CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

For a considerable period Marcus Tullius Cicero enjoyed comparative tranquillity, which at times made him uneasy. He wrote to Atticus, “Am I numb or resigned? Am I growing old? Or have I reached the ultimate wisdom which finds no battle worth fighting? Consider me, dear friend, as one who does not look too closely at anything or anyone any longer. I have entered into the period of what some consider the golden middle years, the years that fly and leave no trace and decline into abnegation, which is the ante-room to death.”

As Julius had told him, he did not encounter Catilina, who, though in his fortieth year, remained as beautiful as a statue still, even if it was whispered that he drank heavily, became incoherent and blasphemous, and rarely appeared in court. He had deputies who labored in his name, claiming that Catilina had briefed them in the night. This was not true, for the nights were spent in restless debauchery. If his friends were present he upbraided them for imagined slights and for ignoring him. There were times when he spoke mysteriously, and was elated. Often, at dawn, he was found staggering on the streets with noisy companions who never appeared in the company of other patricians and never hoped to enter any house but Catilina’s.

A madman and a swine, Marcus would think when news of Catilina came to his ears. Marcus began to think that Crassus and Julius Caesar and Pompey had rid themselves of a dangerous man by giving him power he was unable to exercise; he congratulated them in his mind for their cleverness. The gods were destroying, as always, those they had made mad. Once Marcus would have suspected this placidity which surrounded him, for he knew that the gods, being malicious, often lulled a man to sleep so that he was not aware, until too late, that he had been stricken mortally. I had hoped to be a hero of my country, he would think. But the age of heroes seemed to have passed. Sometimes the insidious thought came to Marcus that nothing would ever stir again in the Republic which would capture imagination, whether for good or evil. Everything conspired, it appeared, to dull perception, to lull the spirit, to make every man say, “All is peaceful, all is prosperous, all is contained.” Where was a man, these days, like Scipio Africanus, a man with style and color and fire? Romans, modern Romans, would look on such with suspicion and disfavor. Romans did not want to be excited by oratory and brilliance. They wanted their banks, their pleasures, their families, their excursions, their mean little gratifications. They wanted destiny no longer. They wanted no rainbows in their skies, no storms, no disturbances of the status quo. Industrious and materialistic, they preferred the theatres and the circuses and their sports, their couches and their fat families.

Marcus, insensibly, was caught in this tide of complaency; he felt its pull. He began to believe that it was ridiculous for any man to try to awaken the soul of Rome, and he wondered whether it would be kind anyway, or to what men should be awakened. Crassus pursued a middle way. He attracted no overt attention, nor did the Senate or the tribunes. An actor was more celebrated than Crassus. The sun was peaceful on Rome and the streets were busy and there was much speculation and more and more news of prosperity. The world gave the impression of having reached a fixed place of calm, and all the battles were forgotten. There was no sign of impressive evil, nothing that would inspire indignation or resistance. “A fine age in which to live,” said many veterans of many holocausts, and they spoke with thanksgiving. “We are stable. Let us pursue the joys of life in this Umbrian atmosphere.”

“I leave for Jerusalem soon,” said Noë ben Joel to his friend. Noë was bald now, and he was very rich, for his comedies were extremely popular. “I do not like what I feel. Rome is not for a middle-aged man who has nightmares, and I have them.”

“Do not be absurd,” said Marcus, uneasily.

“I leave for Jerusalem,” repeated Noë, and looked at his friend oddly. “A Jew knows when the knives are loose in the scabbards, and he can smell thunder before the first cloud appears. I beg of you to retire to Arpinum.”

“So you advised me some years ago. Yet you observe that I live in peace.”

Or stultification, thought Noë. A change had come over Marcus, as if something in him was either exhausted or in abeyance. Worse, perhaps he had left the fight, for he did not see the lightnings in the east. He had become plumper, his long cheeks had filled out, his eyes had lost their changeful fire and now had an expression of stillness.

“I have heard much discussion of you in public, concerning that vivid young politician, Publius Clodius, surnamed Pulcher,” said Noë, looking aside in delicacy. “And—and this is probably gossip, his sister Clodia. Alas! How scandalous are tongues!”

