Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

The breakthrough wrought by Jason’s voyage had since increased a thousandfold, Seneca observes in his play’s most famous passage. Where once a single ship had disturbed the natural order, Rome had now filled the seas with traffic, scrambling the races and dissolving global boundaries. Because of Rome, the Persians, dwellers on the river Euphrates, now drank the Rhine instead, while the sun-baked Indian sipped the frozen streams of Siberia. “The all-traveled earth leaves nothing in the place it once was,” laments the chorus of Corinthians, speaking, as their obvious anachronisms reveal, with Seneca’s own voice.

In Seneca’s view, however—a view that perhaps anticipates the thinking of modern environmentalists—the ceaseless advance of empire would turn the cosmos itself into an enemy.

After 49, Medea would have been risky for another reason. It portrayed a powerful wife wreaking havoc on an imperial house. Agrippina, Seneca’s friend and patroness, could not have relished such a plot, in the wake of her marriage to Claudius. And she would have been even less pleased by Phaedra, Seneca’s other great portrayal of a destructive queen.

Agrippa had founded a town in Germany as a haven for the Ubii, a tribe he had brought under Roman dominion. His son, Germanicus, later made it his base of operations. Agrippina herself had been born there, during her father’s glorious campaigns. This place, as yet only a regional outpost called Ara Ubiorum, was the focal point of her family’s heroic legacy, and Agrippina knew it. She persuaded Claudius to upgrade it to a colonia, a high-ranking Roman town with full legal status, and to name it after her. Never before had a Roman foundation commemorated a woman. Its full name, Colonia Agrippinensis, “Agrippina’s colonia,” proved too cumbersome for many Roman tongues, and so over time a shortened version, Colonia, gave rise to the modern name, Cologne (or Köln).

By a curious coincidence, the careers of these two brothers—Seneca’s older brother Novatus, and Pallas’ brother Antonius Felix—are bound together by an unlikely thread: the travels of the apostle Paul.

Subsequent Roman procurators continued to use the Sicarii as hit men and squeezed the province badly with tax levies. Late in Nero’s reign, a second revolt would break out there, far more serious than that of the Egyptian. Rome would finally crush Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and destroy its Temple, leaving only one wall—today’s Western Wall—standing in place.

In A.D. 53, under a bloodred sky that seemed to onlookers to be on fire, Nero was married to Octavia, daughter of Claudius. He was then sixteen years old, she a few years younger.

The truth of whether Claudius was murdered can never be known for certain, and some scholars do not believe he was. That said, the timing of Claudius’ death is highly suspicious. It fell some three months before Britannicus’ majority,

Rome had witnessed a truly ludicrous event by late 54: the official deification, sponsored by Nero and Agrippina, of Claudius.

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.

Seneca then broadens the scenario and writes as though all Romans are performing the same exercise. Perhaps one is offended by drunken jesting at a dinner party. Perhaps another is jostled at a rich man’s door by a self-important doorkeeper. A third is seated at a banquet table in a spot lower than he feels he deserves. Seneca urges his readers to forgive such slights and take themselves less seriously: “Pull further back, and laugh!”

The work even explains these traits in a way that might look familiar to a modern psychologist. The wealthy and powerful indulge their children and give them no training in overcoming indignities. “The one to whom nothing was refused,” Seneca writes, “whose tears were always wiped away by an anxious mother, will not abide being offended.” The ability to laugh, he suggests, is an antidote to the petulance that comes with privilege.

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.

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.

his most ambitious, most harrowing drama, Thyestes—perhaps the last play he completed and the only one that can be securely dated to his years under Nero.

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 watched Agrippina suddenly come unglued in early 55. What prompted the tempest was not an issue of statecraft but an affair of the heart.

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.

Nero decided to neutralize one of Agrippina’s chief supporters, the freedman Pallas. Officially minister of the exchequer, but party to all backroom schemes, Pallas had amassed enormous influence and more wealth than anyone in Rome—except his deceased former rival, Narcissus. For seven years, he had used his sway on behalf of Agrippina, but now Nero wanted his mother disarmed. He cut a deal with Pallas, allowing the freedman to take his loot with him, no questions asked, if he would leave without making trouble. Pallas exited grandly, accompanied by crowds of attendants and bearers—a rare political gambler who had beaten the house and, for the moment at least, got out with his winnings intact. The loss of her principal ally turned Agrippina apoplectic. A few weeks earlier, she had touted her role in securing the throne for Nero; now she spoke openly of her power to take it away. Britannicus was about to reach manhood, she pointed out to her son, and could easily reclaim his patrimony. In an inversion of her former line, she portrayed Nero as an interloper and a usurper of Britannicus’ rights.

