by James Romm
That second goal was very nearly achieved. During one torture session, Faenius was assisted by another closet conspirator, Subrius Flavus, while Nero himself looked on. At a certain point, Flavus realized the absurdity, the bizarre futility, of what was taking place: of three men in the room who wanted Nero dead, two were attacking the third, while Nero stood by and watched, unarmed and outnumbered. Flavus used covert gestures to suggest to Faenius that they kill Nero then and there; he even began to draw his sword. But Faenius passed up the plot’s unexpected second chance. He shook his head to Flavus and turned back to his work. The crackdown had gone too far, and he had too little nerve, for a sudden reversal of direction.
Meanwhile guards were spreading through the city to put the populace in a chokehold. Watches were posted on the old Servian wall, their presence visible to everyone, and at points along the Tiber where ships might try to enter—or leave. Squads of Praetorian toughs, their ranks strengthened by strapping Germans, shouldered their way through the Forum and broke into private homes, dragging away those wanted for questioning. Shackles and chains were no longer held in reserve but were slapped instantly onto all suspects. A great stream of manacled men surged toward Nero’s residence, so many that the suspects had to be detained outside, near the gates, for lack of rooms to torture them in.
Immunity was promised to those who would implicate others, and many grasped at the slender hope that this bargain would be honored. The poet Lucan was one of them. Though he had been among the fiercest of the plotters, even offering Nero’s head as a gift to several of his friends, the chance to preserve his own life, so young and full of promise, turned him compliant. He confessed his guilt and gave names of several accomplices, even throwing in that of his own mother, Acilia. If we believe Suetonius’ cruel analysis, he hoped to please Nero, the killer of Agrippina, by joining him in matricide. Luckily, as Tacitus reports, Acilia was forgotten in the confusion and ultimately left alone.
One brave holdout refused to implicate anyone.
The freedwoman Epicharis, a member of Lucan’s household and a fellow firebrand, was still in custody after denying her recruitment of Proculus at Misenum. Now Nero ordered torture—burning with red-hot plates and stretching on the rack—trusting that a woman’s resolve could be easily undone. Epicharis, however, endured her ordeal in silence for the better part of a day. The next day her body was so badly broken that she had to be carried into the torture chamber on a chair. Nonetheless she managed, when left alone in the locked room, to undo her breastband, tie it in a noose, and hang herself, half naked, from the bars supporting the chair’s canopy.
It was an episode that Seneca might have enshrined in Letters to Lucilius, amid his galleries of heroic suicides. A concubine and former slave, seemingly the lowest thing of Fortune, had found the ultimate freedom and power, the choice of her own death. Perhaps Epicharis’ cause had utterly failed. But in Seneca’s moral scheme, where self-destruction granted escape from oppression, this proud woman had won, defeating the aggregate might of the Roman state.
But Seneca was never to learn of Epicharis’ end. Even as his brother’s bedmate was being stretched on the rack, Praetorians, led by Gavius Silvanus, were surrounding the villa outside Rome where he was taking dinner with his wife, Paulina.
Seneca had arrived at this villa earlier in the day, returning from Campania to the outskirts of Rome. His movements, for once, are clear thanks to the detailed report of Tacitus, but his motives are as inscrutable as ever. Doubtless he knew the plot to kill Nero would go into motion that day. Was he hoping to be on hand to serve the new government, even to be hailed as princeps? Would he, like his mythic avatar Thyestes, have gone back to his Argos and drunk again from the poisoned chalice of power? Tacitus did not know and did not speculate. We too can only guess.
Seneca shared a simple meal with Paulina that night, for he had been avoiding foods that might conceal poison. Paradoxically though, even while he sought to elude Nero’s toxins, he had collected some of his own, a cup of hemlock prepared as if for an Athenian state execution. One venom might have been thought as good as another, but the manner and mood of death mattered intensely to Seneca. For years he had contemplated and anticipated, in Letters to Lucilius, the last scene in the vivid drama of his life. Now his chance to play that scene, before an audience of friends and household staff, was at hand.
