by John Hersey
December 22
To RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS
Confidential.
As always, my dear colleague (which you remain), you pull me up short when I have behaved foolishly. The information on Subrius Flavus is that he has been drawn into a homosexual adventure that may expose him to blackmail. I would beg you not to confront him with this information, because we are trying, by the most delicate interventions, to see that the relationship is broken off without damage either to Flavus or to the Guard.
To TIGELLINUS from RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard
Confidential.
This is better. All right, I will watchfully wait a while. Let me know when the man is in the clear.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Secret.
For obvious reasons, in warning Faenus Rufus about the Tribune Flavus, I have had to lie about the nature of our information. I told Rufus that Flavus and the Guard may be subject to blackmail because he is indiscreetly up a delicate ass. I tell you this in case Rufus should ask you about it.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Secret.
You are like a wary insect with long, sensitive feelers. Your antennae gave you signals this time that were accurate. Not an hour after your last message, Rufus approached me in casual conversation, most offhandedly at first but with a hard push as of a cattle horn before long, about what is suspected of the Tribune Flavus. Without going into any details, I reinforced your lie to him.
65 A.D.
January 7
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Another intercept of Cleonicus: Seneca to Lucan, and reply. You will like this, my stone-jawed friend. A little packet of swingle tow dipped in tar, the kind incendiaries use.
“Seneca to Lucan, greetings:
“It has taken me some days to digest the note you sent in answer to my last. I should by now be quite used to the way you strike at people, but I still have my breath knocked out by your blows. I wonder, with a low heart, what can be happening to our relationship. I love you still. I feel the need in you to think about the hard questions you have posed. I want to help you think about them, and I want to think about them, too. Our ways of thinking are different. I am a philosopher, I tend to organize and systematize; you are a poet, you search for the burning metaphor.
“Still, dear Lucan, I will nurse my bruises and try to respond. You now raise the question—if I may generalize from your metaphor—whether moral license paves the way to tyranny.
“Nero’s lusts are diffuse; his emotions do not flow but surge; in all his erotic dealings there is the poison left over from his desire for his own mother’s flesh and his loathing of her authority.
“I will write here—because I sense that you wish to think always of the effect of these matters upon the way the ruler rules—not about Nero’s bizarre lusts, not about mere easements, but about relationships. There have been only three.
“I wrote a moment ago, ‘the way the ruler rules.’ Perhaps I should rather have written, ‘the way the ruler is ruled.’ You will see why.
“First there was Octavia. Nero’s mother forced Nero’s marriage to this poor stiff girl, so fair at the top of her face, with silky hair and a wide forehead and round dark eyes set far apart, but cursed below with a slot of a mouth and a tiny, weak, receding chin. The reason Agrippina chose her was all too obvious, even to Octavia: She was the daughter of Emperor Claudius and marriage to her would give Nero one more grip on the succession. Nero was fifteen and Octavia was thirteen when they were cemented as if by violence.
“Nero always despised her—regarded her as his mother’s puppet. He treated her like a hated younger sister. First this forlorn, passive girl saw her father, then her brother poisoned so her husband could be Emperor. Then she saw her husband fall in love with a former slave girl, Acte. Then she saw him taken with even deeper passion for that ambitious vixen Poppaea.
“The people of Rome loved Octavia, even if Nero did not. She was the last direct descendant of Julius Caesar, and everyone knew of her helpless dignity. I once reproached Nero for the way he treated her, and he said, ‘Beh, she ought to be content with a wife’s jewelry.’ He wanted all along to be rid of her, but my colleague Burrus would not allow it. ‘Give her back her dowry if you divorce her,’ he said. The trouble with that was: Her dowry was the Empire. Nero brought the matter up again later on, and Burrus, always a soldier—how wonderfully blunt he could be!—said, ‘You asked me about that before. You heard what I said. When I say something once, don’t ask me again.’ No one speaks to Nero that way any more.
