The Ides of March Page 8

  XX Abra, Caesar’s wife’s Maid, to Clodia.

  [September 30.]

  Our party will start for your dinner at three. My mistress and the Old Lady in litters, himself walking.

  Himself cheerful. Herself in tears. He made me take all the gold beads off the gown. Sumptuary laws.

  Heard an important conversation. Forgive me, my lady. Old Lady had long talk with her. Said that maybe you will be forbidden [underneath, half-erased: disbarred] from ceremonies. My mistress very angry, shouted that himself would prevent. Old Lady said maybe yes, maybe no. My mistress tears; begs that Old Lady will prevent it. My mistress goes to himself, begs that that will not happen. Himself calm and cheerful, says he knows nothing about it and unnecessary to get alarmed.

  Am about to do my mistress’s hair. Will take an hour.

  My mistress asks questions about your brother.

  My respectful obedience to your ladyship.

  XX-A Caesar’s wife to Clodia.

  TERRIBLE THING HAS HAPPENED. ON THE WAY TO YOUR DINNER THREE MEN JUMPED OVER WALL AND TRIED TO KILL MY HUSBAND. DO NOT KNOW HOW BADLY HE IS WOUNDED. WE HAVE ALL GONE HOME. DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO. WRETCHED AT MISSING YOUR DINNER. HUGS.

  XX-B Head of the Official Police to Head of the Secret Police.

  We have rounded up two hundred and twenty-four persons found near the scene of the attack. Have begun the questioning. Six men highly suspect. We have begun the torture. One killed himself before questioning.

  Crowds have collected before the house of Publius Clodius Pulcher. The rumor has spread that the Dictator was on his way to dine there and the attempted assassination is imputed to Clodius’s agents. The crowd has begun throwing stones at the house and is talking of setting fire to it.

  A number of the house servants attempted to leave by a gate on the Trivulcian Lane and were beaten by the crowd.

  Later.

  Crowds before the house increasingly threatening.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero was in the house, wearing insignia as former consul. Was escorted to his home by military detachment. Crowds spat at him and some stones were thrown.

  In the house remain Clodia Pulcher, a young man who gave his name as Gaius Valerius Catullus and one servant.

  Asinius Pollio was also a guest, but left immediately on hearing of the attempt and went to the Dictator’s house. As he was in uniform he was allowed to pass by the crowd and was applauded.

  Publius Clodius Pulcher escaped before we could detain him.

  Later.

  The Dictator suddenly arrived at the door of the house, accompanied by Asinius Pollio and six guards.

  He received loud acclamation. He addressed the crowd; bade them return to their homes and give thanks to the Gods for his safety. He assured them that he knew no reason why the residents of this house should be suspected of participation in the attempt on his life.

  In the hearing of all, he directed that none of the suspects be tortured until he had seen and questioned them.

  He directed me to make every effort to put my hand on Clodius Pulcher, but to treat him respectfully.

  XXI Asinius Pollio to Vergil and Horace.

  [This letter was written some fifteen years after the preceding.]

  Gout and a bad conscience, my friends, are enemies of sleep; both held me long awake last night.

  Some ten days ago, at our master’s table [i.e., that of the Emperor Caesar Augustus] I was abruptly called upon to recount the curious events connected with the interrupted dinner given by Clodia Pulcher to Catullus the poet, to Cicero, and to the Divine Caesar during the last year of his life. Fortunately for me, the Emperor was called away soon after I had begun my narration. Even in the brief portion which I had recounted, you must have been aware that I was stumbling. Our Emperor is a large-minded man, but he is master of the world, a God, and the nephew of a God. As his divine uncle used to say: Dictators must know the truth, but must never permit themselves to be told it. Unprepared, I was hastily trimming my story to fit an Emperor’s ears. You two should know the truth, however, and tonight I shall hope, in dictating the story, to forget and to appease my two discomforts.

