by John Hersey
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
A scrap, at least, at last. Nothing incriminating, but a very strange account and, to my mind, a significant one.
This comes from Valerius Flavus, with whose talents as an informer you are well acquainted. He was not engaged for surveillance that night—one does not “engage” such a powerful man as he has become—but simply attended as a guest. Today he volunteered this bit. I took the trouble to have a stenographer present at our interview, and we have the following exact transcript of what he said:
“You know, Paenus, I always keep my eyes open. Something about Lucan caught my attention. At the moment when every other man was on the verge of orgasm, or of apoplexy, or of choking to death on laughter, he stood aloof. He was pale. He looked haunted. He looked gray—like a wavering column of thin smoke. I stayed near him without his knowing it. The moment when he betrayed himself was at the race of dwarfs and hunchbacks. The crowd crushed close beside the improvised racetrack, you remember. Lucan had drifted into the midst of the pack, obviously unaware of what was to take place. A certain woman, whom I can name, lightly clad, one of those delicious volunteers, started pressing herself against Lucan, trying to excite him. He pushed her away and cursed her. Then I caught the moment at which he realized what was now to be exhibited. A foot race of monsters. His face, Paenus! As on a scroll was written there: I, too, am a monster. What are they doing to you, fellow monsters? Brothers, brothers, what are they doing to us? You will remember that Tigellinus roared out to the crowd an announcement of the prize for the race, and dropped the flag, and those creatures began to run, spurred by lust, and—you remember this, Paenus—about a hundred paces from the start the fools Isio and Baba darted out from the crowd and together tripped the hunchback who happened then to be quite far in the lead, and one saw on the face of the falling racer an instantaneous flash of disbelief and rage because the soft prize he was already covering in his mind had suddenly been snatched from him. There was all this while a perfect tumult of laughter. Lucan lunged forward. His face was contorted with another sort of disbelief and rage. I think he would have strangled Isio and Baba, one with each hand, but for the fact that the crowd was too tightly compressed. He could not break free. Then, Paenus, I saw tears running down his face. There were tears on many faces—from laughter. His were different. The laughing faces were ruddy. Hectic and crimson. His was white as alabaster. His head was turning slowly from side to side. He was looking at the roaring mouths in the crowd around him. He was weeping like a woman. Anyone else might not have noticed this, Paenus. This might simply have been a young man who was very drunk. Don’t you know, Paenus, how sometimes a man who is very drunk will think he is laughing but be crying instead? But that was not Lucan’s case. He is a deranged person, Paenus. All poets are mad, but he is dangerous. He is capable of believing he is a hunchback. That can lead to no good outcome. I tell you: Beware of Lucan.”
October 18
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Do not let yourself be too elated by the report on Lucan by Valerius. I personally have gone a bit sour on Valerius’s information; though Himself, I must admit, still has confidence in him. First of all, remember his origins. He was born of a shoemaker and grew up in the squalor of a cobbler’s shop. His ugly face, his short, twisted body, leaning to one side over a shriveled right leg, and his gross wit, so very swift, led to his introduction at court in the first place under Caligula as a fool, a butt. But then he began to whisper scandal in the ears of influential persons, and he began to get little rewards, hunks of gristle thrown to a watchdog, and the gobbets grew bigger as the scandal he reported became more shocking—and here we now are with that sorry, contorted shoemaker’s son as one of the richest, most influential, and most destructive men in Rome. He can afford to put on provincial gladiatorial shows! He must love to watch strong men cut each other down. Do you not think it somewhat hard, Paenus, to accept at face value the report by a man with a misshapen body of a straight-bodied man’s reaction to a foot race of men with misshapen bodies? I would make you a good wager that Lucan with his brusque manner has at some point snubbed Valerius.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
You will have to agree that the Valerius report on Lucan has a true ring.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Valerius on Lucan: Believable yes. Actionable, no.
October 27
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Apparently Lucan did send to Seneca the rude letter of which we found the first fragment. Our agent among Lucan’s slaves now brings us from his master’s writing room a copy of Seneca’s reply. This begins to be interesting. I think you will agree that this letter merits being sent in full.
“Seneca to Lucan, greetings:
“Your intemperate letter, dear nephew, hurt me, not because I took your reproaches to heart but because I feel I must have neglected you somehow over the years, must have failed you. How could such an abyss suddenly open between you and me? I have been up all night talking with Paulina about this bitter communication from you.
“You ask how I, of all people, could write the sentence, ‘Writers should never approach too close to power.’
“Education does not end with lessons in rhetoric, Lucan. Give me credit for having learned something in my older years. Yes, this sentence is the fruit of my heavy years—years, I might say, of disillusionment; years, you might say, of clinging to vanity, folly, and some mad hope of advantage.
“I did what I did—I thought I did what I did—for Rome. I tutored Nero when he was a boy, and I advised him when he became a man. I knew from his youngest years his beautiful animal power, and I knew the evil in him. Burrus and I turned his course for a few years to the good side. This seemed to me a valuable thing for a writer to be doing.
