The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (38 page)

The Lady Julia Marcia from the Dictator’s House in Rome to Lucius Mamilius Turrinus on the Island of Capri.

[
December 20
.]

We have been going through a distressing time, my dear boy. You will forgive me, if I do not go into it at length. This terrible event [
the profanation of the rites of the Good Goddess
] has stricken us all. We leave the house as seldom as we can. We look into one another’s faces, like ghosts. We are expecting some punishment – I was about to say: we wish for some punishment. But, of course, we are punished already. As you can imagine it has robbed Rome of all joy in the Feast of Saturn [
the Saturnalia began on December 17
] and my bailiff writes me that a shadow has even fallen across our hill villages. I grieve particularly for the children and the slaves, for whom this season has always been the crown of the year.

The latest news fills me with no less alarm than the scandal itself. The wicked couple has been acquitted. There is no doubt that the judges were bribed with enormous sums by Clodius. What is there to say? We must live in a city where public opinion is overridden by money. They tell me that crowds gather all day before the houses of the judges and stand spitting against the walls and doorposts. I had a few words with Cicero this morning. He is overwhelmed with despair. His speech at the trial was the greatest he has ever made. I told him so, but he only waved his hands in the air and the tears streamed down his face.

My nephew’s refusal to prosecute the matter is understandable, though I regret it profoundly. What he shrank from doing as a husband, he was not absolved of doing as the Supreme Pontiff. There is one detail about all this that I feel I must tell, though in great confidence. My nephew knew in advance that that dreadful man was coming to the rites. He could have had him seized at the door, but Caesar wished that the matter be exposed in the way it was done.

How I wish you were here, my dear Lucius. He is not himself. He has asked me to stay with him for a while. At my urging we have remained in the Public House. [
A Supreme Pontiff generally lived in the Public House on the Sacred Way, placed at his disposal by the State. Caesar, following on his wife’s implication in the scandal, would have preferred to move to his house on the Palatine Hill.
] He has plunged even more deeply into work. It seems certain now that we are to go to war with the Parthians. The Isthmus of Corinth is to be pierced with a canal. The Field of Mars is to be transferred to the region at the foot of the Vatican Hill and the present Field is to contain a vast housing project. Libraries for the people are to be opened, six of them in various parts of the City. This is our tabletalk at dinner, but these are not the subjects weighing on his heart. Oh, that he had some friend here with whom he could be at ease. He does not invite his convivial companions. From time to time we are joined by Decimus Brutus and the other Brutus, but the evenings are not successful. Our friend can only extend friendship to those who first extend it warmly to him. As my husband used to say of certain people: ‘bold-in-love is shy-in-friendship.’

Let me share another secret with you. Advance warning of Clodius’s sacrilegious effrontery came to us from – of all persons – the Queen of Egypt. It is widely believed in the City that he will marry her. That possibility would furnish ample motivation for her exposure of the dreadful plan. You have my complete assurance, however, that there is no truth in that rumour. Something happened between them; I do not know what it was. I think it plays a large part in his present dejection; I know that she is suffering. It is generally believed that we older women are very clever at divining the sentimental histories that are being lived in our vicinity. Not I. All I can say is that some stupid impediment arose to interrupt a most happy conversation. I observe that my great-nephew [
Marc Antony
] has made a journey to the east coast.

It is absurd that Caesar live here alone. We have been talking it over. The season of pretty young girls has passed. Who would be more suitable as a wife for him than our good Calpurnia, whom we have all known so long and who has carried herself with such quiet dignity through so many difficult circumstances? I think you will soon hear that she has moved into this house after the quietest of weddings.

The dogs are barking. He has just returned. I hear him greeting the household. Only one who loves him deeply can know that the good cheer in his voice is assumed. I am astonished at myself: I have loved and lost many in my long life, but never have I felt so great a helplessness before another’s suffering. I do not even know its spring – or of its many possible springs, the principal one.

The next day.

This is written in haste, my dear Lucius. To whom can I speak but to you?

