Book Review by George S: In the foreword to The Ides of March, Thornton Wilder admits to taking liberties with historical chronology. He takes three topics from the last days of the Roman Republic: The assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BC; the offense against religion committed by Clodius Pulcher, who disguised himself as a woman to gain entrance to the ceremonies of the Vestal Virgins (62 BC) ; and the love affair between Pulcher’s sister Clodia and the poet Catullus (during the mid-fifties BC). Wilder compresses these together in a novel without a narrator or a fixed chronological narrative, made up of sequences of letters, reports and other documents – so we get to see events and characters from a variety of viewpoints.
Wilder’s central character is Julius Caesar. The first document in the novel is a letter which shows him expressing irritation with the priests who claim to tell the future by examining the entrails of birds. Caesar is a sceptic, impatient with talk of the gods or destiny. In the forties Wider was much influenced by existentialism; he read Kierkegaard and read ans translated Sartre. His Caesar is the leader as existential hero, accepting the responsibilities of his freedom to choose:
Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.
Caesar refuses ready-made definitions of 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 reminds me of the myriad cries of execration and of delight that have been wrung from men in every time.”
As the novel progresses, we come to understand him as the embodiment of sometimes ruthless rationality, but he is fascinated by domains where irrationality plays its part – especially love, poetry and power.
First (American) edition.
Caesar is a man who has had many love affairs, and in the course of this novel he is puzzled by three women – Cleopatra (whom he recognises as a woman his equal in intelligence) the wayward Clodia Pulcher, and his wife Pompeia, who disappoints him by not living up to her promise, by being imperceptive and easily led.
Clodia in her own way is as unillusioned and independent a thinker as Caesar; she has no truck with conventional morality or proprieties, and has learned her existentialism from Caesar; she tells him:
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. You said that the universe did not know that men were living in it.
Whereas Caesar embraces the challenge of freedom to become a great leader, Clodia’s hunger for life leads her towards the sexually wayward and arbitrary. Wilder’s view of her is presumably based on the devastating depiction in Cicero’s courtroom speech De Caelio, which is a lengthy character assassination of Claudia and her brother. It’s a biassed depiction, and Wilder must have realised that a crusading attorney was likely to give a completely fair assessment of his victim’s character. But Cicero’s Clodia gives Wilder what he needs to set up a contrasting example of existential freedom, in contrast to Caesar. His Clodia is perverse, and helps her brother in his blasphemous plan to trespass on the Vestal Virgins’ ceremonies in praise of the Bona Dea by dressing as a woman out of sheer perversity.
Clodia Pulcher was the ‘Lesbia’ of the remarkable poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, a young man who was redefining Roman poetry. He recorded the affair in and its bitter breaksown in highly original poems; he also wrote and circulated obscene libels against Caesar. Wilder picks up on a sentence in Suetonius’s life of Caesar:
Valerius Catullus, as Caesar himself did not hesitate to say, inflicted a lasting stain on his name by the verses about Mamurra; yet when he apologised, Caesar invited the poet to dinner that very same day, and continued his usual friendly relations with Catullus’s father.
Suetonius offers this as an example of Caesar’s generosity of spirit, but Wilder develops it by giving Caesar a fascination with poetry as a source of power beyond his reach. He is puzzled by Catullus:
But why should Catullus hate me? Can great poets generate indignations out of sentiments acquired in old textbooks? Are great poets stupid in everything except poetry?
Wilder hows Caesar not only forgiving Catullus, even when he knows that the poet has distributed broadsheets attacking him, but taking a profound interest in him. He goes way beyond the historical record by showing Caesar at Catullus’s deathbed, reading Sophocles to comfort him.
Gaius died to a chorus from Oedipus at Coloneus. Caesar placed the coins on his eyes, embraced Cornelius and the wretched physician, and went home, without guards, through the first light of dawn.
Some extracts of Catullus’s poetry are quoted in Latin (Wilder’s mother had been a Latin teacher, and he knew the classics well.) It’s a pity that the Eglish versions provided are in rather wordy free verse, lacking the punch of the original.
There are other vivid characters, including Cleopatra, but Wilder’s central interest is always Caesar, is the man who makes his life by living it, and for whom everything is worth thinking about. His doctor describes him:
“Yes, it is mortal; but we physicians learn to listen to our patients’ bodies as musicians listen to the various lyres which are placed in their hands. His is bald, aging, and covered with the wounds received from many wars; but every portion is informed by mind. Its powers of self-repair are extraordinary. Illness is discouragement. The illness from which Caesar suffers is the one illness which denotes overreaching enthusiasm. It is related to the character of his mind.”
Caesar is contradictory. On the one hand, he takes precautions by keeping spies in all sorts of households, so that he knows what others are saying. On the other, his instinct always is not to limit the freedom of others. He thinks are better said than suppressed. Yet because of his position, and his ability and competence, he dominates others, and so is seen as a tyrant.
Caesar is a tyrant – both as husband and as ruler. It is not that, like other tyrants, he is chary of according liberty to others; it is that, loftily free himself, he has lost all touch with the way freedom operates and is developed in others; always mistaken, he accords too little or he accords too much.
Eventually the resentment of others leads towards the Ides of March.
The book is the product of considerable scholarship about the classical world, and is also up-to-date in its response to the fashionable philosophy of 1948. It makes demands on the reader. Does it qualify as popular fiction? Well, it was selected for the Book of the Month Club (a selection which made Wilder anxious about what his intellectual friends, who despised this middlebrow institution, would say). It became a best-seller. It is a reminder of how excitingly various popular fiction can be.
Cover of the British first edition, with a band showing it was a Book of the Month here too.
