by John Hersey
Set aside fifty-five thousand (LV) sesterces for the expenses of inauguration of the new gardens at the Lake of the Golden House. Funds to be administered by me in person.
September 25
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
You asked for information on EPICHARIS, the mistress of Mela, described by Natalis at the Piso dinner as Lucan’s “second woman”:
This is a woman known in the entire district around Misenum for her powerful and meddlesome energy. While we use the word “meddlesome,” we must make it clear that the woman is much loved by the impoverished artisans and farmers of the area, and by slaves, because this fierce vitality of hers is put exclusively to the service of the poor and of slaves. Mela’s neighbors consider her a great nuisance. We will come back to this matter of her “provocations.”
Epicharis is the bastard daughter of an Eastern slave woman by Apicius Marcellus, Senator. Natalis did not do justice to her face and figure—“ripe persimmon”! She is a woman in whom a peppery strength and a yielding wish to please are not in tension but in balance, and accordingly her body seems always perfectly at ease; they say that one sees feelings stir in her, like smoke lazily drifting in warm, still air; one can read the messages of her responsiveness on her skin. She has huge brown eyes like those of a doe. Natalis was right about the anger. When it flares she seems to become, oddly, even softer than usual. Her forehead and cheeks are wide, and when she is aroused there is a delicate glistening in exceptionally small pores; she has a melting look of one who has suffered and learned both to endure and to act; her mouth looks as soft as the inner petals of a rose.
Though she was brought up on a free status in the Apicius household and enjoys a noblewoman’s prerogatives in Mela’s, she apparently builds her life around her maternal origins—slavery. She presides over Mela’s house, but she regularly performs the most menial and even bestial tasks of the household, laboring in rotation side by side and one by one with Mela’s female slaves. She does not draw back even from recovering night soil from the slaves’ latrines. She seems to want to demonstrate that she came—that in remote ways we have all come—from humble sources, that the strata of society and the whims of fortune are arbitrary, capricious, and perhaps even changeable.
This, then, is the nature of her “provocations.” It seems that a fierce sense of justice burns in her, and the reason Mela’s neighbors despise her is that she takes her symbolic gestures out of the house and onto the streets and into the marketplace. She is often to be seen in public in earnest conversation with slaves, sometimes males, frequently showing the seductive signs of her anger. She will go a mile out of her way to share a market burden with an old female slave. She is attracted to the squabbles of the street booths, and she always takes the part of the slave or the poor against the merchant. She often risks infection and the dangers of excessive gratitude by nursing and bathing sick beggars—in public, in full view of passers-by. On account of these activities she has two reputations in the district—as a pure, kind heart, if you listen to slaves; or, if you listen to masters, as a busybody with a need to share her anger at a world that made her the mistress rather than the wife of a Roman knight.
Mela seems oblivious to this side of Epicharis. He is a mild and decent man, who, unlike his brothers Seneca and Gallio, is totally without ambition. Epicharis firmly manages him but gives him an illusion of his supremacy. He seems an exceptionally happy scholar-farmer.
Now, careful investigations, including a thorough penetration of the Mela slave quarters, do not offer corroboration of Natalis’s suggestion that Lucan and Epicharis have tied a knot behind Mela’s back. Lucan does visit his father’s house from time to time, and he and Epicharis go for long walks in the countryside, but no one thinks that she is anything to him but a sympathetic ear. He, like the slaves and beggars and impoverished free artisans she comforts and “stirs up,” is tortured and confused, these people say, and she gives him courage to inflate his vanity, and that is all. It may be that Natalis’s love of scandal has led him into invention; it may be that Mela’s slaves protect Epicharis, out of loyalty and gratitude; or it may be, of course, that Lucan and Epicharis are more discreet and ingenious than most lovers are. One does wonder whether mild Mela can assuage the enormous sensual energy of this woman. At any rate, Epicharis has a reputation on her home ground for physical integrity.
To IPPOLITE, Imperial Household, from TIGELLINUS
Discretion and secrecy.
Secure the agreement of about twenty women of most noble families and greatest wealth to pretend to be prostitutes in booths on the banks of the Lake of the Golden House on an occasion three weeks from now. Each must be led to think herself a particular choice of Himself. About one third must agree to remain naked behind gauze hangings for a number of hours. Suitably enticing sheer gowns for the others. Teach them soliciting movements and obscene gestures, if they do not already know them. Mix in three or four real whores for piquancy’s sake. Special discretion: I have reason to believe it would give Himself particular pleasure if you could assure me that the knight Annaeus Mela’s mistress Epicharis would be one of these women, naked if possible. While Epicharis may not qualify for this privilege on grounds of social standing, she has other riches that interest Himself. Mela lives at Misenum. I wish you well. Employ only the most trusted go-betweens. Coordinate with Paenus, who may have use for some of these women.
To TIGELLINUS from BALBILLUS, Astrologer
I will try to be straightforward, as you asked me to be. There are some matters, Tigellinus, that cannot be reduced to street language without distorting them. So be it, I will try.
