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Note
on Augury for Caesar
An
augury is a foreboding, a reading of the future. This poem is a reading
of Julius Caesar’s future such as he might have received from an
oracle when he was at Rhodes, aged 22, studying oratory. When he
‘accedes to the ... city’, i.e. becomes the first king of Rome,
he’ll find, ‘if Fortune hold’, his last years as successful as all
his earlier ones. Rome will be a monument to his past. He will have
fashioned history; this is the discredited Carlyle theory, that
civilisation results from the work of great men, heroes. The oracle
foretells the expediency of his methods. He will give his daughter in
marriage to his fellow triumvirate, Pompey, then he will in due course
slay the man; have him slain, that is, the head of his rival will be
brought to him on a platter. His soul will acquiesce in (‘gasp in’)
both actions. He will do anything the occasion demands, even caper in a
saffron gown [as a ‘queen’] to please a king [in Bithynia] at
dinner. The mention of Crassus brings in the third triumvirate, his rich
and powerful friend who suppressed the slave revolt led by Spartacus.
Crassus dies in a war against Parthia of his own provoking. After this,
a civil war between Pompey and Caesar is inevitable: Caesar crosses the
Rubicon, a small border stream in northern Italy, to invade Rome.
The
predictions do not tell a complete story, but hint at events in the life
of this ambitious, political young man who desires the glory of putting
the misgoverned Graeco-Roman world into order. He impresses Crassus as a
horseman. But Julius studies Crassus, too. After defeating Spartacus,
Crassus crucified the remnants of the slave army on either side of the
Appian Way leading into Rome. Julius Caesar sees
how the bit is slatted in a bloodier shout
when they nailed the slaves, six thousand, up
from Rome to Capua down the Appian way.
The
(equestrian) ‘bit’ in the ‘bloodier shout’ shifts the metaphor
from horsemanship into an image of the baying mouth of the Roman mob,
who enjoy nothing so much as a display of gratuitous cruelty.
Whilst
a governor in Spain in the year before his three-way alliance with
Crassus and Pompey, Caesar compares himself to Alexander. In this, many
historians have agreed with him. His military genius required inordinate
cruelty: terror as an example. In Germania he has a king flogged to
death and orders mass crucifixions. Then there’s the time and the
place, respectively:
where your gorge sickened at the dead repast:
( = Pompey’s head on a platter)
When godlike your bones fork these hills:
( = when as a god he walks the hills of Rome)
There
are thoughts here about the mixing, in memory, of life’s events, both
common and momentous. One of the latter would be the ‘strict field
theory’, which suggests anything from military tactics to modern
electronics. I must admit that:
the lower, strict field theory
of the bloodstream; the sinews’ topographic
strain; campaigns; and the manship of campaigns…
are
lines that now seem to have more music than sense, but I think the issue
is as follows. Since I’d lived in the 1950s and ’60s through the
largely unacknowledged heritage of French symbolism and Italian
hermeticism, picked up by such modernists as T.S.Eliot and Wallace
Stevens, and spread through the academic schoolrooms by I.A.Richards,
and by books like William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, it
was not a sin to be difficult and obscure and to allude, much askance,
to distant cultures. At times my allusions got fairly dense. Great
density and allusiveness are not methods I’ve practised too much over
a lifetime, but they are certainly evident here. Juxtaposing ‘strict
field theory’ with ‘the bloodstream’ implies an instinctive
application of tactics, not a rational one. Military geniuses are like
musicians.
‘The
sinews’ topographic stain’ likewise suggests the feel of the
battlefield’s shape ‘in one’s gut’. The suggestion is that
genius, military or of any other kind, most surely needs intelligence,
but is what it is by calling upon ‘an instinct for the subject’
which bypasses intelligence completely. Then:
your heartburn may say if
you made these days, these seething days,
or if each day the day was your creator!
This
is the nub. Is history made by great men or are they puppets of
circumstance? I don’t know the answer. Without Hitler and Stalin, the
20th century wouldn’t have been what it was, but perhaps
the way things were going meant that holocausts and gulags would have
happened anyway. The mechanisation was there, the mind-set there.
Pompey’s head on a platter, like the body of an obscure Hebrew
faith-healer on a cross, were events that happened to happen. History
would have worked out roughly as it did without these, with different
sacrifices. Having said which, we only have one history. What it might
have been is useless speculation.
Alan
Marshfield
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