Dossier on Julius Caesar

THE IDES OF MARCH (246 pp.)--Thornton Wilder--Harper ($2.75).

Suppose that, after the death of Caesar, some industrious private investigator assembled all the relevant documents on the murder--intercepted letters from Caesar's better-known enemies, the report (to Cleopatra) of a secret operative of the Egyptian government, a discussion with Caesar's physician, confidential messages from his wife's maid, and, above all, Caesar's private papers. Suppose, further, that these documents were arranged like the evidence in a murder trial to show who was guilty and why. How would the result compare with the accounts given by Shakespeare and Suetonius?

Thornton Wilder's answer is that contemporaries, blinded by details, would have put together a different story from the one that history tells. The Ides of March is "a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic." Taking only a few liberties with the historical events, Author Wilder has imagined the documents he needs and made a police-court dossier that has plausibility (the kind of plausibility that Robert Graves achieved in I, Claudius) without pretense to truth. Wilder calls his novel a "suppositional reconstruction." The result is an amusing book, or, more exactly, a very clever book based on an amusing idea.

Who Was Guilty? An investigator armed with all the inside information that Author Wilder makes available for him should have no difficulty in deciding who instigated the crime. In this account, Brutus is a minor character. Cassius does not even appear. If they did not know about Brutus, readers might well decide that the real villain must have been Clodia Pulcher, a likely suspect if there ever was one, dissolute, clever, and already mixed up in one attempt on Caesar's life.

A beautiful woman, currently busying herself breaking the heart of the poet Catullus, Clodia is in disfavor with old guard Romans (such as Cicero) not only because of her love affair with her brother, but because of her practice of taking parties of respectable Roman matrons to gladiators' taverns in the suburbs. Clodia has numerous love affairs, delights in building them up to some dramatic public humiliation of her lovers. Bold, self-righteous, Clodia can stand everything except the obscene verses about her which are now beginning to be scribbled in public places all over the city.

Caesar at Home. In Author Wilder's account, Caesar is a serious, capable executive who answers his letters promptly and fusses about the time he has to spend reading tiresome documents.

The best and most imaginative of Author Wilder's imagined documents are those written by the chief of Caesar's secret police, dealing with an attempt on Caesar's life after he has reluctantly agreed to attend Clodia's dinner. Wounded by assassins on the way, with two deep cuts in his right side reaching from his throat to his waist, Caesar nevertheless insists on going on, after his wounds have been bound with sea moss.

"At one point he was forced to stop by pain or weakness. He leaned against the wall in silence. . . . For a few moments he breathed deeply; then we continued on our way. As we drew near to Clodia's house we could see that the police were having difficulty in their attempt to disperse the crowds. . . . When the people recognized the Dictator a great cry went up and space was cleared for him to pass. He walked slowly, smiling from right to left and touching the shoulders of those beside him. Before Clodia's door he turned, raised his hand, and waited for silence.

" 'Romans,' he said, 'may the Gods bless Rome and all who love her. . . . Your enemies have attempted to take my life.' Here he opened his dress and showed the bindings on his side. There was a horror-struck silence followed by a roar of grief and rage." But Caesar's triumph is not finished. He goes in to the dinner, compliments the pale and shaken Clodia (who is in on the plot, or at least has foreknowledge of it), discourses on poetry, orders each of the guests to recite or to tell stories, and then falls insensible in an attack of epilepsy.

The Unexpected. Five and a half months later, Caesar is dead. Wilder ends his novel with Suetonius' description of the assassination, practically the only nonfictional passage in the entire book.

The Ides of March is Thornton Wilder's fifth novel, his first in twelve years. It is a strange book--but then readers can expect the unexpected from the man who has jumped from The Bridge of San Luis Rey to plays like Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth (Pulitzer Prizewinners all). The main trouble with The Ides of March is that the satire on intelligence accounts, given in the laborious accumulation of imagined documents, interferes with the story, while the story is too interesting to be burdened with them. Had he written it as straight narrative, it might well have been a brief comic masterpiece. Even so, his documents have an authentic ring: Wilder has mastered the kind of English that appears in translations of Latin classics.

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