Caesar Read Online Free PDF

blood and mine in him. He would have crushed it like a cockroach. She haunts me. I weep, and weep, and still there are more tears. The last part of her to let go of life was her eyes, so huge and blue. Full of love. Oh, Caesar, how can I bear it? Six little years. I'm fifty-two in a few days, yet all I had of her was six little years. I'd planned that she'd let go of me. I didn't dream it would be the other way around, and so soon. Oh, it would have been too soon if we'd been married for twenty-six years! Oh, Caesar, the pain of it! I wish it had been me, but she made me swear a solemn oath that I'd not follow her.
    I'm doomed to live. But how? How can I live? I remember her! How she looked, how she sounded, how she smelled, how she felt, how she tasted. She rings inside me like a lyre. But this is no good. I can't see to write, and it's my place to tell you everything.
    I know they'll send this on to you in Britannia. I got your middle Cotta uncle's son, Marcus—he's a praetor this year—to call the Senate into session, and I asked the Conscript Fathers to vote my dead girl a State funeral. But that mentula, that cunnus Ahenobarbus wouldn't hear of it. With Cato neighing nays behind him on the curule dais. Women didn't have State funerals; to grant my Julia one would be to desecrate the State. They had to hold me back, I would have killed that verpa Ahenobarbus with my bare hands if I could have laid them on him. They still twitch at the thought of wrapping themselves around his throat. It's said that the House never goes against the will of the senior consul, but the House did. The vote was almost unanimously for a State funeral. She had the best of everything, Caesar. The undertakers did their job with love. Well, she was so beautiful, even drained to the color of chalk. So they tinted her skin and did those great masses of silvery hair in the high style she liked, with the jeweled comb I gave her on her twenty-second birthday. By the time she sat at her ease amid the black and gold cushions on her bier, she looked like a goddess. No need with my girl to shove her in the secret compartment below and put a dummy on display. I had her dressed in her favorite lavender blue, the same color she was wearing the first time I ever set eyes on her and thought she was Diana of the Night. The parade of her ancestors was more imposing than any Roman man's. I had Corinna the mime in the leading chariot, wearing a mask of Julia's face—I had Venus in my temple of Venus Victrix at the top of my theater done with Julia's face. Corinna wore Venus's golden dress too. They were all there, from the first Julian consul to Quintus Marcius Rex and Cinna. Forty ancestral chariots, every horse as black as obsidian.
    I was there, even though I'm not supposed to cross the pomerium into the city. I informed the lictors of the thirty Curiae that for this day I was assuming the special imperium of my grain duties, which did permit me to cross the sacred boundary before I accepted my provinces. I think Ahenobarbus was a frightened man. He didn't put any obstacle in my way. What frightened him? The size of the crowds in the Forum. Caesar, I've never seen anything like it. Not for a funeral, even Sulla's. They came to gape at Sulla. But they came to weep for my Julia. Thousands upon thousands of them. Just ordinary people. Aurelia says it's because Julia grew up in the Subura, among them. They adored her then. And they still do. So many Jews! I didn't know Rome had them in such numbers. Unmistakable, with their long curled hair and their long curled beards. Of course you were good to them when you were consul. You grew up among them too, I know. Though Aurelia insists that they came to mourn Julia for her own sake. I ended in asking Servius Sulpicius Rufus to give the eulogy from the rostra. I didn't know whom you would have preferred, but I wanted a really great speaker. Yet somehow I couldn't, when it came down to it, nerve myself to ask Cicero. Oh,