The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (25 page)

Must I hang on this cross and not die – watching you for eternities?

To whom can I turn? To whom can I cry? Do the Gods exist? Have you shrieked them from the skies?

Immortal Gods, did you then send this monster to the earth to teach us something? That beauty of form is but a sack of evils? That love is a hatred in disguise?

No – no – that lesson I will not take from you – the opposite is true – I shall never know love; but by you I know that love exists.

You came into the world – a monster and an assassin – to kill the Loving – you laid a treacherous ambush and with laughter and a howl you raised the ax to kill the part in me that lives and loves – the Immortal Gods will aid me to recover from my horror – that you in the disguise of the Lovable are moving about among men, waiting for occasion to inspire love and to slay it – it was me you selected for this assassination – me who have one life to live and one love to love and who shall never love again.

But know – exhalation of Hell – that though you have killed the one love I have to give, you have not killed my belief in love. By that belief I know you for what you are.

There is no need for me to curse you – the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred. Clodia is locked with Clodia in eternal loathing.

Catullus to Clodia.

I know, I know that you never promised to be constant.

How often – with the ostentatious honesty of the dishonest – you broke a kiss to affirm your independence of all engagement. You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever.

I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, can I conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love
is
its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense. You laughed and I laughed too. We were pretending that we were not to love forever. We were laughing at all those millions in the world who are Pretenders to Love, who know well that their love will have a termination.

Before I put you forever out of my mind I think of you once more:

What will become of you?

What woman in the world walked in such love as I gave to you?

Insane one, do you know what you have thrown away?

While the God of Love gazed at you through my eyes age could not touch your beauty. While we spoke to you, your ears could not hear the tongues of the world, envy and detraction and all the gusts that are blown about in the malignant air of our human state; while we loved you you could not know the solitude of the soul – does that mean nothing to you? Insane one, do you know what you have thrown away?

But that is not all. Your state is a thousand times worse. Now you are revealed; your secret is out. Since I know it, you can no longer hide it from yourself: you are the eternal assassin of life and love. But how terrifying to you must be the knowledge of your failure, for you have made clear the greatness and the majesty of your enemy, love.

All, all that Plato said was true.

It was not I, I in myself, who loved you. When I looked at you the God Eros descended upon me. I was more than myself. The God lived in me, looked through my eyes and spoke through my lips. I was more than myself and when your soul was aware that the God was in me, gazing at you, for a time you too were filled with the God. Have you not told me so? In what hours, in what whispers have you not told me so.

But you could not long endure this presence, for you came into the world, a monster and an assassin, to kill all that lives and loves. You wear the disguise of the Lovable and you live only to prepare one treacherous ambush after another; you live only for the moment when with laughter and a shriek you may lift the ax and slay the promise of life and the promise of love.

I am no longer breathless with horror. I have ceased trembling. I can muse with wonder, asking myself where you obtained the passionate hatred of life and why the Gods permit this enemy of the world to move about among us. I will never feel pity for you, this horror has no room for pity. Some great intention for the world’s enlightenment stirred in you and was poisoned at the source.

I loved you and I shall never be the same again, but what is my state compared to yours?

Catullus.

O dei, si vestrum est misereri, aut si quibus unquam
Extremam iam ipsa in morte tulisti opem,

Me miserum aspicite et, si vitam puriter egi
Eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi,

Quae mihi subrupens imos ut torpor in artus
Expulit ex omni pectore laetitias.

Non iam illud quaero, contra ut me diligut illa,
Aut, quod non potis est, esse pudica velit;

Ipse valere opto et taetrum hunc deponere morbem.
O dei, reddite mi hoc pro pietate mea.

‘Oh, immortal Gods, if pity be among your attributes,

Or if ever you have brought supreme aid to one already at the point of death,

Turn your eyes upon me, a most wretched man, and if I have lived a pure life,

Tear out from my heart this plague, this pestilence

Which, stealing like a lethargy throughout my deepest fibers

Has driven all joy from my breast.

I no longer ask that this woman return my love

Nor – for that is impossible – that she be chaste;

All I aspire to is that I be healed and that this black malady be removed.

Oh, immortal Gods – grant this in return for my devotion.’

Caesar to Cornelius Nepos.

[
September 23
.]

This letter is confidential.

I have been informed that you are a friend of the poet Gaius Valerius Catullus.

Word has reached me in a very indirect way that the poet has been ill or at least in extreme distress of mind.

I have been a friend of his father for many years and although I have had few occasions of meeting the poet himself I follow his work with much interest and admiration. I wish that you would call upon him and send me word as to his condition. In addition, I should feel very indebted to you if you would report to me, at any time and at any hour, that you find him ill or in any kind of distress.

The esteem in which I hold you and your work leads me to add that I should feel it to be an unkindness did you or your family not keep me informed of any ill-fortune (which the immortal Gods avert) that might befall you or yours. At a very early age I was convinced that the true poets and historians are the highest ornaments of a country; this conviction has only increased with time.

Cornelius Nepos to Caesar.

It is a satisfaction to know that the great leader of the Roman people feels concern for the health of my friend and fellow countryman Catullus and has expressed himself in friendly terms toward me and my household.

It is true that some ten days ago a member of the Aemilian Draughts and Swimming Club, where the poet resides, called on me in the middle of the night saying that Catullus’s condition was causing alarm to his friends. I hurried to his rooms and found him in pain and in delirium. A doctor Sosthenes, the Greek, was administering emetics and then calmatives. My friend did not recognise me. We sat with him through the night. In the morning he was much improved. Gathering himself together with resolution he thanked us for our attentions and assured us that his illness was at an end and requested us to leave him. I returned later in the afternoon and found him in untroubled sleep. He was awakened soon after by a clumsy messenger bringing a letter from that woman who plays no small part in the troubles we had been witnessing – as his delirium had attested. In my presence he read the letter and remained a long time silent in deep thought. He made no reference to what he had read but against all persuasion dressed in formal attire and left the Club.

