning to herself and lives only to impress the chaos of her soul on all that surrounds her should now live in the mind of a poet as an object of adoration and should draw from him such radiant songs? I say to you in all gravity that one of the things in this world that I most envy is the endowment from which springs great poetry. To the great poets I ascribe the power to gaze fixedly at the whole of life and bring into harmony that which is within and that which is without them. This Catullus may well be of that company. Are these sovereign beings then subject to the deceptions of the lesser humanity? What disturbs me now is not his hatred of me but his love of Clodia. I cannot believe he is addressing merely her beauty, and that the beauty of the body is sufficient to evoke such triumphs in the ordering of language and idea. Is he able to see in her excellences which are hidden from us? Or does he see the greatness that undoubtedly was within her before she wrought on herself the havoc which now arouses detestation and laughter throughout the city?

  For me these questions are connected with the first questions which one puts to life itself. I shall continue to inquire into them and shall report my findings to you.

  972. [On politics and appointments.]

  973. [Concerning certain reforms introduced into the Mysteries of the Good Goddess. See Document XLII-B.]

  974. [On some casks of Greek wine Caesar is sending as a present.]

  975. [On Cleopatra’s request that when she is in Rome she be permitted to attend the Mysteries of the Good Goddess. See Document XLIII-A.]

  976. [Recommendation of a servant.]

  977. [On the enmity felt toward him by Cato, Brutus, and Catullus.] I called on Cato on the day commemorating his great ancestor’s services.

  As I have told you before, writing to you has a strange effect on me; I find myself examining matters which I do not otherwise consider. The thought that came to my pen that moment and which I was about to reject is this:

  Of the four men whom I most respect in Rome three regard me with mortal enmity. I mean Marcus Junius Brutus, Cato, and Catullus. It is very likely that Cicero would also be pleased to miss me. There is no doubt about all this; many letters reach me which were not intended for my eyes.

  I am accustomed to being hated. Already in early youth I discovered that I did not require the good opinion of other men, even of the best, to confirm me in my actions. I think there is only one solitude greater than that of the military commander and of the head of the state and that is the poet’s—for who can advise him in that unbroken succession of choices which is a poem? It is in this sense that responsibility is liberty; the more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose. I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility and that no greater danger could befall mine than that it should reflect an effort to incur the approval of any man, be it a Brutus or a Cato. I must arrive at my decisions as though they were not subject to the comment of other men, as though no one were watching.

  And yet I am a politician: I must play the comedy of extreme deference to the opinion of others. A politician is one who pretends that he is subject to the universal hunger for esteem; but he cannot successfully pretend this unless he is free of it. This is the basic hypocrisy of politics and the final triumph of the leader comes with the awe that is aroused in men when they suspect, but never know for certain, that their leader is indifferent to their approval, indifferent and a hypocrite. What?—they say to themselves—: what? can it be that there is absent from this man that serpent’s nest which is lodged within us all and which is at once our torture and our delight—the thirst for praise, the necessity of self-justification, the assertion of one’s self, cruelty, and envy? My days and nights are spent amid the hissing of those serpents. I once heard them in my own vitals. How I silenced them there I do not know, though the answer to that question, as put to a Socrates, exceeds all other questions in interest.

  It is not by reason of such serpents’ nests, I think, that I am hated by a Marcus Brutus, a Cato, and by this poet. It is indeed from their minds that they hate me and from their views of government and freedom. Even if I brought them up to the place I hold and showed them the world stretched out as one can only see it from here; even if I could split open my skull and show them the experience of my lifetime, so many hundredfold closer to men and government than theirs has been; even if I could read with them, line by line, the texts of the philosophers to whom they cling, and the histories of the countries from which they draw their examples; even then I could not hope to clear their eyes. The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error. Brutus and Cato repeat liberty, liberty, and live to impose on others a liberty they have not accorded to themselves—stern, joyless men, crying to their neighbors: be joyful as we are joyful; be free as we are free.

  Cato is not educable. Brutus I have sent to Hither Gaul as governor, to school. Octavius is beside me, seeing all the traffic of state; I shall soon send him out into the arena.

  But why should Catullus hate me? Can great poets generate indignations out of sentiments acquired in old textbooks? Are great poets stupid in everything except poetry? Can they form their opinions from the table conversation of the Aemilian Draughts and Swimming Club?

  I confess, my dear friend, that I am astonished by a weakness that I feel awakening in me, a delirious weakness: oh, to be understood by such a one as Catullus and to be celebrated by his hand in verses that would not soon be forgotten. />
  978. [On a principle of banking.]

  979. [On some conspiratorial activities in Italy agitating for his assassination. See our LXI.]

  980. Do you remember where Redhead Scaevola asked us to go hunting with him the summer we returned from Greece? The second wheat there promises very well. [This is a financial tip, obliquely stated in order not to alert their several secretaries.]

  981. [On the poverty of adjectives which discriminate color in the Greek language.]

  982. [On a possible abolition of all religious observances.] Last night, my noble friend, I did something which I have not done for many years: I wrote an edict; reread it; and tore it up. I indulged an uncertainty.

  These last few days I have been receiving unprecedentedly absurd reports from the disembowelers of birds and the auditors on thunder. Moreover, the Courts and the Senate have been closed for two days because an eagle let fall an untidy mess within an arrow’s flight of the Capitol. My patience was drawing short. I refused to perform myself the ceremonial of propitiation, to mime the frightened self-abasement. My wife and my very servants looked at me askance. Cicero deigned to advise me that I should comply with the expectations of popular superstition.

  Last night I sat down and wrote the edict abolishing the College of Augurs and declared that henceforward no days were to be regarded as unlucky. I wrote on, giving to my people the reasons for this action. When have I been happier? What pleasures are greater than those of honesty? I wrote on and the constellations glided before my window. I disbanded the College of Vestal Virgins; I married the daughters of our first houses and they gave sons and daughters to Rome. I closed the doors of the temples, of all our temples except those of Jupiter. I tumbled the gods back into the gulf of ignorance and fear from which they came and into that treacherous half-world where the fancy invents consolatory lies. And finally the moment came when I pushed aside what I had done and started to begin again with the announcement that Jupiter himself had never existed; that man was alone in a world in which no voices were heard than his own, a world neither friendly nor unfriendly save as he made it so.