by James Romm
Lucan resented the emperor’s small-mindedness, and resentment began to infect his verse. The subject matter of Civil War—the era of Roman history that had brought Julius Caesar to power—was politically sensitive, though Lucan initially sought to avoid provocations. But as the poem progressed, its view of the house of Caesar became darker. By the time Lucan reached book seven—he completed ten books and intended at least two more—his verses had begun to border on sedition.
Acting either out of anger or envy, Nero banned Lucan from giving readings or publishing. Lucan only made his Civil War more polemical than ever. In book ten—the last book he was to complete—the murder of Julius Caesar was openly hailed as an exemplum for future generations. In private circles, Lucan began to circulate harsh verse lampoons of the princeps—the same crime, as he surely knew, that had nearly gotten Antistius condemned to death two years earlier.
Most likely it was now that Lucan uttered a bon mot that later became legendary. While using a public lavatory, he heard the sound of his own flatulence echoing through the hollow privy beneath him. His quick literary mind seized on an apt quotation—from the poetry of Nero. You might think it had thundered beneath the earth, Lucan intoned, gleefully spoofing the emperor’s verse about an eruption of Mount Aetna. Those who heard him hastened to leave the latrine, fearing that their presence there put them in danger.
Lucan finally chose a direct line of attack. He unleashed his De Incendio Urbis, “On the Burning of the City,” a work dealing with the still perilous topic of the great fire. It is now entirely lost, and its content is barely known—we cannot even say whether it was a poem or an essay—but one scant reference suggests that it held Nero to blame. In any case, merely to write publicly about the fire, an event that had deeply damaged Nero’s reputation, was certain to offend the princeps. Seneca, in all the reams of prose he wrote in 64 and 65, never once mentioned it.
Could Lucan, or any writer, hope to escape with his life after exercising such license? Was the young genius courting arrest? It seems rather that Lucan was hopeful that the current regime would soon be over and that he would emerge into the next era as a hero of the opposition. For by late 64 or early 65, he had become a leading member of a plot to assassinate Nero.
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Nero’s assumption throughout his reign was that only a member of the Julian or Claudian family could rule Rome. Starting with his brother Britannicus and proceeding through Agrippina, Plautus, Sulla, Octavia, and most recently, Decimus Silanus, he had systematically killed off those who shared the blood of Augustus or of Augustus’ wife, Livia. Now there was only one potential rival left: Junius Silanus, last scion of the doomed Silani, the great-great-great-grandson of Augustus. He remained untouched for the time being, but Nero watched him with unease.
Nero had tried to safeguard his rule by leaving Rome no alternatives. He, and the son he hoped to father with Poppaea, would be the only eligible members of the once-crowded imperial house. But the strength of this dynastic strategy had never been tested. The principate, after all, was not a monarchy. It was not clear that every princeps had to come from a single line. Acclamation by the Praetorian Guard was the best authority a new ruler could claim, and this potentially could be obtained by anyone.
Lucan and his fellow conspirators decided to test that possibility. They chose an amiable, flamboyant aristocrat, Gaius Calpurnius Piso, to be put in Nero’s place, should they succeed in killing the princeps. Strangely, they bypassed Junius Silanus, the only male Julian left. Perhaps they regarded him as too young to rule; other young men who had taken the throne, first Caligula and now Nero, had been driven by it into self-absorption, delusion, and fantasies of omnipotence. That pattern, it was felt, could not be repeated.
A dynastic marriage was arranged for Piso, such that the Julio-Claudian house would not be wholly extinguished. It was planned that he would divorce his wife, a commoner ill suited to the throne, and marry Antonia, Claudius’ daughter from an early marriage. Still in her midthirties, recently widowed by Nero’s execution of her husband Sulla, Antonia had shown she was capable of bearing children, though the son she had borne to Sulla had not survived.
