Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

In his prose treatises and in Letters to Lucilius, Seneca examined suicide from every angle, especially the question of when it was called for. Wasting disease might justify it, or the abuse of a cruel tyrant, or the certainty that death was coming soon in any case. As he awaited word from Nero’s palace, Seneca might have reflected that though he was approaching a critical threshold in all three areas, he had not crossed it in any. He still might hope that banishment, not death, would be Nero’s verdict. His philosophic stature might protect him, as it later shielded his fellow Stoic sage Musonius Rufus. Seneca was also in mind of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, whose life in exile—if that was to be her fate—would be much harder without him. “Her spiritus depends on mine,” he had written in one of the Letters, using the Latin word for the breath of life. “The spiritus must be called back as it flees—though in torment—out of reverence for our dear ones, and held on the tip of our lips. For a good man must live not as long as he wants, but as long as he ought.” Those words might have recurred to him as he sat with Paulina, a woman who had never offended Nero but, if familiar patterns prevailed, would be considered guilty by association.