Free Caesar by Allan Massie Page A

perfect love we felt for each other, each being the other and the other each. Now I see that we aimed too high, exceeded our powers. Publius is dead. I am dying, a slave to lusts I no longer find delight in. My reputation - since Cicero - could not be worse. No decent woman in Rome will receive me in her house. I have always despised such women, and what they call decency, and once I would have laughed at my exclusion. Now, I do not know. The cold grey fingers of death have touched me, and what will I find when I descend to the Shades? Will the gods be angered at my presumption? Will Cybele, whom Catullus said I aped, turn on me with terrible wrath? We cannot play gods, I have learned that, my dear, too late, and yet, even as I come to this conclusion, which terrifies me and makes a mockery of my life, I see that there is an exception: Caesar, descended from gods, inhabited by Venus. Do you understand, Decimus Brutus, little Decimus Brutus, Caesar believes himself to be what my brother and I aspired to be? And in time, I will wager, the Roman people will find themselves in agreement. The Senate - that assembly of timid and greedy goats - will fall down and worship him. They will decree that Caesar is indeed a god: 'Divus Julius', they will chant, 'divus Julius'. Temples will be consecrated to him; and what will you do then, little Decimus Brutus? I will tell you your choice. You must acquiesce in the murder of liberty in Rome, or you must kill Caesar."
    "Kill Caesar?"
    "Kill Caesar. It is Caesar or Rome, and as a patriot, you will choose Rome. Kill Caesar. Now go, my dear, and do not return. You have meant something to me, and that is what no living man, except Caesar, can boast. I shall embrace my brother for you, and Gaius Valerius also, if he does not shrink in terror when we encounter each other in the Vale of Shadows."
    CHAPTER 5
    C aesar returned to Rome before the end of the year, in order to ensure that the prolongation of his dictatorship be effected without difficulty. That was achieved. Opposition in Rome was muted, though many of course still sympathised with our enemies. Despite Pompey's defeat and death, these were still numerous. They held North Africa and Spain. The leaders were now Pompey's sons, the renegade Labienus, and Marcus Porcius Cato, the one man whom Caesar utterly hated. In general, hatred was an emotion Caesar despised. He called it "wasteful". No doubt that was his opinion, but the cause of his inability to feel hatred went deeper. To hate someone was to admit him as an equal, and Caesar recognised no equals. This made his hatred of Cato all the stranger, for there was no respect in which Cato could be thought to match Caesar. He was an incompetent general, whose legionaries loathed him, because his pride (or perhaps his secret suspicion of his own incapacity) made him treat them abominably. Caesar could always be free-and-easy with the common soldier for he had no doubt of his superiority, and knew that he could quell insolence or disaffection with a frown or a single biting sentence. Cato was stiff and bullying and a savage disciplinarian; and perhaps it was because inwardly he feared the men he was so eager to dominate. Besides, Cato was a bore with no sense of humour. I have remarked before that Caesar had no fundamental humour, but he was always capable of the sort of quip that pleases the legionaries. And they would follow him eagerly anywhere, into all sorts of danger, confident in his genius; whereas those who served with Cato tell me that he took the precaution of assigning some of his bodyguards to protect his back from his own men. I would find this hard to believe of any other Roman general.
    Moreover, Cato was a wooden orator, and a man of lamentable judgment. He was a drunkard, of the heavy sullen type. There was no joy in him. Caesar once described him to me as "the coldest dullest piece of base metal you will ever meet". And yet it wasn't enough for him to despise Cato, as I did;