Nobody Loves a Centurion(19)

It contained bald and uncomplicated notes concerning Caesar’s doings from the time he left Rome: how he took charge of his legion in Italy and marched north into Gaul, picking up his auxilia along the way. At first I took this to be the sort of preliminary notation any writer may make in preparation for the serious work of writing a history or a speech.

I despaired of the task Caesar had set me. Not only were these mere, skeletal notes, but there was a difficulty I had not foreseen: Caesar’s handwriting was astoundingly bad, so that I had to strain my eyes just to make out the letters. To make things worse, his spelling was more than merely atrocious. Among his many eccentricities, he spelled some of the shorter words backwards and transposed letters on many of the longer words.

I thought of the times I had seen Caesar at his ease, usually with a slave reading to him from the histories or the classic poems. Of course, most of us employ a reader from time to time, to spare our eyes, but I now realized that I had rarely seen Caesar with his nose buried in a scroll. It was an incredible revelation: Caius Julius Caesar, Proconsul and darling of the Popular Assemblies, would-be Alexander, was nearly illiterate!

I decided that I would first have to copy Caesar’s notes verbatim. His literary oddities were so distracting that making any sort of sense of them was a daunting task in itself. I spent most of the morning copying the first scroll into my much more polished hand. When I had it rendered into acceptable form, I went over it again. Then a second time, then a third.

After the third reading I put the scroll down, aware that I confronted something new in the world of letters. Having copied the notes into readable form, I realized that I could do nothing to improve them. I was, as Caesar had said, no admirer of the ornate, elaborate, Asiatic style, but Caesar’s prose made mine seem as mannered as a speech by Quintus Hortensius Hortalus. He never used a single unnecessary word and nowhere could I find a word that could be excised without harming the sense of the whole.

The First Citizen has granted Caesar apotheosis, elevating him (and himself by family connection) to godhead. Caesar was no god, but the gods played some extraordinary tricks with him. How a man who could barely read or write could create the most beautiful, flawless Latin prose ever written is a mystery that plagues me to this day. I had seen some of his juvenilia, and those scribblings were as wretched as the works of most beginners. His mature style might have been the creation of a different man entirely.

I was musing upon these matters when a shadow fell across the table. I looked up and there stood the German slave girl, proud and self-possessed as a princess. I was huddled into my woolen cloak, nearly freezing, yet she stood in her scanty tunic and the cold breeze didn’t even raise goosebumps on her bare limbs.

“Ah. Freda, is it not?”

“Freda,” she said, correcting my pronunciation. Actually, this simple name sounds almost the same in German as it is written in Latin letters. The first consonant is given a little more voice as it comes out between the upper teeth and the lower lip, and the second has a bit of buzz to it as it is made with the tip of the tongue between the upper and lower front teeth instead of touching the front of the palate.

“For Caesar from Titus Vinius,” she said. Her voice was low and husky and aroused uncomfortable sensations.

“You mean for the Proconsul from your master?” I said, pretending to be annoyed by her casual, disrespectful tone. Actually, I just wanted to hear her speak again, barbaric accent and all.

“For His Worship from Himself, if it makes you feel better.” She wielded the old-fashioned slave jargon with a sarcasm Hermes would have envied.

“Why does the First Spear send a personal slave to deliver a message? It is customary to use soldiers as runners.” It was a stupid question, but I did not want her to go just yet.

“I do not care, and neither do you,” she said, radiating equal parts contempt and seductive musk.

“I don’t care for your tone, girl.”

“So? You are just another Roman. If you want to punish me, you will have to buy me from Titus Vinius. I doubt that you have the money.”

“I have never heard such insolence!” What a liar I was in those days.

“Decius Caecilius,” said Caesar from behind me, “if you will let Freda complete her errand, she can go to pursue her duties and we can continue with ours.”

Embarrassments always seem to come in batches. She walked past me so close that I could tell she wore no artificial scent. No mare in heat ever smelled better to a stallion. I did not turn around as she handed her message to Caesar, and she did not glance at me as she walked away. She was as beautiful from behind as she was from in front, especially in motion.