I, Virgil, page 13
'Caesar's given me three legions and Further Spain,' he said. 'Pompey's son Sextus is still free. We'll have no peace until he's dead.'
'Then he's not taking command himself? Caesar, I mean.'
'I wish he was!' Pollio turned to face me. His voice was savage. 'At least he'd be safely out of Rome.'
That surprised me.
'He's not still in Spain?' I said.
Pollio set the empty cup down on the table and began to pace the room.
'No, he's back. Taking the reins into his own hands, he says. In a way he's right, there's a lot to be done and Rome needs a firm grip. But he's making fresh enemies right left and centre.'
'Surely that's nothing new.' I poured a little wine for myself, and added water.
'Fresh enemies, I said.' Pollio frowned. 'The old ones he can cope with. He knows about them. These are friends, or used to be. And he doesn't seem to be aware of it, or even worse doesn't care.'
'Brutus?' I said.
'Brutus is one of them. His brother Decimus. Gaius Trebonius and Gaius Cassius. Half a dozen others, with more every day. All good friends who have reason to be grateful for past and present kindnesses.' He smiled bitterly. 'Who needs enemies, eh?'
'Why?' I asked the simple question.
'Oh, the usual mixture of reasons. For some, the more...upright ones like our friend Brutus' – his mouth twisted – 'it's a crisis of conscience. Caesar, they think, is becoming too much the autocrat.'
'And is he?'
Pollio's eyes opened wide and he stared at me as if I had suddenly grown an extra head.
'Of course he is, man!' he said. 'He can't avoid it. Spend half a day at Rome and you'd realise that. He has to, if he's to get things done. I told you, the city needs a strong hand. And he is dictator, after all.'
'The dictatorship's a temporary office. It's only valid in times of national emergency.'
Pollio's hand slapped the table. The pent-up violence of the blow shocked me, and for the first time I realised how much strain he was under.
'Don't you start, Virgil!' he snapped. 'The old system was rotten as a piece of maggoty meat. Caesar's the only man who can hold the state together, and with him gone these good old boys with their good old names would wreck it in a year. Caesar has to take sole control and keep it.'
'You want him king?' I said. 'You want us to go back to the Tarquins? You know what happened to them.'
'Yes, and so does Brutus. I think he sees himself in the shoes of his famous ancestor. You know what Caesar says of him? “What Brutus wants, he wants with a vengeance.” The gods save us from self-righteous patriots.'
I was positively alarmed now. I had no love for Caesar, but he had at least brought stability. Now it seemed that that stability was under serious threat.
'But Brutus has always supported Caesar,' I said. 'He's one of his right-hand men, as well as being...well...,' I stopped.
'As well as being Caesar's natural son,' Pollio finished for me. 'So the rumour goes, anyway. But we're not talking parricide. Not yet.' He stopped his pacing and poured himself another cup of wine. 'Not yet. As for the kingship, there are faults on both sides. Caesar's vain, he likes external show, that's his weak spot. His enemies are playing on it, voting him all sorts of extravagant honours they know he'll accept, feeding his vanity in the hopes that it'll goad staunch traditionalists like Brutus to do their dirty work for them. And they will, you mark my words, before much longer, if Caesar stays at Rome.'
'He's not aiming at the kingship, surely,' I said. 'He wouldn't be so stupid.'
It would, I knew, be unbelievable stupidity. The title of king has been anathema to Romans since the earlier Brutus drove out Tarquin the Proud four and a half centuries ago. If Caesar were to assume the crown he would need all his armies to help him hold it.
Pollio shook his head.
'Of course not,' he said. 'But he's allowing himself to be voted the trappings, and that's just as bad. It's his blind spot, I told you, and it'll be the death of him.' He caught himself, forced a smile. 'I shouldn't have said that. Make the sign.'
I smiled and made the sign to avert bad luck. Pollio took a deep breath and sat down.
'Leave it,' he said. 'Politics isn't why I came, and it's a dirty business. How's the poetry coming along?'
'Slowly,' I said.
'Anything particular on at the moment?'