Extreme danger to the highest power in the relationship of this comet to the constellation of the bear. I would advise—as I think you knew I would advise—a large-scale sacrifice of the lives of persons of great influence and consequence.
There is no other path to safety.
To IPPOLITE, Imperial Household, from TIGELLINUS
Another task.
That scoundrel Licinius Crispus has proposed for my occasion by the lake something that would amuse us. A foot race of hunchbacks. Arrange it.
September 27
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Herewith the passage that Lucan read at the Piso dinner. You will see that my informant extracted the meat from the nut in the quotations he offered. We now realize that they amounted to a brilliant act of culling by memory after one hearing. I think you are hard on this young man.
Enclosure: Draft, Pharsalia, Book X, Lines 1–60.
While picking off this passage in Lucan’s library, our alert agent found there an unfinished letter from Lucan to Seneca, and made a copy. Although the letter contains nothing overtly incriminating, its tone is worth noting at this moment, and it contains a reference to the Piso dinner. I send forward to you some excerpts.
“…I miss you, dear Seca. You told me once that I called you that when I was very small. We have not always seen eye to eye. I have been rude to you, a bad nephew. I am driven to rudeness, to quarrels, I hope you know that; then I am driven to regrets. I feel the need these days of your presence. I wish I could talk with you. What are the responsibilities of a writer? My famous nerves are raw, I wake up and stumble around in my room at night. I see monstrosities, dear Seca, Seca, and it is not easy for me to keep myself close to my great work. The idea of art sometimes nauseates me when I think of what is happening in Rome in broad daylight….
“I write in a void. To write is to reach out in agony to other souls. But I am cut off. If I read a few lines at a dinner at Piso’s, I am like a musician hired to play the flute. The guests are drunk. My passion, my anger—they fly past those ears to the walls and fall with shattered wings to the floor. Write to me, Seca. What I remember best about you, now that we are separated, is your great calm. What can a writer do?…”
Septem
ber 28
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Today discussed with Himself the question of Lucan. Himself says Lucan is not dangerous. He believes Lucan’s famous outbursts, his boldness of speech, his truculence are all signs not of manly force but of childishness. This childishness is, in Himself’s view, the secret of Lucan’s impressive talent. “We see genius when we see, as the windows of a supreme intelligence, the wide-open eyes of a child.” Not that Lucan is a genius. He is, rather, according to Himself, a “phenomenon.” Himself has read this new passage on Alexander from the Pharsalia, and, after a laughing comparison of it with the truckling adulation that Lucan put into the first book of the poem, when he was licking up favors—“Ah, Tigellinus, I was the charioteer of the Sun, then, he wanted me to shine forever over Rome, I was his muse!”—after this comparison, he said seriously that he admired this passage. Alexander, he said, was indeed a monster—“because of the narrowness of his ambition.” As to the obvious thrust of the passage toward his own person, as to the increasing republicanism of the poem, he is rather pitying than angry.
But if Lucan’s uncle is involved in these rumblings, whatever they may mean, that, he says, is quite another matter. It is strange, Paenus: The most powerful man on earth still has for this feeble old scribbler the awe of an unprepared pupil toward his stern master. He is, besides, still very angry at Seneca for his withdrawal to Nomentum after the fire, his pretending to be sick, shutting himself up, as if—this is what angers Himself—as if disapproving everything.
I know that you already have Seneca under surveillance. Redouble it. Extra care.
September 29
To TIGELLINUS from IPPOLITE, Imperial Household
Ask me to suborn a hundred proud women to a charade of prostitution, or to the thing itself, two hundred, but do not ask me to approach Mela’s Epicharis on this errand. I have diligently inquired about her, and it is clear that she is far removed from the bored and disenchanted circle here in Rome in which we can confidently fish for beauties for this game. I feel sure that she would never accede. But there is more than that. I do not address this to you on my own behalf. Not only does this woman hold her head very high, but there is this: The son of her patron is Lucan, a poet of genius who has reason to be resentful. You will expose yourself—and Himself—to powerful satires.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
You will be glad to know that for some time we have been making efforts, now promising fruit, to soften—never mind how—Seneca’s freedman Cleonicus, who is the philosopher’s most trusted servant and his messenger in the delivery of his moral epistles to his friend Lucilius Junior in Naples. About four months ago we received information from a slave of Seneca’s that besides the letters Seneca has been sending Lucilius, he has also been writing more personal letters to others, including Lucan, which Cleonicus has carried, concealed in some way not yet clear to us—letters which may well tell us much that we want to know about Seneca’s present attitude toward Himself. I expect to be able to send you some of the harvest of this effort soon. This will have been a remarkable feat of confidence, and we must be prepared to give a suitable reward to the beautiful young man—I will reveal only that much of the how—who will have pulled it off.
The Lucan file is ready.
To GEMINUS, Imperial Household, from TIGELLINUS
For an occasion at the Lake of the Golden House, assemble trumpeters, zither players, flutists, cymbalists, foot-cymbalists, and singers. Sensuous music.
You have two weeks.
