In a seafront café, waiting for the boat to Piraeus, I saw a book nestling in a cardboard box of discarded holiday thrillers: The Ides of March (1948) by Thornton Wilder, a 1960s Penguin Modern Classic. Scuffed and grey, it beckoned with the modest allure of a vestal virgin in a troupe of painted harlots. An epistolary novel about Julius Caesar in the last year of his life – how could I never have heard of it? I paid one euro and hurried on to the boat with my prize. Wilder was a gregarious loner who loved nothing so much as a ship’s deck ‘amid the careening smoke stacks and the flying spray’ – it was the perfect place for us to meet.
Rarely has a first page been more startling: a forensic report on the livers and lights of various geese and pigeons in a letter addressed to Julius Caesar from the Master of the College of Augurs – enough to make a reader pause in dismay. But then comes Caesar’s terse rejoinder: ‘Inform the Master of the College that it is not necessary to send me ten to fifteen of these reports a day.’ I burst out laughing on that windy deck – it’s a wickedly funny book as well as painfully sad and beautiful.
Wilder sketched the idea for this novel in 1920 on his first libera- ting voyage to Europe, when he fell in love with Rome as a Latin and Archaeology student at the American Academy. He didn’t write it though until 1946, by which time he was a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and playwright, most famous for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He’d served in Africa and Italy as a lieutenant-colonel in US Air Intelligence, to defeat what he called ‘the tragic nonsense the Germans have raised in the world’. A bookish, scholarly dreamer in his late forties, he’d proved, unexpectedly, to be a good soldier,
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Subscribe now or Sign inIn a seafront café, waiting for the boat to Piraeus, I saw a book nestling in a cardboard box of discarded holiday thrillers: The Ides of March (1948) by Thornton Wilder, a 1960s Penguin Modern Classic. Scuffed and grey, it beckoned with the modest allure of a vestal virgin in a troupe of painted harlots. An epistolary novel about Julius Caesar in the last year of his life – how could I never have heard of it? I paid one euro and hurried on to the boat with my prize. Wilder was a gregarious loner who loved nothing so much as a ship’s deck ‘amid the careening smoke stacks and the flying spray’ – it was the perfect place for us to meet.
Rarely has a first page been more startling: a forensic report on the livers and lights of various geese and pigeons in a letter addressed to Julius Caesar from the Master of the College of Augurs – enough to make a reader pause in dismay. But then comes Caesar’s terse rejoinder: ‘Inform the Master of the College that it is not necessary to send me ten to fifteen of these reports a day.’ I burst out laughing on that windy deck – it’s a wickedly funny book as well as painfully sad and beautiful. Wilder sketched the idea for this novel in 1920 on his first libera- ting voyage to Europe, when he fell in love with Rome as a Latin and Archaeology student at the American Academy. He didn’t write it though until 1946, by which time he was a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and playwright, most famous for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He’d served in Africa and Italy as a lieutenant-colonel in US Air Intelligence, to defeat what he called ‘the tragic nonsense the Germans have raised in the world’. A bookish, scholarly dreamer in his late forties, he’d proved, unexpectedly, to be a good soldier, shaping strategy with the same grasp of both the aerial view and the details on the ground that he deployed in the ‘joinery’ of plot construction. Shattered by overwork in the war and the horror of the atomic bomb, he called The Ides of March his ‘post-war adjustment exercise, my therapy. Part almost febrile high spirits and part uncompleted Speculations on the First Things’. It certainly required a spirited and altogether thrilling audacity to invent Catullus’s love letters or to add new ones from Cicero to Atticus. In this ‘fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic’ he takes bold liberties with chronology and parodies the ‘apparatus of a work of scholarship’, presenting a compilation of documents in the guise of archivist or curator. ‘I not so much asked the reader to “believe” me as to “play this game” with me.’ The book was, as he said, ‘yelling with life’. He could hear his novel as though in a theatre. Each document is like ‘a speech, a cry, at which we are present’. He delighted in shifting between voices, from low life to high; mixing slaves, starchy Roman matrons and secret police officials with his historical cast of household names. ‘Such characters!!’ he exulted, ‘Caesar, Cicero, Catullus and Cleopatra!!’ The whole confection bursts with the wild bravura, the dramatic shifts of tempo and emotional pitch that characterize a musical Fantasia. The Ides of March is a multiple love story. We start with Clodia (for whom the template was the scandalous high-society actress Tallulah Bankhead). This beautiful and witty doyenne of the aristocratic Palatine ‘fast set’ is the Lesbia of Catullus’s famous love poems. She blows sometimes warmish but mostly cold on Catullus, driving him to distraction. She’s obsessed meanwhile with Caesar – they have ‘history’. She lives only to humiliate men and ‘impress the chaos of her soul on all who surround her’. It’s Caesar who planted that chaos in her soul, and her schemes to destroy his faith in the women he loves drive the action. Cleopatra arrives in Rome on a state visit from Egypt – ‘Missy crocodile is being fanned across the straits.’ Caesar looks forward to renewing his love affair with that ‘cat-like bundle’, the ‘light-hearted murderess’. They have blissful nights together but then through Clodia’s machinations, Caesar comes upon her struggling – not hard enough – in the arms of Mark Antony. The shift in Caesar’s letters from joyous pillow talk to a forgiving politeness beautifully expresses his controlled pain. Clodia’s next plot is to smuggle her brother Clodius, disguised as a woman, into the sacred Rites of the Good Goddess, so that he can seduce Caesar’s frivolous young wife Pompeia. Caesar loses both wife and mistress, but poetry is his greatest love and he loves Catullus’s love poetry in spite of the viciously obscene epigrams which Catullus writes against the Dictator; the walls of Rome are covered with them. Catullus the poet wishes him dead with a bitterness driven by his love for Clodia. But Caesar, wearied by the ‘ocean of flattery’ in which he lives and moves, is not offended by Catullus’s insults and barbs. He is drawn by what he calls Catullus’s certainty that ‘love is the only manifestation of the divine and that it is from love, even when it is traduced and insulted, that we can learn the nature of our existence’. When the poet lies on his deathbed cursing Clodia and the love he wasted on her, Caesar comes to his bedside and soothes the poet’s anguish, praising wicked Clodia to the skies. Opinions vary on Catullus: Cleopatra calls him a ‘scurrilous versifier’. Cicero preens his wit on the pet sparrow of Catullus’s famous poem: ‘We are told that it often perched in Clodia’s bosom – a much travelled thoroughfare, only occasionally available to birds.’ Caesar hurls himself into making Rome great again with a flurry of radical edicts: a reformed calendar, corn dole for the poor, land for veterans, sumptuary laws to curb extravagance, new infrastructure and a march on Parthia. The city is divided between the adulation of the common people and the seething discontent of patricians and intellectual elites. They bewail the death rattle of the Republic at dinner parties and mull over the Dictator’s enigmatic personality. Conspiracies are rife. Even families are divided. If all this sounds strangely contemporary it’s because Wilder had an uncommon talent for capturing the universality of human experience. That’s why his plays Our Town and By the Skin of Our Teeth resonated so powerfully with audiences everywhere. Time and place were for Wilder mere contingency. The Ides of March, of all his works, ‘comes nearest to what one would call fun’ he wrote in 1956, ‘fun to force the reader to assume that people have been much the same in all times and ages’. He peopled his Rome with characters he knew and dedicated his novel to two of them. The model for Catullus was his great friend the Roman poet Lauro de Bosis, who ‘lost his life marshalling a resistance against the absolute power of Mussolini; his aircraft pursued by those of the Duce plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea’. The other dedicatee was Edward Sheldon who features in the novel as Lucius Mamilius Turrinus, the recipient of Caesar’s most soul-searching letters. With this dedication Wilder pinpointed two contrasting facets of heroism: the spectacular death plunge of the Roman Icarus and the steady insuperable power of the mind that had allowed a blind, pain-racked and immobilized friend for twenty years to be a ‘dispenser of wisdom, courage and gaiety’. Caesar in the novel is the ‘reflector’ of that powerful energy. ‘The principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind,’ he writes to his friend Lucius. He foresees his doom and in his intimate letters to Lucius reveals a ‘lofty, smiling half-sad unshakenness’ in the face of treachery from those he’s pardoned and befriended. He is by turns scornful, humorous and lyrical as he ponders the questions that haunt us all in the darkest hours of the night: how to bear the unbearable, what meaning can we stamp upon our lives? Though tempted to abolish at one stroke the absurdities of Roman religion, Caesar refrains. It’s not only that a report on chicken livers can be useful if it bends the Senate to his will, but some vestigial ‘shudder of awe at the unknowable’, some sense of the ‘the numinous that is probably hoax and the charlatanism that may be divine’, stays his hand. The irony is that he is himself becoming a cult object; woven inexorably into the tapestry of state religion, with something of the aura of a sacrificial king who must die and be dismembered for the flourishing of his city. ‘I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it,’ he writes to Lucius. Wilder poured much of himself into this multifaceted portrait of a dictator – which might seem strange, but his experience of war had taught him much about soldiers and leadership and he puts the noose firmly round Caesar’s neck, exploring through him that demoralized state in a nation, the inability to govern itself, that produces dictators. It’s a mystery that such an ingenious and original writer, whose work resonates to this day, is not better known outside America. He wrote with passion and humour, alternately weeping and rocking with laughter. A lifelong celibate with a genius for friendship who adored clever witty women and wrote inspirationally strong and intelligent women into his novels, how, I protest, could he be left languishing in a cardboard box? Is it because he failed to drink himself to death or shoot himself or break any hearts except his own? He created in this novel an intricate hall of mirrors that reminds us of how unknowable we are to each other. It’s a vision of man’s essential solitude, but he infuses it at the same time with his unique and con soling air of ‘wisdom, courage and gaiety’.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Noonie Minogue 2026
About the contributor
Noonie Minogue is a tutor of Greek and Latin, designer and cartographer of The Rome Game – a magnum opus to be finished perhaps in the next century – and author of Nero the Singing Emperor.
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