  We had been awaiting for some time the arrival of the Dictator and his party. Outside the house, Clodia had lined rhe streets with priests and musicians and a large crowd had gathered to watch him pass. We were the last to learn that an attempt had been made upon his life. From the first (and to this day) the people of Rome have believed that it was Clodius Pulcher’s hired bullies who attempted to assassinate his guest. As we waited stones began falling in the court and bundles of burning straw were flung over the walls and fell at our feet. Finally some terrified servants told us the news. I received permission from Clodia to go to Caesar’s house. As I was in uniform I passed through the crowd without difficulty. I learned later that Cicero had addressed the mob from the door of the house, reminding them of his services to the Republic and bidding them return to their homes; that the crowd had been unimpressed and even insolent, and that he had hurried home barely escaping with his life; and that a number of servants, attempting to leave by the garden gate, had been clubbed to death.

  On my way across the Palatine Hill I picked up the trail of Caesar’s blood. I found him sitting in the courtyard of his house being treated for his wounds. The faces of his servants were white; his wife was distraught; only he and his aunt were calm. The assassins’ knives had made two deep cuts in his right side, reaching from his throat to his waist. The physician was washing and binding these with sea moss. Caesar sat jesting impatiently. As I approached him I saw in his eyes an expression which I had only seen there during the moments of greatest danger in the wars, a look of expectant happiness. He called me to him and asked me in a whisper how things were at Clodia’s house. I told him.

  “Good physician,” he said. “Make haste, make haste, make haste.”

  From time to time members of his secret police entered bringing reports of the search for his attackers.

  Finally the surgeon drew back and said: “Sire, I now resign the healing to nature herself. She asks of you immobility and sleep. Will the Dictator graciously drink this opiate.”

  Caesar rose and took several turns about the court, attentive to his condition, his eyes resting smilingly on me. “Good physician,” he said at last, “I shall obey you in two hours; but first I have an errand I must perform.”

  “Sire! Sire!” cried the physician.

  His wife flung herself at his knees, wailing like Cytheris in a tragedy. He raised her up, embraced her, and beckoned me sharply to the door. There he collected a few guards, bade his litter follow him, and we sped across the Palatine. At one point he was forced to stop by pain or weakness. He leaned against the wall in silence; his hand directed me to be silent. For a few moments he breathed deeply; then we continued on our way. As we drew near to Clodia’s house we could see that the police were having difficulty in their attempt to disperse the crowds. All Rome was streaming up the hill. When the people recognized the Dictator a great cry went up and space was cleared for him to pass. He walked slowly, smiling from right to left and touching the shoulders of those beside him. Before Clodia’s door he turned, raised his hand, and waited for silence.

  “Romans,” he said, “may the Gods bless Rome and all who love her. May the Gods preserve Rome and all who love her. Your enemies have attempted to take my life—”

  Here he opened his dress and showed the bindings on his side. There was a horror-struck silence followed by a roar of grief and rage. He continued calmly:

  “—but I am still among you, capable, and earnest to serve your welfare. Those who attacked me have been caught. When we have examined the matter to the bottom a report will be made to you of all that has happened. Return to your homes; draw your wives and your children about you and give thanks to the Gods; then sleep well. A measure of wheat shall be given to every father of a family that he and his may rejoice with me and mine over this happy issue. Go quietly to you
r homes, my friends, without lingering; for the rejoicing of a child is noisy, but the rejoicing of a man is silent and contained.”

  He stayed a moment while many came forward to press their foreheads on his hands.

  We went into the house. In the courtyard Clodia stood ready to receive him, at the point where her brother should have been standing. A few steps behind her Catullus was holding himself, erect and sullen. Caesar greeted them formally and apologized for the absence of his wife and aunt. In a low voice Clodia apologized for the absence of her brother.

