The Conspiracy

by John Hersey

  “Especially am I sorry to learn that you have stopped agitating the very questions you have put so insistently to me in recent weeks. I felt that after my last letter we were coming straight back to them, and I want now again to write to you about them, hoping that you will answer me. For I am caught up in them now.

  “A writer cannot change the world; his duty is to describe it. It may be that because a writer, like a sculptor or painter or musician, has wider-ranging and more sensitive perceptions than a man of affairs, he can describe the world in ways that open the eyes of the man of action, and therefore affect the action. This would be a happy outcome if all writers were good men, or sages. But alas, the magical gifts of art are distributed by fortune at random. The seeds are thrown by the sower’s hand in an April wind. Consider a man like Petronius. Where you see horrors, Petronius sees picnics. He is an apt friend for the worst Nero I know; yet even I cannot help seeing that he glows with talent.

  “Then what should a writer do who sees horrors? Of course he will write in order to heal himself, but his writing will not wipe out objective horrors. Should he not then approach power, in his life as a man outside writing, in order to try to obliterate, or at least mitigate, these horrors that remain?

  “My experience suggests to me, Lucan, that power—at least as it is presently misconstrued in Rome, the power of the Agrippina side of Nero—cannot any longer be directly influenced, cannot be turned toward wisdom by counsel. Nor can it even be changed by the very means it understands best—by violent force. The story I have told you of Nero’s effort to purge himself by violence of the Agrippina in himself, of the ‘materials of tyranny,’ has a sad lesson: His effort led only to an opposite end—Agrippina confirmed in him, and in us. You may say: A serious writer’s concept of power would be different—thoughtful, benign. But power consumes its own source, and all men who approach too close to it are swallowed sooner or later by power itself and its maintenance.

  “Where does that leave the writer? I was greatly moved by what you wrote about the power of art: recognition. I have come after all my years at the arm of the throne to believe that the writer should stand aside, should describe, should ponder the moral implications of what he recognizes—recognition meaning, I take it, the ability to see in others what is in oneself, and in oneself what is in others. It seems to me that the reason you were so shaken yet so strong at the literary evening was because you saw that much of what was in Nero, for better and for worse, was also in you. You must not let this recognition paralyze you. A man in power—for that is what you are, as a writer, in this sense of being able to open men’s eyes to each other—a man in power cannot rest. Write, Lucan, write.

  “I think I am almost a free man. I am trying to move toward wisdom. If I have a writer’s power, I have no need of it—perhaps this is partly because I am getting old. I have no need of power over anyone, certainly not over my beloved wife Paulina, now my only constant friend. I am not yet a sage, but I would like to be. I have no fear of death.

  “Farewell.”

  “Lucan to Seneca, greetings:

  “Your letter, dear Seca, seemed to be designed to calm me, with its hilltop detachment and the advantage over me of assurance that old age unfairly gives you. Instead of easing me it made me irascible, jumpy, and anxious. When I come at the end of each of your letters to your brief soaring declarations about death, your little blackbirds flying into pink sunsets, I feel as if I had ants under my skin. I still live in Rome, Uncle. Your bucolic ramblings do us no good. We are in a predicament, you are in a country daydream.

  “I agree with you that not all writers are good men—but that is irrelevant. Mark my words, Petronius may not be driven into the same corner with you and me, but he is just as great a threat to the tyrant as we are, perhaps greater, because he has more humor than you or I have. He sees incongruities faster than we do. A truly funny man is very dangerous to the seat of power.

  “You tell me peremptorily to write. Sit down. Write. ‘A man in power cannot rest.’ As if my difficulty were laziness. How little, after all, you recognize.

  “But write to me again. Seca, Seca, Seca.

  “Farewell.”

  March 7

  To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police

  Another gleaning from a scroll in one of Lucan’s library boxes—a new, a pungent view from this particular correspondent. Was it Natalis who first spoke of this woman’s gift for “provocations”?

