by James Romm
15. a spirited, beautiful twenty-two-year-old: Agrippina’s beauty is attested by Tacitus (Annals 12.64.4) and Dio (60.31.6). Both authors report an anecdote (Tacitus skeptically) that after Agrippina died at age forty-three, Nero viewed his mother’s corpse and remarked on its attractiveness.
16. Agrippina formed a bond of friendship: This must be assumed given Agrippina’s recall of Seneca in 49, even if we do not identify the memoria beneficii referred to by Tacitus (see here) with an event in Caligula’s reign. The section of Tacitus’ Annals dealing with Caligula’s reign is lost. But his first mention of Seneca in the extant portion of the work shows that he had already introduced him earlier.
17. “Sand without lime”: Suetonius, Caligula 53.2. On the thin evidence for this period of Seneca’s life, see especially Clarke, “Seneca the Younger Under Caligula,” 62–69.
18. “There is hardly a sentence”: The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, ed. Sir George Otto Trevelyan (London, 1875), p. 1:339.
19. “It seems that Nature produced him as an experiment”: Consolation to Helvia 10.4. In some translations, the emperor whom we usually call by his nickname, Caligula, is instead referred to as Gaius, the name by which Seneca knew him. For Seneca’s horrific remembrances of Caligula, see Griffin, Seneca, pp. 213–15, and Anthony A. Barrett, Caligula: The Corruption of Power (London, 1989), pp. 156–58.
20. family was linked to the Seianiani: The degree of Seneca’s family’s involvement with Sejanus is disputed, but it is clear that there was some. Zeph Stewart has perhaps overstated it in “Sejanus, Gaetulicus, and Seneca,” American Journal of Philology 74 (1953): 70-85, as Griffin (Seneca, pp. 48–50) has pointed out, but Griffin also agrees that Seneca’s uncle, Galerius, and the close family friend Lucius Junius Gallio (later the adoptive father of Seneca’s brother Novatus) had close Sejanian associations. Barrett (Caligula, pp. 112–13) has made the case that Lucilius, a close friend of Seneca, also had strong ties to the Sejanus conspiracy.
21. written about a.d. 40: The dating is uncertain, but the reading advanced here, first put forward by Stewart (“Sejanus, Gaetulicus”), assumes that the work was published after the Lepidus conspiracy had come to light in the fall of 39. Griffin (Seneca, p. 397) rejected Stewart’s reading, partly on the basis of uncertainty about the publication date, but then, in a separate discussion, leaned toward “a date after 39.” In an extensive study of the work, On Seneca’s Ad Marciam (Leiden, 1981), C. E. Manning opted for a date of 40, whereas Abel (Bauformen in Senecas Dialogen, p. 159) argued for 37. Since no certainty is possible on other grounds, the cogency of Stewart’s interpretation is itself an argument for a post-39 publication date.
22. a pattern of opportunism: Stewart (“Sejanus, Gaetulicus,” p. 85) speaks insightfully of “the spirit of opportunism which is so often present and so offensive in [Seneca’s] writings,” though he sees this spirit diminishing as Seneca ages. My own view is that over time Seneca merely got more adept at weaving his opportunistic stratagems into the weft of his philosophic discourse.
23. largely obsolete by Roman times: The leaders of the so-called Middle Stoa, in the second and first centuries B.C., especially Panaetius, had abandoned the scheme of cyclical destruction in favor of Aristotle’s hypothesis that the cosmos was eternal.
24. Caligula awoke from a strange dream: Reported by Suetonius, Caligula 57.
25. more likely well briefed on what was to happen: This is the opinion of Levick (Claudius, pp. 32–8).
26. a precedent that was to endure for centuries: The role of the Praetorians in determining when a princeps had failed, and who was to be his successor, increased over time. In A.D. 193 the guardsmen assassinated the reigning emperor, Pertinax, and then held a notorious auction in which the office of princeps was literally sold to the highest bidder.
27. he kept a cool distance from the conspiracy: At De Ira 1.20.9, Seneca speculates as to what motivated the conspirators who struck Caligula down, making clear that he himself does not know. He uses the assassination as a moral exemplum in De Constantia Sapientis 18 and Letters 4.7, both times indicating only a general knowledge of the circumstances.
