The Conspiracy

by John Hersey

  “Do you wish to be Emperor?

  “Ah, Lucan, the questions we have been asking each other are now enlarged a thousandfold. Entirely changed.

  “I must think. I must think. I must think.

  “Write to me. First write to me a note by my trusted Cleonicus assuring me that having read this letter once over, you have then destroyed it. Your life, about which I care, as well as mine, about which I do not, depend on your doing so.

  “Farewell. Write to me.”

  THREE

  March 16

  To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS

  First of all, Paenus: Keep your head. Follow my example. At times like these I purposely slow everything down. I think more deliberately, I speak measured sentences, I even walk at a more leisurely pace than usual. You can watch me. In my youth I was forced to live for a while as a thief, and occasionally I had to keep out of the hands of policemen. I found that a very good tactic was to show myself fleetingly here and there before informers, or to leave unmistakable traces of my presence at widely separated places. Once the police began hurrying and scurrying—dashing to investigate one report after another—I knew I was safe.

  We cannot pounce. We must first be very sure of our ground.

  We must find out who the night visitor to the author of this letter was. “A calloused hand.” “Rough fingers.” But “a distinguished name.” And the assurance that the military adherents favor the author of the letter, not his rival. All this points to a soldier. If a distinguished name, a soldier of high rank. I need not stress that this suggestion that military men, perhaps members of the Praetorian Guard, are involved in this business comes as a great shock. We thought we were simply dealing with a circle of arrogant, vain, effeminate, erratic, corruptible writers and their weak-willed hangers-on.

  Am I right in thinking that your penetration of the Guard with agents is weak in all ranks? We have not time to repair that deficiency. Do not send fools blundering into the Guard. For the moment I will take responsibility for the delicate task of opening up information on the military side.

  I am not yet telling Himself about the letter we have intercepted. Himself loses all judgment when it comes to the author of that letter. I shall protect the Person for now in whatever ways I can without disturbing him.

  Keep cool.

  Orders:

  Free your best and subtlest men from other concerns to concentrate on this pile of stinking night soil.

  Send me your file on the author of the letter.

  Commence surveillance of Mela and Epicharis.

  Commence close surveillance of Piso. The unnamed rival in the letter fits a description of him.

  Commence surveillance of Natalis.

  To RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS

  Secret. Urgent.

  I must talk with you on a most urgent and most secret matter. Meet me punctually on the fourth hour in the gardens of the Golden House, near the statue of Apollo on the path to the lake.

  To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police

  You are consistent, as always, in your inconsistency. You tell me to slow down, and you send me scrambling in all directions.

  It will be a pleasure to commence—or, if I may use the word, recommence—surveillance of Natalis. Your other orders also noted for action.

  To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS

  Rest your wit. Get busy.

  March 17

  To TIGELLINUS from RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard

  Secret. Urgent.

  I have given myself twenty-four hours before commenting on your performance in the gardens yesterday. I needed twenty-four hours. In the first place, you seemed to me incoherent. In the second place, you lost yet again, and worse than ever, all sense of military propriety. I repeat what I have said before: You and I are of equal rank.

  What makes you think you can use the Emperor’s name to order me to conduct a purge of the Guard; then cancel it, excusing the inexcusable order on the ground that an augury had made it seem desirable; and now reinstate it, mumbling that you cannot reveal what makes it necessary this time, and that you don’t want the Emperor upset by the details of such trivial matters as this? Trivial? The ruin-by-slaughter of his protective force? Carousing has weakened your brain, Tigellinus.

  I have had enough of your “cannot reveal.” I will give you twenty-four hours to make good on your reasons for this “command”; if I have not heard or seen the reasons by the fifth hour tomorrow I shall go to the Emperor. I am sworn to protect his Person.

  To RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS

  Secret. Urgent.

  I will not be given an ultimatum by you. I suggest that you carry out forthwith the careful investigation I proposed. If you do not feel able to do this, rest assured that I will very soon have a colleague of equal rank other than yourself.