'Not really. A few bits and pieces.' I suspected that there was a reason behind the question, but could not see what it was. 'Nothing of much importance.'
'Good.' Pollio frowned, reached into a fold in his mantle, brought out a book and handed it over. 'You've read this, I suppose?'
I examined the title. Theocritus's Idylls.
'Yes, of course,' I said. 'Theocritus is one of my favourites.'
'Anyone ever turned him into Latin? I don't mean translated. An adaptation.'
'Not that I know of.'
'Care to have a shot at it?' And when I did not answer: 'I'd arrange publication, naturally.'
I sat down, my head whirling. Despite Pollio's offhand manner, it was a momentous offer; what amounted to a major commission – my first – by one of the most respected men in Rome. It could make me as a poet. If I did it well.
If I did it well.
'I don't know what to say,' I managed at last.
'Say yes.'
'But Theocritus.... I'm not nearly good enough.'
'You are. The last poems you sent me showed that.' We had kept up a correspondence, naturally, while he had been out of Italy: disjointed, by necessity, but as regular as we could make it. I had sent him copies of whatever poor stuff I happened to be working on, and his criticism had helped me enormously.
'Why don't you do it yourself?'
He shrugged.
'I don't have the time,' he said. 'And anyway, you're by far the better poet.'
'That's nonsense.'
'Not at all. I've produced the best I'm capable of. I may write more – I will when I've more leisure – but I'll never write better. You're different, Virgil. You'll keep on improving, however long you write. You can't help it.'
I blushed, but my brain was beginning to seethe with ideas. Few poets are amenable to adaptation, just as only certain plants may be dug from their native soil and transferred successfully to grow elsewhere; but I had always felt that Theocritus was one of them. He was, in a way, already acclimatised, for he had lived the first part of his life at Syracuse, and his poetry breathes the Sicilian countryside. The Idylls are pastoral vignettes, simple stories of shepherds and shepherdesses and their rustic concerns; yet the simplicity is deceptive, for Theocritus is a master- craftsman, and each poem is an exquisite miniature perfectly executed in painstaking detail. Such poetry could well transfer its setting from the Sicilian to the Italian countryside – to Campania, even to Cremona and Mantua...
'Let me think it over,' I said.
Pollio grinned.
'Fair enough,' he said. 'I'm not asking you to have the thing finished in six months, I know how slowly you work. Don't start until you're ready and take as long as you want.'
'It may take me years. If it ever gets done at all.'
'It'll get done.' Pollio took the wine-cup from my hand and filled it to the brim. 'And however long it takes it'll be worth the wait, I'm sure of that. Now sit down and drink this. You'll need proper fortification if I'm to bore you with my African reminiscences.'
I laughed and drank.
It was to be two years before I completed the first of the Pastorals to my satisfaction, and a further eight before all of them were published. By that time, the world had changed again and both I and my poetry had changed with it. The Pastorals made me, certainly, but in a way, as you will see, they were also my undoing.
Pollio stayed with us for two days, then, the following February, a further three or four before setting out for Spain. We did not discuss the political situation to any great extent on that occasion, but I could see that he was sick with worry.
'Caesar's planning to invade Parthia,' he said. 'If he'd take himself off east now and leave Rome to settle down I'd breathe a lot easier. He's like a child with a stick poking a hornets' nest to see the insects flying about.'
'You think they'll sting him?' I asked.
He turned a haggard face towards me.
'I think they'll kill him,' he said.
Six weeks later the news arrived from Rome. The hornets had swarmed in earnest, and Caesar was dead.
32.
Do you know the story of Oedipus?
Oedipus was the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and of his queen Jocasta. For years they had been childless. Laius goes to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi to ask help of the god.
'I have no son,' he says. 'Tell me, Apollo, how I may get myself an heir.'
'Count yourself fortunate, Laius,' Apollo tells him. 'Your son will kill his father and marry his mother.'
Laius is horrified. He returns to Thebes and without giving her a reason puts his wife aside. Jocasta in her fury makes him drunk and slips into his bed. She conceives, and nine months later bears his child.