Strange things are happening. He too could not contain himself and spoke of it to me, with a feigned lightness. He was speaking of the many conspiracies that are continually being uncovered, plots to overturn the State and to assassinate him. He was folding and unfolding some papers in his hand. ‘Last year it was Marc Antony,’ he said. ‘Now it appears that Junius Brutus is thinking of these things.’ I drew back with horror. He leaned over me and said with a strange smile: ‘He cannot wait until these old bones are quiet.’

Oh, that you were with us here.

Cleopatra to the Lady Julia Marcia, on her farm in the Alban Hills.

[
January 13
.]

Your assurance to me that you are completely recovered of your indisposition has given me great joy. I trust that the messengers I sent daily to your door did not become a burden to those who were attending you.

I have waited for your restoration to health to lay before you a most urgent question. I am surrounded by a wall of enemies; I am fortunate in this, however, that you are not only the sole person to whom I can turn, but that you are the person best fitted to advise me.

Gracious lady, I came to Rome in order to further the interests of the great country over which I rule. I came here as a stranger ignorant of the customs of the Romans and exposed to the danger of making errors which might jeopardise my entire mission. To protect myself I organised a system of observers whereby I might be kept informed of much that was passing in the City. At no time have I used the information which I have received in any way that might disturb the best interests of the citizens; on a number of occasions I have been able to serve the public order.

Through diligence and good fortune I am in a position to follow most closely the plans of a group which designs to overturn the State and assassinate the Dictator. The group I speak of is not the first that has been brought to my attention; it is the most determined. It is not advisable that I include the names of these conspirators in this letter.

Most gracious lady, it would be difficult for me to lay my information before the Dictator at this time. In the first place, he might well be vexed that for a second time a woman and a foreigner should be informing him of a matter that so closely concerns him. In the second place, a grievous mischance has separated me from his trust and confidence. My only consolation is that he knows that my loyalty to his position in the Roman Republic is unshaken and unshakable.

The conspiratorial group to which I refer planned to murder the Dictator as he returned at midnight on January 6 from supervising the elections of the aldermen. Their plan was to lie in wait about and under the bridge that crosses the rivulet by the shrine of Tebetta. On that occasion I sent anonymous letters to four of their members telling them that Caesar was aware of their intentions. They now plan to attack him as he leaves the games on 28 th of January. You can understand that it would be unwise for me again to write to the conspirators and I have promised my informant who is enrolled in their number that I shall not do so.

I most urgently ask your advice on this matter, noble lady. The most obvious recourse, I realise, would be to submit this information to the head of the Dictator’s confidential police. That I cannot do, however. I am only too well aware of the incompetence of that organisation. It submits reports to the Dictator wherein misrepresentation masks negligence and private prejudice is set forth as assertion, important information is withheld, and trifles are enlarged.

Let me hear from you.

The Lady Julia Marcia to Cleopatra.

[
By return messenger
.]

I thank you, great Queen, for your letters and again for the many marks of your concern for me during my illness.

Of this last letter: my nephew is aware in general terms of the group that you speak of. That it is the same organisation and that he knows their names I am assured by the fact that he discussed the ambush at the bridge. I have no doubt, however, that your information is more detailed than his and that it is of the greatest importance. It has been a constant anxiety with me, great Queen, that he does not bring to the suppression of such conspiracies the energy and attention which he devotes to the dangers to the State.

I shall see that he learns of the plans drawn up for an attack on his life to be made on the 28th. When a suitable moment presents itself I shall let him know that we are indebted to you for this warning.

The season we are going through has been filled with so many reasons for distress and confusion that the happy hour I spent with you seems to have taken place many years ago. May the Immortal Gods soon restore to Rome a measure of tranquility and may they avert from us Their just anger.

Caesar’s Journal – Letter to Lucius Mamilius Turrinus on the Island of Capri.

[
The following entries appear to have been written throughout January and February
.]

