Dying Every Day

by James Romm

  Another admirer of Seneca’s tragedies left behind a play modeled after them. That play, Octavia, stands as the greatest Roman tribute to Seneca—an imitation that attests to his stature as author, and a stirring portrait of his efforts to uphold moral politics. Whoever composed it followed Seneca’s verse style so closely that the play was long thought to be the work of Seneca himself, as it is identified in manuscripts. One or two scholars still believe that today, though most agree it should be deattributed.

  The author of Octavia gave his hero a star turn in one long scene of the play. He showed “Seneca” trying, earnestly but in vain, to correct Nero’s abuses and guide him to a better path. He depicted this sage lamenting his departure from Corsica and longing to be back under the benign night sky. The speech suggests that the question of what had brought Seneca into Nero’s palace—his own ambition, or forces beyond his control—was a cardinal one for the generation that had witnessed his rise and fall. This author holds impotens Fortuna, a fate that could not be resisted, to blame.

  Other literary men who survived the reign of Nero paid their tributes to Seneca’s memory, some of them hard to decipher. Pliny the Elder, who died in the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii, awarded Seneca the admiring title princeps eruditorum, “princeps of the wise.” In its literal meaning, the phrase merely proclaims Seneca wiser than his peers, but in common usage the word princeps of course had larger resonance. Pliny perhaps meant to throw a barb at Seneca’s palace career with this ironic phrase, or perhaps he only intended a wry compliment. Perhaps he alluded to the rumor reported by Tacitus, which, if true, meant that Seneca had missed, by the slimmest of margins, the chance to become princeps himself.

  The satirist Juvenal was a child during Nero’s reign, but perhaps he could remember the strange political partnership that dominated it. He included a memorable passage in his eighth satire, a long rant on the follies of Rome’s class prejudices: “If the people were given a vote, who is so far gone in vice / as to hesitate before picking Seneca over Nero?” And then came Tacitus, whose multilayered and ambivalent account of Seneca has been explored extensively in this book.

  Seneca’s critics were also active in the years after his death. Their names are largely unknown to us, but their views can be found in the pages of Cassius Dio. They restated the charges first made by Suillius in his Senate attack and rebutted by Seneca in De Vita Beata: it was sheer hypocrisy, they said, for a Stoic sage to gather a huge fortune, or for a lover of freedom to work hand in glove with a princeps. They tried to make tyrannodidaskalos, “tyrant teacher,” Seneca’s epitaph, rather than Pliny’s princeps eruditorum. In the eyes of many today, they succeeded.

  Perhaps the most apt judgment on Seneca’s career can be taken from something Quintilian said in his Institutio Oratoria. On its surface the remark applies to Seneca’s literary style, but it seems to reach beyond that and into the realms of morality, politics, and character—the arenas in which Seneca’s strange drama played out.

  “There is much we should approve in him, much that we should even admire,” Quintilian wrote. Then he urged Seneca’s readers to be selective in winnowing out good prose from bad, saying: “Only take care in making your choice.” Finally he added, speaking this time of Seneca, “If only he had taken that care.”

  The Stoic movement at Rome, though deeply damaged by the deaths of Seneca, Lucan, and Thrasea Paetus and the exile of many others, was not defeated. Some important leaders survived the great purge of 65 and 66, including Helvidius Priscus, Thrasea’s son-in-law and protégé, and Demetrius the Cynic, once guru to Thrasea and Seneca. Both these men, along with the famed Etruscan sage Musonius Rufus, hurried back to Rome after Nero’s death, determined to continue their cause.

  They were angry now at injustices that had been done. Helvidius tried to get revenge for his father-in-law’s death by indicting one of those who engineered it; but so many senators had colluded in Thrasea’s downfall that, he came to feel, any prosecution risked starting a new purge. Musonius, however, succeeded in gaining the conviction of Egnatius Celer, a Stoic turncoat who had betrayed his great teacher, Barea Soranus, in exchange for vast rewards. In the early days of the new princeps, Vespasian, it was Celer who was in disrepute, and a death sentence was easily procured.

