The Ides of March

The usage and very structure of our language exhibits and inculcates the belief that we are passive in the presence of life. Bound committed helpless. Our language tells us that we are given such and such qualifications at birth. That there is a Great Giver who gave Clodia beauty, health, wealth, high birth, and conspicuous intelligence and to another slavery, disease, and stupidity. She has often heard it said that she was endowed with beauty (by what endower? ) and that an-other was cursed with a sharp tongue—did God curse? Even if we assume the existence of a God who, as Homer says, pours out from his urns his good and evil gifts, I am amazed at the pious who insult their God by failing to see that as this world is run there is a field of circumstance that is not commensurate with God's providence and that God must have so intended it. But to return to our Clodia: the Clodias under such a dispensation never receive enough; they are poisoned by resentment against this niggardly Giver who has only given them beauty, health, wealth, birth, and intelligence, who is holding back a million gifts, namely, perfect felicity in every moment of every day. There is no rapacity equal to that of the privileged who feel that their advantages have been conferred upon them by some Intelligence and no bitterness equal to that of the ill-conditioned who feel that they have been specifically passed over. Oh, my friend, my friend, what better thing could I do for Rome than to put the birds back into the world of birds, thunder back into the phenomena of the atmosphere and the Gods back into the memories of infancy?
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 Last night, my noble friend, I did something which I have not done for many years: I wrote an edict; reread it; and tore it up. I indulged an uncertainty. These last few days I have been receiving unprecedentedly absurd reports from the disembowelers of birds and the audi-tors on thunder. Moreover, the Courts and the Senate have been closed for two days because an eagle let fall an untidy mess within an arrow's flight of the Capitol. My patience was drawing short. I refused to perform myself the ceremonial of propitiation, to mime the frightened self-abasement. My wife and my very servants looked at me askance. Cicero deigned to advise me that I should comply with the expectations of popular superstition. Last night I sat down and wrote the edict abolishing the College of Augurs and declared that henceforward no days were to be regarded as unlucky. I wrote on, giving to my peo-ple the reasons for this action. When have I been happier? What pleasures are greater than those of honesty? I wrote on and the constellations glided before my window. I disbanded the College of Vestal Virgins; I married the daughters of our first houses and they gave sons and daughters to Rome. I closed the doors of the temples, of all our temples except those of Jupiter. I tumbled the gods back into the gulf of ignorance and fear from which they came and into that treacherous half-world where the fancy invents consolatory lies. And finally the moment came when I pushed aside what I had done and started to begin again with the announcement that Jupiter himself had never existed; that man was alone in a world in which no voices were heard than his own, a world neither friendly nor unfriendly save as he made it so. And having reread what I wrote I destroyed it. I destroyed it not for Cicero's reasons—not because the ab-sence of a state religion would drive superstition into clan-destine forms and still baser practices (that is already taking place) ; not because so sweeping a measure would disrupt the social order and leave the people in despair and dismay like sheep in a snowstorm. In certain orders of reform, the dis-locations caused by gradual change are almost as great as those caused by a total and drastic alteration. No, it was not the possible repercussions of the move which arrested my hand and will; it was something in and of my self. In myself I was not certain that I was certain. Am I sure that there is no mind behind our existence and no mystery anywhere in the universe? I think I am. What joy, what relief there would be, if we could declare so with com-plete conviction. If that were so I could wish to live forever. How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, with-out guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives. You and I long since decided that the Gods do not exist. Do you remember the day that with finality we agreed upon that decision and resolved to explore all its consequences—sitting on the cliff in Crete, throwing pebbles into the sea, counting porpoises? We took a vow never to allow our minds to offer entrance to any doubt upon this matter. With what boyish lightheartedness we concluded that the soul was extinguished at death. [The English language cannot reproduce the force of this phrase in Caesar's Latin where the very cadence ex-presses a poignancy of renunciation and regret. The recipient of the letter understood that Caesar was referring to the death of his daughter Julia, the wife of Pompey, the overwhelming loss of his life. Mamilius Turrinus was with him when the news of her death reached Caesar's headquarters in Brittany.] I thought I had not relapsed from all the strictness of these assertions. There is only one way, however, to know what one knows and that is to risk one's convictions in an act, to commit them in a responsibility. In drawing up the edict last night and in foreseeing the consequences that would ensue, I was driven to examine myself most strictly. All the conse-quences I would most gladly face, certain that the truth would ultimately fortify the world and all that are in it, but only if I were certain that I was certain. Some last hesitation arrests my hand. I must be certain that in no corner of my being there lingers the recognition that there is a possibility of a mind in and be-hind the universe which influences our minds and shapes our actions. If I acknowledge the possibility of one such mystery, all the other mysteries come flooding back: there are the Gods who have taught us what is excellent and who are watching us; there are our souls which are infused in us at birth and which outlive our death; there are the rewards and punish-ments which furnish a meaning to our slightest action. Yes, my friend, I am not accustomed to irresolution and I [ 
am irresolute. You know how little I am given to reflection; whatever judgments I arrive at I arrive at I know not how, but instantaneously; I am not adept at speculation, and since the age of sixteen I have regarded philosophy with impatience, as a tempting but fruitless exercise of the mind and as a flight from the obligations of immediate living. It seems to me that there are four realms in which, with dread, I see in my life and in the life about me, the possibility of this mystery: The erotic—have we not explained away too easily all that accompanies the fires that populate the world? Lucretius may be right and our jesting world wrong. I seem to have known all my life, but to have refused to acknowledge that all, all love is one, and that the very mind with which I ask these questions is awakened, sustained, and instructed only by love. Great poetry—poetry is indeed the principal channel by which all that most weakens man has entered the world; there he finds his facile consolations and the lies that reconcile him to ignorance and inertia; I count myself second to no man in my hatred of all poetry save the best—but great poetry, is that merely the topmost achievement of the man's powers or is that a voice from beyond man? Thirdly, a moment that accompanies my illness and whose intimation of greater knowledge and happiness I cannot hastily dismiss. [This sentence is evidence of the unbounded confidence that Caesar felt in his correspondent. Caesar never per-mitted any reference to be made to his attacks of epilepsy.] And finally, I cannot deny that at times I am aware that my life and my services to Rome seem to have been shaped by a power beyond myself. It may well be, my friend, that I am the most irresponsible of irresponsible men, capable long since of bringing upon Rome all the ills that a state can suffer, but for the fact that I was the instrument of a higher wisdom that selected me for my limitations and not for my strength. I do not reflect, and it may be that that instantaneous operation of my judgement is no other than the presence of the daimon within me, which is a stranger to me and which is the love which the gods bear to Rome and which my soldiers worship and the people pray to in the morning.
