Caesar

I cannot in honour be party to the deed. Besides, I am certain that you are too pessimistic, Decimus. There will be no subsequent trouble, for all good men will regard us with favour, and applaud our deed. We shall not be seen as villains, but as heroes who have restored liberty to Rome.'

So, it was, ill-advisedly, decided. Only Caesar should die. Then all would be sweetness and light.

The Ides of March, the Theatre of Pompey, then a general acclamation of the Liberators.

Having at last allowed himself to be convinced, it seemed that Markie had cast aside all doubt.

Cassius saw the reason of my arguments, but he supported Markie's rejection of them, because he valued his participation more highly than he valued reason.

Chapter 21

On the eve of the Ides of March, Lepidus invited me to dine. I hesidated to accept

This was natural. I had after all recommended that he should suffer with Caesar. At the very least, I had argued, subsequent to our formal conclave, that he and Antony should be arrested. This modest proposal Cassius had also declined to entertain (even though his own judgment approved it) because he feared it would give Markie reason to withdraw from our enterprise. I recognised Cassius' weakness in this decision. For all his merits, and great strength of will, without which nothing would have been done, for he was truly the fount and origin of the business, he suffered from a defect which was the obverse of his singular qualities. He readily fell victim to what 1 can only call monomania; once he had an idea fixed in his mind, nothing could persuade him to alter it. That fixed idea was the necessity of Markie's participation. There was nothing I could do to shift it. Accordingly, of necessity, I acquiesced.

Nevertheless I was conscious that there was a certain delicacy involved in accepting Lepidus' invitation. Moreover, I would have liked to compose myself for our great action in silence and privacy. Yet there were cogent reasons to accept. For one thing I couldn't tell what doubts and fears my absence might not give rise to.

I was dismayed all the same to discover that Caesar was of the party. So was Trebonius. His presence alarmed me for I knew him to be nervous, and therefore feared that his manner might arouse suspicion. Metellus Cimber was there also, and this displeased Caesar, for he knew that Cimber was anxious that the decree of banishment which his brother had suffered, should be rescinded. He frowned on greeting Cimber, warning him by his manner that the moment was not propitious to raise his brother's case. Seeing this, I took Cimber by the sleeve, and warned him to keep silent. I reminded him also in an urgent whisper that he and his brother had a vital role to play the next morning.

'Very well,' he said, 'but it offends me to see the dictator so debonair and think of the injustice done to my poor brother, and to recall the indignity he has suffered and the hardships he now endures.'

'Let all go well,' I said, 'and he will soon be restored to you.'

Lepidus called us to supper. If I had not known him well, I would have read anxiety in his manner. But Lepidus was always fussy as an old hen. It was strange. Many women were said to judge him the handsomest man in Rome, and certainly in repose he would have made an admirable model for a statue representing heroic virtue; but then he rarely was in repose. Now his fussing irritated Caesar, accustomed though he was to Lepidus' manner.

At last, he broke out:

'Let us be, Lepidus. Your dinner will not be spoiled if we delay a moment before attending it. In any case,' he said to me, speaking more quietly, so as not to give offence to our host, 'a dinner's but a dinner. I can't be troubled with these fellows who treat it as some sort of sacred rite.'

This was true. Caesar was indifferent to what he ate and drank. I had often heard him mock his two former colleagues, Crassus and Pompey, for the care they took for their stomachs.

'I am in this respect a Greek,' Caesar would say. 'I come to table for conversation rather than food. As far as eating goes I am as happy with a hunk of bread and cheese, as with the elaborate fare these fellows insist on.'

By unspoken agreement we avoided politics and war that evening, though Lepidus tactlessly tried to introduce the question of the Parthian campaign. Caesar himself swept that aside.

'If you seek enlightenment on that matter, Lepidus, call on me in office hours…'

He turned to me and enquired as to Longina's state of health.

'I am told you have sent her to the country. I trust that doesn't indicate that there is some trouble.'

'No,' I said, 'the air in Rome, you know. And then I think it is easier to get good milk in the country, and that is something for which she has developed a taste in her condition.'

He snapped his fingers, to summon a secretary whom he kept always near him, and who, on this occasion, was perched on a stool in a little passage leading to an antechamber.

'Make a note, will you,' Caesar said, 'that I wish to have a report compiled concerning the quality of the milk sold in the city. It should also tell me the conditions in which cows are kept, the time that elapses before milk is offered for sale to the public, and whether new regulations are needed to control the trade. For instance, whether we should impose a limit on the number of cows kept within a space of a certain size. Oh, and anything else that is thought appropriate. I should like a preliminary report seven days from now, and the project to be completed by the end of the month. I have no doubt that we shall find several reforms called for.'

He turned back to me.

'Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention, Mouse. I grow ever more convinced that the secret of successful administration lies in the realisation that ordinary people suffer most from what might seem tiny unimportant matters to such as us, but which in their condition prove irksome. The quality of milk will matter more to a young woman of the poorer classes than the question of whether your father-in-law should be consul in forty- two, as he wishes, or will have to wait till the next year.'

Talk at the table had moved on to questions of philosophy while Caesar concerned himself with the city's milk supplies. Someone — I forget who now — was discoursing on Platonism and the Theory of Ideas. He was speaking approvingly. Metellus Cimber repudiated the notion.

'I'm a plain man and a soldier, and I have no time for this farrago. I assure you, it's no good arguing in the middle of a battle that the spear which is being thrust at your belly is only a shadowy representation of the idea of the true spear. No use at all. It's all mystical Greek nonsense and any Roman should be ashamed of spouting it.'

'That's rather too strong, Cimber,' I said. 'I'm at one with you about the spear, of course. Nevertheless, there's a certain charm in Plato's thought, and when you consider abstract nouns — justice, of course, even love — you have to admit that there is some force in the suggestion that our experience of these is always imperfect.'

Lepidus nodded his head several times, ducking towards me, to Cimber, and then to the man who had introduced the subject. It always pleased him to hear intellectual matters discussed at his table, even though he was quite incompetent to contribute to the debate himself.

Caesar, usually alert to this sort of conversation, seemed abstracted, and I felt ashamed of what I was saying. After all, I thought, men like Caesar and myself knew the urgency of a reality to which I supposed that Plato had been a stranger. So I said:

'And yet, in the end, this is all frippery when set beside the knowledge of reality which the experience of battle gives you. That is why we Romans are superior to the Greeks of today. We act; they talk.'

Now, I wonder: will men still read and debate Plato when Caesar and Decimus Brutus are no more than tinkling names, or perhaps even forgotten?

The conversation turned towards the subject of death.

Someone asked Caesar what manner of death he would choose for himself.

'A sudden one.'

Then he signed a number of official letters which a slave brought to the table.

I walked home with Trebonius and Metellus Cimber. They were excited by Caesar's reply to that last question. 'It is as if he had some foreboding.'

'Well,' Cimber said, 'there have been a number of strange happenings. Did you hear that some have seen men of fire struggling against each other in the heavens? I'm also told that a soothsayer — some say Spurinna,