Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

Many suspected foul play, but they bowed to the logic of history, according to Tacitus: in royal families, brother had ever been at war with brother; the principate could not be shared. “Death to the weaker; leave the stronger to reign in the empty throne room,” Seneca had written, probably only a few weeks earlier, in Apocolocyntosis, quoting Vergil’s advice on ending strife in a beehive with two “kings.” But in Apocolocyntosis, Seneca had also depicted Augustus, among the company of the gods, thundering disdain at Claudius for killing members of his family. And in De Ira, he had compared a princeps to a gentle physician, administering death only as a form of mercy when a patient was beyond cure. For the author of those two works, the murder of Britannicus raised disquieting questions. Was a moral principate, an administration compatible with Stoic precepts, going to be possible? Seneca had based his vision of good governance on the regime of Augustus; but the regime to which he belonged, dominated by an insecure, spoiled teenager and his unstable mother, seemed a long way off from that shining ideal. He stood closer to the moral universe of his tragedies, works like Medea and Phaedra, than to De Ira and his other prose works.