by John Hersey
Your file leaves out the great Quinquennium all Rome speaks of—the first five years of Himself’s rule, when Seneca and Burrus steered the way, a time unequaled in our history for peace, wealth, wisdom at home and abroad.
Do you think it is easy for me to remind you of these things? People constantly tell me that I am a horse dealer, Paenus. I had to follow in the footsteps of a man whom Himself regarded as a great and very kind philosopher. I hate Seneca; partly I hate him because I see his worth.
If you listen even now to Himself, Seneca was a good and true friend. I remind you (oh, yes, I have a file of my own on Seneca) that somewhere he quotes Hecato: “I can show you a potion, compounded without drugs, herbs, or any witches’ incantations: ‘If you would be loved, love.’ ” In his own heavy way, Seneca loved Himself.
Seneca had what I consider a malign softening influence on Himself. He tried to teach Himself to hate bloodshed, and to the extent he succeeded in this he also succeeded in confusing Himself on the scores of valor, law-keeping, vigilance. Himself for a very long time kept his distance from the combats of the arena, gladiatorial shows, the sight of slaughter—but also from the sight of courage. One consequence of all this was Himself’s predilection for singing, acting, reading poems in public; he needed to test his gifts, but the only contests Seneca permitted him were in the Greek style, without bloodshed. Many people give Seneca great credit for this—a fact which your report totally ignores.
In those first years Seneca taught Himself another lesson you and I despise—of mercy. Your file leaves out these words Seneca put in the mouth of the most powerful man on earth in those early days: “The humblest blood is precious to me; my sword is in its sheath; if a suppliant has nothing else to plead except that he is a man, yet as a man I will favor him. My severity I hide; my clemency is in the open and ready for use. I have rescued the laws from neglect, and I observe them as if I too were accountable.” You do not have to like this, but give Seneca credit!—the public does, and Himself does. Oh, you have given me a feeble file.
After Burrus died three years ago, ambitious men—I was one of them, Paenus, and probably you were, too—revived all the old Suilius slurs about Seneca’s wealth and…and all that your miserable file recooks, and Seneca went to Himself and said: You do not benefit from the advice of a discredited man; let me retire, let me give you all my wealth, which I owe to you anyway, let me give you all my estates, let me retire to a small country house. You and I can see through the hypocrisy in this, Paenus, but many thought it was the sincere act of a great man, of a philosopher.
And his greatest strength you have also left out of your file of dirty crumbs. He is not afraid of anything. He is not afraid of Himself, or you, or me, or death. Many people make fun of what he has written about the way a man should be willing to die. But I know this man. Here he means what he says.
This is, I think, in fact, our principal hope. If we come to a showdown, I am not sure that Seneca would fight. He regards death as the one sure liberty, the only escape from tyranny. I think he might prefer that liberty to a fight for power, because, being honest although vain, he would wonder whether he, any more than the student he loved, would be able in the end to avoid being influenced by men like you and me, Paenus, to avoid becoming a tyrant himself.
As for his views on tyrannicide: Even an ignorant clod like yourself should know that these mouthings have been the clichés of the schools of rhetoric and philosophy since the time of Cicero and Cato. They mean nothing. They are just words that schoolboys memorize.
After reading this file of yours I have concluded that our greatest danger at this moment comes from the feeblemindedness of the protectors of the Person. I wish I could have your throat cut. But who would I put in your place? Secret policemen see everything as if it were under water or beyond a column of smoke. The whole flock of you are worse than useless. You are dangerous.
March 19
To TIGELLINUS from RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard
Report on first day of check of Guard: No substantive findings.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
You have a marked talent for disheartening your subordinates. Since the last Cleonicus intercept I have been working all hours, as you can imagine. I feel most heavily the responsibility reposed in me. I do the best I can. Yet the officer to whom I report has nothing to say to me except that he should have my throat cut. I trust he will remember that if he feels that we are in a tight position, it is because I and my service, though we are sensible of our imperfection, have brought a great deal to light.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
“Sensible of our imperfection.” You have been reading too many letters written by Seneca. Stop whining and get busy.
March 20
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
First product of surveillance of Mela’s household: this letter, found in a jewel box of Epicharis’s, copied, returned. Note with care the examples Lucan cites from his own work.
“Lucan to Epicharis, greetings:
“What am I to do? I cannot get ahead. This has never happened to me before. I sit at my desk and nothing comes but anger, dullness, and a stupid appetite for daydreams that will not take form. I have done everything I could think of to waken my muses, feast them, and even get them drunk if I could. I have reread and reread the parts of Livy that up to now have given me the yarn for my beautiful weaving; I have read Virgil, to remind myself of the standards I must better; I have read here and there in Metamorphoses, which has always in the past had the effect of making me want to pour out my genius, has always sent me running to my tablets. Now I cannot focus on the books. I am stuck. Caesar is stuck in Egypt. I have not more than two hundred lines to go to finish Book X. I know where I want to go. I want to carry the great work through to the death of Cato, and indeed I have already experienced again and again, with hot tears in my eyes, the flooding emotion that will be contained by the carefully built dikes of that last book. If I can ever reach it. I range back, reading and thinking about my earlier passages. I marvel at the conciseness I could achieve:
“Delay wounds the well-prepared….
