Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

The invented Greek word apocolocyntosis, coined by analogy with apotheosis, may simply be intended to convey the spirit of the ludicrous. For Rome had witnessed a truly ludicrous event by late 54: the official deification, sponsored by Nero and Agrippina, of Claudius. It was the first time in almost two decades that such an honor had been granted, and only the second time a princeps had received it. Augustus, of course, had been the first. The notion that Claudius ranked with his most sanctified predecessor was patently absurd. Seneca’s older brother Gallio, formerly called Novatus, quipped to his cronies that Claudius had been hauled up to heaven with a hook—meaning the hook the Romans used to haul the corpses of criminals through the Forum, before they were dumped into the Tiber.

Laughable or not, the move held advantages for Nero. He could now be called divi filius, son of a god, as he soon was on coins and in inscriptions. By a twist of irony, the same rise in stature accrued to Britannicus, Claudius’ natural son, the new emperor’s chief rival and foremost threat.

Livia had become priestess of Augustus’ cult and was thereafter accompanied by a lictor—a bearer of bundled rods, symbolizing the right to use force as an instrument of control. Agrippina, in fact, saw to it that she would outstrip her predecessor. The senatorial acts that deified Claudius awarded her two lictors to Livia’s one. They also set aside funds for a colossal new temple in central Rome, to be superintended by Agrippina as flamen or head priestess.

It was this solemn act of deification, this prop to the authority of both Nero and Agrippina, that Seneca mocked in Apocolocyntosis. Abandoning the reserved, high-minded tone of the moral treatises, he here writes in such an uncharacteristically funny, irreverent voice that, were it not for a chance comment by Cassius Dio, no one would ever think the work was his.

Rome now had the youngest ruler the Western world had ever seen. Even Alexander the Great, the paragon of precocity, had entered his third decade before assuming rule over Macedon and starting his conquest of the East. Nero was still sixteen, yet reigned over an empire larger than Alexander’s had ever been. And his talent for leadership, his inclinations toward command and rule, were nothing like Alexander’s. Lacking in self-assurance, easily seduced by fantasies and whims, Nero was going to be vulnerable to intimidation and control. So at least his mother might hope, for it was she who planned to control him. Nero’s youth, idealized for public consumption in the vigorous portrait statues of the day, posed a welcome contrast to the decrepitude of Claudius. Rome’s hopes for a bold new beginning were high. Poems and pamphlets—among them Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis—proclaimed the dawn of a new golden age. Such sentiments were by now de rigueur at the accession of an emperor, but they seemed more convincing when addressed to a trim, athletic, moderately handsome teenager.

No outward signs had forewarned of Caligula’s madness; just so, there was no way to know, at Nero’s accession, what weaknesses were lurking in the boy’s nature. The principate, that great magnifier of mental flaws, would bring them out in time—but few could have guessed how soon.

Caligula was not the only nightmare that the Roman elite were trying to escape. Claudius, too, had murdered large numbers of them (or in a more generous mood, had forced them to commit suicide). He had used the vague charge of maiestas, treason, to arrest his enemies, then tried them in secret proceedings within closed chambers of the palace. Messalina and palace freedmen often joined him on these tribunals, sitting in judgment over men indicted on their say-so. Acting in concert with high courtiers, playing on Claudius’ fears and superstitions, his wife and her allies had often goaded the emperor into a guilty verdict. Claudius’ regime was widely disliked by the Senate for these abuses. But Claudius was also the source of Nero’s legitimacy, since it was he who had adopted and promoted the boy. The first challenge facing the new princeps was what posture to take toward his predecessor. A balance had to be struck between the reverence befitting a son and protégé, and the reckoning up of past abuses.

The historian Tacitus, writing many years later, notes the sophistication of the funeral speech and remarks on Seneca’s “pleasing talent, well suited to the ears of that time.” Given the patent fictions the speech contained, this praise is ambiguous, one of Tacitus’ many multilayered comments on Seneca’s career. “The ears of that time,” after all, were accustomed to hearing doublespeak and empty flattery. Tacitus was himself both a writer and a courtier, who had survived the reign of the despotic Domitian only by carefully adapting his words. He had sympathy for Seneca’s plight—but a certain contempt as well.