When he looked up mildly he saw that Marcus’ face had become uncomfortably red. “Oh, Publius,” he answered with an air of carelessness. “One of those eager young men now in politics, foaming like wine that has gone bad, and resounding like a struck drum, all noise and air. I deplore his zeal. He speaks of ‘different times, different laws, to meet our changing problems.’ He does not seem to realize that man never changes and that his problems are always the same though he gives them new names. Publius thinks that everything is new, new, and must be attacked in a bold way, and that modern man, himself, is unique, whereas any ripened man can tell him that what he thinks is ‘new’ is as old as death, and as you have once quoted yourself, Noë, ‘there is nothing new under the sun.’ Increasing years will quiet Publius’ enthusiasms and his present conviction that man has suddenly embarked on a pristine experience in living, and the past is dead.”

“Ah,” said Noë, still watching his friend covertly, and remembering the gossip concerning the beautiful Clodia and Marcus. “Do you believe the rumor that Clodius, when prosecuting Catilina for extortion during his term of office, was bribed to acquit him?”

Marcus looked aside; he appeared to have been attacked by a slight pain. “I do not believe Clodius accepted a bribe, for all the rumors. He may have been convinced that Catilina was innocent. Catilina endlessly declaims that he is a friend of the common man; Clodius like many young and jejune men, is convinced that the common man, the man in the streets, possesses a mysterious sanctity, though how he arrives at that conclusion is not to be understood. So it is very probable that Catilina’s wily espousal of the common man struck a large gong of sympathy in Clodius, who therefore not only forgave him his sin of extortion but denied it ever existed. Nevertheless, I like the young man. He amuses me and saddens me at the same time with his youth, and his belief that he possesses all wisdom, a disease of his age.”

Noë noticed that Marcus did not speak of Clodia, the notorious and lovely sister of Clodius. Noë did not condemn Marcus; in reality, he hoped that Marcus was enjoying life to some extent with Clodia, who was not only beguiling but was noted for her wit and sparkle. As Noë was a great and avid gossip, he knew almost everything that transpired in Rome, mostly scandalous. He knew that Marcus and Terentia fought angrily, that Terentia was not only a shrewd woman insofar as money and investments were concerned, but that she was greedily ambitious and wanted fame in Rome as the wife of a famous and potent man. Noë, from gossip, had been informed that Marcus and Terentia slept in different chambers, that Marcus had once slapped his wife’s face before slaves, that once she had hurled a platter of saucy pasta at his head with disastrous results, notably a black eye and a cut on Marcus’ face and a badly puffed nose, that Marcus had asked for a divorce which Terentia had refused, and that they now lived, more or less, as formal strangers, except when Terentia was inspired to angry diatribes concerning inconsequential matters, such as Clodia. You are a virtuous husband, Noë, he complimented himself. And you have had many opportunities, but actresses do not always bathe often and they are careless with cosmetics. Moreover, they are expensive and my dear wife keeps all my books.

Marcus said, “But you will return from Jerusalem?”

“No. Not this time. I shall write you daily; perhaps you will join me for a while. Now that my children are of an age to marry I believe they should know their ancient traditions. They have acquired cosmopolitan ways in Rome; these should be balanced by deeper matters.” Noë began to laugh. “I still cannot believe that our dear, greedy, posturing Roscius has become an Essene in the caves of Judea! When God touches a man, however improbable that man is for the choosing, He lights a fire in him. So Roscius, to escape identification and notoriety, has assumed the name of Simeon, and says, in all seriousness, that he will not die until he has seen the face of the Messias with his own eyes. That is why he often emerges from the caves—where he studies and prays with his fellow Essenes—and haunts the Temple in the city, staring at the face of all babes who are brought before the altar. Poor Roscius.”

“I should have thought it of anyone but Roscius,” said Marcus, smiling with regret that never again would he see that mobile face, those magnificent eyes, and hear that loud and musical voice. His own face changed, and he said, “Do not tell me, I implore you, that I shall never see you again, Noë. We were children together, and youths, and young men, and we are middle-aged now. You are part of my life.”

“I tell you, I can no longer remain in Rome. I am afraid,” said Noë.

“Do not leave too soon,” said Marcus, and it came to him that each year saw a diminishing, through death or exile or change of residence, of the substance of his own life. “And when you go, do not come for a last embrace. I do not wish to know the day.”