  “We will make the tour of the altars,” he said. This he did with that incomparable mixture of serenity and gravity which he brought to the performance of all ritual. After giving a smiling glance toward Catullus he added the Collect for the Setting Sun which is customary in households north of the Po. He then suddenly became extraordinarily lighthearted. He had found one servant crouching behind an altar. He took her playfully by one ear and led her to the kitchen. “Surely, the dinner is not all spoiled. You can make us one dish; and while you are making it we will begin with our drinking. Asinius, you will fill our cups. I see, Clodia, that you have prepared a dinner in the Greek manner. We shall have a feast of talk, for the company is well chosen and there is no lack of subjects for our discussion.” Here he put the garland on his head saying: “I shall be [in Greek] King of the Banquet. I shall select the subject, reward the discreet, and impose the penalties upon the stupid.”

  I attempted to fall in with his mood, but Clodia could not find her tongue and for a time remained pale and shaken. Catullus reclined with lowered eyes until he had drunk several cups of wine. Caesar continued talking, however, with animation; to Clodia about the sumptuary laws, and to Catullus about his plans for controlling the floods on the Po. Finally, when the tables were withdrawn, Caesar rose, poured the libation, and announced the subject of our symposium: whether great poetry is the work of men’s minds only, or whether it is, as many have claimed, the prompting of the Gods. “Before we begin,” he said, “let us each recite some verses that we may be reminded of the matter before us.” He nodded toward me. I recited the “Oh, love, ruler of Gods and men” [from Euripides’ play, now lost, the Andromeda]; Clodia spoke Sappho’s “Invocation to the Morning Star” [also lost]; Catullus spoke very slowly the opening of Lucretius’s poem. There was a prolonged silence while we waited for Caesar to take his turn and I knew that he was struggling against the tears which so frequently overcame him. After he had drunk deep he recited, as though negligently, some verses of Anacreon.

  The first speech fell to me. As you know, I am more at home in the countinghouse and in the councils of war than in these academies. I was glad to remember the lessons of my pedagogue and I repeated the commonplaces of the schools, that poetry, like love, indeed proceeded from the Gods and that both were accompanied by a state of possession that had universally been conceded to be more than human; that the perdurance of great verses was itself a sign of a more than human source, for all the works that a man makes are destroyed by overwhelming time but that the verses of Homer outlive the monuments they describe and like the Gods who inspired them are eternal. I said many foolish things, but none which had not already been said many thousand times.

  When I had finished, Clodia rose, drew the folds of her gown about her and saluted the King. My opinion of Clodia had never been as harsh as that held by the majority of our community. I had known her for many years, though I had never been among those of whom Cicero had said that “only her dearest friends are in a position truly to detest her.” Never, however, did I have occasion to admire her more than on that evening. Her house was in disorder; she had good reason to believe that her brother had been killed and that she herself lay under suspicion of having planned or at least foreknown, the attempt on the Dictator’s life. At that moment the behavior of Caesar must have seemed inexplicable to her. She was pale, but composed; her famous beauty seemed to have been enhanced by the dangers through which she had passed; and the speech that she made was so ordered and of such cogency that at its termination I was more than half-swayed to her opinion. She began by saying that she accepted in advance whatever penalties the King would impose upon her, for she knew that the things she had to say would be unfavorably received in this company.

  “If it be true, Oh King,” she began, “that poetry comes among us at the prompting of the Gods, then indeed we are twice miserable—once because we are men, and twice because we would know this much of the Gods, that they wish us to remain as children ignorant and as slaves deceived. For it is poetry that puts a fairer face on life than life can claim to; it is the most seductive of lies and the most treacherous of counselors.