  I repeat: We are in an emergent situation. Act promptly if you are loyal to Himself.

  To TIGELLINUS from RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard

  Secret. Urgent.

  So we are to brawl, are we? I am a soldier, Tigellinus, and you are a horse dealer. Something has made you lose your nerve. I have not lost mine.

  To RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS

  Secret. Urgent.

  In the files of the Secret Police reposes a clear proof, supported by the testimony of persons still living, that you were, on nine separate and distinct occasions, the backstairs servant and servicer of the pleasures of the sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, mother of Nero. A member of the Guard does not violate an Imperial Person. I can have you snuffed out in half a day.

  March 18

  To RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS

  No answer to my last, soldier?

  To RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS

  Please give me daily reports on the investigation of the Guard. I know that you will proceed with the utmost regard for secrecy and subtlety in your inquiries.

  Confidential

  THE SENECA FILE

  LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA

  For recognition: Stature so short as to seem stunted, head unusually large, bare-bald except at sides and back, narrow shoulders, low paunch, stiff thin legs like hoe handles. The awkwardness of this squat figure is offset by a round face of imposing radiance, intelligence, and serenity; right eyebrow much higher than left, consequent expression of perpetual surprise, thought by inferior persons to be an expression of disdain; limpid, responsive dark brown eyes; long straight nose; narrow but full, sensitive, and sensuous mouth; small wen on lower left chin.

  Weaknesses: Vanity, inconsistency, asthma, prolixity, simultaneous love of poverty and luxury.

  Born in Cordoba in the 24th year of the reign of Augustus. Presently sixty-two years old. Father: Marcus Annaeus Seneca, the rhetor, whose loathing of everything Greek might perhaps be noted in view of Himself’s Graecophilia. Mother: Helvia, irreproachable matron. Elder brother: M. Annaeus Novatus, adopted by his father’s friend Junius Gallio, became Consul and, thirteen years ago, Proconsul in Achaea. Younger brother: M. Annaeus Mela, who, unlike his Senatorial brothers, remains satisfied with equestrian rank; married a woman from Cordoba, fathered the poet Lucan.

  As a boy, weak in the lungs. Taken to Alexandria for his health under care of an aunt.

  Lifelong conflict, perhaps a consequence of this early delicacy, between impulsive asceticism and love of comfort. Under the influence of his teacher Sotion, took up the doctrines of Pythagoras, who, being a believer in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, argued against meat-eating on the ground that one might be committing murder or even parricide when slaying and devouring an animal. Senec
a later gave up vegetarianism, either because, as some say, he was afraid of being considered a Jew, or because, as others say, his father, fearful for his health, insisted on a normal diet. Seneca began as a young man to affect poverty; to sleep on a hard couch; to take unheated baths; to refrain from using ointments and unguents; to avoid hot-air baths; to refuse wine; to abstain from oysters, mushrooms, and whatever might be considered condiments rather than nourishment. To much of this rigor Seneca was trained by his later teacher, Attalus the Stoic.

  The Stoic teachings, however, opened the way to luxury as well. Seneca has often written that whether a man has or does not have material things is a matter of indifference. Though the cold baths, the hard couch, the abstention from wine continue, there is all too much evidence that Seneca has not remained indifferent to his worldly condition. See the denunciations of Suilius, below.

  Seneca served adequately as Questor under Tiberius, in the twentieth year of that Emperor’s rule. Served as Consul Suffectus, third year Nero.