28. In one hypothetical discussion: The passage in question, De Beneficiis 7.20.3, is often taken as an oblique justification for the murder of Caligula, for instance by Griffin (Seneca, p. 214). But the wording of the passage is obscure, and Griffin acknowledges in the note to her recent translation of the work—Seneca: On Benefits (University of Chicago, 2011), p. 208—that Seneca might have been advocating helping a mad tyrant kill himself. Seneca also qualified his advice: he said that such a final remedy would be appropriate only if the mad tyrant had no hope of recovery. Would that scenario include Caligula, whose madness had gone on for only two years?
29. the defining problem of Seneca’s age: Vasily Rudich, with his firsthand experience of repression and covert dissent in Soviet Russia, has contributed enormously to our view of the Neronian era in his two studies, Dissidence and Literature Under Nero and Political Dissidence Under Nero. Rudich, it should be noted, takes a rather dim view of Seneca’s solutions to the problem of autocracy.
30. Pastor, a wealthy eques: Pastor’s story is related at De Ira 2.33.3–4. Nothing is known of the incident, or of Pastor, beyond what Seneca tells us.
31. for Seneca, it became a kind of fixation: Griffin (Seneca, chap. 11) reviews the wide array of Senecan texts with admirable thoroughness and carefully distinguishes “the notion that Seneca exalted suicide” from “the truth … that he exalted martyrdom” (p. 386). Choosing to accept a painful or arduous death, for Seneca, carried many of the same moral virtues as inflicting it on oneself. Nonetheless Griffin agrees that “Seneca used suicide frequently to preach contempt of death,” tracing this focus to the prevalence of political suicide in his own day. Paul Plass, in The Game of Death in Ancient Rome: Arena Sport and Political Suicide (Madison, Wisc., 1998), is more inclined to regard Seneca’s treatment of suicide as obsessional. See also Catharine Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome (New Haven, Conn., 2007), especially chapters 4 and 5. Robert Kaster makes the interesting observation that Seneca’s “hymn to suicide” in De Ira “seems to owe more to traditional Roman thought than to Stoic doctrine.” See Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum, trans., Anger, Mercy, Revenge (Chicago, 2010), p. 123 n. 300.
32. the Latin phrase se necare: James Ker (Deaths of Seneca, p. 200) traces the etymology as far back as Domenico da Peccioli, a fourteenth-century humanist.
33. an exemplary act of lived philosophy: The full account of this tradition is given in R. J. Goar, The Legend of Cato Uticensis from the First Century b.c. to the Fifth Century a.d. (Brussels, 1987). A shorter version can be found in the introduction to Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome, the cover of which sports a superb French canvas depicting Cato’s death. The philosophic background is discussed by Miriam Griffin in her two-part article, “Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide,” Greece and Rome 33 (1986): 64–77 and 192–202.
34. it glows incandescent: The major passages are found at De Providentia 2.10–13; De Constantia 2; and Letters 24.6–8, 67.13, 95.70–72, 104.29–34. An intriguing but unprovable thesis by P. Pecchiura in La figura di Catone Uticense nella letteratura latina (Turin, 1965), pp. 69–71, holds that Seneca only glorified Cato’s suicide during the times he was out of political power.
35. A bizarre compact: Discussed in Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome, pp. 116–21, and Plass, Game of Death, chap. 7. The terms of the compact are stated most explicitly by Tacitus, Annals 6.29.1–2, in a passage describing practice under Tiberius. Edwards notes that at some later time, the guarantee that a suicide’s legacy would pass to his heirs was revoked, but it seems to have been in place throughout the Neronian era.
36. two notebooks of enemies’ names: Attested by Suetonius, Caligula 49.
37. was rushed as he expired to a place of execution: As described by Tacitus (Annals 6.40); see Plass, Game of Death, p. 95. An even more absurd example is found at Annals 16.11, where Nero interc
edes to block an order of execution passed against victims who were already dead.
38. to embarrass the princeps: Tiberius, according to Tacitus (Annals 6.26), felt discomfited by the suicide of Cocceius Nerva. Significantly, though, this discomfiture arose because Nerva killed himself while he was under no charge or suspicion. True “political” or “forced” suicides do not seem to have been interpreted as an act of protest, pace Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome, pp. 122–23.
39. the sequel to the story: Related by Herodotus, Histories 3.202.
40. a cathectic spell: See Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 1993), and Susan E. Wood, Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 b.c.–a.d. 68 (Leiden, 1999). Judith Ginsberg’s analysis of Roman “rhetorical stereotypes” evoked by Agrippina the Younger is also very illuminating: Representing Agrippina: Constructions of Female Power in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford, 2006), chap. 3.
