Darkness and Dawn; Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale

by F. W. Farrar

  CHAPTER LVIII

  _THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SENECA_

  ‘Hoc inter cætera vel pessimum habet crudelitas, quod perseverandum est.’--SENECA.

  The family of Spanish Romans from Cordova of which Seneca was thehead had risen to strange prosperity only to be dragged throughdeadlier overthrow; but the fate of their greatest scion, the poetLucan, was the most humiliating. He might seem to have been markedout from infancy as the spoiled favourite of fortune. While littlemore than a boy, he had gained such a reputation for ability, thatNero had summoned him from Athens before his studies were completed.For a year or two he was the Emperor’s intimate friend, and at thesame time he rose to be the favourite poet and writer of the day.When he recited in the lecture-rooms he achieved an astonishingsuccess. He was appointed augur and quæstor before the legal age,and when, as quæstor, he exhibited games to the people, he wasreceived with thunders of applause as loud as those which had greetedVirgil in the days of Augustus. It is impossible to imagine a giddierpinnacle of temptation for a hot-blooded Spanish youth of genius,who at the age of twenty could not have been a friend and courtier ofNero without being plunged into every sort of moral temptation. Letit be remembered in Lucan’s honour, that if he did not escape fromthat furnace unscathed--if his hair had been singed and the smellof fire had passed upon his garments--he yet never showed himselflost to virtue. In the midst of deplorable weakness he retained hisconviction that freedom, and truth, and purity, were best.

  Nero’s jealousy showed itself in the most public and insultingmanner, when one day he got up and went out of the room for no reasonwhatever, in the middle of one of Lucan’s readings. It culminated ina prohibition to Lucan to read or publish anything further. The youngpoet, feeling within him the true fire of genius, nursed his ragein secret, and changed the tone of the ‘Pharsalia’ from inflatedCæsarism to savage denunciation. He mocks at the sham liberty whichit accorded; brands with satire its shameful flatteries; and treatingits apotheoses as a sacrilegious comedy, declares that the day wouldcome ‘when a freer and truer Rome would make a god, not of Cæsar,but of Cato.’[110] Ten years earlier he had been writing of Nero asa supreme divinity; now in his writing-desk lay the fierce complaintthat, as a consequence of the civil wars, men had come to worship_shadows_ in the temples of the gods.[111] He consoled his seclusionby living in virtuous union with the young wife whom he loved, andas he poured forth the epic of a soul lacerated by indignation,conscious of his future immortality, he wrote in secret--

  ‘Pharsalia nostra Vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabitur ævo.’

  When Piso’s conspiracy began, Lucan became its passionate supporter.Men might ask what was the use of substituting one actor like Pisofor another like Nero, but if a republic was impossible, Lucan feltthat no change of a Cæsar could be for the worse, and in his burninghatred promised that he would slay the Emperor with his own hand.

  Alas! when detection came; when he saw knights and senators andsoldiers sinking all around him into treacherous weakness; when thegrim executioner stood at his elbow pointing to the rack, Lucan hadnone of the inward strength or ennobling convictions which might haveenabled him to retain his manhood. Sinking to an incredible depthof baseness, he betrayed the name of his own mother as an accomplicein the plot. His momentary infamy did not save his life, though itmust have cost him a pang worse than that of death. Bidden to die,he opened his veins in four places, and went into a hot bath. Hislast thoughts at the end of a life so brief, so full of glory, sofull of shame, are left unrecorded. Only as he watched the bloodflow, he was reminded of the fantastic lines of the ‘Pharsalia’ inwhich he had described the similar death of a soldier on the field ofbattle. He recited them with a feeble voice, and spoke no more. Thathe should, at such a moment, have recalled verses so fantastic ischaracteristic of a soul not naturally ignoble, but distorted and,so to speak, encrimsoned by the horrors of life’s tragedies andlife’s amusements in the midst of which he lived.