To BALBILLUS, Astrologer, from TIGELLINUS
You will have to send forward other and better advice about propitiation of the comet. Idiot, this is not a time when we can afford to slaughter popular men. Do you not remember the riots after the divorce of Octavia? Are you not aware of the mood of the people since the fire? Even you should realize that this has not been a good year. Send alternative means of propitiation. Take note, Balbillus. This is a command.
To IPPOLITE, Imperial Household, from TIGELLINUS
Get her.
September 30
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
I have been having some thoughts, stirred up perhaps by the report on the Piso dinner, on how to deal with writers, with artists in general—this side of extreme measures.
Their principal weakness is their self-importance. They think that the world cares about their opinions. Some even think they change the world! Lucan speaks of a writer’s “responsibilities.” A writer has no responsibilities, for responsibilities are the burden of power. He is, at best, an entertainer, like that trained bear we saw nodding its head and catching apples in its mouth the other evening. At less than best, he is an oaf who lets farts at both ends.
The second weakness of artists is their love of sniffing each other’s farts. Unlike other egoists, creators of works of art really believe that they are superior not only as individuals but also as a class. For this reason they are extremely jealous of each other’s credentials. They believe they have a sort of priesthood. They delight therefore in cutting down others of their kind, believing they are keeping the priesthood pure and strong.
Now, how play on these weaknesses? One way—used by Himself all the time—is to aggravate the first weakness, by praise and the giving of honors, in order that the second weakness may be intensified to the point where they denounce and even inform on each other. Another way is to intrigue with them, in response to the second weakness, for the destruction of undesirables among them. Another way is to undermine their sense of their importance by ridicule, name-calling, and vulgar attacks, which, though these may tend to unite them superficially, will nevertheless creep under their skins, for they are, of all men, the most vain, sensitive, and needful of praise. If you overstate by threefold your criticism of them, and if they half believe what you say, you will have accomplished a beginning of their demoralization. Another method is by sexual entrapment into blackmail. You will say all men are vulnerable in this respect. No, these people are more so, because their active imaginations make both the possibilities and the consequences of action vivid in their minds far beyond reality.
If these means fail, it is always possible, Paenus, as you know better than I, to knock them over the head and drop them in the Tiber.
October 1
To TIGELLINUS from BALBILLUS, Astrologer
I cannot move the stars. The Emperor, with all his power, cannot move the stars. You are an upstart. You would do well to heed the warnings of the augurs and of Balbillus, who loves Rome, knows science, and has no fear of upstarts, who come and go.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Urgent.
Do you know anything that would compromise Balbillus, the astrologer?
Send me the Lucan file.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Urgent.
Balbillus—untouchable. Be careful.
To FAENUS RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS
Confidential.
Would this not be a good time, esteemed colleague, for a discreet but ruthless check on the loyalty of the officers and men in the ranks of the Guard? We are in a delicate period. The great Guard is like a mechanism, let’s say, for the closing of a sluice. One faulty cog on one key gear and the floodgate is breached at the moment of danger. I believe it would give Himself much comfort if you would supervise the investigation yourself.
October 3
To TIGELLINUS from FAENUS RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard
Confidential.
If this is indeed a “delicate period,” it seems to me that a “ruthless” purge—that is what you are suggesting, is it not?—would be a calamitous mistake. Letting some of its blood would shatter the morale of the Guard—make every Guardsman’s lo
yalty rest on his fear of the sword at the neck. Such slaughter would be widely reported throughout the city, which is so surfeited with punishments that, as you know, even the followers of the Eastern superstitions, the Jews and the adherents of Cristus, are now objects of pity rather than, as before, contempt and loathing.
Better, I would suggest, build the loyalty of the Guard than enforce it. It has been a long time since Himself gave the Guard a donative.
To FAENUS RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS
Confidential.
A donative is out of the question. You should know, dear colleague, that the Imperial Treasury is severely strained by the reconstruction of the city. Himself today requested me to see that the check of Praetorian loyalties is made. He would be grateful if you would see to it. In view of your expressed doubts about this measure, Himself requested prompt word from you that you will not be halfhearted in its execution.
To TIGELLINUS from FAENUS RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard
I am a soldier. I am never fainthearted in the carrying out of orders.
Confidential
THE LUCAN FILE
MARCUS ANNAEUS LUCANUS
For recognition: Lucan is of moderate stature, but he gives the impression of being small. He seems shrunken into himself; this is a matter partly of his bearing, which is flaccid and all pulled down, partly of his introverted personality, and partly of the odd shape of his torso, which has a low bulge front and back—it is a jug, a pear, a young onion. His complexion is pink, except during bouts of melancholy, when it is marble pale or sometimes livid. A charming face made up of undistinguished features—large blue eyes resting on puffy cushions; weak chin and mouth; protruding ears. Curly blond hair. Notably expressive hands, lissome gestures. Physical summation: a picture of compactness, intensity, heat, erratic power.
Born November 3, third year Caligula, in Cordoba—celebrates his twenty-fifth birthday next month. Grandfather: Seneca the Elder, the rhetorician. Father: Annaeus Mela. Uncles: L. Annaeus Seneca, the philosopher, and M. Annaeus Novatus Gallio, formerly Proconsul in Achaea.