To Julius Caesar; on bias, perspective and dinner parties

Book 2, letter 18

Part 4 of 4

To Julius Caesar; on bias, perspective and dinner parties

*

Summer strikes the anvil of the mountain and all the daylight hours are infernal. I stay indoors and write, or read, or sip iced tea and stare out the window, my brain slowly simmering in its juices.

I've been reading about the day you visited Cicero and had dinner with him at his villa near the beach. Your soldiers were encamped in the fields, orderly and disciplined, while the two of you talked of philosophy and literature. You and Cicero had been writing letters to each other for some time before this. You seem to have been good friends for a few years, before everything changed.  Before you changed.   I have been reading the Evelyn Shuckburgh translations of 1899 CE.  I don't have any of Cicero's letters to you, but I have this one that he wrote to Atticus.

CICERO TO ATTICUS

Tusculum, Aug. 26, B.C.45

It escaped my memory to send you a copy of the letter I sent to Caesar at the time. It was not, as you suspect, that I was ashamed of showing it to you, for fear I should seem too much of a flatterer; nor, I assure you, did I write otherwise than I should to an equal. For I have got a high opinion of those books of his, as I told you when we met. So I wrote without flattery, and yet I think he will read it with great pleasure.

I did a little digging and found that 'those books of his', that Cicero refers to, are the Anticato.  I was fascinated to discover that Cicero had written a panegyric in praise of Cato, that gruff stoic, and that you Caesar had written a counter article, heaping scorn upon the name of the recently dead senator. I remembered that Cato had committed suicide rather that live under your rule, Caesar. He preferred death, to living in a dictatorship. It is strange that when Cicero wrote in praise of a man who hated you completely, you responded in literary kind, not with violence, but with civil discourse. Is this an example of the clemency you are famous for, or was it that even then you thought Cicero might be of use to you if kept alive, dangling from a hook? I shouldn't be too quick to judge, there are a lot more letters to read, and unfortunately both your, and Cicero's articles on Cato are lost to us.

However, a translation of the letter Cicero wrote to Atticus about your dinner visit, is right here in my hands.

CICERO TO ATTICUS

Puteoli, Dec. 21, B.C.45

To think that my formidable guest leaves no regret behind! For indeed it passed off splendidly. However, when he reached Philippus on the evening of the 18th, the house was so full of soldiers that there was hardly a room left for Caesar himself to dine in. Two thousand men if you please! I was much disturbed as to what was going to happen the next day; and Cassius Barba came to the rescue and gave me guards. A camp was pitched in the fields, and the house put under guard. On the 19th he stayed with Philippus till one o'clock and admitted no one: at his accounts, I believe, with Balbus. Then he walked on the shore. After two he took his bath. Then he heard about Mamurra without changing countenance. He was anointed and sat down to dinner. He was undergoing a course of emetics, so he ate and drank at his pleasure without fear. It was a lordly dinner and well-served, and not only that, but

"Well cooked, and seasoned, and, the truth to tell,

With pleasant discourse all went very well." (A quotation from Lucilius.)

Besides his chosen circle were entertained very liberally in three rooms: and freedmen of lower degree and slaves could not complain of stint. The upper sort were entertained in style. In fact, I was somebody. (*) Still he was not the sort of guest to whom one would say: "Be sure to look me up on the way back." Once is enough. There was no serious talk, but plenty of literary. In a word he was pleased and enjoyed himself. He said he would spend one day at Puteoli and another near Baiae.

There you have all about my entertainment, or billeting you might say, objectionable, as I have said, but not uncomfortable. I am staying here a while and then go to Tusculum. As he passed Dolabella's house and nowhere else the whole troop formed up on the right and left of him. So Nicias tells me.

Translators notes: (*) Or, as Tyrrell suggests, "we were quite friendly together,"i.e.Caesar did not "assume the god"; or possibly even "we all felt we were in civilised society."

I love to read such things. I can truly see you as a living, breathing human being. A man who shaves and eats breakfast and scratches his chin and talks with friends and enemies and all the people in your life that fit between those categories. You are alive in my mind, and letters such as these from Cicero grant me a fresh perspective of you, Caesar. It is easy to look upon the life of a tyrant and discount all these little humanising details in order to justify a black and white view of them. It would be easy to just write you off as a bloodthirsty dictator, and certainly there is enough evidence that even that seems a generous description of your brutality, but people can never be summarised with glib adjectives. To do so would amount to a gross oversimplification, a falsehood.

So how do I avoid bias, how do I form a perspective broad enough to encompass the whole truth?

Questions without answers, I suspect.

With admiration and respect,

Morgan.

PS. I found this little gem in “The Memoirs of Augustus Caesar, nephew of Julius”.

[7] When Augustus Caesar was holding the funeral games for his father, a star appeared in the middle of the day, and Augustus declared that it was [the star] of his father. Baebius Macer said that a large star rose up in about the eighth hour of the day, and it was crowned with rays, like ribbons. Some people thought that the star was an omen foretelling the future glory of the young Caesar, but Caesar himself interpreted it as the soul of his father, and he placed a statue of him on the Capitol, with a golden crown on his head and this inscription on the base:"to Caesar the demi-god". Vulcatius the haruspex said in an assembly that it was a comet, which portended the end of the ninth saeculum and the start of the tenth saeculum. But because he had revealed this secret against the will of the gods, he would die immediately; and he collapsed in the midst of the assembly, before he had completed his speech. This is mentioned by Augustus in the second book of his Memoirs about his life.

So Caesar, were you really a God? If not when you were alive, you certainly are now, for your name is known in every nation upon the earth.

'til next time.

With gratitude and respect,

Morgan.