Laius is no murderer, yet he knows the child cannot be allowed to live. He takes the baby from its nurse, pierces its feet with a nail, and leaves it to die on Mount Cithaeron. Oedipus is found by a shepherd and taken to Corinth, where he is adopted by the king, Polybus, and his wife Periboea.
Oedipus grows to young manhood thinking that Polybus and Periboea are his true parents. Taunted over his lack of resemblance to them, he goes to Delphi seeking an answer from the god.
'Father-murderer!' the god screams. 'Mother-copulator! You pollute the ground you walk on, you make filthy the air you breathe! Leave my shrine!'
Oedipus, sick with disgust, flees from Delphi, not towards Corinth – for he loves his parents dearly – but to Thebes. He meets an old man in a chariot, who orders him roughly out of his path. Oedipus in his anger pulls the old man to the ground and kills him, not knowing that the stranger is Laius, his father.
He travels on, and meets with the Sphinx, a monster with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, a serpent's tail and eagle's wings.
'You cannot pass me,' says the Sphinx, 'unless you answer my riddle.'
'Ask on,' says Oedipus.
'What creature walks on four legs and on two and on three, and is weaker the more legs it has?'
'Man,' says Oedipus. 'For he crawls when a baby, walks erect in his prime and leans upon a stick when age takes him.'
The Sphinx, knowing herself answered, leaps from the crag on which she perches and is dashed to pieces on the rocks below.
Oedipus comes to Thebes and is welcomed as the slayer of the Sphinx. The Thebans take him as their king, he marries the widowed Jocasta and gets children on her.
Time passes. Oedipus's crime begins to stink. Plague wraps the city. Flies breed. People die and are left unburied in the streets, or burned in heaps on greasily-smoking pyres. Oedipus sends to Delphi to ask how the god's anger may be turned.
'Drive out the murderer of Laius,' says the god.
Easy to say, thinks Oedipus. But who is Laius's murderer? The old man was killed by an unknown assailant, and there were no witnesses. Yet Oedipus cannot rest until the problem is solved. He pokes and pries, asks questions, digs into the past as a farmer digs into a dung-heap, turning it over and over until the stench rises and fills his world. Jocasta, realising the truth, begs him to let things be, but in his pride he will not, until he has laid bare the whole, rotten, stinking mess and stands naked amid the ruin he himself has caused. His mother-wife hangs herself, and in his new-found knowledge and self-loathing he takes the brooch from her breast and puts out his own eyes.
Hubris. The Greek word is untranslatable: a gnawing, destructive canker of overweening pride and self-love. In his pride, Oedipus dared to tamper with the universal order, and his tampering destroyed him.
Hubris destroyed Caesar as thoroughly as it did Oedipus. What were the events of the Festival of Wolves, if not a product of Caesar's hubris?
The day is dark with black clouds and hail. The priests of Pan, their foreheads smeared with the blood of dogs, run screaming through the streets of Rome, hairy as goats, lashing any woman they meet with their rawhide thongs to make her fertile. One of them – Antony – carries a crown. He approaches the dais where upon a gilded throne Caesar sits stiff-faced, immobile, robed in purple, red-booted like the ancient Alban kings, watching the rites. Three times priest-Antony offers Caesar the crown, three times Caesar puts it from him, while the mob howls about them, demanding that he take it; until Caesar's gesture of refusal becomes mere stylised pretence...
Hubris.
He died a month later.
He had ample warning, so they say. Ghosts walked the Market Square, owls were seen in broad daylight and crows roosted in the temples. Lightning struck his statue, obliterating the first letter of his name. The night before the murder, his wife Calpurnia dreamt of it in her sleep, and begged him not to attend the senate. On his way to the meeting, a certain Artemidorus handed him a note on which the details of the plot were given in full, down to the names of the conspirators. All this he ignored. Fate could not touch him, no, not him, not Caesar. Other men, perhaps. But not Caesar.
Hubris.
They stabbed him at the base of Pompey's statue; and when he fell they stabbed him again and again, until they were sure of him. After he was dead, his son Brutus raised the bloody dagger aloft above his father's head and cried:
'Cicero!'
What Brutus wanted, he wanted with a vengeance. No matter who it hurt.