No one among the band of plotters dreamed of restoring the republic. Lucan was glorifying that long-ago world in his Civil War, but the values of epic poetry did not often carry over into political reality. Most in the Roman elite accepted the view that Seneca had expressed in De Clementia: autocracy had won. To imagine otherwise was to court a new civil war and social chaos. The best Rome could hope for, as the men behind Piso judged, was a milder, saner autocrat and a return of dignity to the Senate.
The conspiracy gained strong military support. Faenius Rufus, coleader—with Tigellinus—of the Praetorian Guards, was a crucial convert to its ranks. Rufus had fallen from favor as Tigellinus rose, since he declined to feed Nero’s appetites and flatter his vanities as Tigellinus did. Nero had begun to treat Rufus with mistrust, even accusing him of having shared the bed of the hated Agrippina. A fall from grace, perhaps even a death sentence, was likely coming, unless Rufus struck first.
Other Praetorians joined the plot because Nero offended their soldiers’ honor. Some were disgusted by a stagestruck princeps or one who raced as a charioteer. Others suspected Nero of having set the fire that destroyed Rome. Still others resented him for the murder of Agrippina, daughter of the great Germanicus, or for the deepening bankruptcy of the Roman state, provider of their generous salaries.
On the civilian side, adherents of the plot spanned the social scale. At the top were senators, among them consul-designate Plautius Lateranus, son of a hero of the conquest of Britain. Among the equites, Claudius Senecio, who had long been one of Nero’s closest friends, vowed his support. At the bottom of the ladder was Epicharis, a clever Greek freedwoman and courtesan, at this time apparently the concubine of Annaeus Mela, Lucan’s father and Seneca’s brother. Despite her low station, Epicharis was among the most zealous conspirators, as the rest would soon learn—to their woe.
The plotters hoped to enlist Seneca in their cause. On several occasions, Piso, who had three years earlier been so close to Seneca as to bring suspicion on them both, wrote to the great sage requesting a parley. But Seneca put him off, claiming ill health and a desire to not be disturbed. Piso finally sent a go-between, Antonius Natalis, to persuade Seneca to meet with him in person.
The arrival of this messenger raised difficult questions for Seneca. At stake was the fate of a man whose life had intertwined with his own for nearly two decades. He had helped raise Nero from age thirteen and had been the closest thing to a father the princeps had. Clearly he had failed to instill in him any part of his own moral code. But had Nero become such a monster that Seneca wished him dead? Or would help kill him?
And what would become of the Roman state should the plot succeed? Seneca knew Piso well enough to see that he was no Augustus. Piso too might fall from favor, and the pattern of dislike leading to abuse, abuse leading to assassination, would set in all over again. In De Clementia, Seneca had described the Roman people as a mob needing to be controlled, liable to do itself much harm if it threw off its “yoke.” Perhaps the harm even Nero might do was less grievous than the alternative.
Then, too, Seneca faced the ethical questions surrounding regicide. In De Beneficiis, he had written that a ruler who went utterly insane could be justly removed; assassination would in effect be a mercy killing. But such cases, Seneca went on to say, were freaks of nature, as rare as fires mysteriously spewing forth from underwater caverns. Even Caligula, he elsewhere implies, did not meet this threshold; still less then did Nero. Was the princeps so far gone in mind, in his late twenties, as to deserve death?
Finally, Seneca had to consider his own fate, his tenuous hold on life. Were his chances of survival better if he joined the plot or stayed out of it? Nero, if we trust the report in Tacitus, had already tried to have his former tutor poisoned. If the plotters succeeded in killing Nero, Seneca had nothing m
ore to fear, but they might well fail. If so, Nero would seize any evidence as a reason to arrest Seneca—something he had thus far been unwilling to do. The death that would follow would be more painful than any poison.
Throughout his political career, Seneca, a practiced diplomat, had hedged bets and navigated between extremes. Now, at his most important crossroads, he once again temporized. He would neither join the conspiracy nor oppose it. His reply to Piso was this: it would not be in his own interest or in Piso’s to meet or have further communication. But, he added, his own well-being depended on Piso’s safety. The remark was an elaborate pleasantry, but it carried a tone of approbation; he seemed to be signaling he would not stand in the plotters’ way. It was a sentence he would come to regret.
