Note: Set sometime after . Also: togas are good for improving one's posture.


Reflecting back on it, Caesar thought his choice of words to have been an improbable one. How, really, could one possibly look 'lean and hungry' in the immense quantities of fabric that comprised a toga? Wrapped around and around in a double layer of draping wool nearly five times his own girth - particularly including the extra artful folds of the sinus over the stomach - any man looked fat and fat men appeared enormous. Perhaps, then, the eye made accommodation for the numerous folds, mentally subtracting them to gauge a man's weight? It might serve to some extent, but not to identify true gauntness.

Calling again to his mind the image of Cassius as he had seen him the afternoon of the Lupercal, leaning against a brightly coloured column, Caesar remembered something of Cassius' posture. He had held himself in a very uncomfortable manner, almost stiffly, which had been a very odd pose for a man apparently taking his ease with the aid of a convenient piece of architecture. Something in the set of his shoulders, the position of his arms, had suggested a man engaged in a great balancing act . . . which was not so very dissimilar to Cassius as he often appeared in the Senate. Jove knew a toga wasn't the easiest garment to wear and was nothing like a tunic for freedom of movement, but the weight and pile of the wool itself held it in place well enough and surely a grown man had no fear that the entire thing would slip off of him with the first careless motion?

No? Why yes, of course, that was surely it. Cassius, so spectacularly ill-at-ease in a toga that he had nothing at all of grace in action was, even to the eye, an entirely separate entity from his primary article of clothing. 'Hungry' might have had something to do with his face - a glint in the eye, perhaps - but 'lean' was for the almost absurdly distinct man swaddled within the immense bundle of fabric.