The Conspiracy
Page 22
I cannot say to you that I am sorry.
Verify the death, and give us an exact account of it.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
By mounted courier.
Seneca has requested permission of me, but I do not feel that I should be the one to grant or deny it, to have near him at his death his nephew Lucan.
I realize that sending this message postpones the carrying out of Himself’s command until very late hours, but I believe, I hope correctly, that Himself would want to make this decision.
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
By mounted courier.
Permission not granted. Lucan is a confessed conspirator against the Emperor’s life and is under house arrest. Himself allows Seneca the consolation of the presence of his physician and friend Statius Annaeus. We have sent for him, and he will be brought directly there.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
By mounted courier.
Seneca’s wife Paulina, saying she does not wish to survive her husband, has opened her veins as he opened his—before the arrival of the surgeon. Does Himself want this?
To PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police, from TIGELLINUS
By mounted courier.
No. Bind up Paulina’s wounds. Do not let her die.
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
By mounted courier.
Seneca is dead. Paulina lives. Full report in the morning.
April 29
To TIGELLINUS from PAENUS, Tribune of Secret Police
I have been up all night writing this report. I am weary to the marrow. A dim gray hint of morning in the rectangle of my window cannot pale the hypnogogic phantoms that dance in the dark corners of my room, mocking me for the stupid account I have written. They are noblewomen, these dancers, pale as woodsmoke, perhaps a chorus of Paulinas and Epicharises. They sway and dip. They point their fingers at my desk. Closing my eyes does no good; they surge into larger and more menacing dream figures. You were cruel to me after the torture of Epicharis; very well, be cruel again. Once more I have been shaken. What sort of career have I? Who are we, Tigellinus? Seneca was in fact dangerous. But not, I think, for the reason we fancied. Read these poor shards of the truth of what happened last evening, and judge for yourself. I must risk sleep and the company of these women, the personages of my threadbare conscience.
The Execution of Seneca
The Tribune Silvanus returned to Marcellinus’s house in the fourth night hour, and he informed me of the verdict. Though he had had it from the lips of Himself, he was unwilling to deliver it to Seneca, so it fell to me to announce the sentence. I asked Silvanus to provide a guard of six tall soldiers, and he did.
Seneca and the small company were still on couches in the dining room, and their conversation, as before, was animated, punctuated by exclamations and sallies of laughter. They fell silent, however, on my approach and that of the guard of six.
I thought it best, again, to be formal.
PAENUS: Nero Caesar has commanded me to announce to you, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the sentence of death.
SENECA, calmly: I am not surprised.
At once a clamor of wailing and lamentations went up from Paulina and the host and hostess. A slave of Marcellinus’s, who had been pouring wine, ran from the room, and soon appeared, one by one, the train of Seneca’s freedmen (our famous Cleonicus, weeping like a rain cloud, among the first), secretaries, bearers, and other slaves who had accompanied their patron and master on his trip into the countryside. There was universal crying, moaning, breast-beating.
Seneca raised his arms and made arresting motions.
SENECA: My friends! My friends! Please be generous enough to let me speak to this policeman.
This perfectly accurate designation was spoken without sarcasm or even weight, but it served to reduce me in everyone’s eyes, including, I am sorry to say, my own, to a rather shameful condition of inadequacy. It was as if the wine-wet mouth in that benign, rubicund face had said that such an important message should have been delivered to such an important man by a high-ranking military person, indeed by a Co-Commander of the Praetorian Guard if not by the Supreme Commander, the Emperor Himself. Seneca was the only calm one in the room. His gestures were stately, larger than lifesize. I was reminded of Epicharis’s having said that his every pose was struck as if he were modeling for a sculptor chipping at marble.
SENECA, mildly, to me: It would console my last hours to have with me my dear nephew Lucan. May I send for him?
At once I realized that this was not a decision that a policeman could make, and I replied to Seneca that I would dispatch a messenger to Nero Caesar to ask for the Imperial pleasure. I left the room, I wrote and sent off the message, and—knowing that I could not remain apart from a man under a capital sentence—I returned to the banquet room.
Seneca was now speaking words of consolation to his wife, friends, and dependents. Where, he asked, with an indulgent smile, were all the philosophic words of good sense he had been imparting to them all these years? Certainly they should not be surprised by this verdict, any more than he was, for they all knew about Nero’s cruelty. Nero had done away with an uncle, a brother, a mother, a wife; there was not much left but to get rid of a man who had been teacher, guardian, and friend all in one. Gradually, as Seneca talked, the lamentations were stilled.
SENECA: There could not be a better time for me to depart than this. There would have been little left for me save the dregs in the cask—where the amount is small and the quality vile. I am at the most delightful moment of life, when it is on the downward slope but has not yet reached the abrupt decline. I am ready. I have always said that we die a little every day of our lives; this is only an arrival. You have been patient and tender, Paulina, about my asthma; some physicians call its shortness of breath “practicing how to die.” I am rehearsed and ready.
