Dying Every Day

by James Romm

  “Exile, torture, disease, war, shipwreck—think on these,” Seneca counsels. “Let us take in with our mind the worst thing that can possibly happen, if we don’t want to be mastered by it”—for it will eventually come to pass. The rise of cities only portends their fall; we should greet that fall with untroubled minds. Besides, he remarks—changing tack and offering multiple solaces—new buildings will sprout from under the ashes. A better city will rise than the one destroyed by the flames.

  This last idea strikes the keynote of apocalypse, another theme that had haunted Seneca from his earliest writings. His Stoic training taught that all humankind would be wiped out, then reborn in a primitive state, in an endless cycle designed to renew the tired world. But Seneca imagined the scene more vividly than any Stoic before him. And he was more certain that the last days were near.

  “There won’t be long until the destruction,” he writes in Natural Questions. “Already concordia [the harmonious balance of the cosmos] is being tested and torn apart.” The certainty and imminence of the collapse seems to have given him a kind of comfort. All would meet the same fate. All action—attempts to flee, to find remedies, to help others—would be equally useless.

  Earlier Stoics had theorized that flames would cause the world’s end, the fiery cosmic exhalations they called ekpyroseis. But Seneca, in Natural Questions, imagined, as he had before in Consolation to Marcia, a universal flood. With grim foreboding, he notes that water is everywhere on earth—collecting in every hollow, flowing down every mountain, pooling beneath every acre of ground. “Nature has put moisture everywhere—so that, when she wishes, she can attack us from all sides,” he writes in Natural Questions. In a special-effects spectacular, he imagines each source breaking its bounds, each aquifer bursting forth from beneath its crust, until earth itself is liquefied.

  “All boundaries will be sundered,” he foresees, in the same ecstatic tone he had used in Consolation to Marcia. “Whatever Nature has split into separate parts will be merged together.… Waters will converge from East and from West. A single day will serve to bury the whole human race. All that fortune’s favor has preserved for so long, all that it has raised above the rest—the noble, the glorious, the kingdoms of great peoples—all will plunge alike into the abyss.”

  The twilight of the world, it seemed to Seneca, was coinciding with the twilight of his own life. Soon, he foresaw, virtue and vice would no longer matter; such distinctions would be swallowed up by the cataclysm. Perhaps he told himself that the same was true of autocracy and freedom, passivity and defiance, action and inaction.

  Seneca was not the only leading figure trying to withdraw from political life. Thrasea Paetus, the senator whose Stoic beliefs mirrored Seneca’s in many ways, had suddenly stopped attending Senate meetings, at some point in 63.

  This absence was remarkable and, to many no doubt, discouraging. Thrasea had thus far been a lone example of bravery in a servile body. It was he who had stirred the Senate to reduce the sentence of Antistius, the man whose only crime had been to recite risky verses at a dinner party. More recently, he had again led the Senate in asserting itself. He introduced a motion to ban state commendations, which, as he pointed out, were being used simply to advance the careers of corrupt administrators. His plea for honesty in public discourse was warmly welcomed—though the presiding officers, fearing Nero’s disapproval, at first would not allow it to come to a vote.

  Thrasea’s dissent had often, up to now, taken the form of nonparticipation. He had walked out of the Senate, without a word, on the day in 59 when it heard, with approbation, the letter justifying Nero’s killing of Agrippina. A short while later, when others had cheered Nero’s first singing performance, he had withheld applause. Under the reign of Nero, where servile conformity was regarded as loyalty, mere absence and silence could be forms of protest. Now Thrasea had decided to employ them on a broader scale.

  But was his departure from the Senate an act of courage or cowardice? By his absence, did he advance the cause of autonomy or deprive it of a leading voice? The dilemma must have troubled him, as it has troubled many others—righteous people whose political participation has helped bad rulers. Is withdrawal from the fray an act of conscience or mere self-protection?

  However Thrasea answered these questions, he soon showed official Rome that his absenteeism would be total. On New Year’s Day 64, when the Senate gathered to beseech the gods on behalf of the Roman state, Thrasea did not attend. Two days later he skipped another annual rite, at which the senators swore loyalty to the princeps and prayed for his safety. These breaches of protocol were unmistakable in their import: Thrasea was gone for good.

