'Is it? Is it? I wish I knew.'
He leaned back and stroked his belly. We were in the hot room of the baths, I remember. He brushed the palm of his hand across the folds of flesh and flicked a stream of sweat and vapour on to the tiled floor.
'Is it? There are times, cousin, when it seems to me that there are only two realities I recognise: the first is physical. The body is real, I can't deny that.'
'Many have.'
'They have less flesh than I. The body is real and so, as a consequence, are its demands.' 'And the mind?'
'Belongs to the body… part of the body.' 'It controls the body.'
Casca laughed: 'How can you, an old soldier, say so! You have known fear in battle. Which is in the ascendant then? Mind or body? Or does fear force itself on you from without?'
'If so, fear is real.'
'We think it is. And as for the mind controlling the body, let us return to where we started. There is a part of the body' — he fondled it — 'which sometimes displays an intelligence of its own. I may wish to stimulate it, and it says 'no' and remains limp. At other times it moves on its own without my permission. In short, it does as it pleases whether I am awake or asleep. Sometimes I am awake and it sleeps. Sometimes I sleep and the dear little thing dances and sweats. So where is the reality of the controlling mind?'
'You said you recognised two realities. What is the other?'
'Boredom.'
'That is not a philosophical answer.'
'Boredom,' he repeated, 'which forces one to seek reality in action. Which reality will, of course, be an illusion.'
He called on the slave to drench him with cold water, and then waved him away.
'Disappointing,' he said. 'The dear little thing took no interest. It is only your vanity which is wounded by your wife's adultery.'
'Men have killed for that reason.'
'What? Kill Caesar? My dear Mouse, that is an interesting idea. That might release me from boredom. How shall we set about it? All the same, Mouse, you will never kill Caesar on account of a chit like your wife.'
I t will seem strange to anyone who reads this apology for my life that when I have such a short time before me (as I fear) I should spend part of it extracting trivialities from my memory. But if this arouses incomprehension, it will be because such a reader is incapable of imagining the complexity of things. The truth is that we do not know the springs of conduct; we do not know which particular circumstance or feeling drives a man to any particular action. When now I think of Casca arguing for the autonomy of sexual desire, I find that his arguments have an application that may be pushed much further. If we do not know why we experience desire, if this is something which escapes our control, then can we pretend to know why we are driven to still more obscure courses?
It seems to me now that I had never questioned my attachment to Caesar. When the civil war broke out, I was on his side, one of his favoured generals. It was natural that I continued so. I never argued the case, and not only because I was inspired by Caesar's own confidence of victory.
My imagination drifts back to that moment when we crossed the little stream called the Rubicon, and to that strange figure which rose out of the mist, playing the pipes, on the further bank. The image is vivid: perhaps my imagination has enriched or perverted it: was there really, for instance, that suggestion of goat's legs? Were the limbs even covered, as memory insists, in goatskin? Some of the soldiers, you will recall, cried out that the god Pan welcomed us to Italy. We all felt that something rarely mysterious presented itself to us; it gave an aura of incomprehensibility to what was in reality a militarily commonplace action. Had the sun been up, the figure would have appeared absurd.
Yet the memory will not leave me; surely, memory insists, there was some significance to that moment which the mind refuses to grasp. Or is perhaps incapable of grasping.
Now, considering it, it seems to me at the very least, part of a vaster mystery: why we subdued our wills to Caesar.
My cousin Marcus Brutus once spoke in terms of fatalism: we were doomed to submit to Caesar. My father- in-law Cassius rebuked him. The fault, he said, lay not in our stars. The fault was in our natures. No impersonal force, only our own weak- ' ness, determined that we should be underlings.
Artixes has just left me. We have been drinking wine, thin, sour stuff such as they make in these barbarian parts, but wine nevertheless, and I think I am a little drunk.
No matter. There is truth in wine, or, as the proverb has it, wine releases the voice of truth.
Caesar: did I submit my will to him that morning when he emerged from my mother's bedchamber and I responded to his smile with a smile? And when I found Longina's door barred against me, and knew Caesar was within, and so left the house, and descended to the Suburra to a brothel where I paid for an African girl, was that merely yet another acknowledgment of my inferiority?
That was the trouble, wasn't it? Caesar diminished me. He diminished all of us. And we could never understand how or why.
There were times — I have recounted some — when I myself, by my words or actions, saved Caesar from the disaster for which he appeared to be heading — in Egypt and in Spain, for example. There were times when he set me tasks which I accomplished better than he could have performed them himself.
It made no difference.
As my mother said: 'Of course we all adore Caesar but at the same time we know he cares nothing for us.'
'That,' some might say, 'was because he was truly a god.'
I have never seen Caesar afraid. I admit that. Gods are never afraid.
That proves nothing. There was a centurion from Aricia, I remember, a sour, bilious man who was never afraid. But Caesar had the imagination to sense fear. Did he? There were times when I have thought he lacked imagination. Certainly his literary style was peculiarly deficient in that quality. He once showed me a poem he had written. It was embarrassing. Catullus said that to me also.
Caesar… Suppose I had joined Pompey. I might have been killed at Pharsalus, but I would have died a free man.
Perhaps I should set myself to try to understand Labienus. We never made that attempt. It was simpler to condemn him.
But Labienus was my precursor. I see that now.
So: Labienus…
We spoke of him with bitterness, of course. He was a traitor. No man had been more richly rewarded by Caesar. Had things turned out otherwise, he would have shared the consulate with Caesar in 48, both supported by the authority of Pompey. Well, that was not to be, and in the crisis Labienus proved more mindful of old family loyalties to Pompey than of his long association with Caesar. When he departed, he did so scrupulously, not attempting to carry other of Caesar's officers with him. Later he regretted this failure, though at the time he considered his behaviour honourable. He wrote to me once on this matter. I still have the letter, which I recovered from the place of concealment I had thought fit for it, shortly before the disaster that landed me where I now find myself. It was in my travelling bureau when I was captured, and since my documents were recently restored to me, I think it proper to publish it now.
It is dated some months after Pharsalus, from Africa whither Labienus had fled, and directed to me at my mother's house in Rome.
Decimus Brutus,
An old colleague fallen into adversity greets you. I beg you not to yield to what I suppose may be your initial impulse which might lead you to destroy this letter without perusing it.
I write not to excuse myself, for in my opinion my conduct does not require exculpation. Nor do I write to seduce you from your loyalties, which would in any case — I have no doubt — be a vain effort.
You know of course that I was torn between two loyalties, and there is no need therefore to expatiate on the conflict of loyalties which engaged me. Suffice to repeat that I had obligations to both Caesar and Pompey, and that I chose to honour the latter.
It would be easy to maintain that that was all there was to my decision: that, since I recognised my loyalty