33.
We felt the shock of Caesar's death even at Naples, where politics was held in low regard as a topic of conversation. Most of our community approved of the assassins' motives, and even of their methods: tyrannicide has an honourable place in Greek as well as Roman history. I did not, although I did not say so very loudly, first of all because I had met and talked with Brutus, and if the others were anything like him then they were far less sympathetic figures than the man they had killed; secondly because, like Pollio, I was for order over chaos, and as far as I could see order had received a setback. Like all fanatics, Brutus and his friends had concentrated on sweeping away the system they opposed, without thinking of what to put in its place or of the realities of power. To my mind that is as criminal as consciously to set up an unjust and tyrannical regime – worse, for when no-one is in control the very fabric of society falls apart and evil prospers at every level just as surely as scum rises to the surface of a stagnant pond.
We were well-supplied with news over the next month, mainly because it was grist to the Epicurean mill: the deviousness of professional politicians overcoming the ideals of (Stoic) philosophers who foolishly believed that philosophy and politics could ever mix. Antony's speech, and the reading of Caesar's will which left his gardens across the river to the People and three hundred silver pieces to each adult male citizen, stirred up the mob against the killers, and they were forced to flee from Rome. Reasoned argument cuts no ice with the Roman mob where their purses are concerned. Anyone could have told Brutus that, but he would not have listened. He had to learn the hard way.
Nor was the august Roman Senate of any use. Many of them were Caesar's appointees; and once Antony had pointed out that if they cancelled Caesar's legislation they would be out on their senatorial ears they were quick to shelve their principles and temper their support for his murderers. Cicero, too, kept quiet. Above all, he was a realist, and must have found Brutus's much-publicised cry over Caesar's corpse extremely embarrassing. Slowly but surely, Antony, standing in Caesar's shadow, was gathering the reins of power into his own hands, and the Republicans could only watch helplessly and grind their teeth in rage.
Early in May, however, news came that was to change the situation completely, although neither we nor anyone else realised it. Caesar's heir Octavian landed in Italy, at a small fishing-village called Lupiae, not far from Brindisi.
It is difficult to talk about Octavian without hindsight. To you, my reader, I know that it is as if the leading actor has finally stepped onto the stage, and that the others will at once stand back and allow him his natural pre-eminence, or try to upstage him and, inevitably, fail. Ghostly Augustus already looms behind his shoulder, bathing him in divine radiance. Whatever Octavian does will be, somehow, right, his final victory god- ordained, only a matter of time.
Disabuse yourself of that view, if you can. See him for what he was, not for what he was to become. Judge him as if he were simply one racehorse among many. Weigh his chances in the power stakes against such experienced runners as Antony, Cassius, Cicero and the rest of the field. It is only by doing so that you will appreciate both his greatness and the less savoury aspects of his character.
He is nineteen years old, hardly more than a boy, thin-chested, spindly-legged, of poor constitution and delicate health. He has little experience of warfare, none of command. His education has been academic, albeit the best that money could buy (although his spelling and orthography are appalling). His natural father's family, although wealthy and highly respectable, are political lightweights – provincials, outwith the tenuous, iron-strong network of influence which ensures, even as he lies in his cradle, that a boy will rise to high political rank.
Against this, set three things: his friends, Agrippa and Maecenas (I will come to them later); his standing as Caesar's adopted son; and, last but not least, his single-minded ruthlessness. Others may have discounted Octavian's chances of success. Octavian himself never did, not for one moment. Armoured in his perfect egoism, he searched out his opponents' weaknesses one by one, pulled his adversaries down, and trod upon their naked backs.
Towards the end of April, Octavian entered Rome. He was hailed by the people and by Caesar's veterans as the dead dictator's son and avenger. Significantly, he was careful to accept his role publicly, and by implication to cast doubts both on Antony's position as Caesar's legitimate successor and on his willingness to avenge a murdered friend: over the past month Antony had been building up a fragile modus vivendi with the tyrannicides and the Senate. The appearance of a nimbus around the sun was also, somehow, linked with his arrival and interpreted as a divine imprimatur of his claims....