Fortunately for Seneca, a great dramaturge would immortalize that scene, using a report passed on by an admiring eyewitness. Tacitus, ever fascinated both by Seneca and by the ways great men met their dooms, made it one of the longest, most detailed, and most intense episodes of the Annals. He shaped it into a tour de force but left its tone ambiguous, reserving judgment on Seneca right up to the end. It is unclear whether he cast the man’s final drama as tragedy or as satire, or as a modernistic melding of the two.
Among the scene’s ironies was the fact that Silvanus, the captain of the squad sent to confront Seneca, was, like Faenius Rufus, an as-yet-undiscovered conspirator. That very morning, perhaps, he had anticipated coming to this villa to hail Seneca as princeps. But now, to avoid detection, he had to play his part, that of a steadfast Nero loyalist. On orders, he questioned Seneca about his recent exchange with Antonius Natalis. Had Natalis indeed tried to get Seneca to meet with Gaius Piso? And had Seneca sent him back to Piso bearing the strangely portentous message “My well-being depends on your safety”?
It mattered little how Seneca replied, for mere accusation gave Nero license to do as he liked. Nonetheless, Seneca gamely mounted a defense. He still might win clemency from the regime or at least respect from the two friends dining with him—witnesses who would transmit his last acts to the world. It was true that Piso had sought meetings, he told Silvanus, but he had rejected these requests. As for the fateful sign-off, Seneca had intended nothing by it, for he had no reason to so highly value the health of any man—except, he added significantly, that of a princeps. He had no reason to flatter Piso, for flattery was not his way, as Nero could himself attest. Indeed, he grandly claimed, the emperor had seen more of freedom than slavery in Seneca’s behavior.
Silvanus returned to the palace and reported Seneca’s words. Nero was closeted with his two closest advisers, Poppaea and Tigellinus. He asked whether Seneca was preparing to commit suicide. No doubt he hoped for a positive answer, for evidence was slight, and in the end evidence would be needed. Silvanus, however, said that Seneca showed no awareness of peril. Nero told him to return to the villa and deliver the emperor’s verdict: death.
Silvanus did not obey. Though he knew the plot had collapsed, the actions required for Nero’s reign to continue were more than he could endure. He made his way to his commanding officer and fellow conspirator, Faenius Rufus, to ask whether he should carry out his mission. Rufus ordered him to do so, but still Silvanus demurred. He could do nothing to save Seneca, but he could at least spare himself the taint of collusion. He asked another soldier to carry his fatal message and went on his way.
The double role Faenius Rufus was playing had helped none of the conspirators. They were getting weary of concealing it. Scaevinus, the first plotter to confess, was under interrogation by Faenius when his patience ran out. With witnesses standing by, Scaevinus replied knowingly to one of Faenius’ questions: “No one knows better than you yourself; why don’t you step forward and help out your great princeps?” Taken by surprise, Faenius turned white and began spluttering incoherently. The game was up, and he was soon under arrest.
After that, the military’s huge role in the plot was unmasked. This led to some remarkable exchanges, as Nero questioned Praetorians who, with nothing left to fear, were blunt in their replies. Subrius Flavus explained to the emperor the origins of his disaffection. “No one in the army was more loyal to you than I—when you deserved our love,” Flavus said. “But I began to hate you, after you became the murderer of your mother and wife, a chariot driver, an actor, and an arsonist.” Tacitus remarks that nothing Nero heard during
the crisis wounded him more than this terse catalogue of crimes.
A centurion named Sulpicius Asper was equally forthright in addressing Nero. Asper framed his defense in philosophic terms. Asked why he had joined the conspiracy, he replied, in Tacitus’ account, “Because there was no other remedy for your atrocities” (or according to Dio, “It was the only way I could help you”). Seneca was not alone in seeking an ethical imperative for assassination.
One by one the soldier-conspirators were betrayed, arrested, and beheaded, willingly stretching their necks for their comrades’ blades. Flavus is said to have looked impassively at his own grave as he went to the block, finding it too shallow. “Not even this is up to code,” he sneered. The Rome he had been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neronopolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.