“A people in want knows not fear….
“Popular crime goes unavenged….
“Thinking nothing done when anything remained to do….
and how I could characterize the different prides and jealousies of Caesar and Pompey in a single lightning stroke:
“Caesar could bear no man in front of him,
Pompey none by his side….
and my soaring passages: the crossing of the Rubicon, the deaths at Massilia, Vulteius on the raft, Pompey’s farewell to Cornelia on sending her to Lesbos, the complaints of the mutineers against Caesar, the storm on the Adriatic, Pompey’s dream of Rome, his murder, Cato’s speech in the desert, the serpents….
“It is a massive and brilliant work, and I stand by the lines in the last book before this one, when I address Caesar and tell him he will live as long as Homer’s heroes because of Lucan’s poem. Lucan will not die, my dear. Lucan will live forever.
“But my poem is like a swift ship that has run aground on a sand shoal. It seems that the helmsman must wait for the full-moon tides to lift free the keel. Why, why, why are they so long coming?
“He has done this to me. He has silenced me—at least as a poet, and for the time being—better than he thought he could. Do you know something? In the very moment of detesting him, I am lonely for his company. I realized this, with a pang, at the literary evening I told you about. He has fascinated me, and I would be a liar if I denied that I took pleasure from being a most privileged insider, one who could with impunity tease and even (then!) abuse the most powerful man; he enjoyed my sharp tongue, because he was stuffed to the point of nausea with the flattery ev
eryone else dealt him. In the end, though, he could not stand my genius, which put his paltry talent in the shade. But now, sitting at my desk unable to write a line of poetry, I am face to face, after all, with his magnetic and destructive power.
“I cannot even write a casual sylvan poem. If I could, it would be about the tiny gold chain you wear on your ankle. Construct the poem in your mind, if you will. You know what is held by that delicate golden fetter until I am able to see you again and touch that chain again with my trembling fingertips.
“Advise me. I cannot write to Seneca; I thank heaven I can still manage to write to you. You are so wise and alive and strong. Advise me.
“Farewell.”
To TIGELLINUS from RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard
Second day of investigation: No findings.
March 21
To TIGELLINUS from RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard
Third day of investigation: No findings.
March 22
To TIGELLINUS from RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard
Fourth day of investigation: No findings.
March 23
To TIGELLINUS from RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard
Fifth day of investigation: No findings.
To RUFUS, Co-Commander, Praetorian Guard, from TIGELLINUS
Let us stop this game of street cats. Report to me when you have found something to report. Find it.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
You should know that I discussed the entire Piso–Lucan–Seneca affair with Himself again yesterday (omitting, however, the most recent intercept, for reasons I have previously mentioned to you). I gave him my frank opinion—that the time has come to break this nasty business over our knee. But Himself insists on restraint, on waiting. Someone, he still says, will lose his nerve and come out with it. I pressed him hard; he is obdurately stubborn about this threat. His reasons must be made of stone. Somewhere in them is his lingering awe of his old teacher and adviser. Somewhere also a revival—perhaps at the literary evening—of his former affection for Lucan malignantly mixed up with envy of Lucan’s poetic gifts. Somewhere also a perverse desire for a thrill, even a dangerous one. He is bored, Paenus. His great palace is built. The new ideas involved in the reconstruction of the city are now old ideas to him. He is bloated like an overfeasted man with ordinary entertainments. We must find new objects for his huge, vital attention.
It occurred to me that we must make special efforts to enliven the circus games next month in honor of Ceres, to find a few horses with truly great hearts. We will have him watch these proud ones training beforehand—give them to the Green team. I know a line of superb bay runners derived from a strain raised on the Plain of Alashkert, captured by Corbulo. I will work on finding some of them. I mention this to you because, while the games promise Himself some diversion, they also (he becomes so engrossed) expose him to close approach. We will therefore have to discuss special security precautions later.
March 25
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Close surveillance of Piso brings us nothing new for the moment. He has been staying in the city in recent days. A dull dinner party which included—among those we must now consider doubtfuls because of before-noted garden strolls—Scaevinus, Quintianus, Munatius, and Vulcatius; but not others. Conversation proper. Emotional timbre on the soft side; little drinking, only Sleepy-Eyes Scaevinus drunk—it would have been more noteworthy if he had not been.
Our two agents do feel, however, that Piso’s demeanor lately has been abnormal in its quietness, its subdued quality. He maintains at all times his accustomed propriety, but they feel it is under harness somehow. The skin of his face has become sallow and flaccid, and there are gray patches under his eyes of a peculiar triangular shape, reaching far down into his cheeks. He is at his thief-checkers board day and night.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
Now you feed me the desperate information that a man has bags under his eyes from playing too much checkers.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Cut my throat. That would be more pleasing to me than this continuous chopping at my shoulders. I am doing the best I can with limited resources.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
“Limited resources.” Does this phrase suggest a request for more money for your elite corps of deaf-mutes and blind men? You are not only incompetent. You are mad.