  The death of his father, Mela, was also stained with dishonour.Avarice seems to have run in the family, and not even the death ofhis glorious son could check Mela’s besetting vice. A nobler manwould have hid his head in shame as well as sorrow, but Mela showeda discreditable eagerness in recovering the debts due to Lucan,whose great wealth was now added to his own. Among other debtors, hepressed hard on Fabius Romanus, who had been Lucan’s intimate friend.What a picture do we see of the noble and literary society of Romewhen we are told, as if it were a quite ordinary occurrence, that,in base revenge, this intimate friend of a poet who had betrayed hismother resorted to forgery in order to ruin his friend’s father! Heforged a letter of Lucan to prove an imaginary complicity in the plotbetween him and his father. Mela knew that his wealth would be hisdeath warrant. Nero no sooner read the forged letter than he summonedMela to his presence, with a keen eye on his possessions. Mela sawthat the game of life was over, and opened his veins, after havingwritten a will which was doubly base. To save his estate fromconfiscation, he left a large donation to Tigellinus, and hisworthless son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito. He added spite to hisgreed and baseness. ‘I am condemned to die,’ he said, ‘though Ihave done nothing to deserve punishment; but Crispinus and AniciusCerealis live, though they are enemies of the Emperor.’ AniciusCerealis was the consul-designate who, after the conspiracy, hadproposed in the senate that a temple should with all speed be rearedat the public expense ‘to the Divine Nero.’ His abjectness didnot save him. On hearing of the sentence in Mela’s will he, too,committed suicide.

  The senators seemed to take a pleasure in pusillanimous adulation.They decreed supplications to the gods, and a special honour tothe Sun as the detector of the conspiracy, and a restoration of theTemple of Fortune from which Scævinus had taken his dagger. Amidthese decrees, ‘the sweet Gallio’ pleaded humbly that his life mightbe spared, although his only crime was his relationship to Seneca andLucan. Whereupon a senator got up and denounced him as an enemy anda parricide. The rest had the decency to interfere on behalf of theirpopular and distinguished colleague. They begged the accuser to letsleeping dogs lie. But Gallio felt that his career of glory andpopularity was over, and he too committed suicide.

  The city was full of deaths, and the streets witnessed the dailyspectacle of the stately funerals of these political victims, of whomso many were judicially murdered for their wealth, or to gratify thehatred of the Emperor. Yet such was the prevalent baseness, that menwhose sons, or brothers, or friends, or kinsmen had been thus slain,returned thanks to the gods, adorned their doors with laurel as atthe news of a public victory, and rushed to fling themselves at theknees of Nero, and cover his hand with their kisses! Many of thepeople believed that the reign of terror had been enacted simply toreplenish the Emperor’s treasury, and pitied the murdered aristocratsas though they had been as innocent as the murdered Christians.

  No delation pleased Nero more than when Natalis coupled the name ofSeneca with the name of Piso. How far Seneca was really an accompliceis doubtful. He had been cautious, but he can hardly have beenignorant that Subrius Flavus had formed a design to set Piso asideand elevate Seneca himself to the Empire. It was certainly suspiciousthat on the eve of the conspiracy Seneca had returned from hisCampanian retreat, and stopped at one of his villas only fourmiles from the city. There was no evidence against him except this:--Natalis had been sent from Piso to complain that Seneca would neversee him, and to ask ‘why their friendship should thus be allowed todrop.’ Seneca had replied ‘that frequent intercourse was inexpedientfor them both, but that his happiness depended on Piso’s safety.’ Butit was whispered among Seneca’s most intimate friends that he had,in fact, assented to the assassination of Nero ‘in order to free Romefrom Nero, and Nero from himself.’ The glittering antithesis betrayedits own authorship.

  Nero sent a Prætorian tribune, named Silvanus--not knowing thathe too was one of the conspirators--to require an explanation fromSeneca. He found the philosopher at supper with his be
loved wife,Pompeia Paulina, and two friends.

  Seneca gave a calm explanation. He had merely told Piso that he wasin weak health, and desired perfect quiet. ‘Why,’ he said, in replyto the Emperor’s inquiry, ‘should I have preferred the fortunes ofa private person to my own safety? I am no flatterer, that I shouldhave made such a speech. No one knows this better than Nero, who hasexperienced my boldness more often than my servility.’

  When Silvanus brought back the answer, he found Nero sitting withPoppæa and Tigellinus--a bad omen for Seneca’s safety.

  ‘Is he preparing to put himself to death?’ asked the Emperor.

  ‘No,’ said the tribune. ‘He showed no sign of panic. His look and hiswords were entirely cheerful.’

  ‘Go, bid him die,’ was Nero’s brief answer.

  Silvanus was, however, unwilling to deliver such a mandate in personto a brother conspirator. He sent it in by a centurion.