The roll of accused civilians kept growing as well. Nero lengthened it by adding long-standing enemies, guilty or no. A sitting consul and close friend of the princeps, Atticus Vestinus, got onto the list, though he was implicated by no one. He had shown, with his abrasive jokes, that he knew too much about Nero and was not afraid of him. A squad of soldiers was sent to bring Vestinus in for questioning. Vestinus was feasting with friends when they arrived, making a good show of fearlessness. But one word of summons was enough to dispel the charade. He immediately opened his veins and retired to his bath to die. His dinner guests were detained at the table for hours, their terror furnishing sadistic amusement for Nero.
Soldiers bared their necks and senators slit their arms, all going passively, peacefully, resignedly to their dooms. Some even took their own lives after they were out of peril. Gavius Silvanus, who had refused to deliver Seneca’s death sentence, was acquitted by Nero’s inquisition but killed himself nonetheless. Perhaps the guilt of surviving a horrific purge was too much to live with, or else fear of retribution from the kin of the unlucky.
In the great catalogue of deaths that ends the extant text of Tacitus’ Annals—a list so long that Tacitus fears it will bore and disgust his readers—only one man is said to have gone down fighting. Junius Silanus, the last male descendant of Augustus other than Nero himself, was in detention in the town of Barium when a soldier arrived to kill him. Though unarmed, Silanus fought back with all the strength he had, quipping to his assassin that he would not get a free pass for his job. He alone died in combat, wounds on the front of his body, rather than fading slowly away in the warm, languid waters of his bath.
In his prose treatises and in Letters to Lucilius, Seneca examined suicide from every angle, especially the question of when it was called for. Wasting disease might justify it, or the abuse of a cruel tyrant, or the certainty that death was coming soon in any case. As he awaited word from Nero’s palace, Seneca might have reflected that though he was approaching a critical threshold in all three areas, he had not crossed it in any. He still might hope that banishment, not death, would be Nero’s verdict. His philosophic stature might protect him, as it later shielded his fellow Stoic sage Musonius Rufus.
Seneca was also in mind of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, whose life in exile—if that was to be her fate—would be much harder without him. “Her spiritus depends on mine,” he had written in one of the Letters, using the Latin word for the breath of life. “The spiritus must be called back as it flees—though in torment—out of reverence for our dear ones, and held on the tip of our lips. For a good man must live not as long as he wants, but as long as he ought.” Those words might have recurred to him as he sat with Paulina, a woman who had never offended Nero but, if familiar patterns prevailed, would be considered guilty by association.
Then a centurion arrived from Rome, and all hope vanished.
Seneca asked the soldier if he might have access to his will. Apparently he wanted to deed part of his wealth—most of it was already in Nero’s hands—to the two friends who were dining with him, sharers of his last hours. Nothing he might write now could stop Nero from seizing the whole estate, if he pleased, but the centurion nonetheless refused the request. Seneca explained to his friends, in the words of Tacitus, that he could thus leave them only the imago of his life, the one legacy over which he had control.
Imago is a multilayered word. Like its English derivative image, it can mean simply “shape” or “form.” But it can also mean “illusion,” “phantom,” or “false seeming,” something “imagined.” Tacitus, a superb ironist and verbal artist, chose this word with care. Seneca, too, as Tacitus was aware, was a consummate ironist—an author who had painted his self-portrait in half a million words yet had never, in all his treatises, plays, and epistles, addressed the truths of his life in power. He had created an imago of himself since the day he began writing. He was shaping it still in his last hours, hastily revising an incomplete work and taking steps to ensure its survival.
But perhaps it was not too late to speak truth. In an effort to comfort his friends, who now had begun weeping and lamenting, Seneca pointed out that the current crisis had been predictable. “What was left to Nero, after the murders of his mother and brother, except to add that of his teacher and mentor?” he said. Seneca himself had helped conceal those two murders and had colluded in at least one of them. His blunt words, spoken (in Tacitus’ phrase) as if to Rome generally, seemed intended both to expose them and to lay them squarely at Nero’s feet.
The death of Seneca, as depicted by Rubens in the early seventeenth century. The philosopher’s idealized features were taken from the bust known today as Pseudo-Seneca (see here).
