Arethusa

3.1 Withdrawal Symptoms

Dear oh dear,

The third and final installment is as top-heavy as the first, starting with the collection’s second biggest number, in very many epistoliterary ways the converse of its oppo, 1.1, then scaling down, this time in marked diminuendo, to a half dozen close-knit shorter salvoes, all mailed to Caesar’s stockades in Furthest Gaul as autumn cooled into winter. Again, thrills and spills out in the jungle are heavily filtered so we never lose sight of where the real action is. These were still exciting times for a teetering Rome, for tantalized Qfr, for others—encamped at the other end of the world, but the play is with the letter writer unless he says otherwise; and even then.

Totting up another temporizing month’s work or so, the stack-burger opener (finessed here: Henderson 2007 makes a total mess of 3.1’s right mess: reframed for now) works discomposedly, anti-oratorically, to tend scrupulously to brave displaced Qfr’s every point or query raised in the flurry of letters express-pinged from way beyond the frontier, while nevertheless firmly squashing all interest in anything to do with campaigning, pioneering, exploring, the new cold conquests (3.1.11), except as they concerned the “real” addressee, Julius, and the “real” campaign, to ingratiate the Cicerones with him, infiltrating and planting friendly staff around Caesar, and shoring up poetic Q against doubt and depression. In this first outing, we can spot the supposed, agreed, originary oneiric idea of kick-starting the principium petitionis for Quintus thin, trail off, and, in the out-turn, symbolically shed (25): [End Page 489]

ex Britannia Caesar ad me Kal. Sept. dedit litteras quas ego a. d. IV Kalend. Octobr. satis commodas de Britannicis rebus; quibus, ne admirer, quod a te nullas acceperim, scribit se sine te fuisse, quum ad mare accesserit. ad eas ego ei litteras nihil rescripsi, ne gratulandi quidem causa—propter eius luctum.

    te oro etiam atque etiam, mi frater, ut ualeas.

From Britain, Caesar sent me a letter dated 1 Sept. and I got it 27 Sept., plenty agreeable on the Britain front, writing in it, so I won’t get fazed at getting no mail from you, that he was minus you when he hit the coast. To this I’ve written back nothing. Not even congrats. Why?—Because of his bereavement.

    I ask you, and ask again and again, brother mio, do see you fare well.

All that way to the edge and missing from action: Q already dropped from the team. Even while the formal—incandescent—paterfamiliar pledge to admit Brother Caesar into the clan is being delivered (18): “ego uero nullas deutéras phrontídas habere possum in Caesaris rebus. ille mihi secundum te et liberos nostros ita est, ut sit paene par. uideor id iudicio facere, iam enim debeo, sed tamen amore sum incensus,” “In fact, I can have no deuxièmes-pensées in the Caesar dept., for me he comes close second to you and our kids …—nearly joint equal. In my eyes, I’m doing this judiciously (time I did now, a must)—but still I AM ablaze, passionately ablaze.”

BUT it’s curtains and farewell to those heralded chances of glory. An end to wooing Julius, as Julia’s decease (bombshell news fetched in at 17) will clear the way to end détente with Pompey, the clock set to explode all Roman brothers’ plans. Epistolarity slips the freeze-off blocage into the missive, right where it can’t but must be missed. And, the double whammy, to complete the pair (15): “Pompeius a me ualde contendit de reditu in gratiam sed adhuc nihil profecit nec, si ullam partem libertatis tenebo, proficiet. tuas litteras uehementer exspecto,” “Pompey’s really pushing for return to my good books, but to date not got anywhere, and if I hang on to any %age of freedom, he’ll get nowhere. I’m waiting and waiting on a letter from you.”

In the clogging barrage of serried aggiornamenti splurged “above,” Marcus back at base has gone missing from...