“Yes, a writer. I was, am, will be a writer. And so your letter—because you know what a benign influence I exerted for so long, but more importantly because you are a critic I respect, even though you are a very young man—your letter has kept me up all night, trying to find in the company of my dear wife the basis for your scorn, your terrible contempt.
“I am afraid I know. I scooped out the innermost snail meat from my heart before Paulina in the early morning hours, and now I humble myself before you.
“In these hours I recalled three proofs in my writings of the sentence, ‘Writers should never approach too close to power.’ I have written much that I think will live in the eyes of men, but I have written three things that I wish I could erase, and never can.
“First, the groveling in ‘To Polybius,’ in which, begging so abjectly to be allowed to come home from my exile, I tied myself, without realizing it, to a desire for power. To Nero’s mother. Agrippina must have seen that piece of sniveling and decided to make me her creature, one of her tools in her ambition to bring her son to power. She got Claudius to pardon me and appointed me Nero’s tutor as soon as I reached home, and as his tutor I witnessed—and rode, as if in a litter—Agrippina’s inexorable campaign to have her son substituted for Claudius’s natural heir Britannicus. I confess to you, Lucan, in the face of your scorn, that I watched Agrippina’s mastery of Claudius not simply as one watching a spider entrap, lull with venom, and bind a bumblebee, but with a little too much pleasure in the watching, in gazing at the exquisite web, its geometry of avarice pearled with innocent dew, and at the sensuous, darting dance of the web tender on the trembling threads of her treachery. How could I not have known that all the time I was entangled myself?
“Second, the funeral oration on Claudius, after Agrippina murdered him, which I wrote for Nero’s mouth. The Senators knew I had written that gem of hypocrisy, and they openly laughed at it. What the Senators did not know was the depth of the hypocrisy—that I had known beforehand that
Agrippina had hired Locusta to poison the mushrooms for Claudius’s last meal. Soon afterwards I compounded my hypocrisy, in her eyes as in my own, by reading in public my ‘Pumpkinification of Claudius,’ in which, with self-betraying tardiness, I joined the general laughter at the murdered man.
“And third, five years later, my apology for the murder of Agrippina herself. This was the worst. Again, I had known a few hours beforehand that Nero was trying to kill his mother; I had, by my unwillingness or inability to prevent the murder, become very nearly an accomplice. That death may have been a relief for many of us, and especially for me, so long Agrippina’s pawn, but I made the crime of matricide seem like a heroic deed, a blessing for Rome, a deliverance.
“You know about these lapses, Lucan; I suppose everyone knows about them. They are at the center of the humility I have finally grown into. I care nothing about the accusation of adultery with Julia that sent me into exile, or for the gossip that Agrippina seduced me years ago, for Suilius’s gibes at my wealth, for the charges of usury. I am not ashamed of my life. In my actions I have been, by and large, a Stoic man, a strong man; a man for humanity, a man with men and with women. But in my mind, and in yours, I am sure, it is the writing that counts for me and against me.
“I have written much that recommends me, even to a severe critic like you. I believe the first five years of Nero’s reign, when I was hand in hand with noble Burrus in guiding Nero, were the best Rome has had, certainly since the Republic, and I wrote all the great words of those great years. You know my private works. I have been a force for honor. The body of my work is sound. You know that.
“But you know of the slippages, too.
“Those three pieces of writing gnaw at my liver. I am not sure after all this time that I understand power. I do understand that power is dangerous to a writer, and that my long proximity to unlimited power adulterated my writings. In the taste I developed for that proximity lay the one great flaw in my Stoic apparatus.
“One can say that a writer, if he be anything like a sage, is indifferent to wealth and is unchanged by either having it or not having it; but it cannot be said that he is unaffected by power. Power nourishes. Power makes a man more himself. All that is creative and all that is malign in him stands larger and more fully rounded when he has others at his mercy. How much larger than life Nero has become—that feather-stuffed leather ball of a rascal I once tutored, a monster now. Burrus and I had the illusion that under our influence the good in Nero would grow and the evil would shrivel and mortify. What happened, instead, to us, the teachers? I know that I came to harbor murder in my heart. Stoic! Stoic! Could cold baths wash away such secrets? I tried three years ago to retire. Nero refused permission. Now I have finally managed to withdraw altogether from the region of power.
“You will say, Lucan, that I am still very rich. That wealth is power. But a writer does not sleep better on a couch stuffed with down, the finest product of luxury; or worse on a pallet in the slums, a jag of hay for a pillow, under him a crude mattress with its stuffing of rags tumbling out through torn places. What difference to me whether I live in a palace or a hovel? As no general trusts peace enough to be unready for war, so no writer, at least no wise writer, will allow himself, once wealthy, to become unequipped for beggary. Let that man enjoy the present who faces with composure any future.
“There is no hypocrisy in that, Lucan. I face the ultimate poverty, death, with evening calm. It seems that no one, not even you, will believe that.
“Farewell.”