  “Epicharis to Lucan, greetings:

  “You were so worked up before you left that I never had a chance to say what I thought. You dramatize and enlarge all things, for you are an epic poet. But I have a different view from yours of tyranny—a quieter but more awful view—more as of mildew than of earthquake. I am closer to faceless people, those without names, than you. The effects of tyranny, my dearest one, are to be seen not so much in executions, privations, surveillances, matricide and fratricide, ruined reputations, unjust trials, exile, and murder, shocking events of the capital; no, tyranny has finally achieved its foul purpose when among the many, scattered at large, there are acquiescence, apathy, complacency, bland acceptance of outrage, pride in vulgar triumphs, blurring of the meaning of words, confusion in moral standards—in short, a blight of the communal character. It is when people who are thought of as good solid citizens, those who make up the backbone of the populace, become touched by this blight and do not realize it, become not only the infected but the infectors—this is when tyranny has won the day. The ‘good’ citizens then say: What a beautiful day! What a fine year this has been! Are you going to the amphitheater this afternoon?

  “You would do well to listen with a more attentive ear to your uncle.

  “In haste. Farewell.”

  March 15

  To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police

  Urgent urgent urgent.

  Here it is. I waken you in the night with good reason. An intercept of Cleonicus. Here it is, Tigellinus.

  “Seneca to Lucan, greetings:

  “I write to you again sooner than I had thought to do.

  “It is the hour of beginnings, for the day and for me. The sun will soon rise. A peculiar terraced fog, hugging the ground, rises step by step up the levels of the vineyard across the valley. I have never before seen such a weird geometric mist. Augury? In full view of it, and by lamplight in my still-dark room, I commence, with trembling hand, a fateful letter to you, my dearest nephew.

  “On this most important morning of a life that has not been lacking in importances, I turn to you, Lucan. I have talked all night with Paulina. Now I must talk with you—a writer, a kinsman, a friend, a critic, a dear part of myself.

  “Everything has changed. The world of action, of shove and shout and cut and take, has penetrated this philosopher’s refuge. Yet I feel safe here at Nomentum. While what I am to describe to you comes to fruition, I shall play the part of a serene old man, far removed from influence, weary indeed of a surfeit of it, an old countryman who seems mainly interested in the system devised on these umber hills by my neighbor Columella and by the freedman Sthenus for the abundant cultivation of grapes, and in the capital they will say that Seneca is at one of his villas writing tragedies, pruning vines, taking cold baths in all weathers at the age of sixty-two, and sending homiletic epistles to his friend Lucilius Junior, who, poor fellow, is already all too amply instructed by his wordy friend.

  “I was wakened in the night by the hand of Paulina—how shrewd of them to use her, to know that though I trust my brothers and my nephew and my friends and my freedmen and my slaves with my life, because I value life but do not fear death, this generous creature is the only one besides yourself to whom I entrust secrets—to be told in a whisper of her warm breath that a clandestine visitor was waiting to talk to me in the potting shed of the topiary nursery; I must go there in silence withou
t slaves and without light, she said.

  “I felt the way along the walls of my room to its door, made my way through the atrium by a dim sight of the pool, groped from column to column of the peristyle, and went out at the back of the house. The night was chilly; no stars could be seen; the moon, I recalled, had waned far past the third quarter and must have been low in the sky. I could just make out the white paths. My feet were bare. I walked with the slow way-feeling shuffle the honor guards use at the tomb of Augustus, and I kept to the dew-wet myrtle and ivy off the paths to avoid a crunching noise on my beloved Pentelican gravel. I know every turning of the garden maze, and soon I was in the ornamental nursery and was approaching the potting shed when I saw a specter come from it toward me.

  “It materialized and touched me for recognition, a calloused hand on my jowls, rough fingers shaping my nose, a palm—vanity crackled in me alongside a sense of danger—checking the bald isthmus at the top of my head. A harsh whisper: ‘Are you alone?’ I whispered in retort: ‘Identify yourself at once.’ My eyes were adjusted to the dark, but I could not see features. The shape whispered a name. A distinguished name, Lucan. ‘How am I to know that you are———?’ A rough hand took my hand and placed my fingers on a certain tactile identification which satisfied me. Some day I will tell you more.

