Peggy Guggenheim

I raced this little train for many years, carefully avoiding it at the most dangerous crossings where people were often killed. Our house painter lost his son that way. He was run down on his motorbike. The painter received my condolences with tears at the same time, and in the true French manner, he tried to sell me the motorbike.

The French and wine, the Germans and beer

from Rubicon:

To the legionaries, marching ever further north along pitted,

winding tracks, peering nervously through the endless screens of

trees, it must have appeared that they were entering a realm of

utter darkness. This was why, on their shoulders, they bore stakes as

well as spears. The camp they built after every day’s march, always

identical, night after night, provided them not only with security

against ambushes, but also a reminder of civilisation, of home. In

the midst of barbarism, a forum and two straight streets would be

laid out. The sentries, peering out into the blackness from behind

the palisade, would have the comfort of knowing that behind them,

at least, there was a corner of a foreign field that was temporarily

Rome.

Yet what appeared impossibly barbarous to the legionaries had

already been synthesised and fed through Caesar’s intelligence

machine. Their general knew precisely where he was heading —

and it was not into the unknown. Caesar may have been the first to

lead the legions beyond the frontier, but there had been Italians

roaming through the wilds of Gaul for decades. In the second cen-

tury BC, with the establishment of permanent Roman garrisons in

the south of the country, the natives of the province had begun to

develop a taste for their conquerors’ vices. One, in particular, had

gone straight to their heads: wine. The Gauls, who had never come

across the drink before, had not the slightest idea how to handle it.

Rather than diluting it with water, as the Romans did, they pre-

ferred to down it neat, wallowing in drunken binges, and ‘ending

up so inebriated that they either fall asleep or go mad’. Merchants,

who found this style of consumption highly lucrative, had begun to

foster it as widely as they could, travelling far beyond the limits of

the Roman province, until soon enough the whole of Gaul had

grown sodden with liquor. Naturally, with a market of alcoholics to

exploit, the merchants had begun to inflate their prices. Since their

ability to do this depended on the natives not cultivating their own

vineyards, the Senate, ever sawy when it came to fleecing foreign-

ers, had made it illegal to sell vines to ‘the tribes beyond the Alps’.18

By Caesar’s time the exchange rate had stabilised at a jar of wine for

one slave, which, at least as far as the Italians were concerned, made

for a fabulously profitable import—export business. The slaves could

be sold on for a huge mark-up, and the extra manpower available to

Roman viticulturists enabled ever more gallons of wine to be pro-

duced. It was a virtuous circle that kept everyone - apart from the

slaves, of course ~ happy. The Gauls stayed sozzled, and the mer-

chants grew rich. 

Caesar, in daring to imagine that he could impose himself upon

a country as vast, warlike and independent as Gaul, was perfectly

aware how much he owed to Italian exporters. It was not only that

they provided him with spies. The Germans, having witnessed the

effect of wine on the Gauls, had gone so far as to ‘ban it from being

imported into their own country, because they think it makes men

soft’.19 Quarrelsome too. Wine was more precious to Gallic chief-

tains than gold. Tribes were endlessly raiding each other for slaves,

depopulating the countryside with their razzias, breeding bestial,

debilitating rivalries —- all of which made them easy prey for a man

such as Caesar. Even when his spies reported that a confederation

numbering 240,000 had been formed against him, he was unper-

turbed. This was despite the fact that the tribes in his way belonged

to the Belgae, the people who, because ‘they were furthest removed

from the civilisation and luxury of the Roman province, and were

least often visited by merchants importing the kind of goods which

lead to effeminacy.

Cliches, Heaven forfend!

Yet, we must resolutely avoid straining for expression.

-‘Let us never become fioriferous, never resort to circumlocution;

for straight speech is much the easier and far the more

graphic. “Never rouge your style,” wisely cautions George

Henry Lewes, [Success in Literature: Bacon, Boston] “trust to

your native pallor rather than cosmetics.” In short, be your-

self; be natural. After all, writing, whatever its subject, is

self-expression. Be honest about‘ it. T V

Following are a few of the incorrigible bromides, listed for

the purpose of assisting you to avoid them and their kind:

all too soon

checkered career

sigh of relief 

last but not least

beat a hasty retreat 

tired but happy '

the commercial world, the social world, etc. 

cheered to the echo

favor with a selection

render a vocal solo

rendition

discourse sweet music

hungry as bears

repast

do justice to a dinner

toothsome viands

sought his downy couch

vast concourse

never in the history of

news leaked out

dull, sickening thud

those present

in evidence

abreast of the times

was the recipient of

everything went along nicely

the student body

doomed to disappointment

was an impressive sight

made a pretty picture

completed the scene

working like Trojans

herculean efforts

wended their way t

enjoyable occasion

in a pleasing manner

untiring efforts

all in all

it goes without saying

bolt from a clear sky

someone has said

specimen of humanity

had the privilege

replete with interest

undercurrent of excitement

last sad rites

tonsorial parlor

breathless silence

speculation was rife

tiny 10¢! .

along‘ these lines

as luck would have it

nestled among the hills or among

trees

like sentinels guarding

all nature seemed

all nature clothed in a robe

each and every

on this particular day

long felt want

it seems (in narrative)

fair maidens

the proud possessor -

in touch with

waited in breathless suspense

order out of chaos

those with whom_we come in contact

social function

imbued with

mother earth

The light fantastic toe

Truth is stranger than fiction

Teach the young idea how to shoot

Method in his madness

Sadder but wiser

Cupid has been busy

Variety is the spice of life

The best laid plans of mice and men, etc.

