The Conspiracy

by John Hersey

  By the way, have you found the Farentum dagger?

  January 20

  To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police

  No, we have not found the Farentum dagger. I would remind you that there are at present three hundred forty thousand adult male citizens in the urban populace. Not to mention at least that many again—women and children. Not to mention an even larger number of slaves. A garrison of twelve thousand soldiers. Diplomats, merchants, travelers. No, we have not found it. But we are looking. All seven hundred fifty-three of us are looking.

  February 1

  To TIGELLINUS from TULLIUS SEVERUS, Senator

  You asked me to see what I could do with the Consul Vestinus about his rough tongue in the presence of the Emperor.

  I have talked with Vestinus twice now, both times on easy terms at social occasions. The first time my approach took the form of teasing; his response was surprisingly modest and sober—he had taken office as Consul only two weeks before, and he was wearing this demeanor like suitable clothing of office. The second time was yesterday, when my approach, while casual, was more serious than the first time.

  His reply, I am sorry to report, was worse than curt. With a gesture he called his bodyguard around him; a second gesture pointed out to me a kind of protective dance the bodyguards began around his person, like a buzzing of bees around a disturbed hive, which suggested, beneath an elegant series of motions on their part, a hostile message from their master, something like this (as I decoded it): Watch out, false friend. You are a messenger. I do not like your message.

  And then he lowered his head, as if, as Consul, to dismiss me from an audience. It was an unpleasant performance. The hostility of this dance of the bodyguard, you see, was not really aimed at me.

  February 9

  To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS Discretion.

  The literary evening of which you and I disapproved is to take place next week. In order to provide even a minimum of security in this situation, whose dangers we cannot accurately estimate, we will have to resort to a measure of which I usually do not approve. We will have to enlist some of the guests as bodyguards pro tem. It will be obvious to you that the utmost discretion will be required, as the nature of the suspected danger cannot under any circumstances be revealed.

  Two men come to mind as likely candidates for this delicate responsibility: Petronius, who hates Seneca and Lucan (but Seneca, by the way, has had the audacity to decline to come from Nomentum); and Bassus, who is a good strong fellow and, I gather, on speaking terms with Lucan but not much more. Vagellius is too close to Seneca. Calpurnius has been patronized by Piso. Celsus, of course, is feeble.

  Do what you can. But do it carefully, Paenus. Bear in mind that when it comes to action, most writers are fools.

  February 13

  To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police

  Another intercept of Cleonicus. Notice two phrases which I have underlined near the beginning of this copy; to say nothing of the way the letter ends.

  “Seneca to Lucan, greetings:

  “What a peaceful day I have had! I was up long before the sun and read some letters of Epicurus—one especially to Idomeneus struck me with its clarity and good sense, saying, for example, that one should attempt nothing except at the time when it can be attempted suitably and seasonably. He wrote, ‘Do not doze when you are meditating escape.’ Later I worked outside with my bailiff and a squad of slaves. I love the country chores of winter, the period of waiting and planning for seed time. We turned some compost and did the cold-weather pruning. In the afternoon I wrote a felicitous letter to my dear friend Lucilius. I exercised and bathed—perhaps I can confess to you, dear Lucan, that I had Cleonicus light a fire to take the chill off the water, make it tepid. My old bones cannot stand the frigid baths I took for so many winters, in water warmed only by the sun. I dined on fruit and bran. And now I sit down to chat with you. What pleasures I have!

  “But now—now my heart grows heavy for the first time all day, because I remember that you asked me to write to you about Agrippina, about her death. I will try.