  Like Seneca, he turned increasingly to his writing and to his study of Stoic precepts. It was probably in these years that he produced a biography of Cato, the exemplar of Stoic courage whom both he and Seneca revered. Perhaps he was inspired by Seneca’s nephew, Lucan, who by this time had begun circulating his Civil War, an epic poem about the conflict in which Cato had died. For all three men, Seneca, Thrasea, and Lucan, Cato provided a powerful symbol of integrity in an age of autocracy—a symbol that could still be safely held aloft, thanks to a century of intervening time.

  Thrasea had begun studying with Demetrius of Sunium, the Cynic guru whom Seneca also frequented and whom he had lionized in De Beneficiis. This man was said to go about “semi-nude,” wearing only a threadbare cloak that left one shoulder exposed, or even to lie naked on the ground, showing both contempt for social mores and indifference to discomfort. In Demetrius, the virtues of the great Cato, who had also practiced self-exposure as an ascetic discipline, seemed to be reincarnated. This hardy Cynic provided both Thrasea and Seneca with a spiritual refuge—an escape from the cares of the palace, in Seneca’s case, and from those of the Senate in Thrasea’s.

  Meanwhile in Sicily, Seneca’s friend Lucilius was also seeking otium, retreat from political involvement, in the early 60s, as is clear from Seneca’s advice in the Letters. To judge by the urgent tone of this advice, and the many different forms it took, the decision to leave the public sphere, for a thinking Stoic, was a complex one. How far into retreat should Lucilius go? Seneca wonders at various points in the Letters. How should he protect himself from the incursions of politics and business? How ought he to disguise his retreat—for to make it openly, Seneca is quite certain, would incur ill will or actual danger. At one point, he advises Lucilius to feign illness rather than openly withdraw. “Some animals mix up their own footprints around their lair so as not to be found,” Seneca writes, metaphorically casting the seeker of otium as a hunted beast. “You must do the same, or there will be no lack of men to chase you down.”

  Seneca wrestled all his life with the issue of otium or nonparticipation, expressing different views in different works and even in different sections of a single work. He devoted an entire treatise to it, De Otio, only part of which survives. In a modern scholarly study, an analysis of Seneca’s views on otium runs to fifty dense pages and even then comes to no firm conclusions. “It is difficult, if not impossible, to give an account of Seneca’s views which, while remaining faithful, would produce a consistent and coherent system,” concedes Miriam Griffin, the author of that study.

  The problem that the principate presented to Stoic men of morals was indeed insoluble. The Stoic creed, with its emphasis on service to the common good, required involvement in political life, unless the regime was hopelessly evil or the Stoic’s own life was in danger. But what if the Stoic’s life was more endangered by leaving politics than by staying? And what if, by his departure, he made an evil regime more evil? The let-out clauses posed perils of their own. And the question of when to invoke them—at what point a regime’s malady became incurable, or one’s own risks rose unacceptably—was a thorny one.

  Seneca’s own career exemplified the dilemmas, yet he could not safely write from experience. He had to frame all discussions of withdrawal in general, even hypothetical, terms. This gives many of
his works a strangely detached quality. He tells his father-in-law Paulinus, his brother Gallio, and his friend Lucilius to chuck political office and devote themselves to philosophy. But Seneca himself, when he addressed those men, still clung to political office. He spoke often as though he would withdraw, was doing so, or had already done so, never acknowledging the bonds that kept him at court.

  The leading men of Nero’s age made their way, as best they could, through the moral thicket of the participation problem. Thrasea chose to depart the arena, while Lucan, as will be seen, remained intensely engaged. Seneca, less free than these two to do as he wished, took the middle path, the hardest of all. He withdrew only part of himself into a serene world of philosophic contemplation. The other part, the part that had chosen politics to begin with, remained chained to Nero—even though the emperor was rapidly becoming Seneca’s worst nightmare.