March 26
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
Surveillance of Mela’s household brings us this letter, copied before the original was dispatched.
“Epicharis to Lucan, greetings:
“Two days ago I went for a stroll along the cart track you and I followed on that divine afternoon. There had been a tramontane wind for several days, which at first had swept the sky clean with its raw, cold breath, but now it had turned sweet and mild, and with the sun like your warm hand on my shoulder, I felt the optimism and yearnings of springtime turning over in me. I ached for your company. Lizards were out on the rocks sunning themselves. A thousand sparrows darted among the live-oaks and shouted your name. Sap was dripping from broken twigs, and buds were fat and yellow.
“Do you remember the hill beyond the farm where we saw the seven black lambs? As I walked, following the cart ruts around its shoulder, I saw in the corner of my eye, up at the crest, a figure, a creature of some kind. Looking more closely I made out a person lying supine on the bald, stony crown of the hill. The form did not move. I left the track and struck out through the brush, climbing. There may have been a path, but I could not find one. I tore my clothes and scratched my feet.
“At last I broke out onto the barren upper reaches of the hill. Dry boulders—tufts of nettle and spikey grass—a place that even goats had avoided. There on the hard ground a man lay flat on his back, looking stonily at the empty sky above him. I bent over him and put my hand on his forehead, which burned like a sun-baked rock. At my touch the man started feebly to cough. A terrible anger began to flame in me, as I realized who this was—a slave, Lucan, sick in the lungs, abandoned by a master to whom he had become a burden.
“I flew down the hill weeping and ran all the way home, and I asked Mela to let me have four strong men and a litter, and we went and got the man and brought him here. I have been nursing him day and night. I feed him tiny sips of hot gruel and bathe his face with damp cloths. Just today he has begun to be able to speak. He spent two nights in that north wind. He is young, younger than you, and very ill. I don’t know whether he will live. He is too frightened yet to tell me the name of his master.
“Ah, Lucan, I know that you will find your way back to your poem. How urgent it is! This kind of heartlessness, in which Rome wallows, wounds me, wounds you. I am only able to reach out to one person at a time, but you can speak to many through your powerful poem. Speak, speak, dear heart!
“Farewell.”
Comment from our agent:
Our brief penetration of the Mela household tends to make us feel that Mela’s role, if any, in whatever is being concocted, is a wholly passive one. He has chosen, first as wife and now as mistress, women who take charge of him. He condones, or at least does nothing to limit, the activities of Epicharis, even though he must surely see that they are deeply disturbing to the proprietors and householders of a wide region.
These activities of hers are incessant, but they seem to us to be scattered, impulsive, and deficient of any coherent political meaning or effect. She is a meddlesome sympathizer. I confess that we have not yet worked our way deeply enough into the Mela establishment to be able to rule out the possibility of clandestine meetings or rendezvous, and we do not know what messages Lucan may or may not have been carr
ying back and forth from the capital. But all we have seen, really, is a woman who goes to the market every day overflowing with agonizing concern. She is physically so lovely that it is all too easy for her to take reward for her gestures in the adoration of others’ eyes—or, in the case of males, in signs of acute but strictly forbidden desire.
We speak of gestures; this is all her activities consist of—bits of pantomime. Glimpses of gentility (for she seems to be a rich lady) leveling itself with common folk. She relieves an old woman of her market basket and carries it for her. She bends over a beggar’s leg and washes an open ulcer with lint soaked in oil of eucalyptus. She squats on the harbor mole in peasant fashion and helps an old man to clean his bucketful of fish. As we have seen, she rescues a sick slave set out to exposure and tries to nurse him back to health—to be a slave to Mela?
It is true that the edge of anger and the “gift of provocation” (mentioned in our instructions) are always in evidence. She talks and talks. But we have not yet uncovered any specific or patterned incitements on her part. She makes these ignorant people feel dissatisfied, but so far as we can tell she does not organize their resentments in any way. Hence we feel that her activities could go on for a decade and still not produce significant rebellion.
The slaves in the Mela household are not in agreement about her relationship with Lucan. Some say they have seen signs of physical transactions between the two, but when these persons are pressed, it turns out that none has seen embraces, nobody has surprised the pair in hiding, there are none of the usual accounts of disarrayed clothing or semen on bed-sheets. The rest of the slaves affirm that Epicharis is faithful to Mela and that she treats Lucan as a nursemaid would treat a child. Difficult to evaluate these contradictions. It must be said that the “best” slaves in the household are fierce partisans of Epicharis. This has made our penetration difficult. From our point of view her gestures seem trivial and shallow; these “best” slaves obviously see them otherwise.