I have given the Dictator these details in order that he may make his own observations.

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

991. [
On Cleopatra and her visit to Rome
.]

The Queen of Egypt is approaching. Missy Crocodile is being fanned across the straits.

My correspondence with Majesty has been as spirited as could be expected. Her Latin is broken, but I notice that she manages to achieve precision when an occasion requires it.

I do not expect a literal obedience to the regulations that I have laid down governing her visit here. The Queen is incapable of complying precisely with any direction that may be given her. Even when she believes herself to be obeying implicitly, she manages to admit a deviation or two. I must expect this. I confess that I am charmed by this invariable variation, though I have been obliged before now to show her a stern face on it. It is prompted by her unfathomable pride and by the independence of a woman who is herself accustomed to punish any slightest disobedience by death.

Her letters – even in one conjuncture, her silence – have delighted me. She is indeed a woman now and a most queenly one. At moments I find myself dreaming that she is more woman than queen and must arrest my thoughts.

Cleopatra is Egypt. No word she lets fall and no caress she dispenses is without a political implication. Each conversation is a treaty and every kiss a pact. I could wish that association with her did not require so constant a vigilance and that her favours had more abandon and less art.

It is many years, many years, however, since I have known a disinterested friendship on the part of anyone except yourself, my aunt, and my soldiers. Even in my home I seem to be playing a perpetual game of draughts. I lose a ‘man’; I am menaced from the flank; I rally to a sortie; I capture a ‘horseman.’ My good wife seems to derive some pleasure from this skirmishing, though it is not conducted without tears.

Nay more, it is many years since I have felt directed toward me a disinterested hatred. Day by day I scan my enemies looking with eager hope for the man who hates me ‘for myself ’ or even ‘for Rome.’ I am much condemned for surrounding myself with unscrupulous adventurers who enrich themselves from the appointments I accord them. Yes, I sometimes think that it is the candor of their greed that pleases me; they do not pretend to love me for myself. I shall go so far as to say that I have occasionally been moved to pleasure when one or other of them lets fall an expression of his contempt for me – in that ocean of flattery in which I live and move.

It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the person which others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say ‘thou slave.’ A dictator is believed to be niggardly of benefits, incalculable in displeasure, jealous of capable men, athirst for flattery, and not ten but twenty times a day I feel myself drifting toward those qualities and must draw back sharply. And ten times a day, as I await the arrival of the Queen of Egypt, I find myself dreaming of the possibility that she, now grown a woman, can see that all that I can give to her and to her country I give outright; that she need not contrive to obtain it; that all the devices within her power cannot obtain what it is unsuitable to accord her; and that these things being understood, we may move in a realm that is . . . but I am drifting beyond the possible.

Cicero, in Rome, to Atticus in Greece.

[
This letter aroused much merriment and derision in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. It is perhaps apocryphal. We know that Cicero wrote Atticus a letter concerning marriage and that in the two succeeding letters he implored his friend to destroy it – which Atticus would certainly have done. On the other hand, there have come down to us over a dozen versions of what might well have been the letter in question. All these differ widely among themselves and all are larded with obviously burlesque interpolations. We here select the passages which the majority of the versions have in common, our theory being that a secretary of Atticus probably made a copy of the original letter before its destruction and that this copy began circulating surreptitiously throughout the Roman world
.

[
It should be remembered that Cicero not only divorced his universally respected wife Terentia after many years of increasingly contentious marriage, but that he promptly married and divorced his rich young ward Publilia; that Cicero’s brother Quintus had long been stormily married to Atticus’s sister Pomponia whom he had recently divorced; and that Cicero’s beloved daughter Tullia had been none too happily married to the husband Dolabella, an ambitious and dissolute friend of Caesar whom her father had selected for ber
.]

One marriage in a hundred is happy, my friend. This is one of those things which everyone knows and which no one says. No wonder that the exceptional marriage is widely celebrated for it is the exceptional which makes news. But it is a part of the folly of our human race that we are forever tempted to elevate the exception into the norm. We are attracted to the exception, for every man thinks himself exceptional and destined for the exceptional; and our young men and women advance into marriage under the assumption that ninety-nine are happy and one unhappy, or that they are marked for the exceptional happiness.

Given the nature of women and the nature of the passion which draws men and women together, what chance has marriage of being happier than the combined torments of Sisyphus and Tantalus?

By marriage we place into the hands of women the governance of our household which they promptly extend, as far as they are able, to an interest over all our goods. They rear our children and thereby acquire a share in the disposition of the children’s affairs when they have reached maturity. In all these matters they pursue ends totally opposed to those a man envisages. Women wish only the warmth of a hearth and the shelter of a roof. They live in fear of catastrophe and no security is sufficiently secure for them and in their eyes the future is not only unknown but catastrophic. To forfend those unknown evils there is no deception to which they will not resort, no rapacity they will not exert, and no other pleasure or enlightenment they will not combat. Had civilisation been left in the hands of women we should still be housed in the caves of mountains and man’s invention would have ceased with the domestication of fire. All they ask of a cave beyond its shelter is that it be a degree more ostentatious than that of a neighbor’s wife; and all they ask for their children’s happiness is that they be secure in a cave similar to their own.