BOOKS: Dossier on Julius Caesar

THE IDES OF MARCH (246 pp.)—Thornton Wilder—Harper ($2.75).

Suppose that, after the death of Caesar, some industrious private investigator assembled all the relevant documents on the murder—intercepted letters from Caesar's better-known enemies, the report (to Cleopatra) of a secret operative of the Egyptian government, a discussion with Caesar's physician, confidential messages from his wife's maid, and, above all, Caesar's private papers. Suppose, further, that these documents were arranged like the evidence in a murder trial to show who was guilty and why. How would the result compare with the accounts given by Shakespeare and Suetonius?

Thornton Wilder's answer is that contemporaries, blinded by details, would have put together a different story from the one that history tells. The Ides of March is "a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic." Taking only a few liberties with the historical events, Author Wilder has imagined the documents he needs and made a police-court dossier that has plausibility (the kind of plausibility that Robert Graves achieved in I, Claudius) without pretense to truth. Wilder calls his novel a "suppositional reconstruction." The result is an amusing book, or, more exactly, a very clever book based on an amusing idea.

Who Was Guilty? An investigator armed with all the inside information that Author Wilder makes available for him should have no difficulty in deciding who instigated the crime. In this account, Brutus is a minor character. Cassius does not even appear. If they did not know about Brutus, readers might well decide that the real villain must have been Clodia Pulcher, a likely suspect if there ever was one, dissolute, clever, and already mixed up in one attempt on Caesar's life.

A beautiful woman, currently busying herself breaking the heart of the poet Catullus, Clodia is in disfavor with old guard Romans (such as Cicero) not only because of her love affair with her brother, but because of her practice of taking parties of respectable Roman matrons to gladiators' taverns in the suburbs. Clodia has numerous love affairs, delights in building them up to some dramatic public humiliation of her lovers. Bold, self-righteous, Clodia can stand everything except the obscene verses about her which are now beginning to be scribbled in public places all over the city.

Caesar at Home. In Author Wilder's account, Caesar is a serious, capable executive who answers his letters promptly and fusses about the time he has to spend reading tiresome documents.

The best and most imaginative of Author Wilder's imagined documents are those written by the chief of Caesar's secret police, dealing with an attempt on Caesar's life after he has reluctantly agreed to attend Clodia's dinner. Wounded by assassins on the way, with two deep cuts in his right side reaching from his throat to his waist, Caesar nevertheless insists on going on, after his wounds have been bound with sea moss.