Perhaps one other consideration led Seneca to hold aloof. Tacitus reports a rumor that some of the Praetorians, led by one Subrius Flavus, intended to install Piso, then kill him in turn and put Seneca in his place. They regarded Seneca as a virtuous man who would command the respect of the public, while Piso, in their eyes, was a moral lightweight—a man who had demeaned himself by performing in tragic dramas. How would it ease Rome’s shame, they asked, if a lyre player were removed from power but replaced by an actor? Tacitus states, but again only as a rumor, that Seneca was aware of this subconspiracy.
Of all the tantalizing but ambiguous clues to the mind of Seneca, this is surely the most tantalizing and the most ambiguous. It has no more substance than a story heard and recorded, several decades after the fact, by a man who was not sure he believed it. Yet Tacitus was not willing to dismiss it; nor are many modern historians. It raises the awesome possibility that Seneca, while holding back from action, had hopes of ending up the new princeps, the Western world’s first philosopher king.
But it remains only that, a possibility, not subject to proof or refutation. Here is the greatest measure of how little, in the end, we understand Seneca, the man who tried his whole life to reveal his soul yet left so much opaque. After all his discussions of how and why to withdraw from political life, we cannot declare that the rumor Tacitus reported was groundless. We cannot know that Seneca, if Rome had acclaimed him, would have declined to rule.
Though it had many notable members, the conspiracy against Nero lacked leadership. Piso, with his charm and affability, stood high in the group’s affections but proved unable to guide it toward action. Much time passed as the plotters debated when and where to carry out their deed. They had complacency on their side, for Nero had no cause to suspect an attack, but the odds of detection increased each day. In the end, it was Epicharis, the Greek freedwoman belonging to Seneca’s brother’s household, who, in an excess of zeal, forfeited the element of surprise.
Epicharis, weary of the constant debates and delays of her fellow conspirators, took it upon herself to push the plot forward. While in Campania on other business, she visited the naval squadron at Misenum, the sailors who had served Nero loyally and killed his mother for him. One of those assassins, a midlevel officer named Proculus, felt he had not gotten the rewards he deserved. He grumbled loudly about Nero to all who would hear, including Epicharis. She seized on the chance to recruit him. If Proculus would bring his sailors into the plot, she said, he would get his just rewards and more.
But Epicharis had misjudged Proculus’ disaffection. He had only meant to vent his grievances, not avenge them. Appalled at Epicharis’ suggestion, he took word of the interview straight to Nero.
Epicharis was brought in for questioning but denied everything. She had given Proculus no evidence of the plot nor disclosed any names, so the investigation went no further. But Nero had been put on alert. He kept Epicharis in his custody.
The plot that had moved so slowly now went into high gear, for the plotters expected to be betrayed. It was the middle of April; a yearly planting festival sacred to Ceres was set to begin. Though reclusive at other times, Nero would attend the closing ceremonies in the Circus Maximus, a structure already rebuilt after the fire nine months earlier. It was planned that Lateranus, a consul-designate who could get close to Nero, would take the emperor’s knees as if making an appeal on some personal matter, then immobilize him. A similar strategy had been used against Julius Caesar more than a century earlier, with devastating effectiveness.
A senator named Flavius Scaevinus asked for the privilege of striking the first blow. He was hardly the obvious choice, as his life to that point had been marked by self-contentedness and soft living. But Scaevinus felt that his moment was at hand. He even procured a sacred dagger with which to stab Nero, an ancient relic that had been enshrined in a nearby temple, and he cherished this object with fetishistic care. On the night of April 18, just before the close of Ceres’ festival, Scaevinus asked his freedman Milichus to sharpen and polish the dagger for him, and also to procure bandages and tourniquets for stanching blood.
