Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2014 by James Romm

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romm, James S.

Dying every day : Seneca at the court of Nero / by James Romm. — First Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-307-59687-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-385-35172-0 (eBook)

1. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, approximately 4 B.C.–65 A.D.

2. Statesmen—Rome—Biography. 3. Philosophers— Rome—Biography. 4. Nero, Emperor of Rome, 37–68.

5. Rome—History—Nero, 54–68. I. Title.

B618.R64 2014

188—dc23

[B]

2013020720

Cover design by Jason Booher

Cover photo montage by Markley Boyer

Cover images: (left) Seneca, bpk, Berlin. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany; (right) Nero © RMN-Grand Palais / (both) Art Resource, NY

First Edition

v3.1_r1

for Tanya

meae deliciae, mei lepores

Renaissance medallion, Nero Watching the Dying Seneca.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: The Two Senecas

CHAPTER 1 Suicide (I)

CHAPTER 2 Regicide

CHAPTER 3 Fratricide

CHAPTER 4 Matricide

CHAPTER 5 Maritocide

CHAPTER 6 Holocaust

CHAPTER 7 Suicide (II)

Epilogue: Euthanasia

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A Note About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Amici vitia si feras, facias tua.

If you put up with the crimes of a friend,

you make them your own.

—ROMAN PROVERB

Introduction

The Two Senecas

Here is one way to describe the career of Seneca, writer, thinker, poet, moralist, and for many years, top adviser and close companion of the emperor Nero:

By a strange twist of fate, a man who cherished sobriety, reason, and moral virtue found himself at the center of Roman politics. He did his best to temper the whims of a deluded despot, while continuing to publish the ethical treatises that were his true calling. When he could no longer exert influence in the palace, he withdrew and in solitude produced his most stirring meditations on virtue, nature, and death. Enraged by his departure, the emperor he had once advised seized on a pretext to force him to kill himself. His adoring wife tried to join him in his sober, courageous suicide, but imperial troops intervened to save her.

And here is another way to describe the same life:

A clever manipulator of undistinguished origin connived his way into the center of Roman power. He used verbal brilliance to represent himself as a sage. He exploited his vast influence to enrich himself and touched off a rebellion in Britain by lending usuriously to its inhabitants. After conspiring in, or even instigating, the palace’s darkest crimes, he tried to rescue his reputation with carefully crafted literary self-fashionings. When it was clear that the emperor’s enmity posed a threat, he sought refuge at the altar of philosophy even while leading an assassination plot. His final bid for esteem was his histrionic suicide, which he browbeat his unwilling wife into sharing.

These are the opposing ways in which Romans of the late first century A.D. regarded Seneca, the most eloquent, enigmatic, and politically engaged man of their times. The first is taken largely from the pages of Octavia, a historical drama written in the late decades of that century, by whom we do not know. The second is preserved by Cassius Dio, a Roman chronicler who lived more than a century after Seneca’s death but relied on earlier writers for information. Those writers, it is clear, deeply mistrusted Seneca’s motives. They believed the rumors that attributed to Seneca a debauched and gluttonous personal life, a Machiavellian political career, and a central role in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero in A.D. 65.

Between these extremes stands Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians and by far the best source we have today for Nero’s era. Tacitus, a shrewd student of human nature, was fascinated by the sage who extolled a simple, studious life even while amassing wealth and power. But ultimately Seneca posed a riddle he could not solve.

Tacitus made Seneca the principal character in the last three surviving books of his Annals, creating a portrait of great richness and complexity. But the tone of that portrait is hard to discern. Tacitus wavered, withheld judgment, or became ironic and elusive. Strangely, though aware of Seneca’s philosophic writings, Tacitus made no mention of them, as though they had no bearing on the meaning of his life. And he passed no explicit judgment on Seneca’s character, as he often did elsewhere. Our most detailed account of Seneca, in the end, is ambivalent and sometimes ambiguous.