A compact of mutual respect had been struck between Senate and princeps, as in the days of Augustus. The nightmare of Caligula seemed to be gone, the policies summed up in a slogan that Seneca quoted on three occasions, always with revulsion: Oderint dum metuant—“Let them hate, as long as they fear.”

The ideas Seneca put into the inaugural speech share a common outlook with De Ira, which by now was certainly in circulation. That work taught the powerful and proud that it was better to ignore a wrong than stoop to anger. “To fight against an equal is risky; against a higher-up, insane; against someone beneath you, degrading,” Seneca wrote in De Ira. He gave the example of Cato, that Stoic nonpareil who, when spat upon in public by an adversary, merely wiped his face and returned a good-natured quip. If one could not turn a blind eye, one could at least forgive, knowing that all human beings are prone to do wrong.

Every night before bed, Seneca confides to his readers, he sat quietly beside his wife and took stock of his day, reviewing moments when he gave in to his passions. Perhaps he grew too hot during a dispute, or spoke more sharply to an underling than the man could handle. In each case, he tells himself: “See that you don’t do that again, but now I forgive you.”

While Claudius lived, the task of getting Nero onto the throne had kept Agrippina, her son, and her son’s tutor in close alignment. Now that this goal had been achieved, their relations had become far less stable. Much would depend for Seneca on how he negotiated the change in the troika. Stoicism had taught him much about managing emotion and keeping the rational mind in control. But how rational could he remain amid the wrath of a possessive, domineering woman, still vigorous in her late thirties, and the rebellious, impetuous urges of a seventeen-year-old boy?

It was more than mere whimsy, for Nero knew that she had carefully cultivated the allegiance of the Praetorians for years. They were loyal more to her than to him. He had much to gain from seeming, in their eyes, a devoted son.

The message sent through these media was clear: Nero meant the public to see Agrippina as a sharer in rule. It was an obvious move for a youth who had been promoted to the principate in his teens, but it posed considerable risks. Romans who had witnessed the depredations of Messalina, or the machinations of Livia, Augustus’ wife, before her, were not eager to see another woman grasping the levers of power. The specter of impotentia, the will to power that Roman men demonized in Roman women, was again rearing its head.

Seneca explained his philosophy of executive restraint in De Ira. There he compared a leader’s handling of the state to a physician’s care of the body, an analogy he would often return to. Just as a good doctor seeks the least aggressive cure, a leader should use the gentlest methods of correction. He should chastise with only words if possible, then proceed to the mildest of blows. Execution should be only a last, desperate resort, for those who are so morally “ill” that death is, in effect, euthanasia. Had Agrippina been permitted her own turn on this medical metaphor, she might have argued the benefits of prophylaxis. Sometimes tumors had to be excised before they turned malignant. Or she might have fired back at Seneca the line he had recently quoted himself, from Vergil’s guide to beekeeping: “Death to the weaker; leave the stronger to reign in the empty throne room.”

Like most Romans, Seneca mistrusted ambitious women, especially mothers who sought power through their sons. In a letter to his own mother, Helvia, from his exile on Corsica, Seneca had praised her for keeping out of politics even with two sons in the Senate: “You did not make use of our influence as though it were family property.… The only things that touched you from our elections to office were the pleasure they gave you and the costs they imposed.” Helvia’s passivity posed a stark contrast, Seneca wrote, to “those mothers who wield the potentia of their sons, with the impotentia of women.” His wordplay contrasts political governance—normally the province of men—with female inability to “govern” desire and emotion.

Seneca never mentions Agrippina in any of his surviving writings. Indeed his moral treatises deal only infrequently with women in general. De Ira characterizes anger as a “womanly and childish vice,” but its cases in point come from the realm of adult males. Even in Apocolocyntosis, his scathing satire on the abuses of Claudius, Seneca mentions Messalina—the moving force behind numerous executions, and his own exile—only as a victim, not as a perpetrator, of crimes.

