The Conspiracy

by John Hersey

  “The three men closed around Agrippina’s couch. She said with great calm, ‘If you have come to ask how I am, tell my son that I am better. If you have come to commit a crime, you are the guilty ones. My son would not dare to harm me.’

  “Herculeius hit her on the head with a club, but it was a glancing blow. Then, seeing Obaritus pull out a sword, she proved herself to be the tyrant’s mother through and through. She pulled up her tunic and uncovered her naked privacy and spread her thighs and shouted, ‘Stick it in there, you whore chaser. That’s where Nero came from.’

  “All three stabbed her near the heart.

  “And so it was done. Have you ever noticed, Lucan, how a son, after a mother dies whom he has loved, will subtly change and become more and more like what she had been? This happened to Nero. The murder took place more than five years ago, and in all the time since then I have seen the Germanicus slipping away and the Agrippina taking hold in him. Every single day he has grown more brutal, more witty, more avaricious, more seductive, more suspicious, more lascivious, more conceited, more power-mad—yes, Lucan, more and more a tyrant, yet more and more at one with the temper of Rome.

  “I spent years trying to get away from Agrippina alive—only to find that she lived on in her son. I have finally broken away to Nomentum; I have managed to remove myself physically from her-in-him. But how can Rome remove itself from her-in-him, from him-in-itself, from itself-in-itself? All of Rome cannot move to quiet Nomentum. This is Rome’s sad fix just now: Agrippina the sorceress lives. Nero lives.

  “But do you follow what I am saying? Rome cannot deny the spirit of Caligula–Agrippina–Nero coiled in its heart of hearts. It would still be there even if Nero did not live. Germanicus, Augustus, Burrus, Cato—they are in Rome’s heart, too. Which brings us back, Lucan, to your question: Whose ‘fault’ is tyranny? What can a writer do?

  “For myself: I failed in my effort to turn a single Roman from the Agrippina side to the Germanicus side.

  “I shudder. Another time, Lucan, I will write of happier matters. My lovely day is in ruins around me. See my shaky handwriting. Here in my dark room I tremble—for all of us, for dear Rome.

  “Farewell.”

  February 15

  To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS

  I hasten to assure you that the literary evening went off without any of what we had feared. Not, however, without tension.

  Thanks mostly to the wit of Petronius, there was much laughter early in the evening. The dinner was held in a new dining hall of the palace, one that has a fretted ceiling of ivory, whose little panels rotated, at one moment at the height of the fun, and the company was showered with flowers. Our scribblers were enchanted by this device.

  After the banquet, Himself proposed some “controversies,” like those which teachers of rhetoric throw at their students. It was a delicious situation, with Himself—in his best mood, imposing as his own colossal statue out on the ramp of the Golden House—taking the part of the rhetorician and treating these vain hacks like schoolboys. And everyone got into such good humor that for over an hour I could not help thinking, Paenus, that you and I had been having bad, or possibly mad, dreams.

  But then, in the midst of the gaiety, Himself (who, by the way, had not failed to install on a pedestal beside his couch the figurine of the girl who wards off plots; had not failed, either, to pour her a libation, casually lying to the writers, saying that she was a private goddess of his who tended his venereal energies) suddenly proposed a controversy on the topic of an assassination of an Emperor.

  I tell you, Paenus, I felt as if he had hit me a punch with his big fist in the pit of my stomach. But I was bound to remain silent and passive; or at least to limit myself to laughter, with which I covered my anxiety. Himself had at first not wanted me even to be present, but I had insisted, for reasons you can understand, and he finally agreed, on condition that I would not once open my mouth to speak, saying: Yes, it would be good to have one brutish ignoramus among the wits, just as a single gross garnet should always be set in a collar of rubies to highlight the value of the true stones. You may be sure that if my mouth was sealed I kept my eyes open.