One other ancient portraitist has left us his image of Seneca. In 1813 excavations in Rome unearthed a double-sided portrait bust created in the third century A.D. One side shows Socrates, the other Seneca, the two sages joined at the back of the head like Siamese twins sharing a single brain. The discovery gave the modern world its first glimpse of the real Seneca, identified by a label carved on his chest. The bust shows a full-fleshed man, beardless and bald, who wears a bland, self-satisfied mien. It seems the face of a businessman or bourgeois, a man of means who ate at a well-laden table.

Before the 1813 discovery, a different bust, now known as Pseudo-Seneca, had been thought to show Seneca’s face. It was gaunt, haggard, and haunted, its eyes seemingly staring into eternity. Its features had served as a model for painters depicting Seneca’s death scene on canvas, among them Giordano, Rubens, and David.

Once again there were two Senecas. Pseudo-Seneca corresponded to what the Western world wanted to imagine about an ancient Stoic philosopher. Its leanness seemed to represent a hunger for truth and a rejection of wealth and material comfort. The discovery of the true Seneca in 1813 dispelled that fantasy. The world that gazed into that fleshy face realized that Seneca was not who he was thought to be.

The recovery of the 1813 bust parallels, for many, the experience of learning about Seneca’s role in the history of Nero’s Rome. The man we meet in the pages of Tacitus, still more in Dio, is not the man we imagine Seneca to be, if we know him through his moral treatises, letters, or tragedies. He does not seem to match up well with those writings, especially in his relationship to wealth. The two Senecas stand side by side, with no label of authenticity assuring us that one is the true visage, the other an illusion.

What follows is an effort to bring those two Senecas together into a single personality. It is a task that I had long believed impossible, and perhaps I was right to do so. Seneca wrote much but made few clear mentions of his political career, and he played a role in politics that often ignored the principles of his writings. My goal has been to hold both the writer and the courtier in view at all times, despite their nonacknowledgment of each other.

The resulting book is part biography, part narrative history, and part an exploration of Seneca’s writings, both prose and verse. It does not give a comprehensive account of those writings, nor of the history of the Neronian era. My pursuit of a unified Seneca has forced me to be selective in both arenas.

I have focused on those Senecan texts, and passages of texts, that connect most clearly with Seneca’s life at court. That has meant passing in silence over much of what a student of philosophy would look for. Indeed, it has meant omitting completely those works that cannot be dated either before or after the accession of Nero. The reader will thus find no mention here of four important treatises—for the record, they are De Otio, De Providentia, De Constantia Sapientis, and De Tranquilitate Animi—that fall into this category.

The false Seneca…

 … and the real one. Roman portrait busts of the first century B.C. and the third century A.D.

Similarly, I have dealt with only the portion of Nero’s life and reign in which Seneca was involved. I follow Nero’s story only up to early A.D. 66, omitting the final two and a half years of his reign. By a happy coincidence, that is exactly the point at which our surviving text of Tacitus’ Annals leaves off (if the loss of that work’s final segment can be in any way called happy). I deal very little with the foreign affairs of Nero’s regime, or even its domestic achievements. Instead, I have put the personal relations of Seneca and Nero at the forefront, as well as the interactions of both with Agrippina, Nero’s mother. My story is thus in large part a family drama, to the extent that this threesome formed a peculiar sort of nuclear family.

Family dramas are always compelling, but the turbulence within Nero’s palace also held huge historical importance. The future of a dynasty, even of Rome itself, hinged on whether a mother could get along with a son, whether a husband could stay married to his wife, and whether a tutor could get his student to respect and heed him. Nero’s extreme youth at the time of accession, and his growing derangements afterward, made the task of managing him, or the failure to do so, critical to the fortunes of the empire and of the world—for the empire, as Romans liked to believe, had by Nero’s era nearly reached the confines of the world that contained it.