  Helvidius, who had stood by in silence when Thrasea opened his veins, had been made militant by the abuses of the Neronian age. He became determined not to knuckle under, not to allow Vespasian to believe that autocracy had won. He refused to address the new princeps by his imperial titles or to acknowledge his sovereignty over state finance. In verbal showdowns with Vespasian, Helvidius disregarded Thrasea’s advice, once given to the headstrong tribune Rusticus, to bend himself to the temper of the times. Helvidius dared Vespasian to exile him or kill him, claiming those were the only ways to curb his tongue.

  It was not long before the regime of Vespasian went down Nero’s path with regard to the Stoics. Delatores seeking the emperor’s favor again depicted the sect’s solemnity as a kind of sedition. Vespasian took drastic action in 71, banishing all Stoics and Cynics from the city of Rome; he even sent some of the more extreme agitators to the Pontine Islands. Helvidius, of course, he had killed. For the first time in the principate, Rome saw the systematic repression of an entire school of thought.

  For unknown reasons, Vespasian allowed one sage, Musonius Rufus, to stay in Rome during this diaspora and continue giving lectures. Attending these talks was a young man, a foreign-born slave, whose name would soon be known across the Roman world: Epictetus. Once a member of Nero’s staff—he belonged to Epaphroditus, the freedman who had helped Nero die—Epictetus somehow obtained freedom and began giving philosophic lectures of his own, attracting even bigger crowds than those of Rufus.

  As Vespasian’s reign gave way to those of his two sons, first Titus and then Domitian, new crackdowns on Stoicism caused new heads to roll. One man died for writing an admiring biography of Helvidius Priscus; another, the still-unbowed Rusticus, for memorializing Thrasea Paetus. Helvidius’ son, Thrasea’s grandson, was executed for writing a mythic play that carried (in Domitian’s eyes at least) political overtones. It seemed that each new generation of Stoics was destined to suffer new rounds of persecution, as each new princeps sought targets for his cruelty.

  Domitian again, as his father had done, banished the Stoics from Rome, including Epictetus, whose magnetic personality had by now become a phenomenon. Epictetus landed in Nicopolis, in the Greek East, and began attracting new followers. His conversations and quips were written down by one of them, young Arrian of Nicomedia (later a famous historian), and began circulating as the Discourses and Encheiridion (“Handbook”). In time these writings, in Greek, filtered back to Rome, where they came under the eyes of an aristocratic youth named Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. One day, after his elevation to princeps, this Marcus would quote the sayings of Epictetus in his own writings—bringing Stoic philosophy back into the palace from which it had been exiled since the death of Seneca.

  Marcus Aurelius achieved, a century after Seneca had sought it, the reconciliation of Stoic morality and Roman political authority, a development as pathbreaking as Nero’s ill-fated fusion of the roles of princeps and performing musician. The record Marcus left behind of his thoughts and musings, Meditations, still inspires countless readers today. It has appeared in no fewer than six new editions during the year this book was written. It attests to the power of ethical teachings to enlighten even an autocrat, if only he is willing to listen.

  Had Seneca lived a century later than he did, he might have sat at Marcus Aurelius’ right hand, rather than serving as Nero’s footstool. But at least history in the end bore out the thesis on which Seneca had based his life: that moral gravity was not out of place in the halls of imperial power. The Romans had at last gained what many of them, apparently, had hoped that Seneca, despite all his flaws, might be: a philosopher king.

  Acknowledgments

  I have many to thank f
or helping me through the moral thicket of Seneca’s life. Among the scholars I consulted, Elaine Fantham, Miriam Griffin, Harry Evans, and Gareth Williams were generous with their time, as were Shadi Bartsch, Ted Champlin, Robert Kaster, and James Ker. Emily Wilson has been a comforting fellow laborer as we both worked on studies of Seneca (mine went to press before I was able to consult hers). Outside the academy, Dan Akst, Bryan Doerries, Pam Mensch, and Matthew Stewart helped me solve some of this book’s problems, or at least offered solace when I could not solve them at all.

  Much of this book was written at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library, and I want to thank the Center’s marvelous staff, in particular Jean Strouse and Marie D’Origny, and NYPL generally. All of my Cullman colleagues encouraged this work, particularly Annette Gordon-Reed, Larissa MacFarquahr, and Andy Stott, to whom I am grateful.

  Deep thanks go also to my agent Glen Hartley, cartographer Kelly Sandefer, art researcher Ingrid Magillis, bibliographer Cara Wasserstrom, illustrator Mark Boyer, editorial assistants Charlotte Crowe and Audrey Silverman, copy editor Janet Biehl, proofreaders Benjamin Hamiton and Bert Yaeger, and production editor Victoria Pearson.