“Then three years ago Burrus died. Within a month Nero announced that Octavia was barren, and he divorced her and put her under military guard in the country. Twelve days later, Lucan, he married Poppaea.
“You remember the riots that followed—how the mob climbed to the Capitol, knocked over the new statues of Poppaea and broke out statues of Octavia that had been removed and set them up in the marketplace and at temples, with necklaces of flowers on them. Nero sent out the Guard with whips and drawn swords and broke the crowds. Then he bribed Anicetus, the coarse freedman who was Nero’s tutor before me, to claim that he had slept with Octavia, and Anicetus offered up a heap of gross details he need never have invented. On the basis of those lies, Nero charged Octavia with adultery, treason, vice, and abortion, and banished her to Pandateria. A few weeks later soldiers stabbed her and cut off her head and brought it back to Rome for Poppaea to see. Octavia was just twenty-two when she died, poor child.
“Between Octavia and Poppaea had come Acte. Sweet Acte. She was the best person there has ever been in Nero’s life, not excepting Burrus and your correspondent. Do not forget that Nero was only seventeen when he became the most powerful man on earth. He despised Octavia. He was a handsome and virile animal, and, as sometimes seems to happen, a portion of his temporal power flowed down into his private parts, transforming itself into the restless power that itches. He could have (as lately he has) commanded to his couch scores of noblewomen, whomever he wished, humiliating husbands and becoming an arsonist of jealousies. He even lusted for his mother. So when a young friend of his, Tullius Severus, a son of a freedman in the Imperial household, came to me in secret to say that his friend the Emperor had whispered to him that what he wanted to possess more than anything in his Empire was Acte, I saw that this was an opportunity not to be missed.
“I had noticed her. Who had not? She had been a slave captured in the East, a Pergamine, and was at the time a freedmaid sewing and carrying in the palace, a woman, not a girl, four years older than Nero, exactly what an inexperienced boy needed. She had a glowing olive skin and soft and yielding motions of torso, arms, and hands; she moved in a kind of dance of giving. In some ways she was like Epicharis—perhaps this explains what has puzzled you.
“I arranged for Annaeus Serenus, a dear friend of mine, to provide a cover for Nero with Acte. Serenus was the ostensible giver of gifts (Nero’s), the one who whispered ‘endearments’ in her ear (when to meet Nero), the one who escorted her in the palace (to the edge of Nero’s bed). Nero’s mother quickly saw through the ruse, and her fury turned on me. I felt its full force on my face like the hot carrion-tainted breath of a mother wolf. Blown from such a beautiful face. This episode was what gave me Nero’s open trust for the first time.
“Agrippina’s curses, her raving about having a slave girl for a rival—’rival’ was her word, and how much it said—her foul abuses acted perversely on Nero as an aphrodisiac, driving him more than ever like a satyr to Acte. This, too, Agrippina quickly understood, and she suddenly turned herself inside out, saying that her rages had been feigned, and she abruptly handed over to Nero the whole of her enormous fortune and even offered her own bed as a hiding place for his romps wit
h Acte. This was too fast a shift of wind, and I warned Nero to watch out for foul weather. I need not have warned him, because he was her son and had drunk guile at her nipples.
“What did he do? Two master strokes. First, he stripped his mother’s lover Pallas, who had been manager of the Imperial Treasury, of his money power, and thus deprived Agrippina of what was left of her influence. Second, he inspected the Imperial wardrobe and picked out a jeweled dress straight from the lushest fables of court magnificence, and he gave it to her with flourishes of liberality, as something he had chosen for her with his own hand. She perceived the insult—he was ‘giving’ her a tiny bauble from the everything she had surrendered to him—and she erupted into new screams.
“But Nero felt peaceful with Acte, and there followed three good years for Rome.
“Then Nero fell in love with Poppaea—was trapped by Poppaea’s tricks. Acte, patient creature, retired to a hillside villa at Velitrae and prayed at a temple for Nero’s love to come back. It never did.
