The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (19 page)

Cicero does not enjoy discussing Caesar for long at a time; but he is not averse to retouching a portrait of himself with materials from that of Caesar. I was able to bring him back to the subject once more.

‘Every man must have an audience: our ancestors felt that the Gods were watching them; our fathers lived to be admired of men; for Caesar there are no Gods and he is indifferent to the opinion of his fellow men. He lives for the opinion of aftertime; you biographers, Cornelius, are his audience. You are the mainspring of his life. Caesar is trying to live a great book; he has not even enough of the artist in him to see that living and literary composition cannot furnish analogies to one another.’ Here Cicero began to shake with laughter. ‘He has gone so far as to introduce into life that practice inseparable from art which is erasure. He has erased his youth. Oh, yes, he has. His youth as he thinks it was, as everyone thinks it was, is a pure creation of his later years. And now he is beginning to erase the Gallic and the Civil Wars. I once reviewed five pages of the
Commentaries
in minute detail with my brother, Quintus, who was in closest association with Caesar during the events he is describing. There is not a single untruth, no – but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple’s corridors; she does not know herself. “I can endure lies,” she cries. “I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude.” ’

[
Here follows the passage in which Cicero discusses the possibility that Marcus Junius Brutus may be Caesar’s son. It is given in the document which opens Book IV.
]

‘. . . Never forget that throughout the twenty most critical years of his life Caesar was penniless. Caesar and money! Caesar and money! Who will ever write that story? In all the myths of the Greeks there is no story to equal it, however fantastic – spendthrift without income and lavish with another’s gold. There is no time to go into that now, but to put it in a word: Caesar could never conceive of money as money when it was
at rest.
He could never think of it as a safeguard against the future, or as a thing of ostentation, as an evidence of one’s dignity, or power, or influence. For Caesar, money is only money at the moment of its doing something. Caesar felt that money is for those who know what to do with it. Now it is obvious that multimillionaires do not know what to do with their money except to hug it or to brandish it; Caesar, indifferent to money – an attitude which is of course most impressive and bewildering and even frightening to the rich – could always find plenty to do with money. He could always activate another’s gold. He could sing gold out of the strong-boxes of his friends.

‘But doesn’t his attitude go deeper than indifference? Doesn’t it mean that he is not afraid, not afraid of this world about us, not afraid of the future, not afraid of that Potential Predicament in the shadow of which so many people live? Now isn’t a large part of fear the memory of past fright and of past predicament? To a young child who has never seen his guardian frightened by thunder and lightning, it does not occur to be frightened by them. Caesar’s mother and aunt were very remarkable women. Greater terrors than thunder and lightning could not discompose their features. I can imagine that through all the terrors of the proscriptions and massacres – with flights by night through a burning country-side, hiding in caves – they never allowed the growing boy to see anything in them but a confident serenity. Could that be it, or does it go farther and deeper still? Does he believe himself to be a God, descendant of the Julian clan, born of Venus? – and hence beyond the reach of this world’s evil as he is beyond receiving any satisfaction from this world’s gifts?

‘At all events, he lived all those years without money of his own, in that little house down among the working people, with Cornelia and his little daughter; and yet the patrician of all patricians, wearing as wide a purple band as Lucullus’s, contradicting Crassus, contradicting me – oh, there’s no end to him!

‘But – and there is a subtle point here – Caesar is delighted to enrich others. The chief charge laid against him now by his enemies is that he permits his intimates to amass unconscionable fortunes, and the majority of his intimates are scoundrels. Yet isn’t that a sign that he despises them, for he identifies the possession and accumulation of money with weakness – what am I saying? – with
fright?’

Asinius Pollio to dinner. He talked of Catullus and the poet’s bitter epigrams against the Dictator. ‘Strangest thing in the world. In conversation the poet defends Caesar against the constant contempt of his fellow club members; yet in his work releases that unbounded virulence. To observe: Catullus, most licentious in his verses, is astonishingly strict in his life and in his judgments on the lives of others. He apparently regards his relations with Clodia Pulcher – relations which he never mentions in conversation – as a pure and lofty love which no one could confuse with the ephemeral loves in which his friends are continuously involved. His epigrams against the Dictator though superficially political are uniformly couched in terms of obscenity. His hatred of Caesar seems to spring from two sources – his disapproval of the Dictator’s notorious immorality and his disapproval of the type of men with whom the Dictator surrounds himself and whom he permits to enrich themselves at the public expense. Again it is possible that he fears the Dictator as a rival for the affection of Clodia Pulcher or feels for him a jealousy, as it were retrospectively.

Catullus to Clodia.

[
September 14
.]

[
Catullus on the 11th and 13th wrote two drafts for this letter. They were never sent to Clodia, but were read by Caesar among papers found in Catullus’s room and transcribed for the Dictator by his secret police. These drafts can be found in Book II as Document XXVIII.
]

I do not wish to be spared any knowledge that this world is a place of night and horror.

The door you closed on me at Capua had that to say.

You and your Caesar came into it to teach us this: You, that love and beauty of form are a deception; he, that in the farthest reaches of the mind one finds only the lust of the self.

I have always known that you were drowning. You have told me so. Your arms and your face still struggle above the surface of the water. I cannot drown with you. The very door you closed upon me was a last appeal, for cruelty is the only cry that is left you to utter.

I cannot drown with you, because I have one thing left to do. I can still insult this universe which insults us. I can insult it by making a beautiful thing. That I shall do; and then put an end to the long crucifixion of the mind.

Claudilla, Claudilla, you are drowning. Oh that I were deaf; oh that I were not here to know that struggle, to hear those cries.

Clodia to Catullus.

[
By return messenger, the same day
.]