  “Neither the sun nor the situation of man permit themselves to be gazed at fixedly; the first we must view through gems, the second through poetry. Without poetry men would go into battle, brides would enter into marriage, wives would become mothers, men would bury their dead and themselves die; but drunk on poetry, all these men and women rush toward these occasions with I know not what unbounded expectations. The soldiers acquire glory, the brides call themselves Penelope, the mothers bear heroes to the state, and the dead sink into the arms of their mother the Earth that bore them, living forever in the memory of those they leave behind. It is by poets that all men are told that we press forward to a Golden Age and they endure the ills they know in the hope that a happier world will arrive to rejoice their descendants. Now it is very certain that there will be no Golden Age and that no government can ever be created which will give to every man that which makes him happy, for discord is at the heart of the world and is present in each of its parts. It is very certain that every man hates those who have been placed over him; that men will as easily relinquish the property they have as lions will permit their food to be torn away from between their teeth; that all that a man wishes to accomplish he must complete in this life, for there is no other; and that this love—of which poets make so fine a show—is nothing but the desire to be loved and the necessity in the wastes of life to be the fixed center of another’s attention; and that justice is the restraint of conflicting greeds. But these are things which no man says. Our very state is governed in the language of poetry. Among themselves our leaders rightly call the citizens a dangerous beast and a many-headed monster; but from the hustings, well surrounded by armed guards, in what terms do they address the turbulent voters? Are the voters then not ‘lovers of the Republic,’ ‘worthy descendants of their noble fathers’? Office in Rome is won by bribes in one hand, threats in the other; and in the mouth, quotations from Ennius.

  “Many will say that this is the great virtue of poetry that it civilizes men and sets the patterns by which they may aspire to live, and that thereby the Gods are handing down laws to Their children. It is most evident, however, that this is not so, for poetry has upon men the action which all flattery has: it puts to sleep the springs of action; it robs men of the desire to deserve such commendation. At first glance it seems to be merely a childishness, an aid to weakness and a consolation to misery, but no! it is an evil. It weakens weakness and redoubles misery.

  “Who are the poets who have added these new discontents to the eternal discontents of men? It is a small company, renewed generation after generation. Popular observation has long since made the portrait of a poet: they are inept in all practical matters; their absentmindedness renders them frequently ridiculous; they are impatient, easily exasperated, subject to excessive passions of all sorts. Pericles’s sneer on Sophocles as a governor of the city is but the other half of the story of Menander passing through the market with one foot sandaled and one foot bare. These traits, which are known to all, are interpreted by some as indicating that poets are occupied with truths that lie behind appearance and that their contemplation of these truths is like a madness or a God-given wisdom. For me, however, there is another explanation. I believe that all poets in childhood have received some deep wound or mortification from life which renders them for
ever fearful of all the situations of our human existence. In their hatred and distrust they are driven to build in imagination another world. The world of poets is the creation not of deeper insights but of more urgent longings. Poetry is a separate language within the language contrived for describing an existence that never has been and never will be, and so seductive are their images that all men are led to share them and to see themselves other than they are. I take it to be confirmation of this that even when the poets write verses which pour scorn on life, describing it in all its evident absurdity, they do it in such a way that their readers are uplifted by it, for the terms of the poets’ condemnation presuppose a nobler and fairer order by which we are judged and to which it is possible to attain.

  “These then are the men whom some say are the mouthpieces of the Gods. I say that if the Gods exist I can imagine them to be cruel or indifferent or incomprehensible, to be inattentive to men or beneficent; but I cannot imagine them to be occupied in the childish game of deluding men as to their state through the agency of poets. Poets are men like ourselves, but they are ill and suffering. They are in possession of one consolation which is their feverish dreams. But it is not from a dreaming life but from a waking life that we must learn to live in a waking world.”

  When Clodia had finished, she again saluted The King and passing the garland to Catullus sat down. Caesar praised her speech in large terms and without the irony which Socrates employed in similar occasions. His sense of delight at the occasion seemed to have increased; he bade me fill the cups again and when we had drunk he called on Catullus. Throughout the earlier part of Clodia’s speech, the poet had continued sitting with lowered eyes, but gradually his aspect had changed and from the moment he arose and placed the garland on his head all were aware that he was deeply engaged, either through anger or through interest in the matter discussed.