“So then there was—and now there still is—Poppaea. Poppaea’s mother was the most beautiful woman in Rome in her time; I used to tremble, actually to tremble, when I looked at her. You will have observed that Poppaea herself is handsome rather than beautiful; she has her superb amber-colored hair and that pinkish, radiant complexion. She has everything but the exquisite softness of her mother; indeed, she has survived, and Nero’s mother is now dead, precisely because she proved even harder at the core than Agrippina. That kind of hardness shows in a woman’s mouth. Poppaea has a soldier’s mouth.
“Poppaea was originally married to a good man, Crispinus, and had a son by him. But then along came Otho, the wildest and handsomest young man in the capital, one of Nero’s best friends, along with Severus. Poppaea dropped Crispinus like a stone and married Otho. Now Otho made the mistake of bragging to Nero about Poppaea’s late-at-night talents. Otho would get up from a banquet saying he had to hurry home to highborn sweets being kept warm for him by highborn thighs of just the right roundness; he described Poppaea’s movements on the couch a bit too vividly and at least once too often.
“Nero invited them both to a banquet and placed Poppaea at his own side, and she began at once her favorite game: tease-cock. Within a few days Nero and Poppaea were meeting alone. She drove him half mad. First she would say she adored his powerful arms and his charioteer’s neck. But the moment he asked for more than words she began to praise Otho. No, she couldn’t stay. She was a married woman. She preferred Otho’s style and taste to Nero’s. At home everything was smart, dashing, refined; here at the palace you saw banality and vulgarity, an Emperor married to a piece of wood and enslaved to a slave girl, low taste, low associations. At other times she mocked Nero with being not a man but only a son, a helpless child, Agrippina’s toy. Why, she asked, had Nero been afraid to marry a real woman—a woman, for example, like herself? Because such a woman would have made him realize that not Nero but Nero’s mother ruled Rome.
“You know the outcome. Otho sent out of town as governor of Lusitania. Acte off to the hills. Octavia divorced. Poppaea the Empress.
“But winning the great prize did not soften Poppaea. After the riots in support of Octavia, she made a hair-tearing scene—result, Octavia’s head on a tray. She kept on taunting Nero about being nothing but his mother’s tool—result, the grotesquely handled matricide.
“Oh, this one rides very high, Lucan. You look for metaphors: She parades through the city drawn by mules shod with gold. Nero is simply one of these precious-footed beasts of burden. She drives him, she moves him with goad and lash: now repeats dark threats of astrologers, now dabbles in Oriental superstitions, now drills a leak in his treasury, now flirts with the Jewish dancer Aliturus, now provokes him to feigned indifference when you and I give him evidence of plots against him. She is shrewd, shrewd. Every day she models herself more closely on the one woman whom Nero cannot shake, even though she is dead. On Agrippina.
“Agrippina is the malign creative force from which Nero cannot free himself. Poppaea is Nero’s new mother. Do you know that she bathes daily in a marble tubful of asses’ milk—immerses herself over and over in the maternal fluid? Her perfect skin is redolent with the sweetness for which Nero is helplessly nostalgic. She knows what she is doing: keeping Agrippina, whom Nero thought he had murdered, alive, alive, alive.
“These have been the only women who mattered. Really only one, as you see, has mattered—and she not one of the three. If you think about these relationships, you will see that Nero’s licentiousness has been peripheral. His lusts are his cries of pain. Not of joy, not of exuberance, but of pain. They are his protests. They are a form of his cruelty, and his cruelty is a perverted form of his desire to be Augustus—to be wise, just, clement, and loved; to be what I always asked him to be, a good man, a good father. Do you see that? His tyranny is not fatherly, but motherly—and modeled, alas, on the sort of mother that Agrippina was. If only an Acte had been his mother—or a woman like my Paulina, or like Mela’s Epicharis.