1017.
[
Arguments for and against constructing a canal across the Isthmus of Corinth.
]

1018.
[
On the increasing demand for Roman luxuries in the cities of Gaul.
]

1019.
[
Request for volumes to stock the new public libraries.
]

1020. You once asked me, laughing, whether I had ever experienced the dream of the void. I told you I had, and I have dreamed it since.

It is perhaps occasioned by a chance posture of the sleeping body or by some indigestion or derangement within us, but the terror in the mind is no less real for that. It is not, as I once thought, the image of death and the grin of the skull. It is the state in which one divines the end of all things. This nothingness, however, does not present itself to us as a blank and a quiet, but as a total evil unmasked. It is at once laughter and menace. It turns into ridicule all delights and sears and shrivels all endeavor. This dream is the counterpart of that other vision which comes to me in the paroxysm of my illness. Then I seem to grasp the fair harmony of the world. I am filled with unspeakable happiness and confidence. I wish to cry out to all the living and all the dead that there is no part of the universe that is untouched by bliss.

[
The entry continues in Greek.
]

Both states arise from vapors in the body, yet of both of them the mind says: henceforth this I know. They cannot be dismissed as illusions. To each our memory brings many a radiant and many a woeful corroboration. We cannot disown the one without disowning the other, nor would I – like a village peacemaker reconciling the differences of two contending parties – accord to each a shrunken measure of the right.

These last weeks, not my dream, but my waking state has been the contemplation of futility and the collapse of all belief. Oh, worse than that: my dead call to me in mockery from their grave clothes and generations still unborn cry out, asking to be spared the clownish parade of a mortal life. Yet even in my last bitterness I cannot disavow the memory of bliss.

Life, life has this mystery that we dare not say the last word about it, that it is good or bad, that it is senseless, or that it is ordered. That all these things have been said of it is evidence only that all these things are in us. This ‘life’ in which we move has no colour and it gives no sign. As you once said: the universe is not aware that we are here.

Let me then banish from my mind the childish thought that it is among my duties to find some last answer concerning the nature of life. Let me distrust all impulses within me to say at any moment that it is cruel or kind, for it is no less ignoble from a situation of misery to pronounce life evil than from one of happiness to call it good. Let me not be the dupe of well-being or content, but welcome all experience that reminds me of the myriad cries of execration and of delight that have been wrung from men in every time.

From whom better than from you could I have learnt this? Who ever so constantly invoked the extremest ranges of yea and nay – who, but Sophocles, known throughout his ninety years as the happiest man in Greece, and yet from whom no dark secrets were hid?

Life has no meaning save that which we may confer upon it. It neither supports man nor humiliates him. Agony of mind and uttermost joy we cannot escape, but those states have, of themselves, nothing to say to us; those heavens and hells await the sense we give to them, as all living things awaited, incult and abashed, the names that Deucalion and Pyrrha pronounced over them. With this thought I dare at last to gather about me those blessed shades of my past whom hitherto I had thought of as victims of life’s incoherence. I dare to ask that from my good Calpurnia a child may arise to say: On the Meaningless I choose to press a meaning and in the wastes of the Unknowable I choose to be known.

The Rome upon which I have built my life does not exist in itself save as an agglomeration of structures larger or less large than another, of citizens more or less industrious than those of another city. Flood or folly, fire or madness may destroy it at any time. I thought myself to be attached to it by inheritance and upbringing, but such attachments have no more meaning than the beard that I shave from my face. I was called to its defense by the Senate and the Consuls; so Vercingetorix defended Gaul. No, Rome became a city for me only when I chose, as did many before me, to give it a sense and for me Rome can exist only in so far as I have shaped it to my idea. I now see that for years I childishly believed that I loved Rome and that it was my duty to love Rome because I was a Roman – as though it were possible or worthy of respect to love accumulations of stones and throngs of men and women. We are not in relationship to anything until we have enwrapped it in a meaning, nor do we know for certainty what that meaning is until we have costingly labored to impress it upon the object.