The Ides of March Read online

  1. The reports from Source 14 [Abra] are worthless. Her simplicity is feigned. It should not be difficult to increase their value by threats of exposure and by other pressures.

  2. Are you convinced that you have explored all the significance of the Dictator’s disappearance during my reception on the 27th? His attendance at the sickbed of a scurrilous versifier does not appear to afford a sufficient explanation.

  3. Every effort should be made to place an agent in the household of Marc Antony. The evidence you have collected of his disloyalty to the Dictator in [46] is herewith returned. It should be deposited among the documents which you are safeguarding against any possible theft or confiscation. I am retaining the other material you found in his home.

  4. The dressmaker Mopsa. Obtain for me as soon as possible a complete account of her life, parentage, associates, and so on. Also a schedule of her engagements during this month. She is coming to me on the 17th to make my robe for the Ceremonies of the Good Goddess.

  5. Your work for this week is to be an intensive study of the situation of the Lady Clodia Pulcher and her brother. What interpretations are being made of her retirement to the country? When is she returning to the City? The report of Sosigenes [the Egyptian astronomer] was unsatisfactory. I wish you to instruct him in what to observe.

  I agree with you that Clodius Pulcher is attempting to seduce the Dictator’s wife. I wish you to follow this with the closest attention. There is little doubt that communications are passing between them through Source 14. Report to me any suggestions you have for taking advantage of this situation.

  In acknowledgement of the diligence and skill you have shown in the difficult tasks laid before you, it is with pleasure that I assign to you and to your descendants forever the Oasis of Sesseben, together with its revenues and imposts, limited only by the regulations laid down under the 44th and 47th edicts of my reign [limitations imposed on the levies which regional officials and landowners may assess against farmers, and limitation on the charge for the watering of camels at springs and waterways.]

  LII Pompeia to Clodia.

  [November 12.]

  I miss you all the time, dearest Mousie. Nobody can understand why you have to go off into the country now when so much is going on in the city. I asked my husband what interest you could possibly take in mathematics and he said that you were very good at such things and that you knew all about the stars and what they did.

  I give you ten guesses about who comes to our house all the time, at least every other day, and we have the most unusual times. Cleopatra! And not only Cleopatra, but Cytheris, the actress. And my husband arranged it all. Isn’t that strange?

  First Cytheris came to teach me you-know-what. Then Cleopatra started coming to learn some of that, too. At the end of the lesson the Queen asks Cytheris to recite, and oh, such things, my blood runs cold. Cassandra going mad and Medea planning to murder her babies, and everybody dying. And then my husband comes home early and its jabber, jabber, jabber about Greek plays. And he gets up and he’s Agamemnon and Cytheris is Clytemnestra and Cleopatra is Cassandra and Octavius and I have to be chorus, and then we all have supper. Oh, my dear Claudilla, you should be here because I have no one to laugh with; they are all so serious about these things. For me it is very very funny when my husband starts roaring and when Cleopatra goes mad.

  Really, I rather like the Queen. Of course, she’s not like you and me. I used to think she was quite ugly but sometimes she is almost beautiful. But, really, I am not the least bit jealous. My husband doesn’t behave to her any differently than he behaves to Aunt Julia.

  Yesterday, the Queen of Egypt asked my husband when you were coming back. She said that she hoped you would come back soon, as you are her instructress for the rites. My husband said he did not know what your plans were, but that he assumed you would be back by December first.

  Dearest, I saw your brother, the younger one I mean; he came up to me on his horse while I was on the road to Lake Nemi. He looks so like you that I am always astonished. People say that he is a bad man, and even you say so, but I know he is not. You must not take that attitude to him, Claudilla, dear. Anyone would be bad, if you told them all the time that they were bad.

