Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

Of all the tantalizing but ambiguous clues to the mind of Seneca, this is surely the most tantalizing and the most ambiguous. It has no more substance than a story heard and recorded, several decades after the fact, by a man who was not sure he believed it. Yet Tacitus was not willing to dismiss it; nor are many modern historians. It raises the awesome possibility that Seneca, while holding back from action, had hopes of ending up the new princeps, the Western world’s first philosopher king. But it remains only that, a possibility, not subject to proof or refutation. Here is the greatest measure of how little, in the end, we understand Seneca, the man who tried his whole life to reveal his soul yet left so much opaque. After all his discussions of how and why to withdraw from political life, we cannot declare that the rumor Tacitus reported was groundless. We cannot know that Seneca, if Rome had acclaimed him, would have declined to rule.