All work and no play, etc.

Never put off till to-morrow, etc.

Make hay while the sun shines

Made the welkin ring

All is not gold that g itters

When ignorance is bliss, etc.

Music hath charms, etc.

Caesar, from Rubicon

The life of a young Roman nobleman was filled with opportunity

and risk. Civil war heightened the extremes of both. Under Sulla

a young man might be plunged straight into the deep end of adult

life. Some profited spectacularly. Most dazzling of all was the

example of Pompey, who continued to pose and preen perfectly

unruffled by Sulla’s legislation against boy-wonders. Even as the

dictator moved to forbid anyone under the age of thirty from

holding political office, his fresh-faced lieutenant was thrashing an

army of Marian die-hards in Africa, and being hailed by his troops

as The Great . Pompey was exceptional, however, and gloried in

the‘ fact. Others of his generation were less fortunate. Sulla’s secret

police respected neither youth nor pedigree. So it was, for instance,

that because Marius had married into the Iulians, the heir of that

ancient, patrician family found himself on the run. Only nine-

teen, 3 young man whose family connections should have ensured

him seamless advancement, he had to hide out in mountain

haylofts and offer frantic bribes to bounty-hunters. It was an expe-

rience he would never forget. In future years he would prove

Fame Is the Spur 111

himself unusually determined to master the vagaries of Fortune.

No less than Pompey, the young ]ulius Caesar emerged from the

years of Sulla’s domination hardened before his time.

In this both men were only proving themselves true to their

upbringings. Hardness was a Roman ideal. The steel required to

hunt out glory or endure disaster was the defining mark of a citizen.

It was instilled in him from the moment of his birth. The primary

response of Roman parents to their babies appears to have been

less tenderness than shock that anything could be quite so soft and

helpless. ‘An infant, like a sailor hurled ashore by savage waves, lies

naked on the ground, unable to speak a word, utterly dependent on

other people for his survival." To the Romans, such a condition

verged on the scandalous. Children were certainly too weak to be

idealised, and the highest praise a child could be given was to be

compared to an adult. The result is, to modern eyes at least, acuri-

ous and frustrating gap in ancient biographies. Never do the great

figures of the Republic appear chillier or more remote from us

than when their earliest years are being described. We are offered

portraits of them as prodigies of physical toughness or learning -

stiff, priggish, implausible. Anecdotes that portray them as chil-

dren rather than as mini-adults are few and far between. The

greater the figure, the less adequate the portrait of his childhood is

likely to appear. The early years of a man such as Caesar are effec-

tively a blank. Any attempt to .recreate them must depend, even

more than is usually the case in ancient history, on supposition

and generalisation. Yet the attempt is still worthwhile. The Romans

were as aware as any psychologist that ‘Nature displays her blue-

prints most clearly in a man’s earliest years.’2 Childhood was where

the future citizen was made.

What, then, can we say with any certainty about the infant who

would one day destroy the Republic? Gaius ]ulius Caesar was born

on 13 ]uly’100 BC, six years after Pompey, fifteen after Crassus. Ritual

would have surrounded him from his earliest moments. A Roman

did not become a citizen by right of birth. It was within the power

of every father to reject a newborn child, to order unwanted sons,

and especially daughters, to be exposed. Before the infant Caesar

was breastfed, his father would first have had to hold him aloft,

signalling that the boy had been accepted as his own, and was there-

fore a Roman. Nine days later he would have been named. Evil

spirits would have been swept out of the house with a broom. The

boy’s future would have been read in the behaviour of passing birds.

A golden good-luck charm, the bulla, would have been placed

around the baby Gaius’ neck, to stay there until he came of age

and became a full citizen. ~

No delay would have been permitted in preparing for that

moment. The Romans lacked a specific word for ‘baby’, reflecting

their assumption that a child was never too young to be toughened

up. Newborns were swaddled tightly to mould them into the form

of adults, their features were kneaded and pummelled, and boys

would have their foreskins yanked to make them stretch. Old-fash-

ioned Republican moralityiand new-fangled Greek medicine united

to prescribe a savage regime of dieting and cold baths. The result of

this harsh upbringing was to contribute further to an already dev-

astating infant mortality rate. It has been estimated that only two

out of three children survived their first year, and that under 50 per

cent went on to reach puberty; The deaths of children were con-

stant factors of family life. Parents were encouraged to respond to

such losses with flinty calm. The younger the child, the less emo-

tion would be shown, so that it was a commonplace to argue that ‘if

an infant dies in its cradle, then its death ought not even be

mourned’.3 Yet reserve did not necessarily spell indifference. There

is plenty of evidence from tombstones, poetry and private corre-

spondence to suggest the depth of love that Roman parents could

feel. The rigours imposed on a child were not the result of wilful

cruelty. Far from it: the sterner the parents, the more loving they

were assumed to be.

