The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (18 page)

I could endure my life if I knew that you were wretched also; but I see that you are not so and that means that you have one more thing to tell me – that you
must
tell me.

Why do you live? Why do you work? Why do you smile? A friend – if I can be said to have friends – has described to me your behavior at the house of Cato. It seems that you were gracious, that you charmed the company, that you set it laughing, that you talked interminably with – who can believe it? – Sempronia Metella. Can it be possible that you live by vanity? Is it enough for you that you hear the City now and – beyond the City – your future biographers describing you as magnanimous or charming? Your life did not use to be a series of postures before a mirror.

Caius, Caius, tell me what to do. Tell me what I must know. Once, let me talk to you, let me listen to you.

Later.

No, I will not be unjust to you, though you are unjust to me.

It was not you alone who made me what I am now, though you completed the work.

It was that monstrous thing that life did to me. You are the only person living that knows my story – that is a responsibility. Such another thing life did to you also.

Caesar to Clodia.

[
Not by return messenger, but some four days later.
]

My wife, my aunt, and I are coming to your dinner; do not speak of it until you receive my formal acceptance.

You write me of things I told you. Either you are deceiving yourself or me, or your memory is faulty. I hope that arising from the conversation of your guests – who include, I am told, Cicero and Catullus – some matters will be touched on that you have known, but have forgotten.

The degree of my admiration for what you were is known to you. Its restoration, like so much else, is in your power. I have always found it difficult to be indulgent to those who despise or condemn themselves.

Caesar to Pompeia.

[
September 13. From his offices, at eight in the morning.
]

I hope, my dear wife, that you have thought over the injustice of your charges against me this morning. I ask your pardon for having left the house this morning without answering your last question.

It makes me very unhappy to refuse you anything. It makes me doubly unhappy to refuse you the same request over and over again, refurnishing reasons which on earlier occasions you have told me you understood, you agreed with, and you accepted. Since it is these repetitions which try my patience and do an injustice to your intelligence, let me put some of them down in writing.

I can do nothing for your cousin. The record of his cruelty and corruption on the Island of Corsica becomes more widely known every day. It may develop into an enormous public scandal; my enemies may finally render me responsible and it may take a great deal of time which I should be giving to other things. As I told you, I can give him any post, within reason, in the Army; I will not appoint him within five years to any administrative position.

I repeat that it is most unsuitable that you attend the ceremonies at the Temple of Serapis. I know that many remarkable things take place there for which it is not easy to furnish an explanation, and I know that the Egyptian rites arouse strong emotion and send the votaries away in states of mind which they and you describe as ‘happier’ and ‘better.’ Believe me, my dear wife, I have studied them closely. Those Egyptian cults offer particular dangers to our Roman natures. We are active; we believe that even the smaller decisions of the daily life have a moral importance; that our relation to the Gods is strictly related to our conduct. I have known women of your position in Egypt. From time to time they visit their temples in order to prepare their souls for immortality after death; they roll on the floor and howl; they take long imagined journeys during which they are ‘washing their souls’ and passing from stage to stage of divinity. The next day they return to their homes and are again cruel to their servants, deceitful to their husbands, avaricious, noisy and quarrelsome, self-indulgent, and totally indifferent to the misery in which the mass of the people of their country live. We Romans know that our souls are engaged in this life, and the journeys they make and the washing we give them are nothing more than our duties, our friendships, and our sufferings if we have them.

As to Clodia’s dinner I ask you to trust my judgment. In these other matters I am willing to furnish arguments; I could do it in this case also, but this letter is already long and we both have more profitable things to do than to rehearse the history of that couple. They might have become outstanding friends of the Roman good, as their ancestors were, instead of laughingstocks to the people and a consternation to patriots. This they know well. They do not expect us to accept their invitations.

You tell me that my appointees are everywhere enriching themselves at the expense of the State. I was surprised this morning to hear you say this. I do not think, my dear Pompeia, that it is a wife’s business to taunt her husband with inefficiency or reprehensible neglect on the basis of rumours she has picked up in general conversation. It is more suitable that she ask him for an explanation of charges which affect her honour as much as they affect his. If you lay before me an example of such profiteering I shall give you an answer. It could not be a short one, for I would have to open your eyes to the difficulties inherent in administering a world, the extent to which one must compromise with the greed of capable men, to the antagonism always present in one’s subordinates, to the differences that distinguish conquered lands from those long incorporated in the Republic, and to the methods one employs in assisting headstrong men to plunge to their own ruin.

Your frequent charge that I do not love you cannot be repeatedly answered without humiliating us both. No amount of protestation could assure you of my love, if you were not aware of it in every moment of our life. I return to you daily from my work with the most affectionate expectation; I pass with you all the time that is not devoted to my official duties; the very refusal of your requests is evidence of my concern for your dignity and greater happiness.

Finally, you ask me, my dear Pompeia:
Are we to have no enjoyment in our life?
I beg you not to ask me that question lightly. All wives inevitably marry also the situation in which their husbands find themselves. Mine does not admit of the leisure and freedom that many enjoy; yet your position is one which many women envy. I shall do what I can to afford you a greater diversity of recreation; but the situation is not easily alterable.

Cornelius Nepos: Commonplace Book.

[
The great historian and biographer appears to have kept an account of the events of his own time, information gathered from the most varied sources, as material toward some future work.
]

The sister of Caius Oppius tells my wife that at dinner Caesar discussed with Balbus, Hirtius, and Oppius the possible transfer of government to Byzantium or Troy. Rome: inadequate port, floods, extremes of climate, disease from the now uncorrectable overcrowding. Possibility of campaign into India?