  The self-control on the part of our doubtfuls was extraordinary. It reminded me of your thin gleanings from the occasion at the Lake of the Golden House. Lucan, who was at his most electric, delivered a brilliant declamation on the topic, and the only possible sign of disturbance on his part was a flaming blush that stayed on his face the whole time he talked, though he had his ashen look before and after. But his words were gracious and grave, and I was actually afraid that Himself would soften and impulsively forgive Lucan everything and ask him back into the Circle of Friends.

  What saved—or reversed—the situation was the obvious jealousy of Petronius, who insisted on following Lucan and did something at once hilarious, ugly, and frightening. With that viciously penetrating precision of his, he parodied Lucan’s declamation in such a way as to render Lucan’s impeccable arguments ironic and therefore, all of a sudden, nakedly subversive. Only Petronius could have gotten away with such an outrage. But it was a dangerous thing to have done. It released an energy in the doubtfuls.

  There was in fact a moment during Petronius’s declamation when I became greatly alarmed, because it suddenly seemed to me that the dangerous game about which we have speculated was about to be played out.

  I saw Piso touch Lucan’s arm. It seemed to me to be a signal. Lucan became extremely agitated. Others of the doubtfuls glanced at each other.

  We were abysmally ill-prepared to defend Himself. Petronius, whom you had, let us say, half alerted, was speaking. Bassus, who was with us, was nodding from overeating, overdrinking, and boredom. I half rose in my seat.

  A most unexpected cascade of laughter from Himself broke the tension—seemed to disconcert the doubtfuls, especially Lucan, the person who seemed most prone to act; I took the cue and laughed with Himself.

  Himself kept glancing at me as if to ridicule the fears I had expressed to him beforehand. I saw that the moment of peril had passed. I had a queer feeling of emptiness, of having seen a ghost. Had I been imagining things? I know no more than I did before the evening. At least we got by it.

  February 18

  To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police

  You will be interested, I wager, in someone else’s view of the literary evening. Intercepted letter:

  “Lucan to Seneca, greetings:

  “Those people have gone mad. Let me tell you about the banquet you missed. Do you remember, Seca, that in one letter I said they are going to drive us to what we shrink from even imagining? I believe this. They have begun it. In your answer to me then you philosophized blandly about what a writer should be and do—or mostly, rather, about what he should not do. They are making us think hard about what a man should do.

  “After the banquet was over, Piso came home with me, and we sat up till dawn, alternately talking and weeping. As you know, I have in the past thought Piso a pleasant but trivial man. But I felt very close to him during this night in which we shared our grief over what is happening to Rome. My esteem for him deepened. During the dinner I think he saved my life by one timely gesture—but I will come to that.

  “What made the occasion so heartbreaking was that up until a certain point we were all immersed in the old innocent gaiety. Nero was quick and mirthful, and unaffectedly courteous. He behaved toward me as if he regretted the proscription and was on the point of lifting it. Even Petronius, who is high in favor with Nero just now, was unusually restrained at the beginning of the evening; he could not help throwing a few darts, but they were more playful than hurtful. And, as if he had been cautioned beforehand, he kept the full distance of a plow and a team of oxen from me.

  “Will you stand back, dear Seca, and allow me to say that I felt left out, that I realiz
ed I had missed the radiant luxury of the palace life, that my old affection for Nero stirred like a sleeping bear in the wintry cave of my heart?

  “All went well until the banquet had been cleared except for the wineglasses, which were filled again to the brim each time we took a sip. Then Nero proposed that we be a school of rhetoric, he the teacher, setting controversies to be declaimed on. This began in fun. He set us first a controversy I vaguely remembered as one of your father’s, my grandfather’s. Your absence had been noted, I should tell you, at least ten times during the evening, with regrets tinged with pique. ‘Seneca would have liked that…Seneca would have said…Lucan, what does your uncle think about so-and-so?…’ Perhaps I should have pricked up my ears when we got as our first controversy one originally set by Grandfather:

  “A husband and wife have taken an oath not to survive each other. The husband goes on a voyage and sends a messenger to his wife with news that he has been accidentally killed. She jumps off a cliff into the sea, but fishermen rescue her, and she is restored to health. Her father orders her to leave her husband. She refuses. She is disinherited.

