A Friend of Cæsar: A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. by - (great books of all time .TXT) 📕

little sunken; his dark eyes were warm, penetrating; his mouth and chin mobile and even affable, but not a line suggested weakness. The forehead was high, massive, and was exaggerated by a semi-baldness which was only partially concealed by combing the dark, grey-streaked hair forward. He was reclining; if he had arisen he would have displayed a frame at once to be called soldierly, though spare and hardly powerful. To complete the figure it should be added that on one finger he wore a large ring set with a very beautiful seal of an armed Venus; and over his loose but carefully arranged tunic was thrown a short, red mantle, caught together on the left shoulder—the paludamentum, a garment only worn by Roman military officers of the very highest rank.

The general—for so his dress proclaimed him—was playing with a stylus and a waxen tablet, while the young Greek read. Now and then he would bid the latter pause while he made a few notes. The book was Euripides's "Troades."

"Read those lines again," interrupted the general. The voice was marvellously flexile, powerful, and melodious.

And the freedman repeated:—

"Sow far and wide, plague, famine, and distress;
Make women widows, children fatherless;
Break down the altars of the gods, and tread
On quiet graves, the temples of the dead;
Play to life's end this wicked witless game
And you will win what knaves and fools call Fame!"[122]

The freedman waited for his superior to ask him to continue, but the request did not come. The general seemed lost in a reverie; his expressive dark eyes were wandering off in a kind of quiet melancholy, gazing at the glass water-clock at the end of the room, but evidently not in the least seeing it.

"I have heard enough Euripides to-day," at length he remarked. "I must attend to more important matters. You may leave me."

The Greek rolled up the volume, placed it in the cupboard, and left the room with noiseless step. The general had arisen, and was standing beside the open window that looked out into a quiet little court. It was dark. The lamps of the room threw the court-yard into a sombre relief. Overhead, in the dimming, violet arch of the sky, one or two faint stars were beginning to twinkle.

"Play to life's end this wicked witless game
And you will win what knaves and fools call Fame!"

repeated the general, leaning out from the stone work of the window-casing in order to catch the cool air of the court. "Yes, fame, the fame of a Xerxes; perhaps the fame of a Hannibal—no, I wrong the Carthaginian, for he at least struck for his country. And what is it all worth, after all? Does Agamemnon feel that his glory makes the realm of Hades more tolerable? Does not Homer set forth Achilles as a warrior with renown imperishable? And yet, 'Mock me not,' he makes the shade of Achilles say; 'Better to be the hireling of a stranger and serve a man of mean estate, whose living is but small, than be the monarch over all those dead and gone.'"

The general leaned yet farther out, and looked upward. "These were the stars that twinkled over the Troy of Priam; these were the stars that shone on Carthage when she sent forth her armies and her fleets, and nigh drove the Greeks from Sicily; and these are the stars which will shine when Rome is as Troy and Carthage. And I—I am an atom, a creature of chance, thrown out of the infinite to flash like a shooting star for a moment across a blackened firmament and then in the infinite to expire. Cui bono? Why should I care how I live my life, since in a twinkling it will all be as if it had never been? And if Cato and Domitius and Lentulus Crus have their way with me, what matter? What matter if a stab in the dark, or open violence, or the sham forms of justice end this poor comedy? I and all others play. All comedy is tragedy, and at its merriest is but dolorous stuff. While the curtain stays down[123] we are sorry actors with the whole world for our audience, and the hoots mingle full often with the applause. And when the curtain rises, that which is good, the painstaking effort, the labour, is quickly forgotten; the blunders, the false quantities in our lives, are treasured up to be flung against our names. We play, but we do not know our parts; we are Oedipus, who has committed unwitting sin, and yet must reap his reward; we are Prometheus who is to be chained to the rock forever, for offending the gods; we are Orestes whom the Eumenides pursue, chasing him down for his guilt. And all the time we vainly imagine that we are some victorious hero, some Perseus, especially favoured by the gods to fare scatheless over land and sea, and bear away the Medusa's head, and live renowned and happy forever." The reverie was becoming deeper and deeper; the Roman was beginning no longer to whisper merely to himself, he was half declaiming; then of a sudden, by a quick revolution of mind, he broke short the thread of his monologue. "Phui! Caius, you are ranting as if you were still a youth at Rhodes, and Apollonius Molo were just teaching you rhetoric! Why has no letter come from Curio to-day? I am anxious for him. There may have been a riot. I hadn't expected that those excellent 'Optimates' would begin to murder tribunes quite so soon. The carrier is late!" and the general moved away from the window, and took from a cupboard a package of tablets, which he ran over hastily. "Here are the despatches of yesterday. None to-day. I fear the worst." The brow of the solitary speaker grew darker. "Poor Curio, poor Antonius; if they've dared to murder them, let them tremble. I could forgive a mortal enemy to myself, but not one who had slaughtered a friend."

There were steps in the court below, and voices were raised. In an instant the general's eyes were kindled, his frame on a poise. He sprang to the window, and shouted down the dark court.

"Curio! Do I hear you speaking?"

"Salve! Cæsar. It is I!"

"Venus be praised!" and the proconsul, with almost undignified haste, was running out upon the stairs to meet his friend. "Has the city broken out? Has Antonius been murdered? Is the truce at an end? Are you alone?"

