Free Caesar by Allan Massie

that evening when I left my mother's house and made my way to hers on the Palatine. The house was dark. For a moment I thought it deserted, and knew both relief and heartache. I never approached her chamber without trepidation, dreading to learn who or what I might discover there. But this night again she was alone, as that first time. She had been suffering from fever. Her beauty, so well preserved by art, was disturbed by nature. She looked her age.
    When we had made love, performed our sexual acts, achieved a short-lived escape from the desert into which we were abruptly returned, she told me she was dying.
    I wept, I remember that; yet even as I did so, felt my heart lift at the prospect of escape. It was an illusion; I have never escaped, any more than poor Catullus did. The only persons who were unaffected by her — the only ones who enjoyed her and maintained equanimity — were her brother, who as a child of Eros knew delight without the sense of waste, and Caesar.
    She was fascinated by Caesar for that reason. He had escaped her, and yet she felt no anger against him. This puzzled her.
    "When he first told me — in this very bed - that he was a god, I laughed at him. I thought he was inviting me to share a joke. But he meant it. He is descended as everyone knows from Venus, but he believes he is also inhabited by the goddess. They tell me he fucks the Queen of Egypt now. Is she as beautiful as they say?"
    "She does not compare with you, Clodia."
    "But. . ."
    "She is a child, an adolescent. What fascinates Caesar is that she is no more capable of love than he is."
    "Then they are well-matched. Does Caesar know you fucked her?"
    "He would not care. Clodia, I have served Caesar for years. He is the most wonderful and remarkable man I am ever likely to know. Naturally, we laugh at his little vanities, and we often find him exasperating, but our mockery is exercised in self-defence. It is an attempt to pretend that Caesar is a man like ourselves."
    "He is not so different," Clodia said.
    "But he is."
    "He is only different in having no heart, and let me tell you, Decimus Brutus, that there are many men like that." "And women, Clodia?"
    "You mean me, of course. Well, I am not angry to hear you say so, as I would once have been. I told you I am dying. I shall not linger here to waste away. I shall simply remove myself. So there is no need to tell lies any more. I know what people say about me. That brute Cicero slandered me to the world, and the world believed him."
    She laid her hand on my sleeve, and the bones stood out clear.
    "I said I would not lie, but I still say they were slanders. You don't understand, Decimus Brutus, what it is to be a woman, how a woman is thwarted, perpetually thwarted, how her rage rises to see what is permitted to men and denied her. Well, very early, when I was still a child, my brother and I made a vow. We mingled our blood to seal it."
    She paused, and took up the candle and examined her face in the glass, as if seeking the child she had been. And as she did so, I could envisage them, the boy-girl and the girl-boy, each of a beauty such as no sculptor could hope to seize, pressing against each other, lips yoked, their very blood commingling as they strove to unite two souls in a single body and achieve that perfect unity which the philosophers insist we once possessed and must now forever seek in vain.
    "That we would be utterly ourselves, denying nothing, yielding to our every desire, fulfilling nature, hearkening and obeying every prompting of the senses, so that we might achieve the freedom of the gods, that freedom which consists of being absolutely oneself, untrammelled by conventions or the morality which the timid have constructed to ensnare the brave. You have known both of us, you more than any other have loved both of us, for what we are rather than for some imagined picture of what we might be, or be thought to be - and yet, my dear, even your love has fallen short of the