  “Agrippina was the most seductive, the most powerful, the angriest, the most terrifying human being—no, not person, but energy—I have ever known. She had white-hot charcoal burning in her bowels. She used everything she had—beauty, sex, wealth, wits—for one end only, to dominate, dominate. When Nero was four years old, a Chaldean fortune-teller said that her son would rule the world and slaughter his mother. Her wild cry in answer was, ‘I don’t care if he kills me, so long as he becomes Emperor.’ Later, when she had in fact maneuvered and murdered to bring Nero to power, she developed a new desire: to rule the ruler; and she put Burrus, the fist, and me, the mind, in charge of policy, believing we would be her tools, since both of us were indebted to her, Burrus for his appointment as Commander of the Praetorian Guard, and I for my summons home from exile. Then, when she found that Burrus and I had more character than she had thought, she began a long struggle with us. We won—she died violently—not because of our greater strength but because of Nero’s weakness—his subjection to Poppaea, a servitude that made him compound incest with matricide to free himself from subjection to one woman so he could be fully subject to another.

  “With Agrippina, one had to be constantly aware of this sequence: She was the sister of one Emperor, Caligula, wife of his successor, Claudius, and mother of his successor, Nero.

  “They say she had incestuous relations with all three. I never went out of my way to verify this, but it was clear that she threw every moral restraint to the winds when she wanted anything, and I have come to believe that she may have thought of incest as an ornament and instrument of policy.

  “Caligula is said to have committed incest as a matter of habit with all three of his sisters. Drusilla was his favorite; Julia, Agrippina. They say Caligula’s grandmother Antonia caught him when he was seventeen writing infamy with a throbbing stylus in Drusilla’s belly on a table in the library of Antonia’s town house, and later he took Drusilla from her husband, no mean man, an ex-Consul, Longinus, and announced to the world that his sister was his lawful wife. Once at a banquet he had his real wife recline at his right and he rotated his three sister-wives’ in the place of honor on his left. After Drusilla died, he put out Julia and Agrippina as quail for his favorites. Thus Agrippina very early came to think she had an imperial playnook between her thighs.

  “Then when she had sex with Claudius as his Empress she was also committing incest, because she was his firsthand niece, as daughter of his brother Germanicus.

  “As to Agrippina and Nero—worst of all, mother and son—I have seen enough to call myself a witness. Just one example: I saw her approach him, during the period when she was using every wile she knew to crush his affair with Acte, one hot afternoon, when he had been banqueting and was drunk; she was dressed in a sheer tunic through which her whole body could be seen, and they went for a ride in a curtained litter, and when they returned they were obliviously—imperially—what hubris!—careless who saw the stains of ejaculations on his and her clothing.

  “My relationship with Agrippina and Julia had started with the fact that they were daughters of Germanicus. If there ever was a pure man, it was he. After Augustus died, the legions in Germany did not want to accept Tiberius as Emperor and begged Germanicus, their commander, to take the purple on the surge of their arms, but he honorably refused and insisted on their allegiance to Tiberius. He had a glorious, brief career, one of courage and integrity; he was handsome, a hypnotic orator, a scholar of Greek and Roman writings, author of some creditable comedies in the Greek style, a man of extraordinary kindness and modesty. He often fought hand-to-hand in the field. He died at thirty-four at Antioch, and there was suspicion of assassination, because when they gathered his ashes from the pyre they found his whole heart among the
bones; it is well known that a heart steeped in poison will not burn. Germanicus, as I fear you are too young to know, was the most beloved Roman of his time, the hero of my youth, and after he died—I was eighteen—I spent much time with his family. I was in a stage of daydreaming about various careers I might have, and I often wanted to model myself on Germanicus, and I imagined combats which ended with my magnanimously sparing the lives of my beaten enemies. (Burrus, later my partner in influence, was Germanicus in small.) Of all the children, I was drawn closest to Julia, who caught in her dear hands the gentle side of her father. I always thought I could bring out in Nero large traces of his grandfather. But one of Germanicus’s children, Caligula, the Little Boot who grew up the pet of the Legions in the field, became a mad animal; and another, Agrippina, a kind of sorceress. How could those two have come from the loins of that noble man?