Few today would think to read De Ira together with Medea, though the two works might well have been composed concurrently. Indeed, among dozens of modern editions of Seneca, a huge array of anthologies that organize his works for modern readers, only a single volume dares to package tragedies and prose works together. For why would any reader—still less, any writer—choose to inhabit two nearly opposite moral universes at the same time? Medea shows anger run amok, mushrooming into gigantic and hideous forms. “Ira, I follow wherever you lead,” Medea says as she stabs her sons to death, one after the other. But in De Ira, Seneca argues that anger can and must be subdued so that the rational mind can prevail. Our exemplar is Seneca himself, sitting with his wife as evening falls, calmly chastising himself for raising his voice that day.

Interpreters have struggled, and will struggle forever, to understand how one mind could have produced both bodies of work. It is as though Emerson had taken time off from writing his essays to compose the opera Faust. Some have described Seneca’s tragedies as inversions of his prose works—instruction by negative example—but that is too pat an explanation. The author of the plays expresses thoughts that the author of the treatises seems unable even to entertain. The last couplet of Medea, spoken by Jason as he watches his murderous wife escaping in a dragon-drawn flying chariot, resounds with nihilistic horror: Make your way up, through the high expanses of heaven; Proclaim, wherever you go, that there are no gods.

The tragedies feature many such moments. One would guess that their author was well acquainted with despair, even madness. But the prose treatises are optimistic and pious. They proclaim everywhere that there are gods, or Go...

In which body of work do we hear the real Seneca? Or are they two equally authentic expressions of what has been called his “compartmentalized mind”? Did he write his tragedies as a covert cri de coeur, a release of moral revulsion he could not otherwise express? That certainly seems the case, as will be seen, with his most ambitious, most harrowing drama, Thyestes—perha...

In Medea and Phaedra, Seneca plumbed the depths of what he saw as a typically female affliction, impotentia—an inability to master lust, restrain envy, or tamp down the need for control and power. It was a condition he, and other Roman males, feared in all contexts but particularly when it entered the political realm. The passions of unbridled women could destroy that realm and rush the world headlong toward apocalypse. It was these fears of female impotentia that Rome, and Seneca, confronted as they watch...

Emperors felt entitled to any woman they desired, regardless of either party’s marital status. Nero’s passion for Acte was not in itself worrisome. Indeed, it brought relief to many, who had seen Caligula debauch himself with the wives of senators and consuls, humiliating the elite with rape and degradation. The affair with Acte harmed no one—but it sent Agrippina into a rage. She regarded it as a betrayal by her son and a challenge to her authority. “A handmaid for a daughter-in-law!” she exclaimed to her partisans, and demanded of Nero that he end the liaison. “I made you emperor,” she reminded him, implying that she might undo what she had done. Nero had had enough. His mother’s carping and bullying had annoyed him before, so much that he had threatened to abdicate and run off to Rhodes, far from her influence. Now he was ready to risk a true breach, and he turned to his best natural ally, Seneca. Seneca had aided Nero early on in the affair with Acte, directing his close friend Annaeus Serenus, newly appointed as head of Rome’s vigiles (a combined police and fire-fighting corps), to help conceal it. Serenus pretended to be Acte’s lover, passing along Nero’s gifts to the girl as though they came from him. It was a sneaky and passive form of support—given no doubt in hope the affair would soon run its course—but it showed plainly where Seneca’s sympathies lay. If mother and son were going to war, he would side with the son.

The choice could not have been an easy one. Agrippina was his patroness, the woman who had brought him back from exile and given him the power he now enjoyed. He would lose that power, and perhaps his life, if he fell on the wrong side of the rift. Agrippina might even go over the edge if she was pushed too far, a dangerous outcome that Seneca could not have hoped for. Even if Nero must triumph in the end, Seneca had nothing to gain—and indeed had much to lose—from the total estrangement of his two masters.