He talked on in this way, in his soothing, level, pedagogical voice. There was a certain pomposity in all this, but even the portentousness and heaviness were luminous, in a way, because this was so essentially Seneca’s pomposity, it had such integrity. He was being completely himself. I found that I had in my chest a warm and humid congestion, a painful small globe of mourning. (Yes, Tigellinus, I know; you will make me pay for that line—but I remind you of your response to the Seneca file I sent you.)
SENECA: Suppose I were given a magical choice—that of living my life over again. How would I have lived? What would I have changed?
Now Seneca gave a sudden, brief, involuntary start, a shudder of surprise, as if something important had just come to him. He beckoned to a person in the retinue at the side of the room; it was one of his secretaries. He bade the man keep a record of what he was saying. So even in these moments Seneca was aware of the publishability of words! And he began now to choose his expressions with greater care than before.
SENECA: We Stoics find that pleasure is a vice. The trouble with pleasure is that it is fickle, wayward, and often spurious. One says he takes pleasure in a friend’s being elected Consul, or getting married, or having a child; but these happenings are not really joys but often are only the beginnings of sorrow. Joy is a permanent and stable raising of the spirit—of a spirit that trusts in its own goodness and truth. I have had such joys, and I think of them now. Solitude. I have known the pure joy of being alone in contemplation. I have gazed for hours from the walks in my garden at the rim of the Alban hills, and at the Sabines capped with snow. Friendship. I have felt a joy in thinking of those I care about, even when I have been separated from them; and in their company I have known the equal giving and taking of the best that is in us. Love. Paulina—you have entered into my being, I have seen in you not only the woman I desired but always the sort of woman one truly desires.
SENECA: I have loved Lucilius Junior, even at a distance—a friend like a son; in recent years I have written him a letter every day. And well-being. In spite of my malady I have had joy in my body, in cool baths, in simple foods and exercise—how you used to laugh, Paulina, when I did “the clothes-cleaner’s jump,” imitating the launderer treading clothes in a great vat to get them clean! My body has never dominated me. He will have many masters who makes his body his master. I have had lasting joy from mine, because through it I have been in touch with the warmest and most sensitive aspects of life.
Seeming to have forgotten his own question about how he would reorder a new life, if he could have one, Seneca turned now to his host, Marcellinus.
SENECA: You are young, Marcellinus. I see in you a man who is struggling. You are marvelously witty, you can make mourners smile. When I begin to bore you with my everlasting moralizing, you trot out and make sausage meat of this philosopher who was caught in adultery, and that one who stole chickens from a neighbor, and the other who dressed in rags and took huge fees at court. You have great force of character, but you may be skidding toward depravity—I see that you are strongly drawn toward money-making. There is no harm in that in itself, because it is the sign of an unstable mind not to be able to endure riches. But I trust you will remember what Epicurus said: “The acquisition of riches has been for many men not an end but only a change of troubles.” And if the fruit of this truth is that you decide some day to give up your riches, I hope you will avoid the perverted forms of self-display so many young men fall into who renounce their patrimonies—repellent attire, unkempt hair, slovenly beard, open scorn of silver dishes, a couch on the bare earth. Our Stoic motto is, you know, “Live according to Nature.” Philosophy calls for plain living but not for penance. You can live plainly enough with what you have, without giving it up at all. But in your tendency to scan the future with a feverish eye, Marcellinus, always planning, planning, you make me think of another saying of Epicurus: “The fool, with all his other faults, has also this—he is always getting ready to live.” We all live too much in the future. Some things torment us before they should; others torment us more than they should; some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of anticipating, or exaggerating, or imagining sorrow.
Here Seneca paused, deep in thought. One of his slaves stepped forward and handed him a damp cloth, with which Seneca wiped his face and his sweaty bald head; he thanked the weeping slave with a loving look.
SENECA: I have made mistakes. By the standards of the Emperor’s court, Marcellinus, I am a failure. I can tell. Lately no one has come to ask my advice, least of all the man who needs it most, poor Nero. Successful men are blockaded by troops of people who call themselves friends, but those who have failed have more than enough solitude to become philosophers; they can only see the backs of those same people fleeing from the very thing that will some day test their own worth. Most of my mistakes came during my time with Nero; I won’t recite them. I was—I suppose I still am—vain, and I don’t like to parade my faults and errors. I have made some great and mysterious mistake with dear Lucan; there is a gulf between us. But if I put my joys and my mistakes in the balance, Paulina, I am satisfied. I would certainly accept the offer of living my life again, but, Paulina, I would live it over again in exactly the same way. I would change nothing. You see, if I identified all my past mistakes and avoided them in a new life, I would be obliged to make other mistakes in their place. One cannot even try to be wise who has not made a fool of himself, lost friends, compromised, had the shame of telling lies—as we all do, we all do.
At this point the mounted courier returned from the Golden House with the message denying Seneca’s request for Lucan’s company. I was called from the room to hear his report, and I returned to deliver the rebuff to Seneca, adding also, however, that Statius Annaeus was on his way.
