My mother always used to say that lust was a game the gods played to make fools of us, and amuse themselves. When she looked back on her own passion for Caesar, she could no longer understand how it had come about.
Is it the result of a trick of light, of the immediate disposition of limbs, lines, and posture?
How strange to perplex myself with this question now. For me, it has always been inseparable from some idea of degradation. My revulsion of Octavius puzzles me therefore.
Perhaps I was attracted by his freedom from experience. I do not know.
When I look on Artixes, I think this may be possible.
As it happened, I returned to Rome and surprised my wife Longina in bed with a curly headed boy. Both sat up, Longina displaying her delightful breasts. Surprise, then indignation, then fear, as he recognised me, could be read in the boy's face. I had no idea who he was. He looked even younger than my wife. Her tongue flicked her upper lip. Then she smiled.
"Husband," she said. "What a charming surprise," she added in Greek.
"No wonder your freedwomen were alarmed to see me." "They should be whipped for letting you break in on me like this."
She nestled back among the cushions and fluttered her eyelashes at me.
"Fair's fair," she said. "I bet you haven't been faithful to me in Spain. He's a friend of Caesar's," she said to the boy, "and you know what that means. Besides, he's been having the most tremendous thing with Octavius. Does that still go on, husband?"
"I could divorce you," I said.
"Why bother?"
"I could have you whipped yourself. In the days of our ancestors I could have had you put to death."
"Of course you could, but those days have gone. Besides, I know you better than you think. I'm not quite the mophead you take me to be. I've taken the trouble to find out a lot about you, husband, and I could give you quite a long list of your lovers, starting with that famous pair, Clodia and her brother. So don't pretend. Actually, I imagine you're enjoying this as much as I am."
The trouble was, she was right. I found the situation exciting.
"Who's your friend?" I said.
She giggled.
"Can't you guess? We're more alike than you think, husband."
I looked at the boy's tumbling curls, his lustrous eyes, his soft and at that moment trembling mouth. He was slim, and there was a hint of mischief even in his fear.
"Yes," I said, "I see a resemblance."
The boy was Appius Claudius Pulcher, whose father had been consul ten years previously. That father, whom I had known to be proud, corrupt and superstitious (like so many of the clan) had fallen at Pharsalus in the ranks of the Pompeians, though he had despised Pompey himself. He had married his daughter to my cousin, Marcus Brutus, who, disgusted by her infidelity, had put her aside, in order to marry Cato's daughter Porcia, certainly a woman better suited to his priggish nature. This boy must be the fruit of his father's last marriage to a woman half his age whose name I couldn't recall. Appius Claudius Pulcher had hated Caesar. Looking at the boy I couldn't imagine he felt any powerful desire to avenge his father. He probably revelled in his freedom from paternal rebuke, which would certainly have been forthcoming.
There was a silence in the room. My wife appeared content, happy to enjoy what she had provoked. She wanted a scene. So I determined to deny her that. As for the boy, he had clearly got more than he bargained for. I was travel-stained, grim, returned from the wars, a general of renown, not — he must have thought — a safe man to be discovered cuckolding. I told him to get out of bed and dress himself. He obeyed; in some confusion, made uncomfortable by the gaze I directed at him. Then I escorted him to the door of the bedchamber.
"We shall say no more of this at present," I said. "You are ' not to be blamed. On the other hand, you must understand that you have insulted me. Before I determine what must be done, I must talk to my wife. Then you and I will have to talk also. For the moment, think yourself fortunate that I am not a man of the same temper as your late father."
I turned back towards my wife. She had thrown the coverings aside, and lay on her back, her legs spread, her right hand resting between them.
"How masterful you are, husband," she said.
Her voice was low. I unbuckled my tunic and leaned towards her. She put her right arm around my neck and drew me down, and giggled again.
A little later she said:
"We make a better pair than you thought, don't we?"
She proved this to me repeatedly in the weeks that followed. I began to think that I had got a better bargain in Longina than I had thought to have. Perhaps the young Appius Claudius had woken her up. (I soon resolved that problem, by the way, arranging to have him attached to the staff of the Procurator of Judaea. Since the appointment seemed to come direct from Caesar, he did not dare demur. It was unfortunate, and in no way my fault, that he got a fever and died before the end of the year. To her credit, Longina did not protest when I told her that her lover was being despatched into what was effectively exile. I have reason to suspect that they continued to correspond, however, but by the time I came to that conclusion I had other more important matters to consider.)
Longina was not well-educated. Indeed she was scarcely educated at all. She wrote in the same tumbling and ungrammatical manner that she talked. But she was no fool; her wits were quick, and she had a liveliness that one would not have looked for in Cassius' daughter.
My father-in-law viewed the progress of our marriage with an ironic detachment. That was a mood, or air, which he cultivated. Cassius was in reality a man of the most intense passion, proud, jealous and implacable. He had made the marriage in cynical fashion: Caesar had conquered; I was a favourite of the dictator; therefore the alliance was desirable. He looked on me still in those weeks after my return from Spain with an appraising eye. In my company he usually spoke well of Caesar.
As for my wife, she was eager to make the acquaintance of the dictator. She urged me to invite him to our house: "For dinner, supper, anything."
"Caesar demands intelligent conversation," I said.
"And we can't provide it? Well, ask that old bore Cicero if you like."
"Caesar can scarcely go out to dinner without finding Cicero in the party. People look on the old man as a sort of insurance policy. Actually, though Caesar respects him, he more and more finds his tendency to dominate the conversation irritating. Besides, Cicero suspects I penned the Anti-Cato. He has been cool to me recently."
My objections, which I did not in any case understand myself, were overruled. Caesar was invited, and accepted. At the last minute, my wife added my cousin Marcus Brutus to the party — an invitation which did not please me.
"Is it true," my wife asked Caesar, "that you have invited the Queen of Egypt to Rome?"
We all knew he had, and that Calpurnia was furious.
Caesar smiled: "I hope you will make her acquaintance when she arrives."
"Oh I don't expect she'll want to meet ladies," Longina said. "Not if what I've heard is true." "And what have you heard?"
My wife screwed up her nose so that she looked like a little girl.
"Well, that she put her brother to death and that he was also her husband. Is that true?" "Absolutely."
"And when he was her husband, did they… you know?" "Did they what?"
"Well, you know, you must know, go to bed together, fuck?"
"That is something only the Queen could tell you."