The Ides of March Read online

  Dedication

  This work is dedicated

  to two friends:

  LAURO DE BOSIS

  Roman poet, who lost his life

  marshaling a resistance against

  the absolute power of Mussolini;

  his aircraft pursued by those of the Duce

  plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea;

  and to

  EDWARD SHELDON

  who though immobile and blind

  for over twenty years

  was the dispenser of wisdom,

  courage, and gaiety

  to a large number of people.

  Epigraph

  “Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil;

  Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefühl verteure. . . .”

  —Goethe, Faust, Part Two

  “The shudder of awe is humanity’s highest faculty,

  Even though this world is forever altering its values. . . .”

  Gloss: Out of man’s recognition in fear and awe that there is an Unknowable comes all that is best in the explorations of his mind,—even though that recognition is often misled into superstition, enslavement, and overconfidence.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Author’s Note

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Book Four

  Afterword

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements and Sources

  Bibliographical Note

  About the Author

  Also by Thornton Wilder

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  WHEN a sentence in a book delights me, I draw a vertical line in the margin next to it. If I reread the book and the sentence once again makes me think, or cry, or laugh out loud, I cross my vertical line with a horizontal one. In the extremes of literary pleasure, on third or fourth reading, I start adding diagonals.

  No book on my shelf has more cruciforms and asterisks in the margins than The Ides of March. No novel pulls me back more frequently, or with more pleasure, than the story of Julius Caesar’s final months, told through letters, diaries, and other texts supposedly recovered from the waning days of the Roman Republic.

  Described so briefly, Ides might sound like an academic affair—just a lot of togas and declensions. In fact, the book is, in the words of its author, “yelling with life.” It features spies, assassins, sacrilegious deeds, secret ciphers, and Cleopatra. These cloak-and-dagger doings build genuine suspense, even dread. That’s quite an achievement, considering the book leads up to one of the most famous events in world history. Envy the writer who can get his readers thinking, I can’t wait to find out what’s going to happen to Julius Caesar.

  Thus the first layer of scribbles in my margins. The second and third (and so on) layers emerged for a different reason. The Ides of March is not a book with a beginning, middle, and end. Or rather, it’s a book with four beginnings, middles, and ends. Each of its sections retraces the same events, stretching the timeframe earlier and later. Each pass enhances and complicates our understanding of what we’ve read before. Wilder said that the book begins to reveal itself “at its second reading.” It goes on doing so for many readings beyond that, as the spangly shapes in my margins can attest.

  The arrival of this new edition gives me a clean canvas to draw on. That’s reason enough to rejoice. But I suspect that it’s going to be embraced even by those who keep their margins pristine. We are living in boom times for chronological trickery. As I write, America’s water coolers are echoing with astonishment over Watchmen, HBO’s new adaptation of the graphic novel. Its signature storytelling move is to spend a long stretch of an episode in a character’s past, leading us to a richer understanding of the present. On Broadway, the cast of Hamilton performs a courtship scene, then rewinds the action (the dancers do their steps in reverse) and performs it again from another character’s point of view. If this sounds too complicated for the general public, consider that The Avengers: Endgame— which sends its heroes back to earlier points in their stories, sometimes to exact scenes that we’ve watched in previous films—recently became the highest-grossing movie of all time.

  Probably there’s a subtle sociological explanation for all of this: We crave seeing Tony Stark or Angelica Schuyler relive the past because we are reckoning with the something-or-other of twenty-first-century life. But I think we like it mainly because it’s fun. Thornton Wilder certainly thought so. He said that his invitation to readers of this book was to “play this game” with him.

  To say that The Ides of March is a game is not to say that it’s frivolous. In fact, one reason I return to the book as often as I do is because the stakes seem so high. Wilder put a lot of himself into this story, more than in almost anything else he wrote. It also plays a more crucial role in his life’s work than might be apparent at first glance. The best reason to welcome this edition is a fresh chance to understand the game that Wilder invited us to play, in the hope that we can better understand him—and what he was trying to make us understand about ourselves.

  * * *

  Wilder began working on this book long before he began writing it—not that he was aware of it at the time.

  Picture him, an eager young American, spending a postgraduate year in Rome. See him, blue eyes gleaming, as he peers through the gloom (for he is underground, visiting an archaeological dig beneath the city). Watch as he leans in close, staring at a fresco of a Roman family, and becomes aware that a new thought has entered his mind: Between this family, dead for two thousand years, and the living families streaming through the streets overhead, there is no essential difference—really no difference at all.

  The Eternal City had taught Wilder that all cities are eternal—that human experience is essentially one, no matter where or when you perceive it.

  In the decades that followed, he worked out a literary corollary to that insight: If you want to make people see themselves more clearly, a good way to do it is to shuttle them off to a distant time or place. So he invited the readers of 1927 to return to eighteenth-century Peru, in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and he sent the Broadway audience of 1938 back to the New England of the previous generation, in Our Town, confident that they would find their hopes, fears, doubts, and perplexities reflected back to them when they arrived.