  From this letter you must think that I am very happy, but I am not. I almost never go out of the house and no one I wish to see ever comes into it. I went to the Queen of Egypt’s once; I went to pay a confinement call on Porcia, Brutus’s wife. Sometimes I just sit and wish I were dead. What I think is that if one doesn’t live when one’s young, when do you live? I adore my husband and he adores me, but I like people and he doesn’t.

  I’ve just heard that my call on Porcia was simply wasted; word has just come that she’s had a miscarriage, so I needn’t have gone at all.

  LIII Cytheris to Lucius Mamilius Turrinus, on the Island of Capri.

  [November 25.]

  The air of Rome, my dear friend, is uneasy and fretful; its tongues are growing sharp and satirical, without laughter; one hears stories daily of behavior and crimes that are not so much passionate as erratic and illogical. For a time I thought that this malaise lay only within myself, but now all are remarking it. Our Master is busier than ever; edicts fall about us daily. Regulations are laid down for usury and every man must clean the street in front of his door; a great map of the world has been set into the pavement before the law courts, picked out in golden eagles which denote the location of new cities. Young husbands stand before it, stroking their chins, trying to decide whether they shall set up a new home in ice and sleet or under a burning sun.

  I was about to accept your invitation to come to Capri at once, when this Master requested that I come to his house to instruct his wife and his royal guest in the ceremonial that will be required of them in early December. We have had eight sessions, frequently concluded by readings from the tradegies in which we all take part, including Caesar himself. I find myself moving in a tragedy within a tragedy.

  I am coming to understand that mystery, Caesar’s marriage. I see that it is not based on any morbid inclination toward very young girls, as so many sneering tongues have held. Caesar is a teacher; it is a sort of fury in him. He can only love where he can instruct; the return he asks is progress and enlightenment. Of these young girls he asks only what Pygmalion asked of marble. I gather that he has been three times rewarded—by Cornelia, by his daughter, and by the Queen of Egypt; and many times resisted. The resistance he is now meeting is enormous and crushing. Pompeia is not an unintelligent girl, but his method toward her is so unintelligent that he is frightening and starving whatever intelligence she has. Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness. On the one hand he loves her as a delicate growing thing and as a woman (and Caesar’s glance resting on a woman is like no other man’s), and on the other hand he loves her for the potentiality she may possess to be an Aurelia, a Julia Marcia. In his mind Rome is a woman; he married Pompeia to shape her into one more of those living statues of the great Roman matron.

  Cleopatra has disappointed him also. One can only guess how intoxicatingly she must first have filled the requirements of a beloved pupil. She still is. I worship this colossus, but I am an old woman; I am no longer educable. Yet I understand well the eager rapture with which she receives every word that falls from his lips. He discovered, however, that he could teach her nothing essential, for the essence of what he has to teach is moral, is responsibility; and Cleopatra has not the dimmest sense of what is right and wrong. Caesar does not know that he has this passion for teaching; all that has for him the invisibility of things which are self-evident. Hence he is a very bad teacher. He assumes that all men are both teachers and voracious learners; that everyone is vibrant with moral life. Women are more subtle teachers than men.

  I shall never cease to be moved by the view we occasi
onally have of great men trying to make a marriage where no marriage can be, continuing to expend a defeated tenderness on ill-compounded wives. The patience they acquire is a very different thing from the patience that wives exhibit toward husbands; that is in the natural order of things and should no more be singled out for praise than the honesty of the honest. One has seen these insulted husbands finally withdrawing into themselves; they have learned the basic solitude of man as their happier brothers will never know it.

  Such a husband is Caesar. His other bride is Rome. To both he is a bad husband, but from an excess of conjugal love.

  Let me go on a moment more.