  Jim Ottaway, my friend and fellow philhellene, lent his expert eye and sharp pencil to the effort of improving an early draft.

  My final thanks go to Vicky Wilson, an editor who can inspire the sense that writing books still matters, and writing them well matters intensely.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. relied on earlier writers: The sources Dio relied on, at least one of whom held a positive view of Seneca, are discussed by Miriam Griffin in Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (Oxford, 1976), pp. 428–33. It has proven impossible thus far to determine just what these sources were. For more discussion, see T. D. Barnes, “The Composition of Cassius Dio’s Roman History,” Phoenix 38 (1984): 240–55. One specialist on the play Octavia regards it as having been written to answer the critics cited by Dio; see p. 71 of Rolando Ferri, ed., Octavia: A Play Attributed to Seneca (Cambridge, 2003), p. 71.

  2. Our most detailed account of Seneca: A wide range of opinion has been expressed about Tacitus’ views of Seneca, which itself is a testament to their ambivalence. The discussion prior to 1976 is summarized nicely by Griffin (Seneca, p. 441), who then lays out her own largely positive reading. More recent contributions to the discussion are Ronald Mellor, Tacitus’ “Annals” (Oxford, 2011), pp. 165–70; James Ker, “Tacitus on Seneca,” forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to Tacitus, edited by V. Pagán; and many stretches of Ker, The Deaths of Seneca (Oxford, 2009), especially pp. 41–49. My own view falls closely into line with that of W. H. Alexander, “The Tacitean ‘non liquet’ on Seneca.”

  3. the face of a businessman or bourgeois: “The bust does not … leave the impression of a man weighed down by deep, introspective speculations. It is rather a likeness of a man occupied with less weighty matters.” H. W. Kamp, “Seneca’s Appearance,” Classical Weekly 29 (1935): 50. The Penguin Classics edition of Seneca: Letters from a Stoic (Robin Campbell, translator), which used to feature the Berlin bust of Seneca as its cover image, has recently replaced it with a bust of Pseudo-Seneca.

  4. a model for painters: As discussed in Ker, Deaths of Seneca, pp. 299–310.

  5. especially in his relationship to wealth: This has always been the primary arena of attacks on Seneca’s “hypocrisy,” starting with Suillius Rufus in Seneca’s own day (see here in this book) and continuing today. Miriam Griffin (“Imago Vitae Suae,” p. 55), whose view of Seneca is generally positive but highly nuanced, admits in her uniquely personal discussion that however one tries to rationalize Seneca’s riches, “the discrepancy between words and deeds remains.”

  6. to “feel out” that influence: The approach that Griffin (Seneca, p. 412) labels “positivism”—“the explanation of a literary work by its outward circumstances”—has been variously endorsed or rejected by interpreters of Seneca, and some of them will no doubt feel I have carried it too far in this book. But it seems to me that, once this approach is admitted at all—and very few dismiss it altogether—it is difficult to limit its application. Even Karlhans Abel, who strongly criticized the positivist approach in his Bauformen in Senecas Dialogen (Heidelberg, 1967), nonetheless used it in the case of Consolation to Helvia and Consolation to Polybius, and Griffin expressed surprise that he had not added De Vita Beata to the list. Once one has accepted that “secondary purposes” intrude into Seneca’s treatises, causing “oddities of emphasis and argument” (Griffin, Seneca, p. 407), one cannot easily say which passages are “odd” enough to qualify and which are not.

  7. “Seneca was a hypocrite”: The opinion of the ever-provocative Robert Hughes in Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History (New York, 2011), p. 104.

  8. a news item appeared: The May 2013 graduation from Columbia of Gac Fillipaj, who credited Seneca as his inspiration, was covered by numerous news outlets.

  CHAPTER 1: SUICIDE (I) (A.D. 49 AND BEFORE)

  1. The most likely candidate was then twelve years old: The date of Nero’s birth is generally agreed to be December 15, A.D. 37, the date given by Suetonius (Nero 6.1). See the discussion by Barrett in Agrippina, p. 234. Suetonius has erred at Nero 7.1 when he says that Nero began lessons with Seneca at age eleven; he was in fact twelve. See Griffin, Seneca, p. 420.