  “It was clear to Burrus and to me, from the first days of Nero’s reign, that we were going to have to fight with our very lives for the Germanicus in him and against the Caligula—Agrippina in him. Indeed, I had been fearful of his dark side for a long time before he came to power; I remember that the night after Agrippina appointed me his tutor, I dreamed that I was trying to give a lesson to an insane, dwarfed, adult Caligula. From the moment of Nero’s accession, Agrippina controlled him. The password Nero gave the Guard on the first day of his rule was ‘Best of Mothers.’ When Nero consulted on policy at the Palatine, she stood behind a curtain in a doorway to eavesdrop on every decision. Once some Armenian ambassadors were being received. I saw Agrippina coming forward with the intention clearly written on her face of mounting the dais and presiding as co-ruler with her son, and I quickly motioned to Nero to rise from his seat and step down the hall to greet his mother. This filial act adjourned the reception—and barely cut her off from a shocking claim.

  “I have already told you how I encouraged Nero’s affair with Acte, and how that love did indeed shake the mother’s hold on Nero. When Agrippina felt her influence slipping, she resorted to wild threats that she would switch her support to Britannicus, who would have been the rightful heir to Claudius. This only led to Nero’s murder of Britannicus. Then when Poppaea began taunting Nero with being his mother’s puppet, and Nero’s always unstable lusts were cut from their moorings, tending at times to Acte, at times to Poppaea, and at times to others of both sexes, there came a bad period. It was during the consulship of Vipstanus and Fonteius, I well remember. Quite often after the noon meal, when Nero was apt to be drunk, in the hot weather, Agrippina would present herself in voluptuous clothes and offer herself to Nero. I wasted no time in sending Acte to him to tell him that Agrippina was boasting of her ‘love affair’ with her son, that all Rome was talking about it, and that the troops would not stand for an incestuous ruler.

  “This brought him up short—though not, alas, to his senses. He stripped his mother of her private guard and he began to harass her, hiring men to start lawsuits against her and toughs to keep passing by her various villas in Rome, Tusculum, and Antium at night, keeping her awake by shouting abuse and obscenities.

  “But then it suddenly seemed he had a change of heart. He decided to spend the five-day festival of Minerva by the sea at Baiae, and he invited his mother to sail down from Antium to join him. I was with him when he greeted her like an adoring son; he seated her above himself at the banquet that night; he was a playful boy at first, a thoughtful ruler later. I walked down to the harbor when he saw her off—she was staying halfway across the bay at Bauli. I was vaguely aware that there was some mix-up about vessels. It was a brilliant starlit night, and the sea was calm. Nero was effusive in his farewells—like a lover repeatedly kissed her eyes and breasts. We went back to the villa and to bed.

  “I was roughly awakened far along in the night and was ordered to Nero’s bedroom. There I was joined by Burrus and also by Anicetus—the freedman who tutored Nero before I did. And there were two others there: a sea captain named Herculeius, and a centurion of marines, one Obaritus. Nero was pale, sweating, trembling. Out from him and from the others in gobbets and lumps a story was vomited:

  “Nero, having decided to get rid of his mother, had consulted that devious packet of evils, my predecessor in tutelage, Anicetus, who suggested an insanely complicated device for the murder: a vessel that would be designed to fall apart at sea with Agrippina aboard. Anicetus argued that disasters on the water were so commonplace that this way Nero would escape all suspicion; afterward the Emperor would piously put up shrines and temples in honor of his dear dead mother.

  “Nero liked the plan and ordered it carried out. Agrippina agreed to join him at Baiae and sailed down from Antium to the Bauli house in her own trireme. Before the banquet she was told her ship had been damaged in a collision at the mooring but that a beautiful vessel had been put at her disposal to take her across the bay to join her son. She gave Nero a fright—had she been told of the plot?—by deciding to go to his villa by litter instead. But Nero thought he carried off the banquet well, and she agreed to go home in the vessel.

  “Nero waited up, in a crisis of nerves, to hear of the outcome. Several hours later a freedman of Agrippina’s, Agerinus, was ushered in from the gates of the villa, and he breathlessly said that Agrippina had sent him running to tell Nero that the gods had been good to him and to her, that she had been miraculously spared after an accident out on the water, that Nero was not to worry and should not visit her, because she needed rest. The only details Agerinus could add were that Agrippina had swum some distance toward shore—what a powerful life force she was!—and had then been picked up in a skiff by fishermen who had been wakened by shouting and had put out on the water to see what the trouble was; she had a wound on her shoulder.