  I have only recently come to understand some words that you let fall years ago, that “wickedness may be the exploration of one’s liberty”—have I got that right?—and that “it can be the search for a limit that one can respect.” How stupid I am not to have digested that before, my dear prince; I could have played it into my Medea and into my Clytemnestra. Yes, in the light of that thought, can’t we say that a great deal of what we call “wickedness” is the very principle of virtue exploring the laws of its own nature? Isn’t that what Antigone, my Antigone, our Antigone, meant when she said: [In Sophocles’s play, in reply to Creon’s assertion that her slain “good” brother would not wish her wicked brother to receive an honorable burial] “Who can say but that in the underworld his [wicked] deeds may seem to be blameless?” Yes, there lies the interpretation of Clodia’s disorders and unless Caesar is watchful, Pompeia will journey out in search of a limitation to her curiosities. Nature affords them to our senses: fire burns our fingers and the action of our hearts prevents our running up mountainsides; but only the Gods have put a veto on the adventures of our minds. If They do not choose to intervene, we are condemned to fashion our own laws or to wander in fright through the pathless wastes of our terrifying liberty, seeking even the reassurance of a barred gate, of a forbidding wall. It is a recurrent joke among writers of farces that wives rejoice in being beaten by their husbands. It reflects, however, an eternal truth—that there is a great comfort in knowing that those who love you love you enough to take the responsibility for marking out the permissible. Husbands often err—but in both directions. Caesar is a tyrant—both as husband and as ruler. It is not that, like other tyrants, he is chary of according liberty to others; it is that, loftily free himself, he has lost all touch with the way freedom operates and is developed in others; always mistaken, he accords too little or he accords too much.

  LIV Clodia to her brother.

  [From Nettuno.]

  [Selections from almost daily letters throughout November.]

  Don’t come here, Brainless. I don’t wish to see anyone.

  I am completely happy as I am. Cicero is next door, repining and writing those doleful insincerities he calls philosophy. We met several times, but are now reduced to sending each other gifts of fruit or pastry. He could not interest me in philosophy and I could not interest him in mathematics. He’s a very witty man, but for some reason he’s never witty to me. I dry him up.

  I do nothing all day and would be very bad company for you. I study numbers and can forget anything else for days at a time. There are properties in the study of infinity that no one has ever dreamed of. I have frightened Sosigenes with them. He says they are dangerous.

  I am very angry with you for appealing to old Eagle-beak to close that play. Any mortification only begins for us from the moment we take any notice of such things. When will you learn that the enjoyment of the malicious is doubled when they learn that we have been wounded by their remarks?

  As you say, it is vexatious to be charged with a thousand crimes that one never got around to committing. I certainly left my dear parents as soon as I could, but I never lifted a hand to annoy them. Not only did I not kill my poor husband, but I got down on my knees and begged him not to kill himself with overeating. I have never felt a tremor of passion for you or for Dodo; in fact, I have too often gazed with astonishment at the starved water rats that committed themselves to finding you attractive.

  As to this last matter [the death of Catullus?], I don’t wish you ever to mention it again. It is all so complicated; no one else will ever understand it. I don’t wish to hear it mentioned.

  The worst of being charged with crimes, however, is that it makes one restless to deserve all that censure. But, of course, only something enormous would do. Something to darken the sun.

  Of course, I am angry that people should be saying that he directed me to go into the country. Although it’s utter nonsense, it’s more exasperating than all the other lies put together. But I shall not come into town merely to refute it.

  [November 27.]

  Come to Nettuno, Publius. I cannot endure this any longer, but I am not yet ready to come into town.

  For the sake of heaven, come and don’t bring anyone with you.

  The worst about inactivity is that it sets one brooding about the passing of time. And it has set me to remembering, as though I were an old woman. Last night I could not sleep; I got up and burned all my mathematical notebooks; then I threw in all the letters I have received for ten years. Sosigenes danced around like an old moth trying to restrain me.

  Start the minute you receive this letter. I have an idea. Marc Antony failed to complete “the most daring feat ever seen in Rome.” Well, I know another.

  Mopsa is here making me a new robe and turban for the Lalalala games.

  [November 28.]

  I hope this letter fails to reach you and that you are already on your way. If not, start at once.