  2. had dismissed her stepson’s tutors: Tacitus, Annals 12.41.8; see here in this book.

  3. or so she hoped: The reasoning Agrippina used in arranging Seneca’s recall is reported by Tacitus at Annals 12.8. There Tacitus mentions that Seneca’s trustworthiness would be assured by his memoria beneficii, “recollection of a good deed,” a phrase often thought to refer to some prior benefaction by Agrippina but possibly indicating the recall itself. G. W. Clarke has proposed in “Seneca the Younger Under Caligula” that the beneficium in question was the rescue of Seneca’s life when, in an incident related by Dio, Caligula had decided to take it, but this is pure speculation.

  4. I was better off hidden away: Octavia, lines 381–90, with the textual emendations accepted by Rolando Ferri. Seneca blames his change of status on Fortuna, a force to which (as Ferri points out, p. 229) the Stoics did not normally accord such high regard.

  5. he hoped to go to Athens, not Rome: A report attributed to Probus by the scholium to Juvenal’s Satires, 5.109, but treated with grave skepticism by scholars. It is noteworthy that Seneca, unlike other aspirants to philosophic wisdom (including his nephew Lucan), showed no desire to go to Athens in his youth, when he still had freedom of movement.

  6. at the feet of Attalus: Attalus was the most prominent of several teachers whom Seneca remembered fondly later in life; he was also praised by Seneca’s father (Suasoriae 2.12). The debt Seneca felt he owed to Attalus is elucidated at Letters 9.7 and 67.15 as well as in long sections of Letter 108, the source of the passage quoted here.

  7. Seneca briefly adopted their practice: Seneca’s flirtation with Pythagoreanism is discussed in Letter 110, sections 17–23.

  8. Quintus Sextius: Seneca recalled the influence of this Roman philosopher at Letters 73.12–15, 98.13 (which notes Sextius’ rejection of senatorial office), and 59.7 (which contains the passage referred to here in this book, on virtue as a military struggle). In De Ira 3.36, Seneca took Sextius as his model for a famous exercise in self-examination, discussed in this book in Chapter 3, here.

  9. almost hurled himself out a window: Anecdote related by Plutarch, Moralia 77e.

  10. avoiding mushrooms and oysters: Self-reported by Seneca at Letters 108.15: “These are not foods but spurs to compel those already full to eat more.” In the same passage Seneca declares that “my stomach lacks wine,” sometimes interpreted to mean that he was a lifelong teetotaler, but this is surely pressing the statement too hard. It is difficult to imagine that the man who spent sixteen years at the imperial court, and who owned and managed some of Rome’s most productive vineyards, had
never taken a drop.

  11. entered the Senate: The evidence on which to date this crucial turn of events is slim. Most likely Seneca reached the Senate in the late 30s, when he was around forty years old. That is a late start for a Roman political career. Griffin (Seneca, p. 46) thinks that the timing suggests “simple disinclination” toward politics. Her view is approved by Brad Inwood (“Seneca in his Philosophical Milieu,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97 [1995], pp. 64–66), who further speculates that Seneca was pressured into a political career he didn’t want (while also admitting that “we shall … never know” his true motivations). The desire to see disinclination in this delay is indicative of the view that both Griffin and Inwood (and others) hold of Seneca, exemplified by the subtitle to Griffin’s book, A Philosopher in Politics—which defines Seneca as a moral thinker first and foremost and characterizes his political career as something secondary, perhaps accidental. My own approach puts Seneca’s political and philosophic/literary selves on an even footing and even at times subordinates the latter to the former. I am almost prepared to invert Griffin’s formulation and characterize Seneca as “a politician in philosophy.”

  12. His clan, the Annaei, were equites: Attested by Tacitus, Annals 14.53, and implied by Seneca the Elder in the preface to Controversy 2, section 3. In the early principate, equestrian rank required an estate of more than 100,000 denarii, though property alone was not sufficient to ensure appointment to the order.

  13. the elder Seneca gave a qualified blessing: Preface to Controversy 2, section 4. One gets a glimpse of Seneca the Elder’s parenting style in this preface, which is addressed to all three sons yet clearly marks out the youngest as his father’s favorite.

  14. the portent she saw at her son’s birth: Suetonius, Nero 6.1.