"I don't suppose she would though."
"I am sure you will not be too shy to ask her."
I had seen it so often before. Perhaps that was why I had attempted to divert Longina from her intended course. Now Caesar exercised his old accustomed charm. His manner was at the same time intimate and perfunctory. He gave the girl the impression that his whole attention was concentrated on her; and yet he remained aware of his performance, aware of his wider audience whom he invited to admire it.
It was like a play unfolding of which one already knows the conclusion; the chief interest for the audience is therefore to judge the skill with which the dramatist has handled his material. Sometimes, now, especially in these summer evenings, when the mist rising from the valley turns my mood to melancholy (as if there were not already sufficient reasons more substantial than my imaginings to induce such a mood, even a darker one, even despair), then it seems to me that the whole gaudy course of a man's life is indeed no more than such a play, a charade which we enact for the amusement of the indifferent gods. And so I watched the to-and-fro of the conversational dance, saw my wife's lips curve in invitation as she leaned towards him displaying, as if by nature, the rich roundness of a breast, heard her laugh gurgle forth like a stream long dammed-up now breaking free; and all the time, Caesar, the Master, drew her towards him as if there was no more question that she would come than there is that the sun will sink into the western sea.
"What sort of man are you, son-in-law?" Cassius said.
The question was rhetorical.
"If Caesar or any man debauched my wife…"
"Come, Cassius," I replied, "there is no need for this pretence. You know very well what you would do. The same as me: nothing, in the case of Caesar. That sort of virtue is out-of-date. Besides, I have shared women with Caesar before, and on some of them he had a prior claim."
"You deceive yourself, son-in-law, only when you lay claim to any equality with Caesar."
"Very well, Cassius. I yield to you on that point, and I acknowledge also that you may have a father's interest in not seeing your daughter disgraced. But then I tell you, she is not disgraced. Longina made the running herself. She is no flower that Caesar has picked."
"And does that not anger you?"
"Cassius," I said, "I thought you were a philosopher."
But if I could not tell the truth to Cassius, I could not hide it from my cousin Casca.
That was strange, for Casca was not a man whom I could expect to understand noble indignation. I suppose it was because he knew me better than any other man. He knew, for instance, that at any time up to the hour of my return from Spain (when I had surprised young Appius Claudius, himself incidentally an admiration of Casca's) I would have been happy to trade Longina to Caesar in return for the many favours he had done me. But Casca also saw, even while he mocked me, that something more than my vanity was wounded. He saw that I had really believed that, simply because I had found in myself an unexpected tenderness for my wife, she experienced the same feeling for me.
And now Casca said:
"So the Senate proposes to grant divine honours to Caesar. It would be appropriate if you were to speak in favour of the motion."
"In favour?"
"Naturally, my dear. To lose your wife to a man, however distinguished, may be thought disgraceful; to be cuckolded by a god is no shame."
"I can see only one objection, cousin," I replied. "While we may indeed grant divine honours to Caesar…"
"Say 'shall', not 'may'."
"Very welclass="underline" shall. While we shall do so, nobody will believe that Caesar is in reality a god."
"Oh," Casca said, "when you introduce the word 'reality', you lose me, and I lose interest. Who is to say what constitutes 'reality' in this fool's world? Are my debts reality? On which subject, by the way, I am distressed that Caesar has betrayed those who trusted him, and declined to cancel debts as we were told he would; not, of course, that I believed that assurance. Certainly my creditors think them real; as for me, I dismiss them from my mind. And as for passion, which some call reality, you are aware — how could you fail to be? — of my passion for Diosippus, when the moon is waxing, and Nicander when it is on the wane, but you also know that if it was in my interest I would have either of the brats crucified — which I mention only as the nastiest death I can envisage. So where is the reality of my passion? I would weep for either lad, naturally, and my tears would be copious and impressive, but they would not prevent me from acting in my own interest."
"So your self-interest is reality."
"Is it? Is it? I wish I knew."
He leaned back and stroked his belly. We were in the hot room of the baths, I remember. He brushed the palm of his hand across the folds of flesh and flicked a stream of sweat and vapour on to the tiled floor.
"Is it? There are times, cousin, when it seems to me that there are only two realities I recognise: the first is physical. The body is real, I can't deny that."
"Many have."
"They have less flesh than I. The body is real and so, as a consequence, are its demands." "And the mind?"
"Belongs to the body… part of the body." "It controls the body."
Casca laughed: "How can you, an old soldier, say so! You have known fear in battle. Which is in the ascendant then? Mind or body? Or does fear force itself on you from without?"
"If so, fear is real."
"We think it is. And as for the mind controlling the body, let us return to where we started. There is a part of the body" — he fondled it — "which sometimes displays an intelligence of its own. I may wish to stimulate it, and it says 'no' and remains limp. At other times it moves on its own without my permission. In short, it does as it pleases whether I am awake or asleep. Sometimes I am awake and it sleeps. Sometimes I sleep and the dear little thing dances and sweats. So where is the reality of the controlling mind?"
"You said you recognised two realities. What is the other?"
"Boredom."
"That is not a philosophical answer."
"Boredom," he repeated, "which forces one to seek reality in action. Which reality will, of course, be an illusion."
He called on the slave to drench him with cold water, and then waved him away.
"Disappointing," he said. "The dear little thing took no interest. It is only your vanity which is wounded by your wife's adultery."
"Men have killed for that reason."
"What? Kill Caesar? My dear Mouse, that is an interesting idea. That might release me from boredom. How shall we set about it? All the same, Mouse, you will never kill Caesar on account of a chit like your wife."
I t will seem strange to anyone who reads this apology for my life that when I have such a short time before me (as I fear) I should spend part of it extracting trivialities from my memory. But if this arouses incomprehension, it will be because such a reader is incapable of imagining the complexity of things. The truth is that we do not know the springs of conduct; we do not know which particular circumstance or feeling drives a man to any particular action. When now I think of Casca arguing for the autonomy of sexual desire, I find that his arguments have an application that may be pushed much further. If we do not know why we experience desire, if this is something which escapes our control, then can we pretend to know why we are driven to still more obscure courses?
It seems to me now that I had never questioned my attachment to Caesar. When the civil war broke out, I was on his side, one of his favoured generals. It was natural that I continued so. I never argued the case, and not only because I was inspired by Caesar's own confidence of victory.
My imagination drifts back to that moment when we crossed the little stream called the Rubicon, and to that strange figure which rose out of the mist, playing the pipes, on the further bank. The image is vivid: perhaps my imagination has enriched or perverted it: was there really, for instance, that suggestion of goat's legs? Were the limbs even covered, as memory insists, in goatskin? Some of the soldiers, you will recall, cried out that the god Pan welcomed us to Italy. We all felt that something rarely mysterious presented itself to us; it gave an aura of incomprehensibility to what was in reality a militarily commonplace action. Had the sun been up, the figure would have appeared absurd.