Cluvius gives us a painful picture of Seneca’s role at court, five years into the reign of Nero. The high-minded Stoic, who had begun by setting Augustan goals and guidelines for the regime, had been sucked ever deeper into the mire of family intrigue. He was struggling to hold on to his influence over Nero, believing he could still do some good. But the methods he now had to use were expedient in the extreme. To act as imperial panderer, dispatching an ex-slave to the princeps to stop him from sleeping with his mother, brandishing Burrus and the guard as an implicit threat—these were hardly
...more