Seneca then asked me for tablets on which to inscribe a new will, but I, hardened by Himself’s refusal of the request about Lucan, and worried about a further postponement of the execution, denied this favor, too—and at once regretted it, because of Seneca’s gracious, if conceited, reaction. He turned to Paulina and his friends and dependents, and:
SENECA: They deny me the right to readjust my repayments to you for all that you have done for me, so I must bequeath to you by word of mouth the only thing I have left to give—but anyway the noblest thing I have to give: my way of life. If you will accept that and live by it, my dearest ones, you will be known in time for your integrity and loyal friendship.
That put the policeman where he belonged—and did it the more firmly because Seneca included me with his eyes in this bequest. Uffa! I felt the way I feel when I get certain messages from you, Tigellinus, but I must say your messages are both less subtle and less powerful. In other words, I saw in Seneca in those moments, alongside the formidable sweetness and probity, also a flash of bitterness, hatred, and contempt. That raised right eyebrow!
But Seneca faced death; I faced only myself.
Now Seneca stood up and went to Paulina and took her in his arms, and he spoke to her as if they were alone together. He begged her to pay their past relationship the greatest possible compliment—of mourning only a short while, and then living proudly, thinking of the good life they had shared. In this speech to her he was wholly unaffected; these two must indeed have opened themselves to each other over the years. He invited her even to marry again soon, to some honorable and kindly widower—thus paying a further homage to their life together, as if to say, the married state suits me very well because I know how rich it can be.
But Paulina now surprised us. Her eyes were full to the brim with emotion but not, now, with tears, and she still clasped Seneca; she spoke in a steady, deep-throated voice.
PAULINA: I cannot do what you ask, dear man, because I am going with you. I cannot see you off on this journey; I cannot stay behind. I claim the right as your wife, a person partly given to you and partly taken from you, as the source myself of much of your strength and wisdom, and so really a part of you—a sharer in your crime, which is the crime of being too strong to submit either to a tyrant or to fear; as all this, I claim the right to the executioner’s stroke alongside you.
Seneca accepted, perhaps too quickly and readily, certainly with no pause for thought, this claim of hers.
SENECA: I have tried to point out how you could live without me; you prefer to die with me. You know your worth, and I certainly cannot deny that you are the best part of my strength. All right, then let us show our strength together—and your courage, Paulina, will deserve much more fame than mine. I have no choice; you have.
I was so affected by the bravery of this quiet woman that I did not at first consider my own responsibility in the situation. At his acquiescence her face became radiant.
Now Seneca asked Marcellinus for a sharp knife and some basins. Marcellinus left the room and soon came back with a dagger, and a slave brought basins.
Paulina and Seneca, resolute and altogether steady, put two wrists side by side and with one motion of the dagger Seneca quite gently, if that word can apply, opened the veins of both. Then Paulina took the weapon and made a like common incision on their other wrists placed next to one another.
PAULINA, looking in Seneca’s eyes: It does not hurt, Seneca.
I was suddenly greatly alarmed and hurried from the room to send a mounted courier to ask whether Himself wanted Paulina to die.
When I went back in the room, Seneca, bleeding very slowly because of his age and because his body had been so wasted by a frugal diet, was carefully opening some veins in his legs.
That done, he began speaking again to his friends and retinue, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. First he gave some advice about how they sh
ould mourn him.
SENECA: Your eyes shouldn’t be dry when we have left you, but don’t let them overflow, either. Weep, but don’t wail. Do you want to know the reason for noisy lamentations? People want to give proof of their bereavement in their mourning; they don’t succumb to sorrow, they root around in it and dress themselves in it. You know, my teacher Attalus used to say, “Remembering lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits are agreeably tart, or as in extremely old wines it is their edge that pleases us. Indeed, after some time has gone by, all that has given us pain burns out, and the pleasure comes to us pure.”
Now there was some bustle as Statius Annaeus came in. Seneca greeted him as if he were a guest, and Statius deported himself well, showing the warm sympathy of a physician and hiding his grief. He examined the wounds of both Seneca and Paulina, declared them well incised and bleeding gently. He asked Marcellinus to have two cathedras brought in, and for their greater comfort he settled the two in these large chairs with their sloping backs.
Then Seneca went on talking—now to his slaves and servants.
SENECA: My dear friends, I’ve tried to treat you as I would wish to be treated by a master. I think we have respected each other. Respect means love; fear and love are oil and water to each other. We have lived together, talked together, planned together. Try to remember what I have given you tonight—the pattern of my life. And remember that I learned part of that pattern in humility from some of you.
In the midst of my anxiety lest Paulina should die before a message could come back from Himself, I was nevertheless able to perceive a certain false note in this speech of Seneca’s to his slaves, and in their response—many came forward, fell to their knees, and kissed his and Paulina’s hands. The tears of Cleonicus seemed to be, and may have been, perfectly sincere, but I was in a position to know that there was surely irony in them. And I remembered, against the background of Seneca’s sentimental writings on slaves, his not knowing even of the existence of the scullery slave who might have poisoned him.