November 1
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Once again I have discussed with Himself the implications of the Piso dinner, and we went over what you and I have discovered since then, and what we have not discovered.
Himself came forward with one of his characteristically perverse ideas, which worries me, and on which I need your soberest judgment.
He proposes a literary evening, for which he wishes to command the presence of, among others, all our principals: Lucan, Bassus, Nonianus, Piso, Quintianus, Natalis, Gallus. He would also pull Seneca and Columella all the way in from Nomentum. Wants Petronius, who, as you know, despises Seneca and Lucan. A certain quarrel. Wants Celsus, Calpurnius, Vagellius, Antistius, Curtius Montanus. In other words, all the brightest lights, from encyclopedists to tragedians.
He does not say—I cannot pry out of him—what he would order done that night, but I can well imagine that it would be something foolhardy and deliberately risky, an attempt of some kind to draw the conspirators, if there are conspirators, out into the open. Himself was mischievous, cuffing my shoulders with awkward but forceful blows like those of a lion cub at play, as he threw this idea out to me; his eyes sparkled. At moments I thought he was simply teasing me—teasing us, Paenus, because he thinks we jump at shadows in the dark.
But I think he is serious about having such an evening. It is like him to make a bull’s run at danger. Tell me what you think. This is urgent.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Urgent.
I am fearful of the literary evening.
It is true that we know nothing for sure. But I am still shaken by the meagerness of the harvest from the gala by the lake. This business may be farther along than we think. It is like Himself to dangle a perfect opportunity before desperate men. If they were to prove almost but not quite ready, then his game might succeed where many trained agents at my disposal have failed. But if they were ready—no, it would be much too dangerous to offer such an opportunity.
We cannot flood a literary banquet, as we can almost any other social occasion, with strong men, bodyguards. Someone like Lucan would be sure to ask about one of our knuckle-boys, “Who is this one? Let’s have him read us a little lyric.”
No, Tigellinus, tell Himself not to play games with assassins.
November 2
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Your reply confirmed my instinct about the literary evening. This morning I put our judgment to Himself in the strongest terms. He thought a few moments, then set a date and gave me a list of people to invite.
Apropos:
Later in the day Himself decided on a whim to visit the Temple of Saturn, saying he wished to meditate there. (What he did there, in fact, was to enter the vaults of the Treasury, where he gazed fixedly at silver ingots for an hour with a rapt expression, as of a priest.) As the cortege moved homeward up the Sacra Via, my litter preceding his as usual, a commoner, a leathery old gaffer with a face wrinkled into radiance by years of laughter, came forward to the flanking Guardsmen saying he was a carver of ivory and begging permission to give the Emperor a gift. The Tribune Veianus Niger, in our escort, taken with the benign face of the old craftsman, reported the petition to me. I interviewed the supplicant and was amused by his antics; and I descended from my litter and walked with him to Himself’s litter, where the gift was given with good cheer and laughter all around.
The gift was an exquisite ivory figurine of a girl. The old man said that this girl had a singular power: she could ward off plots. Upon the carver’s saying this, Himself, thinking perhaps of my talk with him a few hours earlier about our literary friends, gave me a buffoon’s look of heavy significance, and broke out in coarse laughter.
But when we got back to the Golden House he ordered a little shrine made for her in his bedchamber, and he burned a sacrifice to her, just as if she were a statue of a divinity.
November 4
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
One more item—a rather frail one, I fear—from the gala at the lake. A Senator’s wife whom we assigned to Natalis reports, after repeated questioning, that she thought she intercepted significant glances between Natalis and Scaevinus. This is, as I say, flimsy stuff, but it has a measure of weight in that t
he woman assigned to Natalis did not know that Sleepy-Eyes was another suspected person.
I have felt all along that your complacency about Natalis, in your first analysis of the report of the Piso dinner, was not fully justified. I have taken the liberty of setting a light watch on him.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Remove the surveillance from Natalis at once. A man in a position to learn as much as you must have learned about fellow citizens sometimes forgets himself. Knowledge of other men’s weaknesses dulls one’s perception of his own. Look in a mirror, Paenus. Watch your lips closely as you say out loud to yourself, “Obedience is the first duty of a secret policeman.”
November 5
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Natalis flies free as the summer hawk. Perhaps it was this man’s pleasing nose, arched at the top and then suddenly going flat, with wide horselike nostrils, that led me into indiscretion. Laugh as you forgive me.
November 15
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
A draft of a sylvan poem, or part of one, “borrowed” from Lucan’s desk for copying by our agent in his house. For the eyes of Epicharis? One important clue: the seashore. Misenum? A memory of one of the “walks in the countryside” Lucan is reported to take from time to time with Epicharis? An encoded message? At any rate, here it is:
The south wind guesses in the pines above the dunes,
And shadows and flecks of sunlight shift on the path
That nymphs have made running up from the surf
With sea foam on their thighs to share the wine
And salt the lips of the Hill-gods, mindless of time;
You are here, and I am here, and the sun
Of a single day is high, and our time is short.