My sources of information include the three works already mentioned, the Annals of Tacitus, the anonymous play Octavia, and Cassius Dio’s Roman History (preserved only in fragments and summaries in the segments that cover the Neronian era). Additionally I have relied on Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, various texts by Plutarch, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder, and the anonymous ancient biographies of Lucan. My most important and richest resource, naturally, has been the writings of Seneca himself—though these have also posed immense problems, as they do for all ancient historians.

Seneca wrote voluminously throughout Nero’s reign but hardly ever discussed that reign in print. He rarely mentioned the people with whom he worked hand in glove for years—Claudius, Nero, Agrippina, Burrus, and Tigellinus. Perhaps a code of honor explains his reticence, or perhaps a sense that any disclosure would imperil his safety. In either case, he created a body of work filled with yawning chasms of silence. Even the great fire of 64, an event that destroyed much of Rome and caused massive upheaval, goes unmentioned.

Yet in the case of a writer so reflective, so alive to the world around him, the thought that the life had no influence on the work is implausible. Scholars have long tried to feel out that influence, some investing great effort in this inquiry, others willing only to raise a speculative question or two. I have borrowed from their insights in this book and also, I hope, contributed a few of my own. I do not claim Seneca’s texts should be read as coded historical documents. But they do, I believe, reflect history, if only in the distorting mirrors of myth, metaphor, and analogy.

The debate begun in antiquity over who Seneca was, and whether to admire him, has never been resolved. In the year that this book was written, a scathing paragraph appeared in a popular history of Rome. The author, the art historian Robert Hughes, suggests that Seneca’s contemporaries despised him as a patent fraud. Seneca was a hypocrite almost without equal in the ancient world, Hughes claims. Few can have mourned him. In the same year, a news item appeared about a man in his fifties, an immigrant from Eastern Europe who, while pushing a broom as a janitor at Columbia University, also managed to earn his degree there. In an interview, this man said that Seneca’s letters had inspired him to pursue this rigorous path. To him, Seneca was no humbug.

My greatest challenge in writing this book has been how, or whether, to judge its central figure. I oscillated many times between opposing assessments, sometimes in the course of a single day. I did not feel, even as I completed the book, that I had settled in my own mind its central questions. I only hope that I have presented the problem of Seneca’s character in some of its depth and complexity, and that I have not been unfair.

Seneca admitted in various ways that he had not lived up to his own ideals. He can be faulted for envisioning a better self than the one he was willing to settle for. Yet his vision is nonetheless beautiful, compelling, and humane. It has inspired great writers and thinkers through the ages, and janitors as well.

In the end, Seneca was human, all too human, with the flaws and shortcomings that the human condition entails. As he himself implied in one of his several apologias, he was not equal to the best, but better than the bad. And that, for many readers, will be good enough.

CHAPTER 1

Suicide (I)

(A.D. 49 AND BEFORE)

How does one prepare a preteen for the task of ruling the world?

That question confronted imperial Rome at the midpoint of the first century A.D., as the reigning emperor, Claudius, grew increasingly infirm. It seemed likely then that supreme power would pass, for the first time, to an heir who was not fully grown. The most likely candidate was then twelve years old: Claudius’ stepson, Domitius, whom he had recently adopted and given the name Nero. A natural son, Britannicus, was also waiting in the wings, but he was three years younger.

Given that the entire Roman empire, stretching from southern Britain to the Euphrates, a world-state of fantastic power and complexity, would rest on the shoulders of whichever boy succeeded, those three years might make a huge difference. At least, that was the hope of Nero’s mother, Agrippina, the most powerful woman of her times, now Claudius’ newly wedded wife.

Rome had no handbooks, no courses of study, to prepare a young man to be princeps—the executive office founded eight decades earlier by Augustus Caesar and still poorly defined. Four successive first men had imposed their own stamps on the job, with varying degrees of success. Young Nero, in line to become the fifth princeps, would need to learn from their examples—and that task required no ordinary teacher.

Nero as a young boy.