Caesar’s upbringing was famously strict, and his mother, Aurelia,

was accordingly remembered by subsequent generations of Romans

as a model parent; so model, in fact, that it was said she had breast-

fed her children. This, notoriously, was something that upper-class

women rarely chose to do, despite it being their civic duty, since, as

everyone knew, milk was imbued with the character of the woman

who supplied it. How could a slave’s milk ever compare with that of

a freeborn Roman woman? Irresponsible aristocrats who handed

their babies over to wet-nurses were clearly compromising their

children’s future. Yet still they did it. It was a clear and shocking

symptom of the degeneracy of the times. Aurelia’s boast that she

had devoted herself to child-rearing had a proudly anachronistic

ring. '

And paragon of Republican motherhood that she was, no sooner

had she weaned her children than she set about the business of

their education. Gaius was not the exclusive focus of Aureli.a’s

attentions. As well as her son, she had two daughters, ]ulia Maior

and ]ulia Minor. The Romans believed that girls had to be moulded

just as much as boys. Physical as well as intellectual exercises were

prescribed for both. A boy trained his body for warfare, I1 girl fol’

childbirth, but both were pushed to the point of exhaustion. To the

Romans, self-knowledge came from appreciating the limits of one s

endurance. It was only by testing what these might be that a child

could be prepared for adult life.

No wonder that Roman children appear to have had little time

for play. Far fewer toys have been found dating from the Republic

than from the period that followed its collapse, when the pressure

to raise‘ good citizens had begun to decline. Even so, children were

children: ‘As they grow older, not even the threat of punishment

can keep them from playing games with all the energy they have.

Girls certainly had their dolls, since it was the custom to dedicate

these to Venus as part of the rituals of marriage. Boys, meanwhile,

played obsessively with spinning tops. Dice appear to have been a

universal mania. At wedding parties the groom would be expected

to toss children coins or nuts that could then be played for as

stakes. Caesar would one day talk of rolling a die when he faced the

gravest crisis of his life, and his taste for the metaphor must surely

have derived from his childhood. Even throwing dice, however, he

would still have been supervised by the implacable Aurelia, who

was as concerned to ‘regulate his behaviour when he was playing

games as when he was hard at his studies’.5 Perhaps it was from his

mother, then, that Caesar first learned to practise one of his great-

est skills, the art of distinguishing an acceptable risk from a heedless

gamble.

If so, then it would only serve to emphasise a glaring omission in

accounts of Caesar’s childhood - mention of his father’s influence.

By supervising her son’s upbringing so closely, Aurelia, model

parent though she was, ran the risk of stepping on her husband’s

toes. The freedoms granted to Roman women may have been

exceptional by the standards of the age, but the authority of a

Roman father was even more so. His powers of life and death did

not end with the acceptance of a child into his household. His

daughters, even once they had been married off, might well remain

his wards, while his sons, no matter how old they grew, no matter

how many magistracies they might win, never ceased to be his

dependants. There was no father quite so patriarchal as a Roman

one. As was invariably the case with the Republic, however, rights

brought obligations. At the census every head of a household would

be asked whether he had married for the purpose of having chil-

dren. It was a citizen’s patriotic duty to contribute to his city’s

future manpower. More immediate, however, and no doubt far

more keenly felt, was a father’s duty to the prestige of his family.

Status in the Republic was not inherited. Instead, it had to be re-

earned over each successive generation. The son who failed to equal

the rank and achievements of his ancestors, the daughter who neg-

lected to influence her husband in the interests of her father or her

brothers — both brought public shame on their family. It was the

responsibility of the pater familias to ensure that such a calamity

never occurred. As a result, child-rearing, like virtually every other

aspect of life in the Republic, reflected the inveterate Roman love of

competition. To raise heirs successfully, to instil in them due pride

in their blood-line and a hankering after glory, these were achieve-

ments worthy of a man.

Caesar’s own ambitions were one day to consume the entire

Republic. His father must have had some influence in fostering

them. There were certain things in Rome that it took a man to

teach. The young Gaius’ most valuable lessons would have come

not at his mother’s feet but standing beside his father as he greeted

political allies, or strolling across the Forum, or overheating gossip

at a senator’s banquet. Only by breathing in the subtle scents of

power at first hand could a boy hope to develop a nose for the

Republic‘s manifold complexities. Caesar’s father was well con-

nected, and his name would have opened many doors. In return he

would also have held an open house himself. The Romans had

little concept of private space. The town house of an aristocrat was

less a domestic retreat than a stage on which he could pose and be

admired, a projection in stone of how he wished to be seen. Distant

from the centres of power the ]ulians’ mansion may have been,

surrounded by the taverns and slums of the sloping Subura, yet it

would still have provided Caesar’s- father with a formidable head-

quarters. Suitors and clients would have thronged its hallway.