Seneca had a cup of hemlock prepared for this moment, so that he could die as Socrates had done five centuries earlier. But for some reason, he declined to use it, choosing instead a more Roman death, by slow blood loss. Paulina, the wife who shared Seneca’s peril, now said she wanted to share his fate, and he acceded to this. He and Paulina opened their veins, laying arms side by side so that one stroke of the knife could cross both. To one observer, this was a moment of moving marital harmony, but to another, it appeared that Seneca was forcing his wife to die. Thus do reports diverge, in this last and most extreme case, in the works of Tacitus and Dio.
When the blood didn’t run fast enough from his arms, Seneca gashed himself behind the knees and around the ankles as well. He was in considerable pain, and he and Paulina dragged themselves to separate rooms to be spared the sight of each other’s suffering. Attended by slaves, freedmen, and his two close friends, Seneca waited for death.
But death would not come. Seneca’s aging veins, attenuated by meager diet, were not allowing enough blood to escape. His slow decline gave him time to dictate a last work to his scribes, presumably a moral essay, though Tacitus did not specify. Then he asked his friend Statius to bring him the long-reserved cup of hemlock, and swallowed it. The noxious drink had paralyzed Socrates within minutes, but somehow it had no effect in Seneca’s case.
At last Seneca made his painful way to the baths of his villa and immersed himself in hot water. Still conscious enough to seek kinship with Socrates—who had died, according to Plato, vowing an offering to Asclepius, the god of healing—Seneca sprinkled some bathwater on the ground, saying he did so as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He was either beseeching, or thanking, the god for deliverance. Then, weakened by blood loss and sickened by hemlock but finally suffocated by hot vapor, Seneca breathed his last.
The most complex life of the Neronian age had ended fittingly, with the most complex death. Seneca’s protracted, three-stage suicide had not gone at all according to plan, a plan he had contemplated for years. Yet it was his own distinctive construction, composed without interference from the soldiers. In the end, he must have been pleased with the autonomy and single-mindedness of his exit. It was the one thing he owned that Nero couldn’t touch.
His body was cremated and the ashes interred without rites or ceremony, as he had requested in his will.
Miraculously, Paulina survived the night of April 19. Her arms were bound up by h
er slaves and her bleeding arrested. Some said it was on Nero’s order, to lessen the infamy of Seneca’s death; others said it was by her own wishes, after she realized Nero did not hate her and that her life as a widow might not be harsh. She survived a few years longer, pale and depleted by her ordeal.
She was, it would turn out, a rarity. All Seneca’s other kin and associates were consumed in the inferno of Nero’s wrath.
Lucan’s death followed close on the heels of his uncle’s. Though the young man had been promised amnesty in exchange for information, Nero was thoroughly sick of the poet who outshone him, and ordered his suicide. Lucan opened his veins and bled to death, retaining his literary gifts even as his limbs grew cold. It occurred to him at some point that he had written in Civil War about a soldier dying from blood loss, and as he expired he recited the verses from memory, perhaps these:
He fell, with all his veins burst open;
No life ever fled by such a broad route.…
The lowest part of his trunk surrendered its limbs to death,
But where the lungs swelled, where organs were yet warm,
the fates held on a long time.
Lucan’s father Mela, bereft now of his son and brother, soon found himself sucked into the fire’s backdraft. The youngest of the Annaei had always steered clear of politics, preferring wealth to influence, but that preference led to his downfall. After inheriting Lucan’s estate, he tried, perhaps too hard, to collect debts owed to his son. This irked a certain Romanus, probably one of the debtors, and Mela found himself denounced. A forged letter, tricked up to look like Lucan’s, suggested that Mela had been part of his son’s plot. Mela opened his veins as Lucan had done, after deeding most of his carefully hoarded estate to Nero’s dreaded henchman, Tigellinus.
The oldest of the Annaei, Gallio, nearly escaped with his life, thanks to a sudden reversal of sentiment. The purge had almost run its course when Gallio was attacked by a senatorial foe, Salienus Clemens, as an enemy of the state. The senators present in the Curia sensed that things were going too far; public safety was being used as a pretext to act on private hatreds. Clemens was shouted down. Gallio got a reprieve but could not shake the ill fame that the charge had brought. He too became a victim of Nero’s violence in the end.