A young man’s dalliance with a servant was spiraling into a crisis. Agrippina was lashing out viciously at her son, with her uncanny instinct for what would threaten him politically and terrorize him psychologically. There was no doubt of her standing with the Praetorian Guard, the keystone to control of the throne. The guard had always been fiercely loyal to the house of Germanicus, whose memory they deeply revered. With the guard behind her, Agrippina could, if it came to that, destroy Seneca, Burrus, and Nero together, as easily as she had created all three ex nihilo. The triumvirate forged at the end of Claudius’ regime—the strange triangle of Agrippina, Nero, and Seneca—had collapsed. It was now a game of two against one, with Agrippina desperate not to end up on the losing side. She had shown her willingness to use any weapon, to escalate to the highest pitch of emotion, in order to hold Nero’s allegiance. For Seneca, adherent of Reason, advocate of moderation and the suppression of anger, it was not clear whether, or how, to fight back.

Agrippina had shown, in the Acte crisis, that she would use Britannicus at any opportunity to gain leverage. She had the supreme weapon that could be held over a princeps, a viable replacement. Only when this weapon was defused could Nero hope to control his mother—though she would still have in her arsenal the support of the Praetorians, the heroic legacy of Germanicus, and a remarkable ability to lavish or deny maternal love.

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.

Any illusion that partnership with Burrus, who controlled the Praetorians, would protect him had now been dispelled. In the balance-of-fear calculations that governed palace relationships, poison was a great trump card. Nero now had an expert poisoner in his service and, more important, the courage to deploy her weapons. The threat that Nero’s power posed must have been present to Seneca’s mind at every state dinner thereafter.

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.

Seneca expounded those principles more fully in De Clementia than he had in De Ira. (The two treatises are in a sense complementary, since ira seeks to impose punishment while clementia remits it.) Both essays take the position that all humankind is prone to err and therefore all deserve mercy. But De Clementia is more emphatic on this point.

Everyone should be merciful, given the universal guilt of humankind; but, Seneca claims, emperors—and kings—have even greater reason to do so. Remarkably, he does not blush to dust off the old, vilified word rex as a virtual synonym for princeps. For more than five centuries, Rome had held reges in contempt, which meant that emperors had to conceal their true status. The Roman state was, in theory, still a republic, with the Senate gently guided by a “first citizen.” In De Clementia, Seneca drops the veil of pretense. Rome has become an autocracy, he grants—and a good thing, too, for the alternative is chaos. Should the mob ever throw off its “yoke,” he asserts in the essay’s opening words, it would harm itself and everyone else—an assessment that had propped up the Caesars for a century but that no one had yet dared admit. Seneca begins De Clementia, then, by ceding Nero absolute power; but then he shows why his power should be restrained. Kindness from rulers wins adoration from subjects and results in a long, secure reign; severity breeds fear, and from fear springs conspiracy. The divine Augustus is brought forward, as in other Senecan works, to exemplify the former approach. Augustus, Nero’s great-great-grandfather, found out that a trusted subordinate, Lucius Cinna, was plotting against his life. After a long, tense parley with Cinna, Augustus, far from imposing punishment, awarded him an appointment as consul—the highest political honor. “He was never again the targ...

Nero’s role, as defined by De Clementia, is absolute monarch in law but pious servant of moral principle. He can choose—or already has chosen, under the conceit that Seneca is only showing Nero his own perfection—to rein in power voluntarily. If his fellowship with the all-fallible human race does not compel him, self-interest will.

The second section of De Clementia has not survived intact, but here Seneca went in for theory: defining what clementia is, how it arises and functions. Notionally he was still addressing Nero, but readers knew that the princeps had not the slightest interest in such things. De Clementia, like most of Seneca’s writings, targets multiple audiences and strives for multiple goals. It shows that pure ethical philosophy, the source of Seneca’s high repute, was an ongoing project, though not part of his official brief.

De Clementia is a hugely ambitious effort to hold together a fragmenting life. Perhaps Seneca could accomplish what Aristotle, four centuries earlier, had attempted (in popular legend at least) with Alexander the Great: to bring enlightenment to a global ruler. Perhaps Stoic virtue could after all march hand in hand with power; perhaps the principate could in fact be built on a moral foundation. At least he, Seneca, could be seen making the attempt—a point that would be crucial, should the experiment fail.