  During Caligula’s reign, he distinguished himself, and almost got himself killed, on account of his dazzling skill in oratory, in pleading cases at law. At one trial Caligula spoke before the Senate in his torrential and raucous voice, pouring out invective, and when Seneca followed with a cool and ornamental response, full of balanced clauses and sudden epigrammatic explosions and mellifluous excursions into history and mythology, and the Senate lost its collective head in its applause for his eloquence, Caligula became insanely enraged and wanted to have Seneca executed at once; but a concubine persuaded the Emperor that Seneca would soon die of his asthma anyway, and he was spared—Caligula satisfying himself with the contemptuous remark that Seneca’s speeches were “sand without lime.” (The asthmatic Seneca has outlived Caligula, so far, by nearly a quarter of a century.)

  In this connection, the moralistic philosopher once remarked that longevity at an Emperor’s court depends on one’s ability to be grateful for injuries.

  The best catalogue of Seneca’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities came with the denunciation of him by Publius Suilius, seven years ago.

  Background: Suilius had been a notoriously venal informer under Claudius. Seneca, at the pinnacle of his influence with Himself (this takes place in the fourth year of his reign), decides to crush Suilius, who has destroyed so many good men; invokes, to punish him, the Cincian law against taking money for pleading causes. But Suilius is by this time a very old man with a nasty temper, and is still helplessly gluttonous for victims. In his own defense he impeaches Seneca as follows:

  First, Seneca is vengeful. His motive for attacking Suilius is his desire to destroy all the friends of the previous Emperor, Claudius, under whose reign Seneca endured a well-deserved exile of eight years.

  Second, he is an impudent adulterer. The reason for Seneca’s exile: He had violated the sister of Caligula and Agrippina, Julia Li villa.

  Third, he is a hypocrite. He spent his years of exile in Corsica, which he called, in his “Consolation” to his mother, “terrible, uncouth, wild, horrible.” In all Seneca’s writings on the Stoic acceptance of hardship, one finds a humming tension that comes from his not meaning a word of what he says. “The wise man”—from the same letter to his mother, a private communication published to the world out of vanity, as is every sentence he writes—“The wise man cannot be set back by any blows of fortune. The rougher the ground under his feet, the worse his food, the more squalid his hut, so much the easier can he turn his thoughts inward or lose himself in gazing at the stars….” This (snorts Suilius) from the man whose country houses today rival those of the Emperor!

  Fourth, he is a groveling flatterer. From Corsica he wrote another “Consolation,” to the rich freedman Polybius, who was Claudius’s literary secretary, on the occasion of the death of a brother of Polybius. In the great vault of human literary endeavor there has never been flattery so abject, so maladroit, so transparent—Seneca will say anything in the hope of being pardoned and being allowed to come home. He writes that Polybius, author of pedestrian prose translations of Homer into Latin and of Virgil into Greek, is fully their match—all he needs to be remembered like them is to write a life of Claudius. Seneca so far loses his head as to compliment Claudius even on his wonderful memory—Claudius, who, the day after he had his wife executed, asked why she was late for dinner.

  Fifth, he is laughably insincere. Witness the funeral oration on Claudius that he wrote for Nero. All Rome laughed at that scandalous cynicism.

  Sixth, he is corrupt. Has it been by practicing the virtues of a “sage” and pronouncing philosophic epigrams that Seneca has, during four years as the Emperor’s adviser, piled up three hundred million sesterces?

  Seventh, he is an embezzler. What happens to the wills of rich men who die in Rome without heirs?

  Eighth, he practices usury. It is well known that Seneca drains the provinces by lending money at extortionate rates of interest.

  Ninth, his vanity is at the heart of his inconsistency. The advocate of a frugal life who writes of the simple beauty of a two-day journey on a rough cart carrying the barest necessities—this is the same man who owns five hundred matching dining tables of cedar from Gaul inlaid with ivory from the Syrtes. The philosopher who writes so trenchantly against luxury insists on chipped white marble from the quarries of the Acropolis itself for the garden paths of his four villas.

  (As is well known, Seneca persuaded Himself that any man could build palaces out of blocks of envy, and for his “slander” Suilius was banished to the Balearics. The charges against Seneca stand unanswered on the record.)

