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
...more