[
In Greek.
]

Little-Stag – true, all true – how can I do other than be cruel to you? – Endure it, suffer it, but do not leave me.

I will tell you all – it is my last resource – Prepare yourself for this horror: my uncle violated me at the age of twelve – on what, on whom can I avenge that?
That?
In an orchard, at noon. Under a blazing sun. Now I have told you all.

Nothing can help me. I do not ask help. I ask companionship in hatred. I could not endure it in you that you did not hate
enough.

Come to me. Come to me, Little-Stag.

But what is there to say?

Come.

Catullus.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

‘I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask how that is possible.

I do not know; but that is what I feel and I hang upon a cross.’

Asinius Pollio, at Naples, to Caesar in Rome.

[
September 18
.]

[
Asinius Pollio, traveling as Caesar’s confidential agent, answers twenty questions forwarded to him by the Dictator.
]

My General:

[
Here follow several thousand words concerning certain highly technical procedures employed by the great banking houses situated near Naples; an equally long reply concerning some administrative problems in Mauretania; then some information about the wild beasts that were being shipped from Africa to take part in the festival games at Rome
.]

Question 20: The reason for Gaius Valerius Catullus’s ill-will against the Dictator and an account of the poet’s love affair with the Lady Clodia Pulcher.

I have attempted many times, my General, to obtain from the poet a clear statement of his antagonism against you. My General should know that Valerius is an extremely complicated and contradictory nature. For the most part he is judicious, patient, and even-tempered. Although he is only slightly older than the majority of the members of our [Aemilian Draughts and Swimming] Club, he has long held the position there of being councilor and peace maker. He is, as we say, ‘head of the table.’ Nevertheless, there are three subjects which he cannot discuss or hear discussed without being thrown into a violent rage. He changes colour; his voice alters, and his eyes flash. I have frequently observed him to be trembling. These subjects are bad poets, loose behavior in women, and yourself and certain of your associates. I have had occasion to tell my General already that the majority of the members of that Club affect the Republicans. This is even more true of the two other clubs whose membership is restricted to the young patricians, the Tiburtine Rowing Club, and the Red Sails. It is not true of the Forty Steps which remains exceedingly proud of having been founded by my General. The Republican opinions held by the former clubs, however, do not pass beyond the degree of table talk. The young men are extremely ill-informed on affairs of state, and they are not sufficiently interested to listen to an extended discussion of them; nor will Valerius. His objections veer from position to position; at one moment he is inveighing against the private character of certain officials, the next he is invoking certain principles of political theory, the next he is rendering you responsible for some burglaries that were reported in the suburbs.

I cannot help feeling that his irrational irritability on these three subjects is a reflection of the unhappy situation he is in respecting Clodia Pulcher. It is extremely unfortunate that of all the women in Rome he should have fallen in love with her. When he first came to the city eight years ago she was already the laughingstock of the Club, though at that time her husband was still living. She was the laughingstock not because of the number of her lovers, but because of the unvarying course followed by any amatory relationship with her. She exerts her fascination over a man in order to learn his weaknesses and in order finally to insult him with the greatest possible thoroughness and precision. Unfortunately for her, she does not do this very well. She is in such haste to arrive at the phase wherein she is to humiliate her lover that the fascination is quickly dispelled. Certain Club members who had promised themselves at least six months of enchantment have returned to the Club in the middle of the first night and without their cloaks.

That Valerius should love this woman with such intensity and for so long a time has caused consternation in all who know him. My brother – who is a much closer friend of the poet than I can claim to be – says that when he talks of her he seems to be talking of someone we have never known. It is generally conceded that, next to Volumnia, she is the handsomest woman on the Hill, that she is easily the wittiest and the most intelligent, and that the diversions, country parties, and dinners which she gives are not equaled by any others in Rome; but Valerius tells my brother of her wisdom, her kindness to the unfortunate, the delicacy of her sympathy, her greatness of soul. I have known her for many years; I enjoy her company; but I am never unaware that she hates the air she breathes and everything and everyone about her. It is generally thought that there is one exception, her brother Publius. Cornelius Nepos laid before me his theory that her campaign of vengeance against men is possibly a consequence of the incestuous relations she may have had with her brother. It may be, though I do not think so. Her attitude to him is that of an exasperated and relatively indifferent mother. Passion or the revulsion from passion would have rendered it more exasperated and more possessive.

My admiration – indeed, my love – for the poet is very great. Few things could make me happier than to see him recover from the infatuation which is torturing him and to see him shed the childish and incoherent prejudices which he holds against my General.

The Lady Clodia Pulcher has invited me to a dinner to which she tells me she has invited both my General and that poet. At first the prospect seemed to me unpleasing, but on second thought it seems to offer a peculiarly fitting occasion for dispelling certain misunderstandings. I could well understand that my General would not wish to attend that dinner, however; in that case, I hope that I may be permitted to arrange a meeting with the poet at a later time.

Cornelius Nepos: Commonplace Book

Met Asinius Pollio in the Baths. As we sat in the steam we discussed again the reasons for Catullus’s hatred of our master.

‘There is no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘It has to do with Clodia Pulcher. Now to my knowledge Caesar has never shown any interest in her. Do you know of any?’

I replied that I knew of none, but was not likely to know.

‘I think there has been none. She was a mere child in the years when he was fluttering the boudoirs. There has certainly been nothing between them; but for some reason, Catullus (I feel certain of it) associates them. The epigrams against the Dictator are violent, are savage, but they have very little point. Have you remarked that they are all, without exception, couched in obscene terms? To denounce Caesar for immorality and for enriching a few high officials, believe me, that is like – throwing sand against a strong wind. There is something childish about them; the only thing that is not childish about them is that they are unforgettable.’