Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

The dilemmas Seneca now faced—ethical, political, and deeply personal—would grow more complex and pressing through the decade he was to spend at Nero’s side. To judge by his few oblique references to them, he was never to find resolution. He would describe himself, near the end of that decade, as suffering from an incurable moral illness, able to gain partial relief but no cure. Perhaps that was the necessary outcome of his decision, long before, to enter politics even while pursuing his Stoic moral pilgrimage. He had attained both the wisdom of a sage and the power of a palace insider—but could the two selves coexist? Seneca was not ready to give up on the ideal of a moral principate. His greatest assets, virtuosic eloquence and literary ingenuity, were still as potent as ever. Twice before, he had used these gifts to accomplish feats of dexterity: preaching acceptance of death while also begging for recall from exile, in Consolation to Polybius; viciously lampooning a dead princeps while exalting a living one, in Apocolocyntosis. His command of words was such as to make any goal seem possible. Perhaps it could even hold together his swiftly diverging paths.