2

Oh, what bliss! was Caesar's initial reaction to his sudden removal from the affairs of Asia Province and Cilicia and from the inevitable entourage of legates, officials, plutocrats and local ethnarchs. The only man of any rank he had brought with him on this voyage to Alexandria was one of his most prized primipilus centurions from the old days in Long-haired Gaul, one Publius Rufrius, whom he had elevated to praetorian legate for his services on the field of Pharsalus. And Rufrius, a silent man, would never have dreamed of invading the General's privacy. Men who are doers can also be thinkers, but the thinking is done on the move, in the midst of events, and Caesar, who had a horror of inertia, utilized every moment of every day. When he traveled the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles from one of his provinces to another, he kept at least one secretary with him as he hurtled along in a gig harnessed to four mules, and dictated to the hapless man nonstop. The only times when work was put aside were those spent with a woman, or listening to music; he had a passion for music. Yet now, on this four-day voyage from Tarsus to Alexandria, he had no secretaries in attendance or musicians to engage his mind; Caesar was very tired. Tired enough to realize that just this once he must rest think about other things than whereabouts the next war and the next crisis would come. That even in memory he tended to think in the third person had become a habit of late years, a sign of the immense detachment in his nature, combined with a terrible reluctance to relive the pain. To think in the first person was to conjure up the pain in all its fierceness, bitterness, indelibility. Therefore think of Caesar, not of I. Think of everything with a veil of impersonal narrative drawn over it. If I is not there, nor is the pain.