“I think my own mother found me an obstacle to her lurid ambitions.”
“Let us say this was a long time ago, when the virtues were possible. This mother loved her son. The sun rose and set in him. Then he fell in love. He lost his heart to a woman who was as beautiful as she was wicked. And since she was exceedingly wicked, you can take it for granted that she was exceedingly beautiful. For the son, however, she had not even a glance, not even a nod, not even a kind look. Nothing at all.”
“I’ve met such women,” Cicero agreed.
“So he pined for her. When he had a chance, he told her what he would do for her, what castles he would build, what riches he would gather. These were somewhat abstract, and she said she was not interested in any of them. She asked instead for a gift which was entirely within his power to produce.”
“A simple gift?” asked Cicero.
Gracchus enjoyed telling a story. He considered the question, and then he nodded. “A very simple gift. She asked the young man to bring her his mother’s heart. And he did. He took a knife, plunged it into his mother’s breast, and then tore the heart out. And then flushed with the horror and excitement of what he had done, he ran through the forest to where this wicked but beautiful young woman lived. And as he ran, he caught his toe in a root and fell, and when he fell, the heart was flung out of his hands. He ran to pick up the precious heart which would buy him a woman’s love, and as he bent over it, he heard the heart say, ‘My son, my son, did you hurt yourself when you fell?’ ” Gracchus lay back in his litter, placed the tips of the fingers of both his hands together, and contemplated them.
“So?” asked Cicero.
“That’s all. I told you it was a moral tale with no point.”
“Forgiveness? It’s not a Roman story. We Romans are short on forgiveness. Anyway, this is no mother of the Gracchi.”
“Not forgiveness. Love.”
“Ah!”
“You don’t believe in love?”
“Transcending all things? By no means. Nor is it Roman.”
“Good heavens, Cicero, can you catalogue every blessed thing on earth in a category of Roman or un-Roman?”
“Most things,” Cicero answered complacently.
“And do you believe that?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t actually,” Cicero laughed.
“He has no humor,” Gracchus thought. “He laughs because he feels it is a proper moment to laugh.” And he said aloud, “I was going to advise you to give up politics.”
“Yes?”
“However, I don’t think my advice would affect you, one way or another.”
“Yet you don’t think I’ll ever be a success at politics, do you?”
“No—I wouldn’t say that. Have you ever thought of politics—what it is?”
“It’s a lot of things, I suppose. None of them very clean.”
“As clean or as dirty as anything else. I’ve spent my life being a politician,” Gracchus said, thinking. “He doesn’t like me. I hit him, he hits me. Why is it so hard for me to accept the fact that someone doesn’t like me?”
“I’ve heard that your great virtue,” said Cicero to the fat man, “is a memory for names. Is it true that you can remember the names of a hundred thousand people?”
“Another illusion about politics. I know a few people by name. Not a hundred thousand.”
“I’ve heard that Hannibal could remember the name of every man in his army.”
“Yes. And we will endow Spartacus with a similar memory. We can’t admit someone wins victory because they are better than we are. Why have you such a fondness for the big and the little lies of history?”
“Are they all lies?”
“Most of them,” Gracchus rumbled. “History is an explanation of craft and greed. But never an honest explanation. That’s why I asked you about politics. Someone back there at the Villa said there were no politics in the army of Spartacus. But there couldn’t be.”
“Since you’re a politician,” Cicero smiled, “suppose you tell me what a politician is.”
“A faker,” Gracchus answered shortly.
“At least you are frank.”