  Now in his midtwenties, Nero was growing fat. He had already lost the graceful lines and angles that his youthful portraits reveal. His jowls were heavy, his brow doughy and soft. Soon he would grow a chin beard, the first facial hair yet seen on a princeps, perhaps as a way to disguise the fleshiness of his thick neck.

  Nero had many opportunities to add to his girth, for everywhere he went, he found courtiers and social climbers eager to provide what he most enjoyed: banquets that stretched from noon to midnight, interrupted perhaps by refreshing dips in snow-cooled pools. By offering such hospitality, an aspiring parvenu could rise higher in Nero’s favor than any senator or noble. For it was on the equites and even lower social classes that Nero relied for support. One such was Vatinius, a cup maker from Beneventum, who pleased the princeps with an oft-repeated joke: “I hate you, Nero—because you’re in the Senate!” Both men enjoyed the camaraderie of this quip, the illusion that they belonged to the same class and could together scoff at their betters.

  An official portrait of Nero in his early twenties.

  By May 64, Nero’s mind was bent on music. He was determined to build an audience for his singing and lyre playing, arts to which he had given intense efforts. Thus far, obeying the restrictions imposed by his senior counselors—principally Seneca—he had taken the stage only once, in a private setting, on his own palace grounds. Now he wanted to go public. He chose to begin in Neapolis, a largely Greek city in Campania—the Hellenic spirit being more receptive, he thought, to the mixing of musicianship and rule.

  Even at Neapolis, Nero took cautious measures to ensure a large audience. His Augustiani accompanied him, well paid to applaud in rhythmic patterns for their princeps, along with a few thousand recruits from the lower classes. But he wanted a full house, which at Neapolis meant more than 8,000. His troops and advance men collected farmers and herdsmen from surrounding villages to fill the benches. Finally the Praetorians themselves took up any empty seats. Spectatorship was a new kind of military service, imposed by a new kind of emperor.

  Nero had trained his singing voice throughout his reign and always took care not to strain it. At the suggestion of Terpnus, his Greek lyre teacher, he had kept on a rigorous diet heavily weighted with leeks and had purged himself frequently with emetics and enemas. When he had to address the army, he avoided shouting but whispered instead, and subordinates soon learned they could avoid a dressing-down by reminding him to spare his throat. Terpnus had stayed in his service throughout his reign, coaching what was reportedly a thin and hoarse voice into one worthy of the stage.

  Nero sang for the crowds at Neapolis over the course of several days. No reports have survived of those historic performances, except a notice that the stands at one point collapsed due to a seismic tremor. Fortunately the crowds had all gone home before this occurred. In nearby Pompeii, gladiatorial games were held in thanks “for the safety of Nero in the earthquake,” as one resident inscribed on a wall. Those words were preserved when the town was buried in volcanic ash, fifteen years later.

  Seneca might well have been among Nero’s audience, for several of his Letters to Lucilius place him in Neapolis at this time. But if he did attend the performances, he tried his best to disguise that fact. In one letter, he complains to Lucilius that he had found the theater of Neapolis full while the philosophers’ lecture hall—his own destination—was empty. This was among the riskiest things he said in all his written works, since it could be taken as a jab at Nero’s artistic ambitions. But it also showed, perhaps quite pointedly, that Seneca had no part in them.

  Nero’s launch of a public singing career deeply disappointed Seneca. He had long tried to prevent such a spectacle, finding it unsuited to the gravity of the principate, but he could no longer rein in Nero’s will. Conceivably he had played a role in the choice of Neapolis, not Rome, for the debut, just as earlier he had persuaded Nero to move his chariot racing outside city limits. But it was now Tigellinus, not Seneca, who shared Nero’s counsels, and Tigellinus was urging the princeps to pursue whatever mad fancy he pleased.

  In the ancient battle between philosophy and poetry, the lines of which had been drawn by Plato four centuries earlier, Nero and Seneca had ended up on opposing sides. While Seneca focused on moral self-examination in Letters to Lucilius, Nero moved further than ever from this pursuit—toward passion, fantasy, and the ecstasy of Greek music. Reaching out in their different media toward different audiences, Seneca and Nero were vying for the hearts and minds of Rome, one exalting the power of reason, the other channeling strong emotion.