Agrippina, doting mother of the new heir apparent, was awake to the demands of the situation—and the opportunities. Not only must her son—her only child—receive the best instruction on offer, but official Rome must see him receive it. The quality of Nero’s tutor would reflect, as did every staffing change in the imperial household, the odds of his succeeding his adoptive father. Many Romans still hoped that Britannicus, the natural son of Claudius, would take his father’s place; but Agrippina had dismissed her stepson’s tutors and replaced them with nonentities, to discourage such expectations.

With a deft instinct for image making, Agrippina knew where to turn. A master speaker and writer, a man whose high repute as a moralist would shed its glow on her son, was then in exile on the island of Corsica, longing to return to Rome. This man would be forever in Agrippina’s debt—or so she hoped—if she arranged his pardon and return; he would do whatever she required to elevate young Nero. Claudius had banished this man from Rome eight years earlier, but the charge—adultery—was pardonable. Claudius, worked on by Agrippina, could be persuaded to change his mind.

Thus was arranged the recall of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the man known to us simply as Seneca or as Seneca the Younger. (His father, a literary figure of some repute, had the same name.) From his rocky island home on Corsica, where he had passed his time observing comets, stars, and planets, Seneca made his way to the imperial palace at Rome—an observatory of the dark recesses of the human heart.

I was better off hidden away, far from the crimes wrought by envy,

shunted off from it all, on the cliffs of the Corsican sea.…

How glad I was there, my eyes on Nature’s masterwork—

the sky, and the sacred paths of the sun,

the cosmos’ motions, the allotments of night and day,

the sphere of the Moon, that glory of upper air,

spreading its light to a ring of unanchored stars.

With these words, the author of Octavia, a Roman play written by one of Seneca’s admirers, introduces the character Seneca onto his stage. This unknown author has left us a mythicized, but nonetheless fascinating, account of Nero’s inner circle, a self-enclosed group whose twisted relationships and psychic torments were already legendary in their own day. Tragic drama, this author felt, was the best way to understand these people, even if historical facts had to be bent. Many modern playwrights and operatic composers, including Racine, Monteverdi, and Handel, have concurred.

Seneca never commented, in any of his extant works, on whether he regretted his departure from Corsica, by far the most consequential of the many turns his life took. Some later claimed that he hoped to go to Athens, not Rome, when he left, to study the works of great Greek thinkers in the city where they had lived. But the claim might well have arisen as an effort at image repair. There were many supporters of Seneca, including Octavia’s author, who portrayed him as what he strove to be—a moral philosopher of the Stoic school—and sought to counter the charges, brought by others, that he was a politician, a greedy businessman, and a corrupt power-monger who used philosophy to cloak his motives. The divide between these views continues to this day.

By his own account, Seneca had been won over to Stoicism in boyhood, at the feet of Attalus, a Greek who taught at Rome around the turn of the millennium.

Seneca, with his father and brothers, had moved to Rome from Corduba, in what is now Spain, at a time when Greek sages were thronging to the world’s new imperial city. Attalus impressed young Seneca with his abstemious way of life, an asceticism that, he said, made him a king; by needing nothing—neither wealth, nor position, nor fine dress and food—he gained as much power and freedom as any monarch. To me, he seemed even greater than a king, in that he was entitled to pass judgment on kings, wrote Seneca many decades later—after he himself had tasted the same privilege.

Attalus was only one of several whose wares young Seneca sampled in Rome’s bustling marketplace of ideas. Cynics preached an even sterner ascetic code than the Stoics, ranting against wealth and power while wearing threadbare cloaks and gnawing crusts of bread. Pythagoreans taught the mystical doctrine of transmigration of souls and avoided the eating of meat, which they regarded as cannibalism. Seneca briefly adopted their practice, but his father made him desist. In that year, A.D. 19, a surge of xenophobia had gotten Jewish rites banned from Rome, and a vegetarian diet looked uncomfortably similar to a kosher one.

Most of the philosophers whom young Seneca heard were imports from Greece, but a native Roman school had also sprung up, and Seneca took a strong interest in it. Its founder, Quintus Sextius, had famously declined appointment to the Senate, a high privilege that had been offered to him by Julius Caesar. Sextius preferred to devote himself full-time to philosophy, though he at first found the work so difficult that he almost hurled himself out a window in frustration.

Seneca liked the way Sextius, in his writings, used tough, vigorous Roman language to express Greek moral ideas, which in their native tongue often felt flaccid and effeminate. A passage from Sextius that he admired contained a military analogy, comparing a virtuous man’s resistance to evil to an infantry hollow square—a defensive formation that brought spearpoints to bear in four directions at once. The muscular image held for Seneca the appeal of the unattainable, for he suffered from respiratory ailments and never saw a day’s military service. In his own later writings, of the countless metaphors he employed, among his favorite and most frequent would be that of moral effort, or human life itself, as armed combat.

In his writings, Seneca praised Sextius’ choice, to practice philosophy and forsake politics, but in his own career, he did not follow it. Somehow, by a thought process he never revealed to his readers, Seneca decided, in his thirties, to pursue both paths. Still practicing ascetic habits that he learned from Attalus—sleeping only on hard pillows, and avoiding mushrooms and oysters, Rome’s favorite delicacies—and studying natural phenomena, he nonetheless embarked on the cursus honorum that led, ladderlike, to ever higher offices. In his late thirties, after a sojourn in Egypt with a powerful uncle, Seneca, along with his older brother Novatus, entered the Senate—the very move Sextius had disdained.

By family status, Seneca had no right to a seat in the Senate house. His clan, the Annaei, were equites, knights, well off but neither rich nor noble, and under Rome’s class-stratified constitution, they were excluded from high office. Seneca’s father—a tough-minded, rock-ribbed man of letters, still sharp as a tack in his late eighties—had once hoped for adlection, the magical process by which the princeps could elevate a knight to the Senate, if only so that he might hear Cicero declaim. His two elder sons would finally gain the rank that eluded him.

As he neared the end of a long life, back in the family seat of Corduba, the elder Seneca gave a qualified blessing to the path on which these two had set out, while praising his cherished third son—young Mela, the quiet and studious brother—for avoiding it. I see your soul shrinks back from public office and disdains all ambition, and desires only one thing: to desire nothing, the crusty old man of letters wrote, urging Mela toward his own specialty, the study of rhetoric. "You were always more intelligent than your brothers.… They are all about ambition and are now preparing themselves for the Forum and for political office. In those pursuits, he remarked, as though issuing a warning, the things one hopes for are also the things one must fear."

At around the time those words were written, just after Seneca had made his start in the Senate, Agrippina the Younger (so known because her mother was also named Agrippina) gave birth to a son. The event had political meaning, for this Agrippina was great-granddaughter of Augustus and sister to the reigning princeps, Caligula, who was as yet childless himself. Official Rome marked the arrival of a promising heir—for every male who shared Augustus’ blood had promise, and young Domitius had a greater share than most.

If Seneca joined his colleagues in hailing the birth, as he must have done, he could have little guessed how much his own fate hung on this boy’s future. There was as yet no clue that their two lives would, for almost two decades, be intertwined in a strange and tortuous partnership on which much of Rome’s destiny hung. Nor could Agrippina have divined from the portent she saw at her son’s birth—the rays of the rising sun falling full on the baby’s face—that someday he would seek to have her murdered, and seek Seneca’s help.

A digital reconstruction of the interior of the Roman Senate, with benches on which senators sat.

Agrippina was a spirited, beautiful twenty-two-year-old when her son was born, already well versed in the perils of dynastic politics. Her father, Germanicus, an adored war hero whom many had hoped would be princeps, died under mysterious circumstances in her childhood; his ashes, escorted home from abroad by her mother, had produced a national outpouring of grief. Over the next fifteen years, she lost that mother, and two of her three brothers, to political murders. The reigning princeps, Tiberius, resented the cultlike reverence the public felt for Germanicus, and looked with suspicion on the orphaned children who shared in it. But he nonetheless spared Agrippina and her sisters, as well as Germanicus’ last surviving son, Gaius—known to us by his nickname, Caligula—whom in the end he adopted.