The date of Britannicus’ upcoming birthday grew more threatening as it drew closer. Nero decided he must make that date a deadline in the literal sense—the date by which Britannicus would be dead.

Nero used his mother’s own hired poisoner to accomplish the deed, the Gaul Locusta, “the Crayfish.” Unlike his mother when she killed Claudius, though, Nero did not care about acting in stealth.

Agrippina’s fortunes went into a steep decline, clearly signaled by imperial coinage. Her image was no longer shown facing that of Nero. For a brief time, she appeared in jugate, the profile of the princeps overlaying hers, as she had been portrayed under Claudius. Then she disappeared from state coinage entirely within the year. The “best of mothers” had been thrust from her son’s favor. Spurned, she gravitated toward another outcast at court, her stepdaughter Octavia, orphaned daughter of Claudius and Messalina, now Nero’s unloved teenage wife.

Seneca had to consider not only his own principles but his reputation among the elite. He had crafted Nero’s inaugural speech to the Senate, an address that promised an end to abuses of power. That historic speech had been inscribed on silver tablets and hung on a column for all to see. But those tablets were now badly tarnished. The fresh start that the regime had enjoyed months earlier, its repudiation of Claudian paranoia and subterfuge, had been given the lie.

It did not help that in all likelihood, Seneca was among those to whom Nero gave shares of Britannicus’ property. This distribution caused revulsion in official Rome, according to Tacitus: “There was no lack of those who took issue with this: that men who affected moral seriousness were splitting up houses and estates like booty.”

In the tragedy Seneca wrote near the end of his life, Thyestes, the climactic scene shows a king destroying his brother by feeding him a toxic meal.

Seneca opens De Clementia, “On Mercy,” by giving voice to Nero’s thoughts, a new device for allowing Rome once again to hear his words issuing from the emperor’s mouth. Seneca depicts Nero as an omnipotent but morally serious adolescent. Like a modern teenage superhero, the princeps knows that great powers confer great responsibilities. Principles of justice, mercy, and restraint guide his every move. Whether dealing with foreign foes or the troublesome mob of his fellow citizens, he keeps “harshness sheathed, but mercy battle-ready,” an instance of Seneca’s favorite metaphor, moral effort as hand-to-hand combat.

Seneca’s target audience in De Clementia was not so much the emperor but the senatorial class, the Roman political elite. The treatise sought to reassure these aristocrats that Nero’s character, on which much of their own safety depended, was in good hands.

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.

Nero began sallying out of his palace incognito on rapacious nighttime jaunts, helping himself to merchant goods, drinking and carousing, assaulting passersby. Caught up in the exuberance of power, he wilded in the streets of the city, sexually molesting women and boys alike. It was an early sign of the troubles that awaited Rome. The new princeps was turning out to be a lawless teen with no moral compass.

Nero’s young friends, companions of his wilding sprees like Marcus Otho and Claudius Senecio, egged on the princeps to defy these two father figures. “Are you afraid of them?” they asked, knowing they would score points by irreverence. “Don’t you realize that you are Caesar—that you have power over them, not they over you?” The slow unraveling of Nero’s trust in Seneca had begun—a process that would take ten years to play out and would result in disaster for both men. Nero extended his newfound license to the commoners: he removed the armed details that kept order in Rome’s open-air theaters. Fans of various pantomime dancers—balletlike performers whose sensuality made them the sex symbols of their day—used this freedom to start factional fights in the stands. Nero went to the theaters in disguise and watched these frays with delight, or even took part, throwing stones or broken bits of bench along with the most rabid brawlers. Finally the disorder became so grave that even Nero felt it had to be stopped.

In 55 or (more likely) 56, Seneca attained the highest constitutional office in the Roman state, that of consul. The post carried less power than his unofficial role as amicus principis, friend of the princeps, but it was a towering achievement nonetheless. Seneca’s elder brother Gallio, returned to Rome from his proconsular post in Greece, attained the same honor at about the same time. The two boys from Corduba, provincials born into the equestrian class, sons of a crusty rhetorician who had never made it to the Senate, had come far indeed—a mark of what the emperor’s favor might bring, in Rome’s winner-take-all political system. High office was not the only way Seneca’s fortunes had changed. During the six or seven years since his return from Corsica, he had gotten rich.

But the carping of those who took issue with his wealth got to him. In a portion of his treatise De Vita Beata, “On the Happy Life,” he hit back.