  Those who now surrounded Nero, in particular Tigellinus, saw an opening in this temperamental divide. They whispered in Nero’s ear that the moral gravity of the Stoics was somehow a threat to his regime. In months to come, they would openly allege that mere gloomy looks, or ascetic ways of life, were treasonous in that they implied disapproval of Nero’s exuberance. To be “schoolteacherly”—to go about with a superior or censorious air—became a crime against the state. Nero would rely on such prejudices to brand the Stoics his enemies and to destroy some of the best men of his time.

  From Neapolis, Nero intended to make a crossing to Greece and begin a full concert tour, but his movements became halting and uncertain. He got only as far as Beneventum before canceling his Greek trip and returning to Rome. There he announced an intention to sail for Egypt but immediately abandoned that journey, too, claiming that adoring Romans would not want him absent for long.

  This change of heart prompted Tigellinus, who was vying to add the post of master of revels to his brief, to pull out all the stops. He arranged a fantastic soiree to celebrate Nero’s decision to stay near Rome. On the Lake of Agrippa, a reservoir near the Pantheon, he floated a vast barge and had it towed about by rowers in gold-and-ivory-adorned ships. The lake was stocked with exotic fish brought from afar, while rare animals and birds ringed the shore. In the center of the barge, Nero, Tigellinus, and other high officials dined while lying on purple pillows. The rowers meanwhile took them on a sexual pleasure cruise: on every bank stood women, from high classes and low, beckoning Nero to enjoy their favors in specially built lakeside brothels.

  After this grand fete, Nero left Rome and headed to Antium, about twenty miles south. His intentions at this point are unclear, and from his rapid pace of movement, it seems he had become agitated or uneasy in mind. That summer had been thick with portents. At the start of May, a comet had appeared in the night sky, and it had continued to move slowly through the heavens, week after week.

  Nero looked for advice about the comet’s meaning, but not, significantly, from Seneca—though the sage had discussed comets in Natural Questions and had used “the comet we saw for six months in the most fortunate reign of Nero” (in A.D. 60) to prove that they did not portend the fall of rulers. Instead Nero turned to Balbillus, a former prefect of Egypt who had become adept in astrology. Balbillus did not question the dire significance of this new comet but suggested a ruse to avert the danger. If Nero contrived to kill off some high-ranking aristocrat, the intent of the heavens would be fulfilled and the princeps spared.

>   Probably Balbillus meant to give a pretext for the murder of Lucius Junius Silanus, the last male member of Augustus’ sacred line—other than Nero himself. But on July 17, it seemed that no such measure would be needed, for the comet was no longer seen. The baleful star had shone for more than two months without incident. Rome, and Nero, were able to breathe a sigh of relief.

  But the very next night began a disaster as terrible as if the comet had hurtled to earth and struck the city dead center.

  Nero was at Antium in mid-July of 64, the place of his daughter’s birth and his own, when messengers from Rome told him of a fire in the city. It had begun near the Circus Maximus, a racecourse built of stone but surrounded by wooden shops crammed with flammable goods. Winds were driving the blaze into several adjoining regions, and thousands of residents were fleeing. Nero elected to stay where he was, trusting in the vigiles, the corps that oversaw fire fighting and civic safety, to handle the problem. Later, though, when he learned that his own grand construction, the Domus Transitoria, was being consumed, he made haste to return to Rome.

  By the time he arrived, the city had become a cauldron. The flames had moved at breakneck speed and were attacking four of Rome’s seven hills. The primary weapon of the vigiles, buckets of water, was utterly useless. A fallback strategy, destruction of buildings to form a brake, was failing as well: by the time battering rams could be brought into position, the blaze had already raced past the line of defense, or else the intense heat—estimated at 1100 degrees Fahrenheit—simply jumped any barrier. Those who escaped their tinderbox homes had become a throng of seared, scarred, and panicked refugees. They jammed the narrow streets and blocked one another’s paths, clogging escape routes with heaps of goods they had saved from the flames, or looted.