FullReads

It is during the barney, or as Shakespeare calls it, the “parley” before the battle. Those parleys never seemed to do any good–except to make matters worse, if I might put it like that: it’s the same, under similar circumstances, right up to to-day. Enter on one side Octavius Caesar, Mark Antony, and their pals and army; and, on the other, Brutus and Cassius and the friends and followers of their falling fortunes.

Brutus: Words before blows: is it so, countrymen?

Octavius: Not that we love words better, as you do.

You see, Octavius starts it.

Brutus lays himself open:

Brutus: Good words are better than bad strokes, Octavius.
Antony: In your bad strokes, Brutus, you give good words:
Witness the hole you made in Caesar’s heart,
Crying, “Long live! hail, Caesar!”

This is one for Brutus, though it contains a lie. But Cassius comes to the rescue:

Cassius: Antony,
The posture of your blows are yet unknown,
But, for your words, they rob the Hybla bees
And leave them honeyless.

Antony: Not stingless too.

Brutus: O, yes, and soundless too;
For you have stol’n their buzzing, Antony,
And very wisely threat before you sting.

That was one for Antony, and he gets mad. “Villains!” he yells, and he abuses them about their vile daggers hacking one another in the sides of Caesar (a little matter that ought to be worn threadbare by now), and calls them apes and hounds and bondmen and curs, and O, flatterers (which seems to be worst of all in his opinion–for he isn’t one, you know), and damns ’em generally.

Old Cassius remarks, “Flatterers!”

Then Octavius breaks loose, and draws his Roman chopper and waves it round, and spreads himself out over Caesar’s three-and-thirty wounds–which ought to be given a rest by this time, but only seem to be growing in number–and swears that he won’t put up said chopper till said wounds are avenged,

Or till another Caesar
Have added slaughter to the sword of traitors.

Brutus says quietly that he cannot die by traitors unless he brings ’em with him. (He sent one to Egypt later on.) Octavius says he hopes he wasn’t born to die on Brutus’s sword; and Brutus says, in effect, that even if he was any good he couldn’t die more honourably.

Brutus: O, if thou wert the noblest of thy strain,
Young man, thou couldst not die more honourable.

Cassius: A peevish schoolboy, worthless of such honour,
Join’d with a masker and a reveller!

Octavius calls off his dogs, and tells them to come on to-day if they dare, or if not, when they have stomachs.

Cassius: Why, now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark!
The storm is up, and all is on the hazard.

Yes, I reckon old Cassius (“old” in an affectionate sense) and Brutus came out top dogs from that scrap anyway. And, yes, Antony was good at orating. He was great at orating over dead men–especially dead “friends” (as he called his rivals) and dead enemies. Brutus was “the noblest Roman of them all” when Antony came across him stiff later on. Now when I die—

Octavius, by the way, orated over Antony and his dusky hussy later on in Egypt, and they were the most “famous pair” in the world. I wonder whether the grim humour of it struck Octavius then: but then that young man seemed to have but little brains and less humour.

But now they go to see about settling the matter with ironmongery. You can imagine the fight; the heat and the dust, for it was spring in a climate like ours. The bullocking, sweating, grunting, slaughter, the crack and clash and rattle as of fire-irons in a fender. The bad Latin language; the running away and chasing en masse and by individuals. The mutual pauses, the truces or spells–“smoke-ho’s” we’d call ’em–between masses and individuals. The battered-in, lost, discarded or stolen helmets; the blood-stained, dinted, and loosened armour with bits missing, and the bloody and grotesque bandages. The confusion amongst the soldiers, as it is to-day–the ignorance of one wing as to the fate of the other, of one party as to the fate of the other, of one individual as to the fate of another: