Seneca alone remained, of the old guard who had helped usher in Nero’s age of gold. Isolated and vestigial, he lingered on, with no clear role to play in the regime but no hope of leaving it. The job Agrippina had given him long ago, that of rector, “steersman,” of the emperor’s youth, had ended. So too had the roles he had subsequently taken on—senior counselor, speechwriter, caretaker of government, voice of Nero’s conscience. He lived now in twilight, a prisoner chained to the palace by the very moral stature that had brought him there to begin with.