  On receiving it, Seneca quietly rose from table and said to a slave,‘Bring me my will. I should like to leave a few legacies to those wholove me.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said the centurion, ‘that the Emperor’s commands admitof no such delay.’

  ‘Be it so,’ said Seneca, turning to his friends. ‘Since, then, I havenothing else to leave you, I will leave you my fairest possession,the memory of my life. Be mindful of it, and you will win the fameof honest purpose and loyal friendship. Nay, my friends, do not weep.Where is your firmness? Where is your philosophy? I forbid thesetears. Have I not been long preparing myself for this crisis? Wasany one of us unaware of Nero’s cruelty? After murdering his motherand his brother, what remained for him but to kill his tutor?’

  Then he embraced Paulina, and, softening for a moment, entreated hernot to waste her life in endless grief, but to mitigate the pang ofwidowhood by ever recalling that the life of her husband had beenspent in virtue.

  ‘I will die with you,’ said Paulina. ‘Let the physician open my veinsas well as yours.’

  ‘I will not check you,’ said Seneca, ‘if such is your gloriousdesire. Were I to forbid it, I should but leave you to the enduranceof future wrongs. If you prefer the dignity of death to the enduranceof bereavement, let us both die with courage, though the greaterdistinction will be yours.’

  In truth it would have been strange, and far from creditable,if Seneca had shown any pusillanimity when the hour of hiscondemnation came. Many of the philosophers had contracted lifeinto a contemplation of death. The constant presentment of death tothe mind in days so perilous was natural, and the possibility of aviolent death must have been in Seneca’s thoughts as often as though,like Trimalchio, he had possessed a little skeleton of articulatedivory, and had it passed round among his guests at every banquetwith the melancholy refrain, ‘What a little nothingness is man!’Even Lucan, in his short life, had come to the conclusion that ‘Man’sbest lot is to know how to die, and the next best to be compelled todie’--

  ‘Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi.’[112]

  The veins of Seneca and Paulina were opened with the same cut, but,as Seneca was old and attenuated by asceticism, his blood flowedslowly, and the veins of his legs were also cut. The ancients wereunder a strange delusion in supposing that bleeding was a mild kindof death. Seneca was so convulsed with agony that, fearing to breakdown Paulina’s courage, he persuaded her to depart to another room.When she was gone, he began to dictate his last words. They wereafterwards published and had been read by Tacitus, but they wereso well known that he would not record them. They probably addedlittle or nothing to what he has said about death so many times inhis letters to Lucilius. He still lingered in agony, and bade hisphysician, Statius Annæus, to give him hemlock. When the poisonfailed to act, he stepped into a hot bath to expedite the flow ofblood, and as he did so he sprinkled the slaves nearest to him,saying that it was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He wasthen carried into a bath-room and stifled with the vapour. His bodywas burnt, by the direction of his will, without any solemnity offuneral. Nero meanwhile had forbidden the suicide of Paulina. Herwounds were bound up, and she recovered; but during the few yearsof her survival the excessive pallor of her face was a memorial ofthose tragic hours.

  That Seneca’s life was a failure is admitted even by those whojustly regard him as a seeker after God. He knocked at the gates ofvirtue, but he scarcely entered. He lacked consistency; he lackedwhole-heartedness. Charity makes us reject the dark charges madeagainst him by the malice of Dion Cassius, but the history of hislife shows that he laid himself fatally open to the accusation ofhypocrisy. A Christian he certainly was not, though it is far fromimpossible that, through Pomponia or some other Christian, he mayhave seen some of the writings of St. Paul, and that this may accountfor the singular resemblance of tone and expression between somepassages. Yet the resemblance is more superficial than real, andbetween the character of the Christian Apostle and that of the paganphilosopher there is an impassable chasm. In the whole course of hislife and in every action and writing of it, St. Paul gave splendidevidence that his convictions swayed the whole current of hisbeing; but Seneca’s high-wrought declamations constitute theself-condemnation of every decisive incident in his personal history.A life dominated by avarice and ambition was unworthy of a professedphilosopher; it fell far below the attainments of the humblest ofthose true Christians whom Nero burnt and Seneca despised. Seneca didlittle or nothing to make his age more virtuous; the Christians werethe salt of the earth. The Pagans fled from despair to suicide; theChristians, in patient submission and joyful hope, meekly acceptedthe martyr’s crown.