Imperial freedmen had played many consequential roles over the past decades, but never before a senator’s freedman, still less a senator’s freedman’s wife. The wife of Milichus, a woman whose name has gone unrecorded, became alert to Scaevinus’ preparations. She convinced her husband that something was afoot, and that the rest of the household knew it. Milichus would lose a great reward if he were not first to give information to the palace, she argued. Indeed, merely by sharpening the dagger, Milichus had put his own life in danger.
At dawn on April 19, Milichus and his wife, bearing the sharpened dagger as evidence, made their way to the emperor’s residence and gained an audience with Nero. Scaevinus was immediately seized and brought in to explain himself. Scaevinus defended himself with such vehemence that Milichus almost retracted his charge. But his wife was not going to let slip the prize that Fortune had dropped. She produced new information: that she had often seen Scaevinus in parleys with Antonius Natalis, a known associate of the doubtful Piso.
Now Natalis too was brought to the palace for questioning, and he and Scaevinus were taken to separate rooms. Both were asked for details of their recent conversations, and the details did not agree. Both were put in shackles, and implements of torture—used routinely on slaves and noncitizens, but only illegally, and in crises, on men of senatorial rank—were made ready. Following a pattern that has served tyrants well in every age, both men quickly confessed, each fearing that the other, when flayed or burned with hot irons, was bound to do so.
The most urgent task of the interrogation was to obtain names of accomplices. The accused gave them selectively, hoping to betray only enough confederates to secure their own safety. Scaevinus implicated Lucan and Senecio, both members of Nero’s inner circle, along with several others. Natalis was the first to name the ostensible leader of the plot, Gaius Piso. Then, in an effort to gain Nero’s favor—for he knew how the princeps would be pleased—he named Seneca as well. Natalis himself had carried Seneca’s strangely florid message to Piso, and he now repeated it to Nero: My well-being depends on your safety.
Meanwhile, word had leaked out to Piso and the other plot leaders that their plan had been betrayed. Piso’s associates urged him to go at once to the Praetorian camp, or mount the speaker’s platform in the Forum, and rally the city to his cause. Hatred of Nero was widespread; Piso might succeed in igniting an uprising. In any case, what did he have to lose? His life was forfeit; he could at least go out as a martyr, making a public show of resistance.
Piso wandered out into the streets of Rome, where, for most citizens, the day had begun like any other. The quiet and unconcern he found there must have struck him as cruel indifference. The effort needed to rouse this inert populace, the risk that torture might be inflicted on himself or his beloved wife, were too much to contemplate. He went back inside his home and waited for soldiers to arrive, then opened his veins. Like so many others of his class, senators whose will to fight had been ground down by a century of autocracy, Piso found it easy to give up. The slow oblivion of blood loss overcame him, and then all was peace.
In his will, composed in an e
ffort to save his wife and family, Piso left behind exorbitant praise of Nero.
As he supervised the questionings and watched the list of accused grow, Nero saw his deepest misgivings confirmed. The political elite of Rome, high-minded senators and aristocrats, hated him as he had always sensed they did, hated him enough to kill him. Their moralizing had oppressed him for years. They seemed to share a single disapproving mind, a mind nurtured by the severe Stoic school that taught men to scowl and scold—the school of his former high counselor, Seneca.
Nero resolved to hit back with full force. He would sweep the board clean of his critics, the guilty along with the innocent. For as the circle of suspects widened, the line between guilt and innocence became blurry. Huge numbers of the upper class were known to be friends of those accused or had conversed with them recently. Even Seneca, though he had carefully avoided direct contact, had sent a message to Piso that seemed, to Nero at least, to imply collusion. Nero dispatched a Praetorian tribune, Gavius Silvanus, to find Seneca and confront him with this message.
Nero did not at this point realize that much of the military, including this same Gavius Silvanus, was involved in the plot. He still trusted the Praetorians, even their coprefect Faenius Rufus; he had assigned this man, who was in fact a conspirator, to head important interrogations. Faenius, clinging to the hope of evading detection, maintained a pretense of loyalty and cruelly abused his fellow plotters. Those he was now obliged to torture declined to denounce him, thinking Faenius could engineer their release, or even carry out the planned coup, if he stayed undercover.