  “And so we two important men stood there among the peacocks, bears, rabbits, doves, and dolphins of box and yew and privet and holm oak and holly, and we exchanged exceedingly dangerous words.

  “This visitor told me straight out that certain civilian and military men intended to assassinate Nero and invite me to become Emperor.

  “Did I feel an instantaneous thrust of elation? I felt, first of all, a chill in my limbs, the wind on my wet bare ankles and insteps. Certain animals hide themselves from discovery by confusing the marks of their footprints around their lairs; I think my mind was doing similar work to prevent discovery of where it lived with respect to this sudden intruder on its peace: the thought that Lucius Annaeus Seneca might become Emperor at Rome.

  “Where were all the easy, wise sayings of the Stoic? ‘What a great man! He has learned to despise all things.’ My mind scrambled among trivia. Had this visitor come here alone? How had word been given to Paulina? And suddenly this absurd thought: Could this be a practical joke? No, no, such a visitor as this did not fumble among leaf-bearing animals in a topiary garden in the shank of a cold night in order that a few might join in laughing at an honorable old man. But what if—and this was all too possible, and no joke—what if this visitor had come to test me? What if he was on an errand for Nero himself? What if malice was what gave this night wind such a cutting edge?

  “I could not, in view of these thoughts, respond in any telling way. My visitor generously whispered that he knew what I must be thinking, that I must consider, as a measure of his trust in me, how he was putting himself at my mercy. He wanted no sign from me; he knew all too well, he whispered, that within a tyrant’s reach men could not open their hearts to each other in a sudden rush. He would simply inform me; I should ponder what he told me. There would be a time for answers.

  “My visitor then told me that the plot is already on a developed footing. He said he could not—until the time would come for my reply—tell me the names of the principal conspirators, but he did say that I would be astonished and pleased by some of those names. He mentioned one. He said that several of the civilians who have conspired favor as Nero’s successor the man he named, but the military conspirators, he said, are behind me. Need I point out to you, my dear nephew, that after the assassination of Caligula it was the Praetorian Guard that found the old laughing-stock Claudius, at that moment a most surprising candidate for the succession, cringing behind a curtain, his hands shaking, his big head lolling with started eyes on his weak neck, and hauled him out and made him Emperor, and not a bad one he proved to be? And that after the assassination in turn of Claudius it was the Praetorian Prefect Burrus who brought out at the palace gates not the heir Britannicus but the dead Emperor’s stepson Nero, and at a command from Burrus the duty guard saluted the boy—he was only seventeen—and placed him on a litter and took him to their camp at the city walls, where Nero promised the troops a donative, and they (not the Senate, not the people) acclaimed him Emperor? If the military chooses Seneca after the death of Nero, Seneca will be Emperor…. If Seneca decides he wants to be Emperor.

  “Then I was alone. How did this visitor know his way in my gardens? I shivered and turned toward the house. I remember thinking, beside the path where it turns at the bed of camellias: It is understandable that some men would support the other candidate, because he is an elegant man, he gives sumptuous banquets, he is truly generous, he has taste in literature, he knows exactly what Senator, what writer, what orator, what actor, what charioteer is ‘acceptable’ at any given moment, and he stands for many of the old Roman virtues as opposed to the Greek affectations, as many view them, of Nero. But I could not help thinking that Seneca would be better for Rome. This was not vanity, Lucan, not immodesty; I am far beyond such foibles. It was a question of experience. For seven years Burrus and I were, in all but name, jointly Emperor. I am the better man for the task. And yet…

