Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

The gruesome self-disemboweling came to be seen as an exemplary act of lived philosophy. It showed a heroic devotion to autonomy—the personal freedom that Caesar’s victory had threatened—and a superhuman defiance of pain and fear. As the Caesarean system took hold, Cato’s suicide took on new meaning to those who mourned loss of liberty, shining ever brighter as a moral exemplum. In Seneca’s works, it glows incandescent—as does nearly everything Cato did or said. But political suicide in Seneca’s day was a different gesture than it was in Cato’s. Often it signaled acquiescence to autocracy rather than defiance. A bizarre compact had been struck between aristocracy and ruler: the princeps would allow his victims to pass on their wealth to their heirs, rather than forfeiting it to the state, if they executed themselves rather than force him to use his Praetorians. They could save self-respect, and avoid the horror of decapitation, if they took their own lives. Their bodies would be accorded due rites of burial. The princeps could then present their death to the public as evidence of guilt, or at least of surrender.