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Clodia: "You taught me that the world has no mind. When I said that life was horrible you said no, that life was neither horrible nor beautiful. That living had no character at all and had no meaning. That the universe did not know that men were living in it."
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Caesar: I sometimes think that it is the candor of their greed that pleases me; they do not pretend to love me for myself. I shall go so far as to say that I have occasionally been moved to pleasure when one or other of them lets fall an expression of his contempt for me—in that ocean of flattery in which I live and move. It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the per-son which others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say "thou slave." A dictator is believed to be nig-gardly of benefits, incalculable in displeasure, jealous of ca-pable men, athirst for flattery, and not ten but twenty times a day I feel myself drifting toward those qualities and must draw back sharply. And ten times a day, as I await the arrival of the Queen of Egypt, I find myself dreaming of the possi-bility that she, now grown a woman, can see that all that I can give to her and to her country I give outright; that she need not contrive to obtain it; that all the devices within her power cannot obtain what it is unsuitable to accord her; and that these things being understood, we may move in a realm that is . . . but I am drifting beyond the possible.
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These last weeks, not my dream, but my waking state has been the contemplation of futility and the collapse of all belief. Oh, worse than that: my dead call to me in mockery from their grave clothes and generations still unborn cry out, asking to be spared the clownish parade of a mortal life. Yet even in my last bitterness I cannot disavow the memory of bliss. Life, life has this mystery that we dare not say the last word about it, that it is good or bad, that it is senseless, or that it is ordered. That all these things have been said of it is evidence only that all these things are in us. This "life" in which we move has no color and it gives no sign. As you once said: the universe is not aware that we are here. Let me then banish from my mind the childish thought that it is among my duties to find some last answer concerning the nature of life. Let me distrust all impulses within me to say at any moment that it is cruel or kind, for it is no less ignoble from a situation of misery to pronounce life evil than from one of happiness to call it good. Let me not be the dupe of well-being or content, but welcome all experience that re-minds me of the myriad cries of execration and of delight that have been wrung from men in every time. From whom better than from you could I have learnt this? Who ever so constantly invoked the extremest ranges of yea and nay—who, but Sophocles, known throughout his ninety years as the happiest man in Greece, and yet from whom no dark secrets were hid? Life has no meaning save that which we may confer upon it. It neither supports man nor humiliates him. Agony of mind and uttermost joy we cannot escape, but those states have, of themselves, nothing to say to us; those heavens and hells await the sense we give to them, as all living things awaited, incult and abashed, the names that Deucalion and Pyrrha pro-nounced over them. With this thought I dare at last to gather about me those blessed shades of my past whom hitherto I had thought of as victims of life's incoherence. I dare to ask that from my good Calpurnia a child may arise to say: On the Meaningless I choose to press a meaning and in the wastes of the Unknowable I choose to be known. The Rome upon which I have built my life does not exist in itself save as an agglomeration of structures larger or less large than another, of citizens more or less industrious than those of another city. Flood or folly, fire or madness may destroy it at any time. I thought myself to be attached to it by inheritance and upbringing, but such attachments have no more meaning than the beard that I shave from my face. I was called to its defense by the Senate and the Consuls; so Vercingetorix de-fended Gaul. No, Rome became a city for me only when I chose, as did many before me, to give it a sense and for me Rome can exist only in so far as I have shaped it to my idea. I now see that for years I childishly believed that I loved Rome and that it was my duty to love Rome because I was a Roman—as though it were possible or worthy of respect to love accumulations of stones and throngs of men and women. We are not in relationship to anything until we have en-wrapped it in a meaning, nor do we know for certainty what that meaning is until we have costingly labored to impress it upon the object.