  “I have been up all night, as I say, talking with Paulina. I asked her at once how she had been warned. She told me that a peasant woman, her head covered, had come to the servants’ quarters yesterday with a basket of pheasant eggs and asked to see the mistress of the house, and when Paulina presented herself the woman, coughing like a consumptive, said in thick dialect that she had seen a fox’s earth in a glade through which she had come, not far from our villa, and that she wanted to show the mistress where it was so the predator could be destroyed. Paulina offhandedly told the woman to inform our freedman Florus, who takes care of such things. The woman thereupon stopped coughing and quickly lifted the cloth at her face, and Paulina, after a moment’s astonishment at such honeyed skin on a farm woman’s face, recognized her as someone in disguise—Epicharis, whom of course you know. I am so fortunate in Paulina that I do not need the luxury of envying my brother Mela this fine creature, whose fascination to me is that she seems both womanly-yielding and bronze-strong. I have often wondered how you felt about a woman who had taken your mother’s place in your father’s heart. Paulina, on recognizing her, quickly said that she would like to see the fox’s covert, and the two walked out in the woods where no one could possibly overhear, and even there Epicharis impressed Paulina with the danger of her errand by keeping her voice at a murmur. At exactly the seventh hour of the night, she said, Paulina should waken me and tell me to go to the potting shed—and so forth, exactly as I have told you Paulina did later instruct me. No more would Epicharis say, no matter how Paulina teased her for even the smallest satisfaction—not a word more. Quite likely she knew no more. She did give Paulina the pheasant eggs; and she gave her, though Paulina did not decipher it until nearly dawn, the metaphor of the fox, the predator that must be destroyed.

  “If Epicharis, then Mela? If Mela, then you, Lucan? If my brother is in it, I said to Paulina, then doubtless his son Lucan would also be in it. Or might be. This speculation gave me strange feelings—palpitations, in fact, which I confessed to Paulina and now confess to you. I have here an uneasy puzzle of love and trust. If you are in it, and if my name had come up as a candidate for Emperor, should not you have been the one to come to me and tell me? Would not this have been the natural way? Does your not having come mean that you are for the other man? This is all too possible. I know that that other man is a close friend of yours. You have often disagreed with me. My mind flew back over the correspondence we have had in recent weeks. You have put to me urgently the question: What are the limits of a writer’s duties—to himself, to his art, to his fellow men, to posterity? You are a poet. As a poet, in the successive books of the Pharsalia, I have seen you gradually coming to the point: The predator must be destroyed. But could you, did y
ou dare, be other than a poet? This you seemed to be asking me. Poetry cannot be an agent; poetry must soar above agency. But if a poet’s vision is of a need for an act, then may not the poet become the agent?

  “I have taken the view with you—as recently as ten days ago—that a writer should not step too close to temporal power. You seemed to reproach me for holding this view; you lost your temper with me, you cut me, hit me. Were you testing me? Did my answers turn you to the other man?

  “One refrain in your letters haunts me. Over and over you have said: They are going to drive us to do what we do not wish to do.

  “Of course I never thought, as I wrote to you, of such a preposterous idea as being Emperor. I thought in terms of a writer’s being close to power, as I have been, not of a writer’s having it.

  “I thought in terms of moral influence, not in terms of murder.

  “What am I to say to you now? Why have you not come to me?

  “You see how I take you into my confidence—put my life in your hands. Why have you not trusted me?

  “I do not hesitate to put my life in your hands because I love you and because I feel calm in the face of mere physical danger. Fear for my body I do not feel. Whatever I decide, death will come when it comes. Think, Lucan, a man’s power, or lack of it, or closeness to it, or aloofness from it, does not give him power, or deprive him of power, over his own life. Fully as many men have been killed by angry slaves as by angry monarchs. Since the day I was born I have been walking toward death. My pace is still steady.

  “No, Lucan, the fearful dangers are moral dangers. What am I to think of the violent death of Nero, whom I have loved in the past, whom I now hate? What am I to think of the rights and wrongs of tyrannicide? Is the murder of a murderer not a crime? What now are the responsibilities of a writer? Is recognition enough? What am I to think of what power can do to any man, be he writer or not? Am I so vain as to think I would be immune to the temptations of absolute power?