Tiberius had just died, and the four siblings had just come into their own, when Agrippina became a mother. Caligula was officially coruler, along with Tiberius’ grandson, but he quickly eliminated his partner and assumed sole rule. A dashing twenty-five-year-old, sound of body and—for the moment—of mind, Caligula was hailed as the bringer of a new golden age, and his three charming sisters added to his luster. Caligula even made his sisters sharers of his power, adding their names to the oath of loyalty sworn annually to the princeps. Agrippina, one of the cherished children of Germanicus, had gained stature unprecedented for a Roman woman; and she had wealth as well, thanks to her marriage, since age thirteen, to a rich aristocrat, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Nero’s father.

Agrippina could not attend meetings of the Senate (though one day she would try to fix that), but she heard much about what went on in that fervid chamber, the Curia. An orator who had recently arrived there, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was attracting notice for his unique verbal style—seductive prose with short, punchy clauses and pithy epigrams. Agrippina formed a bond of friendship with Seneca, a man almost two decades older but, as an eques, well below her (and his fellow senators) in rank. So too did Agrippina’s sister Livilla—and that bond was said, by some, to go beyond friendship.

Agrippina’s brother did not care for Seneca, nor for the epigrammatic style in which he spoke. Sand without lime, Caligula called those words, drawing an analogy from the building trade, where sand and lime were mixed to make mortar. Seneca’s speeches, to Caligula, seemed to lack solidity—ear-catching phrases strung together without binder to firm them up. (That critique has been repeated, in various forms, ever since. Lord Macaulay echoed it in the 1830s when he wrote: There is hardly a sentence [in Seneca] which might not be quoted; but to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce.) Or else they were "nothing but commissiones," showy declamations like those put on for prizes at the start of public games.

Senators like Seneca were, at the outset of Caligula’s reign, welcome visitors in the imperial household, for the Senate had cheered the new princeps and rushed to grant him supreme power. But the lessons of Roman history suggested that amity would not last. The Senate, still cherishing memories of its central role under the republic, had never reconciled itself to the principate, even though the attempt to prevent it—the killing of Julius Caesar—had failed. A bloody civil war had decided the question, and Augustus had taken over. But both he and his successor, Tiberius, had struggled to find a modus vivendi with stiff-necked senators. When that effort failed, those necks often went under the sword.

Over seven decades, the Senate had tried to assert its ancient prerogatives. But the princeps always had the final say, thanks to his personal army corps, the Praetorian Guard. These elite soldiers, encamped at the northeastern edge of the city, alone had the right to bear arms within Rome’s boundaries. Each emperor had been careful to ensure that these troops, and in particular their prefects or commanding officers, were well fed, well paid, and loyal to his cause. Though it was bad taste for a princeps to deploy Praetorians against the Senate, all parties were certain that, if so ordered, the troops would obey.

The Praetorians were thus the ultimate weapon of a princeps. Caligula, as his sanity deteriorated and his hostility to the Senate grew, would test that weapon’s limits—and finally exceed them.

The Praetorian Guard, depicted in a relief of the first century A.D.

No one quite knows how the downturn began, but Seneca, an eyewitness, attests to the terrifying depths it reached. Caligula stalks through Seneca’s later writings like a monster in recurring nightmares, arresting, torturing, and killing senators, or raping their wives for sport and then taunting them with salacious descriptions of the encounters. It seems that Nature produced him as an experiment, to show what absolute vice could accomplish when paired with absolute power, Seneca said of Caligula’s madness.

Among the first whom Caligula victimized, after his mind began to turn, were his sisters, Agrippina and Livilla. They had been his closest companions, along with a third sister, Drusilla, who was thought by some to have been his lover. Drusilla died of illness in A.D. 38, plunging Caligula into deep grief; he emerged from the catastrophe a changed