Amid Nero’s experiments in anomie and cultivations of his voice, Rome somehow had to be governed. It was becoming clear that the princeps had little interest in statecraft, and no talent for it. His one big initiative in these early years, a proposal to abolish all indirect taxes—customs duties, tolls, and the like—had to be scuttled by embarrassed advisers, on the grounds that it would cause financial ruin. Seneca and Burrus seem to have kept Rome in order to a large degree, though just how large is a matter of debate. Our sources have little to say about governance during these years, preferring personal dramas and court intrigues—the events that, for them, defined Nero’s reign. Tacitus merely implies that the state was being run, without Nero doing much to run it. Seneca and Burrus, aided by a staff of Greek freedmen inherited from the days of Claudius, most likely had their hands full.

The last sentences of the treatise as we have it—spoken by either Seneca or the ventriloquized Socrates, or both at once—contain a disturbingly dark message to Seneca’s accusers: “Looking down from on high, I see the storms that are looming, ready to break on you with their black clouds, or even drawing near, right next to you, about to whisk away you and all you possess.” Seneca seems, inescapably, to be issuing threats—referring obliquely to his ability to pull imperial strings. After one more fist-shaking sentence, De Vita Beata breaks off. An accident of transmission—a leak or infestation of worms that destroyed part of an early manuscript—created the break. But the resulting text gives the impression of an author suddenly realizing he has gone too far. Seneca had allowed his critics to get under his skin. His outrage at being attacked by lesser men made him zealous in his rebuttal. Though he invoked Socrates as his spokesman, he seems not to have learned from his great forerunner about staying above the fray. The rough and tumble of politics, and the intoxicant of proximity to power, were taking their toll on his Stoic serenity.

Cluvius gives us a painful picture of Seneca’s role at court, five years into the reign of Nero. The high-minded Stoic, who had begun by setting Augustan goals and guidelines for the regime, had been sucked ever deeper into the mire of family intrigue. He was struggling to hold on to his influence over Nero, believing he could still do some good. But the methods he now had to use were expedient in the extreme. To act as imperial panderer, dispatching an ex-slave to the princeps to stop him from sleeping with his mother, brandishing Burrus and the guard as an implicit threat—these were hardly roles he had envisioned when he returned to Rome from Corsica, his trunk full of ethical treatises.

Seneca and Nero had been together for ten years now. Nero had grown up, and Seneca had grown old. The princeps had found new allies, among them another former tutor, a Greek freedman named Anicetus (“Invincible”). Nero had elevated this man to admiral of the Misenum fleet, a naval force he was grooming to be his own corps d’élite—the Praetorians being more devoted to his mother. Other freedmen, slaves, and foreigners had begun to rise at court, men whose complete dependence and subservience gratified Nero. The voices that whispered against Seneca and Burrus had grown in number and stridency, and Nero had shown more willingness to listen.

It was what he had wanted to do years before but was prevented by Seneca and Burrus. Now, abetted by Anicetus, Nero found the courage to act. Perhaps Poppaea goaded him on, as Tacitus claims, by insisting she could never be his wife as long as Agrippina lived. But Nero needed no Lady Macbeth to harangue him into crime. He had already killed his adoptive brother on his own initiative; his mother posed a greater threat and caused him greater psychic torment. Did Seneca take part in Nero’s matricidal plan? Tacitus wondered but didn’t know. Dio made Seneca chief instigator, though like much of his testimony on Seneca, this seems little more than slander. The question of collaboration is indeed hard to resolve. A princeps could not have easily hid such a plot from a high-ranked counselor, but perhaps Seneca no longer ranked very high. If Nero kept him in the dark, declining to consult his old ally against Agrippina, then relations between teacher and pupil had truly gone downhill. If Seneca was consulted, he may have seen he could not prevent Nero from acting but could at least help him succeed. Under that scenario, he may have consented to murder if it could be done cunningly, so as to look like an accident.