Seneca’s line of defense relies on his earlier distinction between the sapiens, complete in Stoic wisdom, and others still striving. “I am not a sapiens, nor—let me give you food for your malice!—will I ever be,” he replies to his accusers. “Demand from me not that I be equal to the best, but better than the bad.… I have not attained good health, nor will I; I mix only pain-killers, not cures, for my gout.” Riches do not befit a wise man, Seneca concedes, but since he is not one, the rule doesn’t apply. He argues, in effect, that he need not practice virtue until he has attained it—even if, as his critics would no doubt counter, such practice might advance him toward his goal.

Poppaea was already married, divorced, and remarried when Nero fell for her, and she had a young son from her first marriage. It seems that Otho, her second husband and Nero’s close friend, first brought Poppaea and the emperor together, though just how is unclear. Tacitus gives two different reports, one making Otho the instigator of the affair—he boasted of Poppaea’s beauty so ardently that Nero had to see for himself—the other suggesting that Nero wanted Poppaea all along and got Otho to marry her as a cover. Whatever the circumstances, Otho ended up far from Rome, dispatched to a provincial post in Lusitania, while Poppaea, now his ex-wife, stayed behind.

Agrippina had been betrayed by those she had put in power, by Nero above all, but also by Burrus, Anicetus, and not least, Seneca. The sage she had rescued from Corsica, who owed all he had to her, had declined to raise his voice against her murder. Politics had first made bedfellows of her and Seneca—in the literal sense, some claimed. But politics, and her son’s disordered mind, had arranged things such that only one of them could survive.

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.

“I neither believe nor rejoice that I am still alive,” Seneca had Nero say, employing a parallel-with-contrast structure typical of his style.

At the culmination of the Juvenalia came an event that Nero’s advisers had long dreaded, though they had no choice but to take part. For the princeps no longer wished merely to practice his singing in private. He had determined to go on the stage.

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. He told the story there of Pastor, a victim of Caligula, who had to smile at the murder of his son because he had another son. By A.D. 60, Seneca had helped Nero acquire several hostages of this kind—including a remarkably gifted nephew, the closest thing Seneca had to a son of his own. Marcus Lucanus, son of Seneca’s youngest brother, Mela, had come to Rome to join Nero’s court. Though still in his late teens, the boy had already shown huge literary talent, outpacing in poetry his uncle’s immense prolixity in prose. In him, the fantastic wordiness of the Annaeus clan, passed down from its rhetorician patriarch Seneca the Elder, had reached its acme. He is known to the modern world as Lucan.

De Beneficiis is a long work, Seneca’s longest treatment of a single topic. It weaves in and out of many themes, some of them touching closely on the author’s own circumstances—though the relevance, as always, remains implicit. One problem Seneca deals with is that of gifts given by kings and tyrants, which cannot be refused, yet cannot be recompensed. He recalls that Socrates was invited to join the court of a Macedonian king but declined on the grounds that had he accepted, he would not have been able to return the royal largesse. Seneca admires Socrates for avoiding what he calls a life of “voluntary servitude.”

In the fog-bound glens of eastern England, Boudicca, warrior-queen of the Iceni, was gathering a mighty host determined to end Roman rule. At her hands, more than 80,000 Romans and their allies would soon be killed, and the Roman army would come within a hairsbreadth of an epic disaster. If not for the iron resolve of her opponent, Suetonius Paulinus, Rome would have likely disgorged Britain from its empire and never set foot there again, abandoning what Claudius had achieved, with such proud self-celebration, a generation earlier.

Fresh Roman troops streamed across the channel to ravage rebel lands. The Britons were already depleted by famine, since warriors on the march had had no chance to sow next season’s crop. The Iceni had beaten their plowshares into swords, thinking they would soon dine on captured Roman provisions. All told, hundreds of thousands died in England within a year’s time, the worst cataclysm yet suffered under Roman imperial rule. In the aftermath, official Rome sought the causes of the disaster, and some held Seneca to blame. According to Dio’s account, before the rebellion began, Seneca had called in his loans to British tribal leaders, abruptly and on harsh terms. That put many Britons into bankruptcy, while others were broken by the corrupt finance officer in charge of the region, Decianus Catus.

Did Seneca indeed touch off Rome’s worst provincial uprising by carrying his profiteering too far? The answer depends on a choice between Dio’s desire to see the worst in Seneca and Tacitus’ more mixed appraisal—the same choice that faces us at many turns. We know Seneca lent money at interest and managed a far-flung financial empire; we also know that rebel Britons were hard pressed by debt. Whether there was a link between the two is ultimately a judgment call.