41. some mixture of these frightening roles: Wood (Imperial Women, p. 261) remarks on the illogic of the blends: “The elements of the stereotype are unbridled ambition, bloodthirstiness, sexual flagrancy, yet at the same time an ability to retain the loyalty of her husband.… Attackers of such women routinely accuse them both of unfeminine frigidity and of promiscuity.”
42. to take the title Augusta: The Senate had offered her this title in A.D. 41, after the birth of Britannicus (Dio 60.12.5).
43. alleged partner in crime: The charge is variously given as adultery pure and simple (Dio 60.8.5) or as something vaguer but still primarily sexual, “immoral relations” (scholium to Juvenal 5.109; see Stewart, “Sejanus, Gaetulicus,” p. 83 n. 86). It is pointless to speculate whether there were any grounds to the charge.
44. Corsica had two Roman towns: As attested by Seneca himself, Helvia 7.9. One of these two coloniae, Mariana, has been the subject of recent radar surveys revealing the remains of streets, houses, and a public bath. The ruins of Aleria, a Greco-Roman city that once had an estimated population of 20,000, can be visited in Corsica today.
45. his first essay written there: The date often given for Consolation to Helvia is A.D. 42, on the basis of its psychology; Seneca wants to assuage his mother’s grief before it has gone past a reasonable limit of time. In Consolation to Marcia, he judged two years too long, and that was for a son who had died. That dating would place it well before Consolation to Polybius. But it should be noted that Griffin (Seneca, pp. 397–98) does not accept this reasoning and in her chronological table lists Helvia after Polybius.
46. the case of Apicius: Helvia 10.9–10. Apicius lived in the early first century A.D. His taste for high living was known to Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, and Aelian, but only Seneca preserved the anecdote about his death. A cookbook of Roman delicacies survives to this day under the name Apicius, but it dates from much later in time. The name Apicius had become so closely associated with fine dining that it was attached pseudonymously to the cookbook.
47. in the play Octavia and elsewhere: The opening monologue of the character Seneca in Octavia (quoted on pp. 16–17) attributes his departure from Corsica to the influence of a capricious Fortune. Rolando Ferri’s comment (p. 229) on the line points out its incongruity: “This plaintive address to Fortune is at odds with Seneca’s own doctrine.” The scholium to Juvenal 5.109 asserts, in a similar vein, that Seneca had wanted to go to Athens, not Rome, on leaving Corsica. Griffin (Seneca, p. 62) is willing to admit that this may have been a wish Seneca actually expressed, but if so, it was probably in retrospect after Rome had become a prison.
48. probably written a year or two after the first: The dating of Consolation to Polybius is fairly secure, given that in it Seneca celebrates Claudius’ recent conquest of Britain.
49. The poet Ovid, banished from Rome: Ovid’s exile (for unknown reasons) to Tomis on the coast of the Black Sea, starting in A.D. 8, was immortalized by the poet’s own Tristia and Letters from Pontus, collections of wheedling, fawning, and bitterly plaintive poems presented to Augustus. Seneca would have known these works. Two of the poems attributed to Seneca by the collection Anthologia Latina (236–37) describe the rigors of life on Corsica in distinctly Ovidian terms and meter, but the attribution is doubtful.
50. Borrowing a trick from Ovid: The parallels between the closing words of Polybius (18.9) and Ovid’s Tristia (3.14 and 5.7.57–58) seem too close to be coincidental. See Griffin, Seneca, p. 62 n. 3, and John J. Gahan, “Seneca, Ovid, and Exile.” For both Seneca and Ovid—writers famous for style and prolixity—the plaint that command of Latin was being eroded constituted a powerful appeal for clemency.
51. “When you wish to forget all your cares”: Consolation to Polybius, sections 7–8 and the far more effusive passage at 12–13. The flattery contained in these passages is so grotesque that an apologist has argued that they should be read as satire: W. H. Alexander, “Seneca’s Ad Polybium: A Reappraisal,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 37 (1943): 33–55. That view is nicely dismissed in Griffin, Seneca, pp. 415–16.
52. Seneca sought to have them suppressed: Dio (61.10.2) claims that Seneca scuttled—or perhaps repudiated, as Griffin (Seneca, p. 415) interprets Dio’s language—a work, sent to Rome from Corsica, containing flattery of both Claudius and Messalina. Consolation to Polybius flatters only Claudius, but most scholars accept that it is the work to which Dio refers.