None of Seneca’s meditations on morality, Virtue, Reason, and the good life could have prepared him for this. Before him, as he entered Nero’s room, stood a frightened and enraged youth of twenty-three, his student and protégé for the past ten years. For the past five, he had allied with the princeps against his dangerous mother. Now the path he had first opened for Nero, by supporting his dalliance with Acte, had led to a botched murder and a political debacle of the first magnitude. It was too late for Seneca to detach himself. The path had to be followed to its end. Every word Seneca wrote, every treatise he published, must be read against his presence in this room at this moment. He stood in silence for a long time, as though contemplating the choices before him. There were no good ones. When he finally spoke, it was to pass the buck to Burrus. Seneca asked whether Burrus could dispatch his Praetorians to take Agrippina’s life.

Now it was Burrus’ turn to face the awful choices that came with collaboration. He too declined to do what the situation, and what full loyalty to Nero, demanded. The Praetorians, he said, had too strong an allegiance to Agrippina, and to the memory of her father. He suggested that Anicetus and the sailors at Misenum finish what they had started.

Nero’s old guard had temporized at a critical pass and thus ceded power to the new. Anicetus eagerly took on the task that Seneca and Burrus had cast off, and Nero instantly affirmed how highly he rated this boon. “Only today did I get control of the empire,” he declared, “and it was a mere freedman who conferred such a great gift.” This barb was aimed at Seneca who, despite having worked for a decade to firm up Nero’s power, had n...

The most important cleanup task in the wake of the messy matricide fell to Seneca. There were concerns that the senators back in Rome, to whom he remained principal liaison, might decry Nero’s deed in the Senate house or conspire with the Praetorians to remove the princeps from power. Seneca was charged with winning their acquiescence. Despite his decline at court, his verbal dexterity was still a vital asset to the regime, as was his high standing among the elite. Here, at least, was a job that toughs and parvenus like Anicetus could not do.

Nero had lacked the courage to proceed openly against his mother or even to acknowledge that he had killed her. Instead he had shown himself nervous and needy, trying to win hearts and minds in the Senate before daring to enter Rome. Indeed, long after the senators had voted to honor him, Nero lingered in Campania, fretting over what reception he would get in the capital. Such a man might be just as dangerous as Caligula, though for different reasons. He would want reassurance and flattery and even—though few in Rome had yet glimpsed his ambitions as a performer—the cheers of sycophantic crowds. His subjects would be required to show not just loyalty but something more, a sort of affection. He would hate anyone in a position to judge him, which meant the entire political class. The aristocracy might again be haunted by old specters—treason trials, banishments, executions, and forced suicides—arising this time not from the whims of a sadist but the demands of a petulant child.

Of many shocking firsts in the history of theater, perhaps none rivals the moment when a Roman emperor, the apex of the social pyramid, appeared in the long cloak and high boots of a Greek citharodist, saying “Please hear me graciously, masters.”

For Seneca, dissent was not an option. His position required him to show support for Nero’s singing debut, however much it disturbed him. Perhaps he even had to assist it, for Dio reports that the sage was enlisted to prompt Nero should he forget his lines. He was being used by the regime, exploited for his tarnished but still lustrous public image, and he knew it. If Seneca observed Thrasea Paetus in the crowd that day, he no doubt envied a man—a Stoic thinker and writer like himself—who could exercise the simple freedom of doing nothing.

Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime’s behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul.

There was of course another reason Seneca stayed by Nero’s side. He had described in De Ira how autocrats exerted control by their power to harm family members.

Though the Roman civil wars had taken place a century before Lucan’s time, they were hardly politically neutral, as Lucan himself understood. The characters who loomed large in his story—the assassins Brutus and Cassius; Cato, the Stoic suicide; and Julius Caesar himself—had by Nero’s day become potent ideological symbols. The birthdays of Brutus and Cassius were observed every year by stiff-necked Thrasea Paetus, in ceremonies that celebrated senatorial autonomy. Cato, too, was widely revered in contemporary writings, as has been seen. Lucan was going to have to walk a thin line in writing about such men while serving under Nero, a descendant of the man slain by them.

Lending at interest, Seneca makes clear in De Beneficiis, is a special kind of giving-receiving relationship, subject to its own fixed rules. At certain points, he stresses the fairness of those rules or insists on the rights of the lender. He sounds content to be one of those lenders and, if necessary, to withdraw credit. But at other points, he castigates the whole project of lending at interest, using the voice of a newly created persona, Demetrius of Sunium.