And Curio, who did not quite possess his leader's ability to "do all things at the same time," answered in a breath: "The city so far keeps tolerable order. Antonius is safe. The consuls and Senate still keep the peace; but so poorly that I thought it my duty to come to you and say things that cannot go in a letter."

"And who is this young man with you?"

"My friend," said Curio, turning to his companion, "is Quintus Livius Drusus, of whom I have had occasion to write no little."

The proconsul sprang forward and seized Drusus by both hands, and looked him fairly in the eye.

"Papæ! I see Sextus Drusus once more, the best tribune in his legion, and my dear friend. Your face should be cause for your welcome, if nothing else. Ah! how much we shall have to say! But you are travel-stained and weary. Words will keep while you bathe, and our dinner is prepared; for I myself have not dined, waiting, as I thought, for your despatches."

"Your excellency shows me too much courtesy," said Drusus, bowing in what was, to tell truth, some little embarrassment; "it is not fit that a young man like myself should dine at the same table with an imperator before whom nations have trembled."

And then it was that Drusus caught his first glimpse of that noble and sententious egotism which was a characteristic of the great proconsul.

"To be a friend of Cæsar is to be the peer of kings."

Drusus bowed again, and then, with Curio, followed the attendants who were leading them to comfortably, though not sumptuously, furnished apartments.

Quintus Drusus in years to come sat at the boards of many great men, enjoyed their conversation, entered into their hopes and fears, but he never forgot the first dinner with the proconsul of the Gauls. Cæsar kept a double table. His hospitality was always ready for the people of note of the district where he happened to be staying, and for his own regular army officers. But he dined personally with such high-rank Romans and very noble Provincials as chanced to be with him from day to day. To this last select company Drusus found himself that evening admitted; and in fact he and Curio were the proconsul's only personal guests. The dinner itself was more remarkable for the refinement of the whole service, the exquisite chasteness of the decorations of the dining room, the excellent cooking of the dishes, and the choiceness of the wines than for any lavish display either of a great bill of fare, or of an ostentatious amount of splendour. The company of officers and gentlemen of the Ravenna district dined together in a spacious hall, where Drusus imagined they had a rather more bounteous repast than did the immediate guests of their entertainer. At one end of this large hall was a broad alcove, raised a single step, and here was laid the dinner for the proconsul. Cæsar passed through the large company of his humbler guests, followed by Curio and Drusus,—now speaking a familiar word to a favourite centurion; now congratulating a country visitor on his election to his local Senate; now introducing the new-comers to this or that friend. And so presently Drusus found himself resting on his elbow on the same couch with Cæsar, while Curio occupied the other end. For a time the latter held by far the larger part of the conversation in his hands. There were a myriad tales to tell of politics at the capital, a myriad warnings to give. Cæsar listened to them all; and only rarely interrupted, and then with words so terse and penetrating that Drusus marvelled. The proconsul seemed to know the innermost life history and life motives of everything and everybody. He described a character with an epithet; he fathomed a political problem with an expletive. Only now and then did his words or motions betray any deep personal concern or anxiety, and once only did Drusus see him flush with passion.

"That affair of the magistrate of Coma, to whom you gave the franchise," said Curio, "was extremely unfortunate. You of course heard long ago how Marcellus, the consul, had him beaten with rods and sent home, to show[124]—as he said—to you, Cæsar, the print of his stripes."

The face of the proconsul reddened, then grew black with hardly reined fury.

"Yes, most unfortunate for Marcellus." It was all that Cæsar said, but Drusus would not have exchanged his life then, for that of Marcellus, for a thousand talents of gold.

"And our dear friend, Cato," went on Curio, who was perhaps not unwilling to stir the vials of his superior's wrath, "has just sworn with an oath in public, that as soon as your army is disbanded he will press an impeachment against you; and I've heard it reported that you will be compelled to plead, like Milo when he was tried for the Clodius affair, before judges overawed by armed men."

"I anticipate no such proceeding," said Cæsar, dryly, in an accent of infinite contempt. Then turning to Drusus, he entirely changed his intonation.

"So long," he said, with a shrug of his rather slight shoulders, "we have talked of comitias and senates! Praise to the gods, all life is not passed in the Forum or Curia! And now, my dear Quintus, let us put aside those tedious matters whereof we all three have talked and thought quite enough, and tell me of yourself; for, believe me, our friendship would be one-sided indeed, if all your trouble and exertion went for me, and you received no solicitude in return."

And Drusus, who had at first found his words coming awkwardly enough, presently grew fluent as he conversed with the proconsul. He told of his student days at Athens, of his studies of rhetoric and philosophy, of his journey back to Præneste, and the incidents of the sea voyage, and land travel; of his welcome at Præneste by the old retainers and the familia of the Drusi, and then of his recent political work at Rome.

"These have been the chief events of my life, Cæsar," he concluded, "and since you have condescended to hear, I have ventured to tell; but why need I ask if such a commonplace tale of a young man who has yet his life to live, should interest you?"

Cæsar smiled, and laying down the beaker from which he was sipping very slowly, replied:—

"Mehercle! And do you wish to have all your exploits crowded into a few short years of youth, that mature age will have nothing to surpass?