  “This message panicked Nero. He could imagine Agrippina going to the Praetorian Guard or to the Senate with a story of his treachery, or even starting a general revolt of slaves. Within an hour Herculeius and Obaritus, who had been aboard the vessel, and Anicetus, who had been waiting on shore, arrived at Nero’s villa and told him what they knew. After the craft had started out, they said, Agrippina had lain down on a couch and had begun talking with great joy about Nero’s sweet behavior toward her that night, with her favorite attendants, Acerronia, reclining at her feet, and Crepereius, standing near the helm.

  “The ceiling over the couch, which had been weighted with lead, suddenly collapsed. Crepereius was instantly killed, but protuberances over the couch saved Agrippina and Acerronia. The mechanisms of further collapse of the vessel failed for some reason. Herculeius quickly ordered the few crewmen who were in on the plot to rush to one side of the craft to capsize it, but those who did not know about the plan scrambled to the other side to right it. At any rate, Agrippina and Acerronia slid or were pushed into the water.

  “The men heard a voice shouting, ‘I am your Emperor’s mother! Save me!’ Those who knew of the plot at once struck at the splashing form with oars, boathooks, and punting poles. When they finally hauled a dead form aboard they saw that the one who had claimed to be Nero’s mother was, after all, her attendant Acerronia, who had evidently realized that the crewmen were out to kill her mistress, and who had proved to be a courageous and loyal woman.

  “Agrippina was nowhere to be seen. When the crewmen reached shore they found a huge babbling crowd of fishermen and country people on the beach, clambering over piers and moored fishing boats, and wading out into the water, excited as simple people will become. They spoke of a miracle. They told the crewmen that the Emperor’s mother had been taken from the water alive by some of their friends. Her rescuers had carried her to her own villa at Lucrinus.

  “Nero was by this time frantic with fear. He called Agrippina’s messenger Agerinus back into his room and told him to repeat his story before witnesses, and while he was doing it Nero dropped a knife in front of Agerinus—it was so crudely done; everyone could see it—and began shouting, ‘Look! Look! The assassin
! My mother sent him to kill me.’

  “Then he called for Burrus and for me. Nero was almost incoherent, and the others had quite lost their nerve, too, being afraid that this panicky, guilty Nero would have them all killed for their mishandling of the murder. How awful to see an Emperor of Rome reduced to such a cringing figure! I need hardly say that Burrus and I were appalled—not only by the stink of the crime but by the idiotic plan and by the botch that had been made of it.

  “I believe the bungling to have been inherent in Nero’s divided soul. He was driven by the struggle within himself to choose crude help of the kind a fool like Anicetus would give him. Perhaps you are right that he had some urge, mute and dim, to rid himself of what you called ‘the materials of tyranny’—but in the moment of crisis he did not turn to Burrus and to me, or to the Germanicus in himself; he turned for counsel to the brute Anicetus, to the very trait in himself that he wanted to murder.

  “Burrus and I stood silent a long time. What could we say? We were now witnesses. Any word would be a word of complicity in one horror or another. It came to me with terrible force that either Nero or his mother must now die violently.

  “I spoke a few short words to Burrus. ‘Can the Guard take over?’

  “Burrus, cold as stone, said, ‘I will not allow it. The Praetorians remember Germanicus, and they would never lay a finger on a child of his. Anicetus started this. Let him finish it.’

  “Anicetus, afraid for his life, said he was willing, and Nero then displayed, even in his panic, a touch of his mother’s bitter irony. ‘This night makes me Emperor at last,’ he said, ‘and look, Seneca and Burrus, my wise men, look who gives me the gift—a former slave.’

  “And so Anicetus, Herculeius, and Obaritus went with some marines to Agrippina’s villa.

  “As they broke into Agrippina’s room the lone slave girl who was with her ran out, and they heard Agrippina say, ‘Do you, too, leave me now?’