Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

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.