  I have just received a letter from the Dictator requesting me to return to Rome to take up my instruction for the Queen of Egypt. He has asked me to dinner on the second.

  LV Cleopatra to Caesar.

  [December 5.]

  I send you the following information, great Caesar, knowing well that my motives may be misunderstood by you. A month and a half ago I would have told it to you at once; that thought has decided me now.

  The Lady Clodia Pulcher has had two robes and turbans made for the ceremonies on the night of December ι ith. She intends to dress her brother in one of them and introduce him into your house. Your wife is aware of this, as a letter from her, now in my possession, shows.

  LV-A Caesar to Cleopatra.

  [By return messenger.]

  I thank you, great Queen. I am indebted to you for many things. I regret that this sorry matter to which you have called my attention should be among them.

  LVI Alina, wife of Cornelius Nepos, to her sister Postumia, wife of Publius Ceccinius of Verona.

  [December 13.]

  Just a word in haste, dearest Postumia. Rome is standing on its head. There has never been such an uproar. Public offices have been closed and most of the shopkeepers don’t even open the shops. Word must have reached you before this: that Clodia Pulcher introduced her brother dressed as a votary into the Ceremonies of the Good Goddess. I was standing a few feet from him when he was discovered. They say it was the Lady Julia Marcia who called attention to it. Our singing had been going on for an hour, and the responses. Some women flew at him and tore off the turban and the bands. Such screaming you never heard. Soon women were striking him from all sides as hard as they could; others dashed about covering up the sacred things. Of course, there wasn’t any other man within shouting distance; but presently some guards came and picked him up, bleeding and groaning, and dragged him off.

  This is the end; really, I don’t know what to say. Everybody says, This is the end. People are even saying, Now let Caesar move Rome to Byzantium. In a moment I must hurry down to the trial. Cicero made a terrible and wonderful speech against Clodius and Clodia yesterday. All sorts of people are being called to testify and rumors are flying about. Some think that the Queen of Egypt had a hand in it, because Clodia served as her instructress; but the Queen was indisposed and did not even go to the rites.

  The strangest thing of all is the behavior of Caesar. As
Supreme Pontiff he should be directing the inquiry. But from the beginning he’s refused to have anything to do with it. There’s no doubt that his wife is as guilty as they are. Isn’t it awful, awful, awful?

  My husband has just come in. He says that Pompeia’s family—twenty of them—went to Caesar last night to urge him to speak in her defense. It seems that he was very quiet and listened to them for an hour. Then he rose and said he had no intention of appearing at the trial; that it was possible that Pompeia was not implicated in this matter, but that it was not difficult for a woman in her position so to conduct her life that such a suspicion would never fall upon her; that the suspicion was damaging enough, and that he was divorcing her the very next day—that is today.

  I’m hurrying to the trial, dear. I may have to give evidence. It is a strange feeling to be hurrying through the streets of this city! It’s as though the city itself were in disgrace and that we all ought to move out of it.

  Book Four

  LVII Servilia in Rome to her son Marcus Junius Brutus.

  [August 8. This letter reached Brutus at Marseilles as he was about to return to Rome concluding his governorship of Hither Gaul.]

  Return, Marcus, return to the city which is bending all its eyes upon you.

  The hero whose name you bear [Junius Brutus who had expelled the Tarquins] lives in you, by spirit if not by blood, and his task is on your shoulders.

  Return to the city whose health is your own health and whose freedom is your own freedom. Romans are again calling on the name of Brutus and all eyes are bent on you.

  The man against whom Rome’s rage is directed is no little man. The man who now stifles Rome is great in all things and greatest in error. The murderer must be of equal stature with the murdered or Rome is twice enslaved. There is only one Roman at that height and all eyes are bent on you. The hand that strikes him down must be passionless as justice. The tyrannicide’s task is a holy task; it is remembered with grateful tears by generations unborn.