So Noë did not tell him that he was leaving quietly the day after tomorrow. When he embraced his friend on his departure he could hardly refrain from weeping openly. “You have my prayers,” he said, scarcely able to speak. Again Marcus’ face changed, and he looked before him, musingly.

“It is said that when a man grows older he begins to think more of God,” he said, as if to himself. “But it is not true. I was afire with the love of God when I was a youth and a young man. Now I rarely think of Him, and each year the thought occurs to me less and less.”

“The world intervenes. We are exhausted with our efforts merely to live,” said Noë. But Marcus did not hear him. “In youth,” Noë continued, “we have energy for the whole world, and all that is in it and all that is without. A man should be able to retire from the turmoil when he is no more than thirty-five, so that he may devote his mind and his soul to God before he has forgotten Him. But that is impossible for most men.”

Marcus looked at him with faintly frowning eyes, as if he had heard a phrase most important to him but now he could not comprehend it, remember where he first had heard it, or who had said it. When Noë departed Marcus still sat in his garden this hot summer evening, and tried to remember. Not an echo rose in him. He began to think of the young and lovely Clodia, and he smiled.

Helvia, that prudent and stable woman, had never interfered in the affairs of the household since. Marcus had married. She approved of Terentia’s thrift and genius with money and investments; she approved of her old Roman convictions, and her piety which was increasing as she grew older. (Terentia was always in the temples, when she was not in the banks and the brokers’ offices.) She approved of her as a diligent mother and scrupulous wife and a deft manager of household affairs. But she sighed over Terentia’s fits of violent temper, growing more frequent lately, the nagging with which she afflicted Marcus over the most trivial matters, and her intolerance of everyone who did not share her narrow convictions. Helvia regretted Clodia, but she understood. She did not, however, know if she were relieved or not that Marcus appeared more serene these days and that things did not ruffle him as once they did. We all grow old, Helvia would think, sighing. It is very unfortunate that we also grow more attuned to the world, and quarrel with it less.

Marcus sat in the sunset garden after Noë had departed. He said to himself, “Am I happy or not? Am I less interested in life, or have I just accepted it at last? I am in harbor. Is that desirable or not? I know I cannot change the world, and I know that Rome is lost. Will it help if I tear myself into shreds? No. I pray that each day will not be stormier than yesterday.” It was only when Catilina’s face rose before him that he felt a sharp spasm in his heart and heard an echo of his old hatred. But Catilina was competently doing himself to death with debauchery. He was no longer Praetor.

But I, myself, shall soon be Praetor, Marcus thought. He smiled pleasantly, though with no excitement. He thought of Clodia, and he smiled again and rose to prepare himself to dine at her house where there was always laughter and wit and intelligent companions and music. It was rumored that she had recently taken one Marcus Antonius, a very young youth, as one of her lovers, but Marcus did not believe it.

Walking slowly and with leisure, Marcus entered his fine house, to which he had added more rooms and more luxury and more ornamentation. He encountered, not without a wince or two, his father apparently awaiting him in the atrium. There were days when he forgot that his father even existed, and he was always startled to see his thin shadow on the marble walls or hear his light and timid voice.

Tullius’ hair was white, his thin face fallen and bleached, his figure gaunt and his gait uncertain, as if his feet hardly felt the earth. Only his large brown eyes remained alive, and now they were eloquent.

He began to speak rapidly and in stumbling accents, as if he felt that if he did not catch Marcus’ attention immediately Marcus would not hear him or see him. He said, “My dear son, I must talk with you; it is most necessary.”

Marcus frowned slightly. He could not control his impatience, his desire to shut his father out of his awareness. He said, “I am late. I am to dine—”

“I know. You are always late, Marcus. You are always dining. You always have appointments.” The old man’s face was broken with sadness, and he bent his head. “There is something very wrong, Marcus. I feel I must speak to you before it is too late.”

“Well?” said Marcus, with resignation. The hall’s white walls and floor were sparkling with late sunshine, and the fountain in the center glittered and sang and caged birds sang sweetly in the corners.

“We have all lost you, even your daughter, Tullia,” said Tullius with humility.

“I do not know what you mean, my father,” said Marcus, exasperated. He looked at the water clock. He must bathe, he must array himself, and it was already late. “Can we not continue when I return?”