“My one virtue, and an extremely valuable one. In a politician, people confuse it with honesty. You see, we live in a republic. That means that there are a great many people who have nothing and a handful who have a great deal. And those who have a great deal must be defended and protected by those who have nothing. Not only that, but those who have a great deal must guard their property, and therefore those who have nothing must be willing to die for the property of people like you and me and our good host Antonius. Also, people like ourselves have many slaves. These slaves do not like us. We should not fall for the illusion that slaves like their masters. They don’t, and therefore the slaves will not protect us against the slaves. So the many, many people who have no slaves at all must be willing to die in order for us to have our slaves. Rome keeps a quarter of a million men under arms. These soldiers must be willing to go to foreign lands, to march their feet off, to live in filth and squalor, to wallow in blood—so that we may be safe and live in comfort and increase our personal fortunes. When these troops went to fight Spartacus, they had less to defend than the slaves. Yet they died by the thousands fighting the slaves. One could go further. The peasants who died fighting the slaves were in the army in the first place because they have been driven off their land by the
latifundia
. The slave plantation turns them into landless paupers; and then they die to keep the plantation intact. Whereupon one is tempted to say
reductio ad absurdum
. For consider, my dear Cicero, what does the brave Roman soldier stand to lose if the slaves conquer? Indeed, they would need him desperately, for there are not enough slaves to till the land properly. There would be land enough for all, and our legionary would have what he dreams of most, his plot of land and his little house. Yet he marches off to destroy his own dreams, that sixteen slaves may carry a fat old hog like me in a padded litter. Do you deny the truth of what I say?”
“I think that if what you said were to be said by an ordinary man aloud in the Forum, we would crucify him.”
“Cicero, Cicero,” Gracchus laughed. “Is that a threat? I’m much too fat and heavy and old to be crucified. And why are you so nervous about the truth? It is necessary to lie to others. Is it necessary that we should believe our lies?”
“As you state it. You simply omit the key question—is one man like another or unlike another? There is the fallacy in your little speech. You take it for granted that men are as alike as peas in a pod. I don’t. There is an elite—a group of superior men. Whether the gods made them that way or circumstances made them that way is not something to argue. But they are men fit to rule, and because they are fit to rule, they do rule. And because the rest are like cattle, they behave like cattle. You see, you present a thesis; the difficulty is to explain it. You present a picture of society, but if the truth were as illogical as your picture, the whole structure would collapse in a day. All you fail to do is to explain what holds this illogical puzzle together.”
“I do,” Gracchus nodded. “I hold it together.”
“You? Just by yourself?”
“Cicero, do you really think I’m an idiot? I’ve lived a long and dangerous life, and I’m still on top. You asked me before what a politician is? The politician is the cement in this crazy house. The patrician can’t do it himself. In the first place, he thinks the way you do, and Roman citizens don’t like to be told that they are cattle. They aren’t—which you will learn some day. In the second place, he knows nothing about the citizen. If it were left to him, the structure would collapse in a day. So he comes to people like myself. He couldn’t live without us. We rationalize the irrational. We convince the people that the greatest fulfillment in life is to die for the rich. We convince the rich that they must part with some of their riches to keep the rest. We are magicians. We cast an illusion, and the illusion is foolproof. We say to the people—you are the power. Your vote is the source of Rome’s strength and glory. You are the only free people in the world. There is nothing more precious than your freedom, nothing more admirable than your civilization. And you control it; you are the power. And then they vote for our candidates. They weep at our defeats. They laugh with joy at our victories. And they feel proud and superior because they are not slaves. No matter how low they sink, if they sleep in the gutter, if they sit in the public seats at the races and the arena all day, if they strangle their infants at birth, if they live on the public dole and never lift a hand to do a day’s work from birth to death, nevertheless they are not slaves. They are dirt, but every time they see a slave, their ego rises and they feel full of pride and power. Then they know that they are Roman citizens and all the world envies them. And this is my peculiar art, Cicero. Never belittle politics.”
II
All this did not endear Gracchus to Cicero, and when they came finally to the first great cross, which stood just a few miles outside the walls of Rome, Cicero pointed to the fat man who sat dozing under his awning and remarked to Gracchus,
“Obviously a politician by look and training.”
“Obviously. In fact an old friend of mine.” Gracchus motioned for the litters to halt, and be laboriously climbed out of his. Cicero did the same, glad for a chance to stretch his legs. It was toward evening now and dark rain clouds were moving in from the north. Cicero motioned at them.