53. Messalina felt her position deteriorating: There is considerable bewilderment over Messalina’s motives in 48, but I have assumed that they were dynastic and power-based rather than purely emotional. Ancient sources portray Messalina as a nymphomaniac driven by bizarre sexual impulses, and there may have been some truth to this. But the marriage to Silius seems to have been part of a coup attempt, possibly plotted in collusion with a faction of the Praetorian Guard. That at least is the view of Susan Wood (Imperial Women, pp. 252–55) as well as Barbara Levick (Claudius, London, 1990), pp. 65–67. Richard Baumann, by contrast, is inclined to trust Tacitus’ account and see Messalina as acting on emotional impulses: Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (London, 1992), pp. 176–79.
54. on orders issued by the palace: Tacitus states that Narcissus, a leading palace freedman, gave the death order, while Claudius himself vacillated and considered pardoning his wife. But Tacitus’ whole portrait of Claudius is a caricature of passivity and uxoriousness. It seems likely, given the rapidity with which Claudius married Agrippina and adopted her son, that he was glad of the pretext to rid himself of Messalina.
55. As had often been true in the Julian clan: The pattern is nicely sketched out and diagrammed in Mireille Corbier, “Male Power and Legitimacy Through Women: The Domus Augusta Under the Julio-Claudians,” in Women in Antiquity: New Assessments, edited by Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick (London and New York, 1995).
56. A decree had to be obtained: Tacitus (Annals 12.6–7) describes with characteristic irony how Lucius Vitellius spearheaded this piece of legislation. It remained legal in the Roman Empire for a man to marry his niece until the fourth century A.D.
57. now perhaps eight years old: There is confusion about the date of Octavia’s birth, since Tacitus (Annals 14.64) declares that she was twenty years old in 62. But most scholars accept the evidence that she was born in 41, not 42, and was thus slightly older than Britannicus.
58. high expectations for Silanus’ future: Dio 61.31.7. Dio then gives the very honor that Claudius had bestowed on Silanus as a reason the regime later wanted him dead.
59. The allegation of incest: That the principal charge against him was incest is the view of Tacitus (Annals 12.3–4) and Seneca (Apocolocyntosis 8). Dio (61.31.8), by contrast, speaks of a plot against Claudius.
60. soon after their marriage: Probably in A.D. 50; see Tacitus, Annals 12.26, and here in this book.
61. he took his own life: The sources diverge concerning the manner of Silanus’ death. Tacitus is quite certain it was a suicide, and he is seconded by the author of Octavia (lines 148–49); but Dio (61.31.8) and Sen
eca (Apocolocyntosis 8) both claim (Seneca in vaguer terms) that he was executed. I believe, with D. McAlindon, that “the authenticity [of the suicide story] is almost certain in view of the expiatory rites in Tacitus.” “Senatorial Opposition to Claudius and Nero,” American Journal of Philology 77 (1956): 116.
CHAPTER 2: REGICIDE (A.D. 49–54)
1. Seneca adapted the cyclical scheme: Seneca’s is the first known attempt by a Stoic to frame the cyclical destruction of the earth as a flood rather than an ekpyrosis, though Thomas Rosenmeyer notes that Cornutus, a Stoic writer roughly contemporaneous with Seneca, gives two alternatives, fire and flood, as the ways the world might end; see Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), p. 149. The extensive discussion by A. A. Long does not even mention the possibility of a world-ending flood: “The Stoics on World Conflagration and Eternal Recurrence,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 23 (1985): 13–33.
2. the fatal waters could arise: In a later apocalypse-by-flood passage (Natural Questions 3.29.4), Seneca took this immanence a step further, imagining the solid earth itself dissolving into water.
3. a practice Seneca deplored: The long diatribe against luxurious use of snow at Natural Questions 4b.13 is the most prominent of several passages.
4. quoted these lines as a prophecy: For a survey of the evidence, see my “New World and Novos Orbes: Seneca in the Renaissance Debate over Ancient Knowledge of the Americas,” in The Classical Tradition and the Americas, edited by Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold (Berlin, 1993), pp. 1:78–116.
5. does not end there: My reading of this famous Medea passage is very much at odds with that of Anna Lydia Motto, “The Idea of Progress in Senecan Thought,” Classical Journal 79 (1984): 226. It is troubling that Motto cites the Renaissance readings of this passage, badly distorted by the tendency to regard it as prophetic of Columbus, as support for her interpretation. I follow closely the view of Gilbert Lawall that the second, “triumphal” ode of the play cannot be understood without reference to the catastrophic third ode that forms its sequel. Lawall, “Seneca’s Medea: The Elusive Triumph of Civilization,” in Arktouros, edited by G. W. Bowersock (Berlin and New York, 1979).