Chapter 12
All the same, Cicero might be an old windbag nowadays, but I couldn't deny that he had spoken sense. We had endured these terrible wars — wars which no one — not even Caesar, as he so often reminded us — had sought, and they had been fought for one simple reason: that the traditional political system of the Republic no longer answered the needs of Empire.
(I explained that to you, Artixes, you will remember, but you will forgive me if I say now that I then did so in excessively simple terms suitable for the understanding of a barbarian youth, however charming.)
But it was this question which perplexed me throughout that autumn. It was a golden autumn, as I recall, one of those years when each day seems imbued with a crisp clarity that calls on man to worship the gods, and yet with a warmth that encourages him to indulge in all physical pleasure. The heat of the day still invited languor, and the little breeze that blew in from the campagna encouraged reflection. We old warriors deserved the languor; we politicians, who had to consider how reform might best be effected, required those moments of reflection. Casca mocked me for my preoccupation. 'Take what the gods give and be grateful.' Rumours swept the city that Caesar intended to introduce Gauls and other barbarians into the Senate in such numbers that we Roman noblemen would become objects of contempt.
'It cannot be,' said even those who most keenly spread the rumour.
'What is the purpose of a Roman nobleman's career in public life?' asked my father-in-law, and now friend, Cassius. He answered his own question.
'He seeks dignity and power.' But what did Caesar plan?
Oh he made minor reforms, of course: he adjusted the calendar, for instance, and set great store by that.
'I am a practical man, Mouse,' he said, 'and concerned with practical matters. There is nothing more practical than the measurement of time. In antiquity our Roman months so ill agreed with the revolution of the year that festivals and days of sacrifice gradually fell in seasons quite opposite to those for which they were intended. It might happen therefore that the sacrifice intended to bless the sowing of crops might, in one year, fall at the time when the corn was yellow. Could anything be more absurd, my dear fellow? Well, King Numa, the great law-giver so revered by our ancestors, took thought and devised a remedy. He ordered that the priests, when times seemed too abruptly out of joint, should order the interposition of this month called Mercidonius, which, as you know, is of the type described as intercalary. But even this has proved ineffective. I have, however, taken counsel of the wisest sages, Greeks and Egyptians for the most part, and we have propounded a new scheme of things, a new calendar, which eradicates these ancient defects, and which will set things right for all time.'
He could continue in this vein for hours. It was extraordinary: Caesar, so swift in action, so witty in repartee, the man whom the ladies called 'Quicksilver', could also be the most frightful bore.
But I suppose that is true of most men when they mount their hobbyhorse.
I could get him to talk of these things. I could get him to expatiate on a plan he had projected to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, to the great benefit of traders no longer compelled to skirt the dangerous coast of the Peloponnesus. He would talk also, again at length, of how the Tiber might be conveyed directly from Rome by a deep channel cut directly from Rome to Circeii, and so into the sea near Terracina.
'The merchants at Ostia may grumble, but what of that? In any case, I shall clear the shore there of its secret and dangerous obstructions.'
Then he proposed draining the marshes by Nomentum and Setia, to employ many idle hands in agriculture.
And so on… There was no end to his schemes for social and physical improvement.
This was all very well. It proved that his luminous mind had lost none of its accustomed invention and activity.
But when I ventured to ask him, yet again, how he intended to reform the Constitution, with the implication (I admit) that any effective reform would make a future career like his own impossible, he frowned and declined to answer.
Let me, as has ever been my endeavour throughout this memoir (which is not, I insist, primarily intended as a work of self-justification, but rather as a treatise which may edify such future generations as may chance upon it), let me then try to speak with all the honesty which I can muster.
It may be beyond the wit of any man to restore the State. It may prove impossible, given the universal nature of our Empire, ever again to combine order with liberty.
This is a matter which I had discussed with young Octavius. He responded to the question with all the pessimism characteristic of youth.
Allan Massie
Caesar
'There has to be a supreme ruler of such an empire,' he said, 'and my uncle has made himself its master, as Pompey failed to do.'
'Sulla was such a master,' I said. 'He drew up a revised Constitution and then retired from public life.'
'And how long did his Constitution last?'
We were in an arbour in his stepfather's garden. Ilex trees shaded us from the afternoon sun. A lizard ran along the wall. A slave brought us wine and we dismissed him. Then he was summoned by Octavius' stepfather, Philippus, as he lay at his ease, half-drunk, at the other end of the garden. We talked in low voices though none could hear us. It was about a month before we set out on the Spanish campaign, before Octavius had made clear to me that relations between us must now change.
I said: 'What do men want? Dignity, first of all.'
'Well, that can be arranged, can't it?'
'Freedom from fear.'
'More difficult to ensure?'
'The ability to exercise their powers to the full.'
'And if these powers clash, one man's with another's, as my uncle's did with Pompey's? What then?'
He stroked his thighs. For a moment I was distracted, amazed as ever by his ability to be so conscious of his own body, yet capable of allowing his intellect to work independently of such preoccupations.
'Do you know what has changed in Rome?' I said.
When I recall my conversations with Octavius, I am perplexed ' — I was perplexed then, am even more so now — by what I can only call my consciousness of duality. This came on me in two forms. In the first place, there was that duality that philosophers have expounded. It was like those dialogues of Socrates: where you are aware that abstract philosophical questions are being debated in an atmosphere of highly charged sexuality. Such duality is always disturbing, and always alluring.
But there was another duality that disturbed me more deeply. I could never be certain which of us — the experienced General, the man of action, the almost grizzled man of affairs — or the beardless boy who had his thighs shaved with red-hot almond shells, and who delighted in his beauty as the most mindless of women does — which of us was master and which disciple. Did I play Socrates to his Alcibiades, or was Alcibiades giving lessons to Socrates?
So, now, when I said, 'Do you know what has changed in Rome?' I did not, even as I spoke the words, know whether I was about to instruct him, or whether I was seeking information.
Of course I must have been about to instruct him, for what could he tell me on such a matter?
'Yes, of course,' he said. 'Rome made itself, or was formed by the gods, as an assembly of free men, exercising voting rights in the Forum about matters which concerned them intimately and of which they might be expected to have arrived at an informed opinion; and now the Roman populace, who still exercise, nominally at least, the same voting rights, who still claim to be the fount of political power, is composed of idle, workless layabouts, whose votes are for sale either to the highest bidder, or to the man who shouts the stupidest but most violent cry.'
I paused. He smiled.
'Come on, my dear, contradict me if you dare.' 'You have told me what I was going to argue myself. And what is the consequence?'
'Well this time, my dear, since we are in such evident agreement, let me urge you to provide the