Dinner again with Catullus at the Aemilian Draughts and Swimming Club. Very pleasant company, young noblemen, representatives of the most illustrious houses of Rome. My chagrin in questioning them about their ancestors – their ignorance concerning them and, I must add, their indifference.

They have elected Catullus to be their honorary secretary, I think out of tactful consideration for his poverty. Thus he is provided with an attractive apartment overhanging the river.

He seems to be their adviser and confidant. They bring him their quarrels with their fathers, their mistresses, and their money lenders. Three times during dinner the clubhouse door was flung open and a distraught member rushed in shouting ‘Where’s Sirmio?’ (this nickname seems to be derived from his summer lodge on Lake Garda) and the two retired to a corner for a whispered consultation. His popularity does not appear to be based, however, on any indulgence toward them; he is as severe as their fathers and, although extremely licentious in conversation, is little short of austere in his life and attempts to inculcate ‘the Old Roman Way’ in them also. Curious.

He seems to have chosen his best friends among the less cultivated members or, as he calls them to their faces, the Barbarians. One of these members told me that he never talks literature, except when drunk.

He appears to be both stronger than he looks, and more frail. On the one hand he can outdo almost any member of the Club in those feats of strength and balance that arise so naturally toward the end of drinking parties – crossing the ceiling by swinging from rafter to rafter, or swimming the Tiber with a cat upheld in one hand, the cat howling but dry. It was he who stole the golden porpoise from the roof of the Tiburtine Rowing Club which figures so largely in the song he wrote for his own fraternity. On the other hand his health is undoubtedly frail. He seems to suffer from some weakness of the spleen or bowels.

His love affair with Clodia Pulcher. Surprise to all. Inquire into it.

Marina, a sister of our second cook, is a servant at the Dictator’s house. She talked freely to me. There have been no attacks of the Sacred Malady for some time. The Dictator spends every evening at home with his wife. He often rises in the middle of the night and goes into his study overhanging the cliff and works. He has an army pallet there and often falls asleep in the open air.

Marina denies he has fits of temper. ‘Everybody says he has rages, sir, but it must be in the Senate and the Courts. I’ve only seen him in a rage three times in all five years, and never at servants, even when they make enormous mistakes. My mistress is often in a temper and wants us whipped, but he only laughs. We all tremble like mice in his presence, sir, but I don’t know why because he is the kindest master in the world. I think it’s because he looks at us all the time and really sees us. Mostly his eyes are smiling as though he knew what a servant’s life is and what we talk about in the kitchen. We all understand very well that cook who killed himself when the stove caught fire. There were important guests and the Housemaster did not want to tell the Dictator so he made the cook go in and tell him. So the cook went in and told him the dinner was spoiled and the Dictator only laughed and said ‘have we some dates and salad?’ and the cook went and killed himself with the vegetable knife in the garden. He was angry, oh, it was terrible, when he discovered that Philemon who was his most favourite amanuensis and had been with him years, tried to poison him. It wasn’t like anger it was like weight, sir, just weight. You remember he wouldn’t let him be tortured, but directed that he be killed quickly. And the Chief of Police was very angry because he wanted to torture him to find out who was behind it. But what he did was worse than torture, I think. He called us all into the room, about thirty of us, and for a long time he looked at Philemon in silence and you could hear an ant walk. And then he talked about how we are all in the world together and how bits of trust begin to grow up between people, between husband and wife, and general and soldier, and master and servant; and I think it was the worst rebuke anybody ever got in the world, and while it was going on two girls fainted. It was like as though there were a God in the room, and afterwards my mistress vomited.

Octavius is home from school at Appolonium. He’s a very silent boy and never talks to anybody.

The secretary from Crete was heard saying to the secretary from Rimini that maybe the Queen of Egypt is coming to Rome, that’s Cleopatra the witch.

My mistress can do anything with him. Whenever she weeps, he becomes like a distraught person. We cannot understand that, because he is always right and she is always wrong.

Cicero to dinner. Much coquetry: his life is over; the ingratitude of the public, et cetera. On Caesar: ‘Caesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity. This is the vice of military leaders for whom every defeat is a triumph and every triumph almost a defeat.

‘Caesar has cultivated this immediacy in everything that he does. He seeks to eliminate any intermediary stage between impulse and execution. He carries a secretary with him wherever he goes and dictates letters, edicts, laws, at the moment they occur to him. Similarly he obeys any impulse of nature at the moment he is aware of it. He eats when he is hungry and he sleeps when he is sleepy. Time after time in the weightiest councils and in the presence of the consuls and the proconsuls who have crossed the world to confer with him he has left the meeting with a smiling apology and withdrawn briefly into the next room; but which of the calls of nature it was we could not know, perhaps it was to fall asleep, to eat a stew, or to embrace one of the three child-mistresses he keeps always at hand. I will say on his behalf that he accords these liberties to others as well as to himself. I shall never forget his consternation at one such reunion when he learned that an ambassador had foregone his dinner and was hungry. And yet – for there is no end to that man – in the siege of Dyrrhachium he starved with his soldiers, refusing the rations that had been reserved for the commanders. His unusual cruelty against the enemy when the siege was lifted was, I think, merely the delayed irritation of his hunger. He elevates these practices into a theory and declares that to deny that one is an animal is to reduce oneself to half a man.’