  Five years ago, we also know, the Britons under Queen Boadicea massacred seventy thousand Romans and allies at Camulodunum, London, and Verulamium. Among the gravest causes of the uprising was Seneca’s speculation. He had had forty million sesterces out at usury in Britain (Stoic “indifference”), and hearing through his privileged position of the unrest on the island, he had called his capital and exacted every grain of his interest, causing immense hardship among influential Britons.

  Seneca is also blamed by many for the murder of the ex-Consul and Prefect Pedanius by one of his own slaves four years ago. Many people say that the widely published sentimental views of Seneca on slavery were what gave the murderer the sense of moral justification and the plain courage to carry a torch into his master’s bedroom and stab him on his couch. This was a frightfully dangerous case; as punishment of the murder, which had been so threatening to every slave owner in Rome, all four hundred of Pedanius’s slaves were put to death, men, women, and children, and mobs with rocks and firebrands turned out in the city to protest this harshness, and to carry out the sentence Himself had to line with soldiers the entire route by which the victims were dragged to execution. A recently published sample of this notorious sentimentality of Seneca’s on the subject of slavery:

  “ ‘They are slaves,’ you say. No, they are men. ‘They are slaves.’ No, they are comrades. ‘They are slaves.’ No, humble friends. ‘They are slaves.’ No—fellow slaves, if one reflects that all are subject to the same fortune. This is why I smile at those who think it is a disgrace for a man to dine with his slave…. The man you call a slave came from the same seed as you, grows up under the same sun, breathes, lives, and dies like you. We Romans are excessively haughty, cruel, and insulting to our slaves. This is the core of my advice: Treat those you have at your mercy exactly as you would wish to be treated by those who have you at their mercy. Perhaps some day you will be a slave.”

  Seneca has for many years shamelessly published subversive views.

  Examples:

  He chides Brutus, because killing a tyrant did not kill tyranny.

  His Stoic hero is Cato. “Cato died with liberty, and liberty died with him.”

  “Hell,” he writes, “is far from being the place of terror it is fabled to be, for in that free state th
ere are no fresh tyrants.” This appears in his “Consolation to Marcia,” which Seneca wrote to her because her father, Cremutius Cordus, had in Tiberius’s time been driven to suicide, and his books had been burnt, because he had praised tyrannicides.

  Seneca has openly written that he himself could be a tyrannicide—e.g., in “On Benefits,” writing “hypothetically” of an Emperor to whom he is indebted and who becomes tyrannical: “If I despair altogether of his amendment, I shall at one blow discharge my debt to him and confer a benefit on mankind, for to such a nature death is a cure, and to speed his departure the only kindness I can do him.”

  Appended to this file are Seneca’s letters in recent correspondence with Lucan, which you have already seen.

  To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS

  I have read the Seneca file, and I am thoroughly dissatisfied with it. It is a bungle. A perfect expression of the clomping around in military boots studded with hobnails that your supposedly secret police have been doing, when they should have been moving on silent sandals. That this file has been hastily and sloppily thrown together is not by any means the real complaint. The error of the file is that it speaks only of foibles, follies, and weaknesses in Seneca. If he was such a wrong-headed, fallible culprit as this file pictures him to be, how could he have been for so long the second most powerful man in Rome?

  No, Paenus, when you are trying to decide how to come to battle with a great enemy, you have to know his strengths. You have to know what powers must be dealt with, what endurance he can command under pressure, what reserves he can bring to the battle.

  You have left out all the large measure of Seneca—and very large it is. His hold on Himself’s heart has a sound basis. You have forgotten to note that Seneca became his tutor when he was a boy eleven years old; that, forbidden by Agrippina to teach her son philosophy, Seneca concentrated on the elements of upright character—on modesty, courtesy, simplicity, sobriety, endurance, willingness to work hard, avoidance of flattery and of excessive passion. Let us not quibble about whether Seneca is himself a paragon of these qualities. You do not note that these lessons took root.