“I never hear you return,” said Tullius, imploringly. “When I awake in the morning you have already gone. When you are at home, you have clients or guests—when you are at home, I hear your voice only at a distance.”

“I am a busy man,” said Marcus. “I have a family whom I must support. I have public duties.”

“Yes,” said Tullius.

“You have not told me of the ‘necessary’ thing.” Tullius lifted his eyes and looked with grave intentness at his son. “I have forgotten,” he said, and stood aside to let Marcus pass. Marcus hesitated. He felt a faint pain in his breast, a sort of vague sorrow. But it was all overlaid with impatience. He said, as if defending himself, “I also write books and treatises and essays. This is a different world than the world you knew, Father.”

His father, for some intangible reason, was a reproach to him. He did not like reproaches; he received too many from Terentia, who wearied him to death now, and who had lost what little comeliness she had once possessed.

“It is always the same world,” muttered Tullius. “You will discover that to your own anguish before you die.”

Marcus’ amiable lips tightened. He inclined his head and went to his quarters and prepared for the evening. The sun at the window darkened as a cloud passed; then the chamber was warm and bright again.

It was very late when he returned. Clodia had been alone, as it had been arranged. Marcus yawned over and over and thought of his own bed with pleasure. Then, as he alighted from his litter, he saw that the bronze doors of his house were open and flooded with light, and that lamplight gleamed at all the windows, though the dawn was already gray in the east.

His heart jumped. He thought of his daughter, Tullia. He hastened into the house to be met in the hall by a weeping Terentia, who immediately fell on him like a tearful fury.

“While you lay in the arms of your harlot,” she screamed, “your mother died!”

Helvia’s ashes were laid with her father’s. The funeral meats had been eaten, the cypress planted at the door, the guests departed. The sun was still warm and golden, the air still sweet, and the birds in the atrium still sang in ecstasy. The garden was still fragrant, and the city below the Palatine hummed and clattered and bellowed, and the hills beyond, chaotic with buildings, caught the red rays of the western sky. Grief comes to every house, but its shadow is driven away as fast as possible. The dead were as if they had never lived, even those of power and of mighty houses.

There had been a multitude of mourners, including all the Caesares, and even Crassus had sent Pompey as his delegate, and the Helvii had wept for their sister, their aunt, their cousin. Quintus and Terentia had wept, but Tullius and Marcus were dry of eye for they mourned her the most. Little Tullia cried for her grandmother, and Marcus could not comfort her.

On the fourth day he sat in his favorite spot in his garden, beneath the myrtle trees, and his hands were flaccid on his knees. He sat for a long time. Then he saw that his father was seated not far from him, and gazing at him, and Tullius appeared like a shade, himself.

“I have lost more than a wife, a dear companion,” said Tullius, in a voice that rustled like dead leaves. “I have lost a mother.”

And that is true, thought Marcus with bitterness. You have made Terentia your aunt and your serving maid and have assigned Tullia to be a sister to you. Always, you have depended on others, leaning upon them, your hands outheld like a beggar’s hands, crying for the alms of love and protection. To my grandfather you were always a child. But you shall not succeed in creating a father in me for yourself.

He did not know why he felt something evilly akin to hatred for his father, except that his own loss was so great and he must turn on something to alleviate his suffering. The house on the Carinae was now occupied by Quintus and his wife, Pomponia, and their young son. Marcus said, “Doubtless, my father, you will feel more comforted if you live with Quintus and his family, for Quintus is much like my mother and he was her favorite, and his boy resembles her.”

Tullius raised his beaten eyes and studied Marcus in silence. Then he said, “So be it.” He groped weakly to his feet and moved away into the shadows like an old man.

“Have you no filial feeling?” Terentia cried. “You have driven your father from your house, and he who does that is cursed!”

“I did not drive him away. He will be happier with Quintus. Had he wished to stay he had but to say the word. I have sent his special slave with him, who will comfort him and sleep at his feet. My door is not closed to him. He will always be an honored guest in my house.”

“I do not understand you, Marcus. You are not the man I knew.”

“No one ever is.”

Terentia was clothed in black. She was fat and sallow in it, and her brown hair had lost its lustre and an extra chin sagged below the first one. Her hands, in her lap, showed their big competence and large knuckles. She has the ugliest hands I have ever seen in a woman, thought Marcus. He felt weary to death.