  “During the declamations, amid the wild laughter, I suddenly felt queasy. My revived tenderness toward Nero was replaced by a surge of anger and fear. There leaped into my mind a haunting image: the dwarfs, hunchbacks, and cripples in the foot race by the lake at that gala in the gardens of the Golden House. It suddenly seemed that all this game of wits that we were engaged in was another such contest, perhaps devised for Nero’s entertainment by that oaf Tigellinus, who was present but sat uncharacteristically silent all evening—that we were the deformed, we the helpless ones struggling for some undefined prize of favor or influence. Suddenly all the intellectual sparkle and the display of skills were disgusting, depraved, groveling. Later, as I was talking with Piso at home, it came out of me that this plunge of mine into outrage came while one of the declaimers was touching on the woman’s rescue by fishermen, and I must have remembered at the edge of my mind your description of Nero’s mother being rescued in vain one criminal night. How could Nero sit there gargling wine and laughter?

  “A second controversy:

  “Under the law, a man must support his parents or be imprisoned. A man kills one of his brothers for being adulterous and another for being tyrannical, though in both cases the father had begged for mercy. The son takes a voyage and is kidnapped by pirates, who write to the father for ransom. The father replies that he will pay double if the pirates will cut off his son’s hands. The pirates’ outlaw honor is offended, and they release the son. The son refuses to support his father.

  “The declamations begin. All who try them except Petronius, who is intoxicated with his present pre-eminence, skirt gingerly around the matter of the brother killed for tyranny. There is on this account a certain awkwardness yet still much laughter. Perhaps others besides myself have shuddered at the thought that the man who set this topic has on his hands the blood of his stepfather, his brother, his wife, his mother….

  “But suddenly Nero stops the declamations. ‘This is boring,’ he says. He is pale and seems pleasurably agitated. ‘I have thought of a better controversy. Try this one, my dear friends.’

  “And then the Emperor of Rome sets this for us to weave our wits around:

  “An Emperor of Rome swears the Senate to loyalty to him and faithfulness to its laws. One of its laws decrees that murder shall be punished by death, another that desecration of an altar is likewise a capital crime. Lightning strikes the altar of the Temple of Jupiter. The augurs advise the sacrifice of a prominent person. The Emperor, who has tired of his wife, provides her for the propitiation. A Senator stabs the Emperor in the name of his oath. The Senate refuses to bring the Senator to trial.

  “Only one man belched laughter along with Himself when this topic had been proposed—Tigellinus. And it was then that I remembered that sentence in my earlier letter to you, Seca. They are driving us into a corner. They need our guilt. They are mad. I wonder why they have chosen us to be the instruments and victims of their awful need. Why we who want only to be free to create works of art for the glory of Rome? Is it because we are the only ones who can recognize horror when we see it? Is sensitivity the one unbearable threat to the powerful?

  “My reaction to the proposal of this third controversy was, above all, one of great sadness. I saw that for me there would be no road, no road at all, no road ever, back to friendship with Nero and back to peace of mind. I looked at Nero and suddenly saw, beyond the wine-marinated eyes and cheeks tight with pleasure and malice, another face—the one you described in your last letter to me, Seca: the face of the Nero who had learned that his mother had been rescued by fishermen. The face of the tyrannicidal tyrant—cringing in guilt and fear. I was frightfully sorry for him, and I hated him.

  “And so when it came time for my declamation I was careful to treat the topic with great respect, and I cast my response almost in the form of a plea. I felt great agitation and emotion. The good side of me, which you, dear Seca, have tried to nourish, came forward. And I thought I made Nero listen to me.