“If you wish to, go along,” Gracchus said. He no longer had any desire to woo Cicero. His nerves were on edge. The few days at the
Villa Salaria
had left a bad taste in his mouth. What was it, he wondered? Was he getting old and insecure?
“I’ll wait,” said Cicero, and stood beside his litter and watched Gracchus go over to the man under the awning. Obviously, they knew each other. It was indeed a strange democracy in the wards and among the politicians. It was a world in itself.
“Tonight,” Cicero heard Gracchus say.
The man under the awning shook his head.
“Sextus!” Gracchus cried. “I told you my offer. I don’t give two damns for Sextus! Either you do as I say, or I’ll never talk to you or look at you as long as I live—or as long as you live. Which won’t be long, sitting under that rotten flesh.”
“I’m sorry, Gracchus.”
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry. Do as I say.”
And Gracchus strode back to his litter and climbed in. Cicero asked no questions concerning what had just taken place, but as they were approaching the gates of the city, he reminded Gracchus of the story he had told earlier in the day, the story of the mother who loved her son too well.
“It was an amusing tale, but you lost it somewhere.”
“Did I? Were you ever in love, Cicero?”
“Not the way the poets sing. But that story—”
“The story? Now, you know, I can’t remember why I told it. I must have had a point, I suppose, but I have forgotten it.”
Inside the city, they parted, and Gracchus went to his home. It was almost dusk when he reached there, and he had his bath by lamplight. Then he told his housekeeper that he would wait a while with dinner, since he was expecting a guest. The woman nodded, and then Gracchus went to his bedroom and lay down, staring blindly and moodily into the darkness. Death nudged him as he lay there. There was an old Latin saying about the darkness.
Spatiem pro morte facite
. Make room for death. Unless one lay with a woman he loved. But Gracchus had never done that. Not with a woman he loved. He bought his women in the market, old Gracchus did. Wicked old Gracchus did. When had a woman come to him, willingly and gladly? He forced himself to have a sense of possession and a current of identity with the women he purchased as concubines; but it was never there.
There came to his mind now that section in the Odyssey where Odysseus exacts his revenge after having slain the false suitors. Gracchus had not had the advantage of a Greek instructor in his childhood, to interpret the classics page by page. He came to them himself and read them the way a self-educated man reads such things. So he had always been puzzled by the fierce, almost inhuman hatred Odysseus displayed toward his female slaves who had bedded down with the suitors. He recalled now how Odysseus had forced the twelve women to carry the bodies of their lovers out into the courtyard and to scrape their blood from the dirt floor of the banquet hall. Then he sentenced them to death and instructed his son to carry out the sentence. The son outdoes the father. It was Telemachus who conceived the notion of twelve nooses on a single rope, of stringing them all up together like a line of plucked chickens.
Why such hatred, Gracchus wondered? Why such wild, terrible hatred? Unless—as had often occurred to him—Odysseus shared his bed with each and every one of the female slaves. So there were fifty women slaves in that household and fifty concubines for the moral man from Ithaca. And this was what the patient Penelopeia had waited for!
Yet he, Gracchus, did the same thing—too civilized perhaps to kill a slave woman who bedded elsewhere, less concerned perhaps—but essentially no different in his relationship to women. In all his long life, he had never greatly concerned himself with what a woman was. He boasted to Cicero that he was not afraid to recognize the essential truth of things—yet the truth of women in the world he inhabited was something he dared not face. And now, at long last—making truly a fine jest—he had found a woman who was not less than a human being. The difficulty was that he had yet to find her.
A slave tapped at the door, and when he spoke, told him that his dinner guest had arrived.
“I’ll come in a moment. Make him at ease. He’s dirty and ragged, but I’ll have anyone whipped who looks down her nose at him. Give him warm water to wash his face and hands with, and then give him a light toga to cover himself with. His name is Flavius Marcus. Address him by his name and address him decently.”