Caesar tried to laugh it off — and indeed Calpurnia made this last comment with a bray like a she-ass, inviting us to share the joke — but he wasn't pleased. I wondered then if he was frightened of Calpurnia.
It sounds absurd. We all know that Caesar was fearless. He made a point often enough of telling us so. Yet, as my friend Gaius Valerius Catullus was wont to say, 'The most mysterious silence in the world is that which surrounds a man and woman when they are alone together.'
Now, naturally enough, she questioned me narrowly concerning Cleopatra — Calpurnia was the sort of woman who always knew the stories that were going the rounds. She didn't trouble to hide her conviction that Caesar was again being unfaithful to her. Most women would conceal such knowledge, on account of their pride. But Calpurnia's pride was of a different order; she delighted in presenting herself to the world as a wronged woman.
'She's of an age to be his granddaughter,' she said. 'Not quite.'
'I've done my calculations. She would be under marriageable age if she was a Roman. What does he see in her?'
'She amuses him. There's nothing more to it. Except this: the relationship is political. The importance of Egypt is well-recognised. Therefore it's a good thing to be on friendly terms with its Queen.'
'Friendly terms! But you men always stick together. The only thing that surprises me is that he preferred her to her brother. He had him put to death, didn't he? Was he very ugly?'
'I've no idea.'
'You're a rotten liar. You're blushing, your face gives you away.'
I tried to turn the conversation to more general questions. But she kept returning to the matter of Cleopatra.
At last she said: 'He'll have to come home in a couple of months. His dictatorship expires, doesn't it? Will he ask for it to be renewed, or will he be content with more ordinary honours?'
'How can I answer a question if his wife is ignorant of the matter?'
Then, to divert her, I sent a slave to fetch the presents which Caesar had entrusted to me.
'There's something inescapably vulgar about all Oriental workmanship,' she said.
Nevertheless she took them with her when she left, though I later heard that, when Caesar eventually came home, he found that some of the jewels which he had had his quartermaster so carefully select had been passed on to Calpurnia's favoured freedwomen. As a loan, of course; if she dismissed a servant she took care to retrieve anything she had lent her.
When Calpurnia left, I said good night to my mother, and went out into the streets, saying I required fresh air, to blow away memories of Calpurnia's spite.
'You won't find that in Rome, nothing but filth. Behave yourself,' and she held out her cheek for me to kiss.
I felt, as I knew I would, the excitement of return, the strange sense of liberation that the city's nocturnal life offered. I passed through the Suburra, stopping to admire the filthy shows outside the brothels. My ears were assailed by the babble of countless tongues, as if all the languages of the world sought to express their vices in the stew of Rome. My poor dead friend Catullus had often insisted that filth and beauty were two sides of the same coin. And, thinking of Catullus, I admitted where I was heading, in a roundabout fashion.
He had loved Clodia to distraction; I myself only knew him after he had broken away, with tears and in trembling. His voice shook when he spoke of her. He could escape neither the memory of her love — the beauty of those great dark ox-eyes — nor the horror with which she had filled him. 'We are drawn to what terrifies and disgusts us,' he said. 'She demands adoration, like the goddess Cybele, and then slays her admirers. Her lusts are insatiable. She exhausts her lovers, and unmans them. I trust, Mouse, that you will never find yourself in the clutches of so terrible a woman.'
That was the warning he gave me, and since then, Clodia's reputation had been utterly destroyed. Who does not remember the lawsuit she brought against Caelius Rufus, himself a close friend of Catullus? (They were the same age — I am some years younger.) When Caelius left her, she accused him of all sorts of crimes: he had tried to poison her, he had defrauded her of money she had lent him, he had plotted the assassination of an Egyptian diplomat, he had tried to raise a riot in Naples; and so on. It was a collection of absurdities. Men said the woman had taken leave of her senses.
Caelius got Cicero to defend him. I was in court. It would be, people promised, better than the gladiators. 'Cicero hates Clodia, on account of the way her brother persecuted him. You know, of course, she was her brother's lover. Fact.' That was the way people talked.
Cicero's speech was masterly. Whatever doubts — generally well-founded — people have expressed about his character, no one has ever denied his genius for forensic oratory. And I doubt if he has ever displayed it to more effect than in his defence of Caelius.
He began quietly, in subdued fashion, remarking that the case against Caelius scarcely needed a defence. It was enough to draw attention to the beauties of his friend's character and the honourable nature of his career. It would be a pity, he observed, as if in an aside, if such a career should be besmirched 'by the influence of a prostitute'. Surely, he asked, the wantonness of women ought to be controlled?
This appeal to the solidarity of our sex had the court nodding in approval.
Then he turned on Clodia, though without even glancing in her direction. He would hesitate, he said, to mention a Roman lady, the mother of a family, in a law-court, without due respect, if she had not herself launched such an attack on his worthy friend Caelius. There was another reason for him to hold back; he couldn't confess to be unprejudiced, not only on account of his friendship with Caelius, but also because 'I have in the past had grave personal disagreements with the lady's husband — I beg your pardon, I mean of course her brother — I always make that mistake.'
And he turned to the jury, spreading his hands wide in simulated apology, while, behind him, Caelius and his friends, who may have known the gibe was coming, rocked with laughter.
Cicero knew, however, that he had to walk warily. Clodia belonged to one of our greatest families, while he himself was a new man from the unimportant town of Arpinum. So, rather than attack Clodia directly in his own person, he summoned up the memory of her greatest ancestor, Appius Claudius the Censor. He had his imaginary figure (for all reconstructions of dead men must be only imaginary) describe his own achievements, praise the virtue of the great ladies of the Claudian family, and then deplore the manner in which Clodia had disgraced them: her choice of a plebeian form of the family name was itself disgraceful, and yet her conduct disgraced even the plebeians.
The woman, Cicero suggested, was not only bad. She was also silly. She was frivolous, without any sense of dignity. She behaved like a woman in a comedy; she might have been created by Terence or Plautus. Since we all knew that the women in these comedies were heartless and impudent tarts, Clodia shrivelled before our eyes. She had, Cicero implied, the morals and manners of a whore, whose word cannot even be weighed.
Finally, he turned to the charge of poisoning which Clodia had laid against Caelius, and laughed it out of court, exposing its improbability, even impossibility. It was the product of nothing but spite. 'This is not the final scene of a comedy,' he said, 'it is the end of a farce'; and which of us, hearing these words, did not glance at the ox-eyed beauty and see her aristocratic splendour fall away to reveal the naked showgirls who prance, cavort and gesture obscenely in these degraded spectacles. 'You will not convict a virtuous nobleman on the word of a vile trollop'; that was his message.
Clodia did not move during this terrible attack. If she felt the faces of the crowd turn towards her, she gave no sign. If she was aware that the young men who had accompanied her to court were drawing away from her, dissociating themselves from her disgrace, she paid no heed. And at that moment something appalling happened. I fell hopelessly, overwhelmingly in love. I was seized with the most intense desire.
Even as I trembled, I asked myself why this should be. 'Know thyself ' — that is the sum of wisdom offered by the philosophers, and few of us know ourselves but slightly. Perhaps that is the greater wisdom. For, in this revelation now vouchsafed me of the form of union I desired, I knew, even as I throbbed with impatient lust, that I was surrendering to a part of myself, perhaps my profoundest nature, which would render me an object of scorn and contempt to all virtuous men. I was horrified by what I learned of my own character, and yet it was inescapable that, with loins aching, I presented myself at her house that evening.
She was alone. I could not believe that she had passed an evening alone in her life. The great saloon into which a stammering slave ushered me was cold as a winter morning. I waited a long time. I wanted to run away.