Near the end of De Beneficiis, Seneca assigns Demetrius two long speeches, using him as a mask the way he had earlier used Socrates. The second speech mounts a harsh attack on the evils of wealth, especially on riches got by lending. “What are these things—what is ‘debt,’ ‘ledger-book,’ ‘interest,’ except names supplied to human coveting that exceeds the bounds of Nature?” the outraged Cynic demands. “What are ‘accounts’ and ‘calculations’? And time put up for sale, and a bloodsucking rate of one percent of capital? These are evils we choose for ourselves … the dreams of useless greed.” Seneca’s use of masks and personae presents problems throughout his prose works, but nowhere more so than here. Demetrius, a man widely admired for contempt of wealth, viciously attacks a practice by which Seneca had increased his riches. Yet it was Seneca who had brought Demetrius onstage and given him voice. The choice of mouthpiece seems self-punitive, like the choice of Socrates, another famous pauper, in Seneca’s defense of his wealth in De Vita Beata, or the stretch of that work that trumpets the charges of Seneca’s enemies as if through a megaphone.

Do as I order. Send someone to bring me the severed heads of Plautus and Sulla. These are the words Nero utters as he comes onstage in Octavia, an entrance that rivals Richard III’s in Shakespeare for boldness of characterization. Nero was hardly as resolute a leader as he is shown in these lines, if we credit the account of Tacitus. Nonetheless, assailed by the urgings of Tigellinus, he decided in the spring of 62 to do away with his two most prominent cousins. It was to them that Romans would turn, as Nero knew, should he lose support, as he might well do by divorcing the adored Octavia.

At the request of Poppaea, the new empress of Rome, Octavia’s head was taken off with a sword and sent to join those of Plautus and Sulla in Nero’s palace.

The danger that now lurked for the Annaei, and for all the political elite, had been made clear earlier in 62. Abandoning his restraint toward the Senate, Nero had come close to executing a Roman praetor, Antistius Sosianus, for a minor offense. That offense, as Seneca and his nephew must have noted, had been a literary one—composing poetry of the wrong kind.

Wherever Seneca went in these years, he carried on work on his magnum opus, a remarkable set of short moral essays framed as letters. Ostensibly addressed to Lucilius, these letters were in fact aimed at a wide audience. But the fiction of an intimate correspondence gave Seneca latitude in the structure of the essays, as well as unusual freedom to vary voice, tone, and technique. The melding of ethical inquiry with epistolary style produced a breakthrough for Seneca. He carried on the Letters to Lucilius at far greater length than anything else he had written and with greater candor about his life and thoughts—or at least, what seems to be candor. A typical letter begins with a moment from daily life, then goes on to explore insights arising from that moment.

Later, washed and changed, with the villa’s slaves giving his body a rubdown to restore its warmth, Seneca reflected on how nausea had driven him to desperation. “I endured incredible trials because I could not endure myself,” he writes, using a typically pointed turn of phrase. Then he let his thoughts wander down their usual path, toward the search for a virtuous life, a life of moral awareness. Discomforts overwhelm the body, Seneca muses, in the same way that vice and ignorance overwhelm the soul. The sufferer may not even know he is suffering, just as a deep sleeper does not know he is asleep. Only philosophy can rouse souls from such comas. Philosophy, Lucilius, is what you must pursue with all your being. Abandon all else except philosophy, just as you would neglect all your affairs had you fallen gravely ill. The letter lands its readers at a very different place than where it appeared to be headed. The retching, desperate man who pitches himself into the sea turns suddenly into a serious thinker. Seneca’s portrait of his own folly in taking a shortcut, and his description of embarrassing physical distress, draw us in with their frankness and closely observed detail. Once we have been hooked by Seneca the man, Seneca the sage reels us in.

His mastery of image making during his decade at Nero’s side, his many efforts to manipulate public opinion, make the task of reading his Letters to Lucilius a complicated one. Is it the real Seneca we see before us—a man of profound moral earnestness, whose every third thought is of philosophy—or an imago, a shape conjured by the wordsmith’s arts? Did Seneca himself, after fifteen years in which his every written word was a political act, even know the difference? Seneca explores in one of his letters how an author’s style reflects his character. He seems not to have considered that style might shape character—that constant, prolonged engagement in “spin” might make it hard for an author to stop spinning.

It is the ideal portrait of a sage in retirement, tranquil, ascetic, serene. But the description takes us only to the midpoint of Seneca’s day. The letter turns to other topics, leaving afternoon and evening a blank. As in much of what he wrote, Seneca has contrived to have it both ways. He wins our trust with his willingness to expose himself. But then he leaves gaps in the record, keeping important moments veiled. The Letters contain no mention of Seneca’s political career.