  If you leave aside The Skin of Our Teeth and its madcap depiction of the Ice Age, The Ides of March is Wilder’s most distant trip through time and space, and his most thoroughly rendered. These pages are thick with the details of daily living. Individual customs of ancient Rome are different from their analogs in 1948, but not the fact that people abide by them, and lash out when they’re violated. Politicians angle for power, and lovers fight for affection (and also for power), as Wilder brings to life a society that’s nothing like ours, but very much like ours.

  In one crucial respect, Ides seems an outlier in Wilder’s historical fiction: Nowhere else does he focus on one of history’s boldface names. “I have pacified the world,” declares Julius Caesar, by way of introduction. “I have reformed the calendar. . . . I am arranging that the world be fed equably.” (We are a long way from Grover’s Corners now.) But Wilder isn’t very interested in Caesar’s power. Or rather, he’s interested in all the things that Caesar’s power can’t do. No sooner does Caesar finish his litany of achievements than he confesses his inadequacy. He feels that Rome requires “some new enlargement” of him, but he doesn’t know what it is. For the first time, he tells his friend Lucius, he is unsure—not just about this or that policy, but about the deepest questions of human life:
“Man—what is that? What do we know of him? His Gods, liberty, mind, love, destiny, death—what do these mean?”

  In other words, the same oneness of human experience that Wilder extended across space and time also extends up and down the rungs of society. You might amass the power, wealth, and acclaim of a Caesar, but you will still roll out of the bed in the morning, strap on your sandals, and wonder what it all means.

  This is not to say that your friends and neighbors will notice you doing it, for one of the book’s recurring ironies is how misunderstood Caesar is. Someone says that he does not love, but we see that he loves profoundly. Plenty of people say that he craves power, but in truth he seems eager to share it—to see Rome’s citizens assume the responsibilities he keeps trying to confer. It is said—by Caesar himself!—that he is a stranger to introspection, but the man reflects on his life constantly. During one bout of self-examination, he floats an idea that startles me as much today as when I read first the book: “If I were not Caesar now, I would be Caesar’s assassin.”

  So complex is Caesar’s view of his power that I still can’t decide if this book has a tragic ending or one that is, in some perverse way, happy. I’m not sure what Caesar himself would think.

  * * *

  Vivid characters, high stakes, a picturesque setting: all the ingredients of a classic novel are here. But to create his “game,” Wilder threw out the rules of classic novels, devising a structure that’s intricate, engrossing, and strange.

  He was candid about why he wanted to write a novel in letters: By the 1930s, he had grown distrustful of the supposed omniscience of the fictional narrator. He wanted to generate a feeling of immediacy, like the experience of watching a play, where the author remains out of view and the characters seem to speak from their own volition.

  It’s a joy to experience Caesar and his world through the perspectives of Cicero, Catullus, Cleopatra, Clodia, and the rest. (Or, more precisely, we experience it through their memories. Here is the riddle of epistolary fiction: A book might be packed with spying, stabbing, cheating, and so forth, but the reader doesn’t have a direct encounter with any of those things. All you get are accounts written afterward by participants or witnesses. Ultimately, this book is 246 solid pages of thinking.) But making all those characters stand up and start talking doesn’t remove Wilder from our view. Somehow the more he tries to hide his authorial input (by populating the book with real people, by claiming he’s only presenting authentic texts), the more conspicuous he becomes.

  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, he says, which just makes you more eager to look. And what you find are personal touches large and small, Wilder’s creative thumbprints everywhere.

  For example: Caesar really did have an Aunt Julia. But she was long dead in 45 BCE. So what is she doing here? Well, Wilder always sought the company of formidable female contemporaries and older women, from his mother to Ruth Gordon to Lady Sibyl Colefax to Gertrude Stein. Wilder also peppered the book with comments that make fun of scholars and their conventions. Once you realize that there’s no character expressing these views, they start to feel like a window direct into Wilder’s sense of humor.

  But the most personal touch of all might be the book’s masterstroke: the ingenious chronological structure, the storytelling approach that feels so timely today. He wrote the book while obsessed with Finnegans Wake, spending hundreds of hours “digging out its buried keys and resolving that unbroken chain of erudite puzzles.” He was confident that readers would treat a book that invites reading and rereading purportedly authentic letters as a game, because that is precisely what he did for fun.

  When you add up all these qualities—the familiar content and unfamiliar form, the historical sweep and autobiographical touches, the immediate pleasures that become more satisfying over time—the full scope of Wilder’s achievement comes into view. The great theme of so much of his greatest work is that we are blind to the life swirling around us. It’s there in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Long Christmas Dinner, and, supremely, in the last act of Our Town, when Emily comes back from the grave, realizing too late how much she missed in her time on Earth. In The Ides of March, Wilder doesn’t tell a story about a character like Emily—he turns the reader into Emily. His four-part structure demands that you revisit the same events again and again, showing you things that you hadn’t seen the first time (or second, or third).