  “But when I was finished Petronius, obviously impressed by the pure feeling I had put into my declamation, and out of a motive of wishing to push me into the shadows—seeing a rather easy job of it because I had been so serious—asked the ‘teacher’ to be heard. He proceeded, with that devilish cleverness of his, to turn everything I had said right inside out. Nero and Tigellinus topped the laughter of all the others. At one moment I felt that I was going to lunge at someone. I did not clearly know at whom—Petronius, Nero, or Tigellinus, one of the three. At Caligula, Agrippina, or Nero, one of the three. At part of myself. At part of Rome. I felt a fool’s action pouring into my limbs. It was just then that Piso, beside me, understanding more than I had thought he could understand, gently touched my arm. His tender gesture had great force—indeed, had the effect of putting chains and fetters on me.

  “Nero and Tigellinus began once again to howl with laughter. I felt suddenly hollow—an empty, empty, empty man.

  “Ah, Seca, I am afraid. I am afraid because I am losing touch with my craft. I am finding it very hard to write poetry. I no longer even think in terms of that question you and I have wearied so: What is a writer’s responsibility?

  “Farewell.”

  February 25

  To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police

  Our agents in the Piso household report:

  In the ten days since the literary evening, there has been a marked increase in the strolling-by-twos (Piso and a variable one other) in Piso’s gardens. In these ten days Piso has moved three times: to his estate near Lake Albanus, to Baiae, back to Rome. At each place, these walks. As before, sleepy-eyed Scaevinus, dainty Quintianus. Again, not Natalis. Lucan less than before, but at least twice. No more appearances of the Praetorian Tribune Subrius Flavus. But now a string of new faces—all men of equestrian rank: Julius Augurinus, Munatius Gratus, Vulcatius Araricus, Marcius Festus, Cervarius Proculus.

  The damnable thing is that these walks may be perfectly innocent. Piso is a sociable man. I heard someone remark once, “The worst thing you can say about Piso is that he has three hundred best friends.” The walks may be innocent. (You see, I am learning skepticism from you, Tigellinus; skepticism even of my own better judgment.) Or they may not be. (My own better judgment.)

  Indoors, meanwhile, the observed activities and overheard conversations are as soft and mild as goosedown; principally thief-checkers and music. As you may know, Piso is a brilliant thief-checkers player; crowds gather around him whenever he plays in a public place, as at the baths. With these guests of recent days he has always played for money and has always won, but he sets modest stakes and, being generous, always gives the guests presents on their departure which far outvalue their gambling losses. He tends to bore them by singing to them from his large repertory of tragic part
s, to the lyre. He has a good voice, but like most people with good voices or ideas that they consider good, he finds it hard to stop. At whatever estate he visits there is a steady stream of poor people and slaves at his gates petitioning him to represent them in the courts. He has two freedmen trained in law who weed out the nuisances and shrewdly select a very few affecting cases that he has a good chance of winning, and he takes them on, enhancing every month his reputation as a defender of the poor. His popularity with the mass of the public and with slaves has never been higher. In this sense, of course, he is potentially far more dangerous than Lucan, who is, after all, only a poet.

  March 4

  To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police

  From Cleonicus:

  “Seneca to Lucan, greetings:

  “Your last letter, my dearest nephew, with its friendlier tone and its touching reference to my ‘nourishment’ of your better side, relieved my great sadness over what had seemed a fissure in the rock of our love. I yearn to see your face, to drink with my eyes from your eyes the distillation of our kinship. There might have been a chance for that, but I denied it to myself. Nero commanded me, too, to the literary occasion at the palace, which you described in your letter. I took my courage in hand and declined, pleading ill health. The fact is, dear Lucan, I have never been healthier or stronger; the air here even in winter has a certain fullness; it is sweet and moist like the meat of a perfectly ripened pear. I thrive on it, and on a life that is totally free of pressure.

  “I am heartily glad, after having read your letter, that I missed this literary evening. But I do not like the sound of debility, along with desperation, that comes through to me, even at this distance, in your written voice. Be careful, Lucan. Distance yourself from anger, from that frenzy to which you are so prone.

  “I do not like to hear that the Muses are teasing you. They flirt with one, Lucan, they are flighty and fickle. But you must be a steadfast suitor. Court them patiently.