Montaigne, after mentioning among his other tutors “Marc Antoine Muret,” que le France et l’Italie recognoist pour le meilleur orateur du temps, goes on to tell us: “J’ay soustenu les premiers personnages ez tragedies latines de Buchanan, de Guerente et de Muret, qui se representerent en nostre college de Guienne avecques dignité: en cela, Andreas Goveanus, nostre principal, comme en toutes aultres parties de sa charge, feut sans comparaison le plus grand principal de France; et m’en tenoit on maistre ouvrier.”
The Julius Caesar written in 1544 belongs to the year before Montaigne left Bordeaux at the age of thirteen, so he may have taken one of the chief parts in it, Caesar, or M. Brutus, or Calpurnia. This would always give us a kind of personal concern in Muret’s short boyish composition of barely 600 lines, which he wrote at the age of eighteen and afterwards published only among his Juvenilia. But it has an importance of its own. Of course it is at the best an academic experiment, though from Montaigne’s statement that these plays were presented “avecques dignité,” and from the interest the principal took in the matter, we may suppose that the performance would be exemplary in its kind. Of course, too, even as an academic experiment it does not, to modern taste, seem on the level of the more elaborate tragedies which George Buchanan, “ce grand poëte ecossois,” as Montaigne reverently styles his old preceptor, had produced at the comparatively mature age of from thirty-three to thirty-six, ere leaving Bordeaux two years before. It is inferior to the Baptistes and far inferior to the Jephthes in precision of portraiture and pathos of appeal. But in the sixteenth century, partly, no doubt, because the subject was of such secular importance and the treatment so congenial to learned theory, but also, no doubt, because the eloquence was sometimes so genuinely eloquent, and the Latin, despite a few licenses in metre and grammar, so racy of the classic soil, it obtained extraordinary fame and exercised extraordinary influence. For these reasons, as well as the additional one that it is now less widely known than it ought to be, a brief account of it may not be out of place.
The first act is entirely occupied with a soliloquy by Caesar, in which he represents himself as having attained the summit of earthly glory.
Let others at their pleasure count their triumphs, and name themselves from vanquished provinces. It is more to be called Caesar: whoso seeks fresh titles elsewhere, takes something away thereby. Would you have me reckon the regions conquered under my command? Enumerate all there are.[37]
Even Rome has yielded to him, even his great son-in-law admitted his power,
and whom he would not have as an equal, he has borne as a superior.[38]
What more is to be done?
My quest must be heaven, earth is become base to me.... Now long enough have I lived whether for myself or for my country.... The destruction of foes, the gift of laws to the people, the ordering of the year, the restoration of splendour to worship, the settlement of the world,—than these, greater things can be conceived by none, nor pettier be performed by me.... When life has played the part assigned to it, death never comes in haste and sometimes too late.[39]
The chorus sings of the immutability of fortune.
In the second act Brutus, in a long monologue, upbraids himself with his delay.