Sex with Caesar
Name-dropping moment coming up — Robert Harris, the author of such bestsellers as Fatherland and Pompeii, remains, at heart, a political journalist. His latest literary success, Imperium, is, basically, an election campaign report. And Harris has a simple piece of advice for the Obamas of this world who would like to get and wield power: "Read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar," he says. "It's all there."
In Imperium, we first meet Caesar, after he has returned from Spain, where he'd been overseeing military finances in his role as Quaestor. "…lithe and well built, with his lean, intelligent face, his amused brown eyes, and those thin strands of dark hair which he combed so carefully across his sunburnt pate." Now, Robert Harris does not do sex in his books — well not in the formulaic sense of today's popular novels — but there is a short scene in Imperium involving Caesar, and seeing that today is the Ides of March, and seeing what became of Caesar, it is worth mentioning, because it is so revealing.
Cicero and Tiro, his slave and scribe, are in the Alban Hills, guests of the great Pompey, who has invited the leading Roman senators to his estate. Tiro, the somewhat unworldly inventor of shorthand, has converted his notes of the morning's meetings into a fair manuscript record and he's on his way to deliver it to his master when he hears "a woman groan, as if in agony." He peeks into the room from where the sound came and he sees Caesar with Pompey's pregnant wife:
"The lady Mucia did not see me. She had her head down between her forearms, her dress was bunched up around her waist, and she was bent over a table, gripping the edge so tightly her knuckles were white. But Caesar saw me well enough, for he was facing the door, thrusting into her from behind, his right hand cupped around her swollen belly, his left resting casually on his hip, like a dandy standing on a street corner. For exactly how long our eyes met I cannot say, but he stares back at me even now — those fathomless dark eyes of his gazing through the smoke and chaos of the years that were to follow — amused, unabashed, challenging. I fled."
With his allusion to the aphrodisiacal nature of power, Robert Harris does very well here in capturing the menace of Caesar.
