I have no rights to anything but the product of my own imagination. The first quote owes its genius to Mary Renault, the second, to Lucius Junius Brutus and Livy, the third to a college professor. My thanks are due to all of them.
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It was in the quiet of the night when Brutus awoke. He lay, staring at the ceiling, listening to the stillness for several long moments as the shadowy print of the tree branches outside shifted across the ceiling, set into motion by a light wind. He sat up then, wrapping his arms around his knees, watching his dim reflection in the bronze mirror that hung on the wall. Antony was asleep beside him, exhausted, as they both were, and easily allowing unconsciousness to offer some brief respite from his day. Brutus knew he should do the same. But he sat awake, as the shadows in the room slowly changed from the dead of night to the grey of early morning. Slowly. Inexorably. Second by second. Minute by minute. Dawn coming. But not yet. The hour when life burns low, and the sick die. What writer had said that...? The memory escaped him and he tugged the blanket from the foot of the bed up and around his shoulders.
He wondered if Caesar had ever sat up all the night like this. Not because he had to. Not because there was work that needed doing. But because here, there was no one to see him but himself. Just the moonlight and the shadows. And what good was it putting on a mask for either of them? Politics is a cruel test of a character. It pushes, and pushes, and then kills us with our own love. He thought of his uncle. Dead by his own sword. Of Caesar, and the blood that had spilled across the floor of Pompey's theater. Of the young man who in the dawn of Rome's Republic had held his hand in a living flame, burning it to uselessness, to prove the bravery of a Roman. Self sacrifice is a virtue. A Roman virtue. His mother had raised him to believe that. Why else had he been able to do what he had done?
A family tie- that was nothing. And why? Because he was not a politician. And where there should have been a space for that 'self' to be self-interested in, he had none. If he had that, then he would not be a philosopher. And that's what he'd always been. A philosopher first, a politician only as a means to an end. Father. Brother. Son. What do those relations matter in the face of oaths made and the law kept? Never allow any man to become a king of Rome. The sanctity of this oath we must guard with all our might; we must neglect no measure which has any bearing upon it....
Self contemplation, has no place. All the virtues, are just another stumbling block. Scandalize. From the Greek. To place something in the way of. Virtue and scandal. Stumbling blocks both.
Antony curled up a little closer to where Brutus sat. He was still fast asleep. Dreamless and calm. And Brutus watched him for a moment, the cool morning light illumining his face. He wondered what he would think of all that was going through his head in that moment. He always claimed that he was just a soldier. Nothing more to it. But perhaps he saw what Brutus was only just beginning to. That politics had no place for someone like him. Or else it had no place that he could fit without twisting and reshaping himself. He was helpless. And he was a piece of history now. He couldn't win. Just as Caesar couldn't win. Just as the ancient kings of Rome could never win. Don't dwell too long on the fact that you have more in common with them in this moment than you do your uncle. More in common with the tyrants than the liberators. Kings. Philosopher kings and their tragic endings.
Liberty - that thing you fought for, where does that exist? Your uncle claimed he had it. When he died, it was what he died for. His own liberty. He would not give Caesar power over his own life. And if a man has no power over that, what does he have? But that liberty - was the liberty of a chosen master. You choose the state. You choose a man. You choose your family. You choose an ideal. But freedom, is something you will always lose. Perhaps the only thing you can choose is to what end your actions are turned, even when they themselves are decided by something or someone else.
Somewhere, back before he had understood, he had heard someone say that "Politics show the flash points of character. That is where people are really, cruelly, tested." You either rise or fall. But it's a sacrifice. You have to give up something, you either defend yourself by never giving yourself, and then you are twisted beyond comprehension, and bend to every impulse that leads a step ahead. No good in the end. Or you strive after the good, and give your whole self, every drop of blood, and breath that you owe to God, to the good of the many, the good of the ideal. You give, yet you have nothing in return. No breathing place. No rest. And the contemplation that lead you to where you are - the contemplation that made you worthy of this great place - it fades too, through lack of use. And you watch it slipping away with the night time shadows as your face becomes the mask the people see. Nothing of a man. Tragedy. Τραγοδια. Goat song. Strange archaic scraps of truth from the dark. A sacrifice. And blood spilled in the mountain chase. That's what it all is. And self sacrifice is the most Roman of virtues.
How could he regret it then - something so basic, so expected. He was not to have a happy ending. That was impossible. And that was why he sat up half the night, waiting for dawn. Because in that moment, he had the freedom of contemplation. To look at himself as he looked at the shadows on the ceiling, and say "this is what I am. This is what is meant by 'me'." And pretend, that in the morning, it would matter.