“You will find the flashing image that sets free the truth; I must laboriously generalize. The gala at the lake, the repeated episodes of loss of control to which many Romans have abandoned themselves, the transmutation of realities of power into fantasies of sensuality—yes, Lucan, these do finally become the essence of tyranny, of both the formation and the acceptance of tyranny. A tyrant is a captive in his own flesh. Nero is not the only tyrant; many men in Rome are in his fix. Forgive me, Lucan, but I see in your Polla something of Nero’s Poppaea. Is that unjust? Why are you so cruel to me?
“And so we are back to the question: Who is to blame for tyranny—the tyrant or the tyrannized? Who is to blame for your outbursts against me—you or I?
“Farewell.”
“Lucan to Seneca, greetings:
“If what you write is true—I am not sure yet whether I accept it, but if it is true, then the matricide was actually an aborted blow for freedom, a blind effort on Nero’s part to purge himself of the materials of tyranny. Tell me about it, Seca. You have told me in the past that you were right in the midst of that crime. Tell me about it. I must know where freedom lies.
“I do not mean to be cruel to you. I hate cant. Sometimes you seem to me to be merely justifying yourself when I have asked you instead, because you are a great philosopher, to teach me—and Rome—how to live better.
“But write to me as soon as you can about the crime.
“Farewell.”
January 18
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
So far I have taken the following steps:
1. All agents are being approached with fresh admonitions and instructions: discretion in searching, following, conducting direct and indirect interrogations, soliciting information, bribing, blackmailing, filching of written materials for copying, etc. You will appreciate that since we are dealing with cells of from three to five persons only, and must penetrate one after another with this new training, the entire process cannot be completed overnight.
2. Great stress is being placed on circumspection in disposals. Every man is being impressed with the fact that a dead body may not tell the whole truth but never tells a lie.
3. Strict warnings have been issued against overenthusiasm in punishments and disciplinary actions short of death. Here, you will be the first to realize, the task of inculcating subtlety is not an easy one. Rough work attracts rough men.
4. In certain current surveillances we will not change agents until the refurbishing of the service is complete; this includes surveillances of the entire list of doubtfuls in the specific case you referred to in your instructions.
5. We are attempting to instill the purest forms of loyalty and patriotism in all our men. You must realize that wherever money and sex are used as instruments of police work, love of Himself and of Rome become subsidiary consid
erations in the minds of the types of persons we are obliged to enlist.
6. I ask more than patience from you; I ask you to practice restraint. Forgive me for this observation: There are times when your interference in our operations is both hasty and crude. It is now clear that in spite of his indiscretion we should not have disposed of the young poet Curtius Marsus, nose-of-all-noses, so hastily. I would give anything for a man with his kind of entree into the circle of writers that presently concerns us. You will say: Nothing is so urgent as the security of the Person. I agree, but I would add: Nothing is so dangerous as a tense secret policeman.
January 19
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Reflections on vigilance, toward the purification of your service:
A secret policeman naturally loves his work. The very fact of secrecy is thrilling. One is privileged to know something, no matter how small or sordid a thing it may be, that almost no one else knows. Do not overvalue patriotism; your preaching to your agents on this score will be taken for what it is—bombast. No, fear for oneself and a love of humiliating others are the shining motives of your cadres. Sex is an unstable form of pressure and should be resorted to only when there is a notorious weakness to be exploited. Perversions cut two ways; the agent is often trapped by his gift for entrapment. Love of discipline, which has a social value, must always be clearly differentiated from love of hurting, which is wanton and dangerous to the lover. Money is your best tool. Men love money more than country, wife, mistress, perversion, reputation, or, in some cases, life itself. We can always find clean money to do dirty work. But a warning: He who handles and disburses such money often develops the delusion that it belongs to him. This statement can be broadened, as follows: Power sometimes fills purses, often empties heads.
I know you will continue to be grateful for my advice and interference when they are needed.