“Do you wish me to divorce you?” asked Terentia, wiping away her tears.

“If you wish.”

“Do you care for nothing?” she exclaimed.

“I try to refrain from caring,” he answered. “That is the only way I can endure.”

“Endure what?” Terentia was outraged. “Are you poor, deprived, homeless, wifeless, childless, without a copper in your purse? Do you sleep under aqueducts among runaway slaves? No! You are rich and famous and have a magnificent house, and are the friend of the powerful, and you own other houses and lands and villas and farms. Your health is good; you want for nothing. There is silver and gold on your table, and lemonwood furniture in your rooms, and ebony and Alexandrian glass and bronze, and your walls are covered with costly murals and your floors with rich rugs. Bankers hasten to honor your drafts. Your offices are filled with notable clients. You are to be Praetor. Yet, you speak of ‘enduring!’ Beware, Marcus, that the gods do not take back their gifts from one so ungrateful!”

But Marcus did not answer. He rose and left her.

The next morning she confronted him resolutely. “No,” she said, “I shall not divorce you. Divorce is a wicked thing. You no longer love me; you love that harlot, Clodia, who perfumes her body and is young and showers gold dust in her hair and reveals the contours of her breast shamelessly. I love you, Marcus. And I shall not deprive Tullia of her father, whom she adores. Despise me and reject me, as you have done for many years. You will find me here to welcome you, when it pleases you to notice my presence.”

He was moved to pity and shame. “I did not think you would divorce me, though we have mentioned this before. Believe me, Terentia, I shall always regard you as my wife, the mother of my daughter, the heart of my household. If I have betrayed you, I offer no excuse, nor do I reproach you who deserve no reproach. If I do not talk with you, it is because I cannot.”

To his surprise she began to smile through her tears. “So my father often told my mother—‘I cannot talk with you.’ All men are the same. They are like children who believe their thoughts are too mighty to be communicated. In reality, they are very simple, and easily understood by women. Now why and how have I affronted you again?”

He made his brow smooth and put his hand briefly on her shoulder. “You have not affronted me. I have a headache this morning. There are so many things—”

“And few of them important,” she said in an arch and soothing voice, and smiled again as if he were ten years old and she his indulgent mother. To keep down his anger he turned aside his head, and listened for the slaves who were bringing his litter.

“Ah, it is well that we women comprehend so utterly,” said Terentia, “and understand that what engrosses men the most is of the least importance.”

Marcus almost ran from the atrium to his litter. He said to himself, when he was sitting on the cushions, I am becoming irascible and hateful.

He thought of his dead mother and wished again that he could weep.

He knew he must flee. He would go to the island for a while and try to remember why he was living.

He would try to remember the meaning of the words of Isaias, of which Noë had told him: “Why do you spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy you?”

There were no answers or meanings in the howling streets of the Urbs, the company of impotent intellectuals, the crowded porticoes of those who questioned, not of the sky, but of mythical enigmas, the tigerfaced men of power, the horrible complex of the city of man with its wastes of streets and godless temples and politicians and evil busyness that had no goal, the white-lipped philosophers who created bodiless paradoxes and knew nothing of the mysteries of a simple tree, the empty-eyed men who talked of reason and had never known reality, the shrieking, wanton-eyed children who had never felt the living earth under their feet, the markets, the shops, the trading and the counting houses, the fora and the buildings of man’s expedient laws, the schools and the sanitaria, the polluted rivers and the stenches of the alleys, the discordant music of those who had never heard the music of a forest, and all the petty and wicked men who prated of the future of man as if man were a beginning and an end in himself!

Only when man left men did he find the Civitas Dei—the City of God—uncrowded, sweet, full of light and emotion and ecstasy and shining law, singing with angelic passions and crying with the utterances of unchangeable truths, brilliant with spaces and inhabited only by beauty and freedom and many silences. The blessed silences where man was not!

The island had another ghost now, and it was that of Helvia. It was strange that Helvia seemed more alive here, and the old grandfather, and Livia, than they had ever seemed in life. Marcus lay on the warm grass and conversed with them and slowly a little peace came to him, and the answer to that which he sought seemed almost within reach of his eye and his ear. But he no longer felt tranquil and for that he thanked the gods.