  What you find aren’t just extra plot details, or clever patterns. You begin to understand the characters more deeply and feel the emotional punch of certain moments, even when the people involved in them don’t. There’s a big asterisk in my copy next to a letter about one of Caesar’s final walks through the city. I didn’t mark the passage at all until I connected it to a very different letter a hundred pages earlier. Now that I see it, the moment leaves me in tears.

  Wilder called the book a game, which it is: Few novels offer so many kinds of delight. But it’s also a tutorial, a lesson in looking more carefully—not just while we’re with Julius Caesar in his world, but after we close the book and turn once again to ours.

  Jeremy McCarter

  Jeremy McCarter is the author of Young Radicals and the coauthor, with Lin-Manuel Miranda, of Hamilton: The Revolution.

  Author’s Note

  HISTORICAL reconstruction is not among the primary aims of this work. It may be called a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic.

  The principal liberty taken is that of transferring an event which took place in 62 B.C.—the profanation of the Mysteries of the Bona Dea by Clodia Pulcher and her brother—to the celebration of the same rites seventeen years later on December 11, 45.

  By 45 many of my characters would have long been dead: Clodius, murdered by bullies on a country road; Catullus, though we have only St. Jerome’s word for it that he died at the age of thirty; the younger Cato, a few months earlier in this very year, in Africa, resisting Caesar’s absolute power; Caesar’s aunt, widow of the great Marius, had died even before 62. Moreover by 45, Caesar’s second wife Pompeia had long been replaced by his third wife Calpurnia.

  A number of the elements in this work which may most seem to have been of my contriving are indeed historical: Cleopatra arrived in Rome in 46, was installed by Caesar in his villa across the river; she remained there until his assassination when she fled back to her own country. The possibility that Junius Marcus Brutus was Caesar’s son is weighed and generally rejected by almost every historian who has given extended consideration to Caesar’s private life. Caesar’s gift to Servilia of a pearl of unprecedented value is historical. The conspiratorial chain-letters directed against Caesar were suggested by the events of our own times. They were circulated in Italy against the Fascist regime by Lauro de Bosis, reportedly on the advice of Bernard Shaw.

  The attention of the reader is called to the form in which the material is presented:

  Within each of the four books the documents are given in approximately chronological order. Those in Book One cover September 45 B.C. Book Two, which contains material relevant to Caesar’s inquiry concerning the nature of love, begins earlier and traverses the whole of September and October. Book Three, mainly occupied with religion, begins earlier still and runs through the autumn, concluding with the ceremonies of the Good Goddess in December. Book Four, resuming all the aspects of Caesar’s inquiry, particularly those dealing with himself as possibly filling a role as an instrument of “destiny,” begins with the earliest document in the volume and concludes with his assassination.

  All the documents in this work are from the author’s imagination with the exception of the poems of Catullus and the closing entry which is from Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars.

  Source material dealing with Cicero is copious; with Cleopatra, meager; with Caesar, rich but often enigmatic and distorted by political bias. This is a suppositional reconstruction provoked by the inequalities in those records.

  THORNTON WILDER


  Book One

  I The Master of the College of Augurs to Caius Julius Caesar, Supreme Pontiff and Dictator of the Roman People.

  (Copies to the Priest of Capitoline Jupiter, etc.; to Madam President of the College of the Vestal Virgins, etc., etc.)

  [September 1, 45 B.C.]

  To the most reverend Supreme Pontiff:

  Sixth report of this date.

  Readings of the noon sacrifice:

  A goose: maculations of the heart and liver. Herniation of the diaphragm.

  Second goose and a cock: Nothing to remark.

  A pigeon: ominous condition, kidney displaced, liver enlarged and yellow in color. Pink quartz in crop. Further detailed study has been ordered.

  Second pigeon: Nothing to remark.

  Observed flights: an eagle from three miles north of Mt. Soracte to limit of vision over Tivoli. The bird showed some uncertainty as to direction in its approach toward the city. Thunder: No thunder has been heard since that last reported twelve days ago.

  Health and long life to the Supreme Pontiff.

  I-A Notation by Caesar, confidential, for his ecclesiastical secretary.

  Item I. Inform the Master of the College that it is not necessary to send me ten to fifteen of these reports a day. A single summary report of the previous day’s observations is sufficient.

  Item II. Select from the reports of the last four days three signally favorable and three unfavorable auspices. I may require them in the Senate today.

  Item III. Draw up and distribute a notification to the following effect:

  With the establishment of the new calendar the Commemoration of the Founding of the City on the seventeenth day of each month will now be elevated to a rite of the highest civic importance.

  The Supreme Pontiff, if resident in the City, will be present on each occasion.

  The entire ritual will be observed with the following additions and corrections: