by James Romm
6. when Seneca wrote Medea: The dating of the tragedies is perhaps the greatest and least soluble problem impeding efforts to chart Seneca’s evolution. Miriam Griffin (Seneca, app. A) did not include the tragedies in her otherwise comprehensive chronology of Seneca’s writing and chose not to discuss them at all in her study of Seneca’s life. Abel (Bauformen) took a guess and listed them as “ca. 50–60” in his chronological table. John G. Fitch has made good progress by comparing the metrical and stylistic features of the plays in “Sense-pauses and Relative Dating in Seneca, Sophocles and Shakespeare,” American Journal of Philology 102 (1981): 289–307, and I accept his conclusions as a general guide for ordering the plays and assigning them to a large span of Seneca’s life.
7. turn the cosmos itself into an enemy: Seneca’s jaundiced view of imperial expansion is discussed in connection with Natural Questions in Harry Hine, “Rome, the Cosmos, and the Emperor in Seneca’s Natural Questions,” Journal of Roman Studies 92 (2002): 42–72.
8. even less pleased by Phaedra: The problem of Phaedra’s topicality is mysteriously not discussed by Michael Coffey and Roland Mayer in their edition of the play (Seneca: Phaedra [Cambridge, 1990]), though they note that “Seneca was aware that the Greek myth could be applied to a Roman political context with perilous results” (p. 4) and that the incestuous union of Claudius and Agrippina bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Greek mythic tales (p. 26). R. G. M. Nisbet, by contrast, has tentatively dated Phaedra before 49, based on the fact that its condemnation of stepmothers was “difficult for a courtier to say at the exact moment when Agrippina was displacing Britannicus with her own son Nero.” Nisbet, “The Dating of Seneca’s Tragedies, with Special References to Thyestes,” in Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar: Sixth Volume, edited by Francis Cairns and Malcolm Heath (Leeds, 1990), p. 353.
9. Phaedra would have raised uncomfortable associations: The close link between Phaedra’s character and that of Agrippina has been noted by many commentators; a list has been compiled by Eckard Lefèvre in “Die politische Bedeutung von Senecas Phaedra,” Wiener Studien 103 (1990): 109–22. Lefèvre’s opinion is that the play must have been written after Agrippina’s death, though the dating scheme established by Fitch’s analysis suggests it is earlier (“Sense-pauses and Relative Dating,” 289–307).
10. addressed this concern in the Senate: Tacitus, Annals 12.5.
11. it seems more likely that, in the matter of succession, the two were in cahoots: This is almost guaranteed by the fact that the breakup of Octavia’s engagement to Silanus, a preparatory step to getting her engaged to the future Nero, preceded the marriage of Claudius and Agrippina. That is, the emperor and incoming empress were already, in late 48, planning for a merged Julio-Claudian line that would carry their dynasty forward. It is hard to imagine that Agrippina, even if possessed of the seductive charms that the sources attribute to her, had already besotted Claudius at that early stage. Levick (Claudius, p. 70) and Barrett (Agrippina, p. 111) concur that Claudius acted with deliberation and forethought in preferring Nero to Britannicus.
12. contrary to Roman law: Previous imperial adoptions, including those of Tiberius by Augustus and of Germanicus by Tiberius, were done by fathers who had no sons. See M. H. Prévost, Les adoptions politiques à Rome (Paris, 1949).
13. February 25, a.d. 50: The date is known through an inscription, number 224 in the collection Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, from the records of the Arval brethren, a priestly caste at Rome. Tacitus (Annals 12.25) specifies that the Senate acted after hearing a speech delivered by Claudius himself. Different versions of Nero’s full name after adoption are recorded; he sometimes appears in inscriptions as “Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar.”
14. more than three years before Britannicus: The exact date of Britannicus’ birth is not known. Tacitus (Annals 12.25.2) states that Nero was three years older than Britannicus.
15. so unfeeling toward his own flesh and blood: Aristotle, in a theoretical discussion of monarchic succession (Politics 1286b25–28), says it would be beyond what one could ask of human nature for a king to prefer some other heir over his own progeny.
16. Narcissus had feared Agrippina: See Tacitus, Annals 12.2, where Narcissus argues against making changes in the dynastic order by bringing Agrippina into the imperial house.
17. effused over the young Britannicus: The relevant passage, from which the quote is taken, is Consolation to Polybius 12.5. Seneca goes on to advise Claudius to make Britannicus “consort” even before his accession, perhaps diplomatically alluding to Claudius’ ill health.
18. perhaps involuntarily: Suetonius (Nero 7) says that Britannicus was merely speaking out of habit, but that rings false since the adoption had taken place more than a year earlier.
19. Only the most revered imperial women: Livia, wife of Augustus, had been the first to receive the title Augusta but did so only after her husband’s death. Antonia, grandmother of Caligula and the ancestor who connected him most closely to Augustus, was the second Augusta, and Agrippina was the third.
20. share the front face with him in jugate profile: Susanna Braund points out that “this was the first time the wife of a reigning emperor had been portrayed with her husband on an imperial coin.” See Braund, Seneca’s De Clementia (Oxford, 2009), p. 432. For further discussion, see Walter Trillmich, Familienpropaganda der Kaiser Caligula und Claudius: Agrippina Minor und Antonia Augusta auf Münzen (Berlin, 1978), pp. 55–63.
21. “This was a new thing”: Tacitus, Annals 12.37.
22. power unprecedented for her gender: Wood (Imperial Women, p. 259) notes that “Agrippina II was the first and only woman in Roman history to demand real, and official, power as opposed to influence.”
23. bring back her severed head: Tacitus (Annals 12.22) says that Lollia was forced to commit suicide, not that she was executed; and he says nothing of beheading. Dio (61.32.4), on the other hand, adds the gruesome detail that Agrippina had trouble recognizing the head, distorted as it was by decomposition, but that she finally assured herself by examining the teeth. Dio strongly implies that Agrippina’s main motive was to amass wealth for Nero.
24. an enormous undertaking: For details, see M. R. Thornton and R. L. Thornton, “The Draining of the Fucine Lake: A Quantitative Analysis,” Ancient World 12 (1985): 105–20. Suetonius (Claudius 20) reports that the project occupied eleven years. The lake was only partially drained in antiquity; it finally disappeared through drainage conduits in the nineteenth century.
25. Agrippina beside him in a chlamys: As described by an eyewitness, Pliny the Elder (Natural History 7.46), as well as by Tacitus (Annals 12.56). The only other instance I am aware of in which a woman wore a chlamys is Vergil’s Queen Dido (Aeneid 4.137), precisely because she occupies what would ordinarily be a male political station.
26. an ingenious rumor was spread: Reported by Dio 61.33.5; other details of the story come from Tacitus, Annals 12.56–57.
27. Pallas rose to heights: The story that follows is taken from Tacitus, Annals 12.53.
28. fulsome praises be inscribed on a brass plaque: They were later moved to a monument on the Via Tiburtina, where Pliny the Elder, a later Roman official, saw them and mocked them in his letters (Epistles 7.29 and 8.6).
29. just when Paul arrived there: The encounter between Paul and Gallio is carefully dated to the late summer of A.D. 51 in Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford, 1996), pp. 18–22. Paul had apparently been in Corinth since spring of the previous year.
30. The head rabbi of Corinth, Sosthenes: He is possibly, but not necessarily, the same Sosthenes as the one mentioned as coauthor of 1 Corinthians in the opening sentence of that epistle. See Murphy-O’Connor, Paul, p. 264.
31. recorded in Acts of the Apostles: Acts 24:1–27.
32. a ruthlessly effective technique: Josephus, Jewish War 2.254–57.
33. An insurrectionist known as “the Egyptian”: His brief but tempestuous career in Judaea is recounted in Joseph
us, Jewish War 2.261–63, and Jewish Antiquities 20.170–72.
34. it must be the Egyptian: As is clear from Acts 21:38.
35. allowed enough freedom of movement: The picture painted by Acts 28:16–30 is of a man under house arrest, able to receive students and acolytes and to teach freely. Rome did not as yet have any prohibitions on Christian doctrine nor any ideological complaint against Paul.
36. Paul’s life in Rome: In particular, it is unclear whether Paul left Rome at some point during the 60s to travel in Spain and elsewhere, a question that hinges partly on the authenticity of the so-called Pastoral Letters.
37. Seneca a kind of proto-Christian: For a survey of the history of this notion, see Arnaldo Momigliano in “Note sulla leggenda del cristianesimo di Seneca,” Rivista storica italiana 62 (1950): 325–44. Lorenzo Valla, the great Italian humanist, first challenged the authenticity of the letters in the fifteenth century.
38. did not think much of philosophy: Suetonius, Nero 52. Suetonius also supplies the less credible report that Seneca prevented Nero from reading any oratorical works other than his own.
39. “You taught me not only how”: Tacitus, Annals 14.55. For the circumstances of this colloquy, see here in this book.
40. a new thing in the history of the principate: Attested by Tacitus, Annals 13.3.
41. a passionate fan of the chariot races: Suetonius (Nero 22) reports that Nero’s earliest teachers had to scold him to stop talking about this sport.
42. stopped being able: The source of this rather cryptic statement is Letters to Lucilius 49.2.
43. “You nurtured my boyhood”: The source is again Tacitus, Annals 14.55.
44. “for the sake of improving”: Letters to Lucilius 108.6–8. Mark Morford has attempted to use the advice on teaching in De Ira (2.18–21) as a template for reconstructing Seneca’s lessons. See Morford, “The Training of Three Roman Emperors,” Phoenix 22 (1968): 57–72. But it is generally assumed that De Ira (or at least its first two books) was composed prior to Seneca’s appointment as tutor. The practical needs of the situation in the palace would have required a very different approach than anything Seneca could have envisioned as general guidelines.
45. “laid siege” to Attalus’ classroom: Recollected by Seneca at Letters to Lucilius 108.3, with a characteristically pointed military metaphor.
46. if only by way of his presence: Seneca was a strong believer in the power of social conditioning. “Those who frequent the perfume sellers and stay there for even a short time will carry away some of the scent of the place,” he wrote in a discussion of philosophic education (Letters 108.4), meaning that proximity to philosophy would cause it to rub off on even those not interested in its teachings.
47. under a bloodred sky: Reported by Dio 61.33.2.
48. show his wife more affection: Suetonius, Nero 35.1, the sole source. In the following section (35.2), Suetonius also provides unique information that Nero several times tried to strangle Octavia.
49. “The soul of my wife”: Octavia, line 537. See here in this book for more discussion of this remarkable exchange.
50. “Her life’s breath depends”: Letters to Lucilius 104.2. Elsewhere Seneca’s references to Paulina are rare and tangential. At Letters 50.2, we learn that he tolerated having her female clown Harpaste in the house, though he disliked clowns.
51. possibly a good deal earlier: Griffith (Seneca, pp. 57–58) reaches the conclusion that the question of whether Paulina was his first wife or his second cannot be resolved.
52. at around the time Seneca became Nero’s tutor: The date of c. 49 for Paulinus’ appointment has been convincingly argued in Miriam Griffin, “De Brevitate Vitae,” Journal of Roman Studies 52 (1962): 104–13.
53. Miriam Griffin, a leading Seneca scholar: Griffin’s interpretation, advanced in the article cited in the previous note, seems to me the only good explanation for the treatise’s anomalies, just as that advanced by Zeph Stewart in the case of Consolation to Marcia (see here in this book) alone explains the unique relationship there of author and addressee. However, Griffin’s critics jumped on her argument and caused her to take a more cautious approach in Seneca, where she explains at length (pp. 401–7) that she still believes in a date of 55 for De Brevitate Vitae but cannot prove it. Gareth Williams, in his introduction to a recent edition (Seneca: De Otio, De Brevitate Vitae [Cambridge 2003]) calls Griffin’s interpretation “highly speculative” (3 n. 7) and “intriguing but inconclusive” (20), and refuses to date the treatise.
54. do two things at once: Griffin (Seneca, p. 407) speaks in terms of a “primary” (philosophic) and “secondary” (political) purpose to several of the prose works, a position mischaracterized by Williams (introduction to Seneca, p. 2) as “ulterior motive.”
55. His great wealth: Narcissus was credited with an estate of 400 million sesterces (Dio 61.34.4). Jeffrey Winters has estimated the average wealth of the ten richest Roman senators as only a quarter of this amount: Oligarchy (Cambridge, 2011), p. 92.
56. a maimed hand: Agrippina refers to the hand (Tacitus, Annals 13.14) in a context clearly signifying that she perceived it as a political liability. The historical evidence on Burrus is nicely collected in W. C. McDermott, “Sextus Afranius Burrus,” Latomus 8 (1949): 229–54.
57. a farce written by Seneca: Apocolocyntosis 3, discussed here in this book.
58. “the palace is being torn apart”: The campaign is described by Tacitus (Annals 12.65). Other sources (Suetonius, Claudius 43) give some of the actions attributed to Narcissus (less plausibly) to Claudius.
59. Tiberius removed the signet ring: Suetonius, Tiberius 73. The source of the anecdote is a work subsequently lost.
60. a similar quandary: Griffin, who is usually quite circumspect in dealing with historical evidence, concurs that in 54 “Claudius began talking about [Britannicus’] advancement.” See her Nero: The End of a Dynasty (London, 1984), p. 32. Levick (Claudius, p. 76) speaks of “increasingly sharp rows” between Claudius and Agrippina over Britannicus’ future and believes that Claudius intended Nero and Britannicus to be joint heirs.
61. some scholars do not believe: Neither Barrett (Agrippina, pp. 141–42) nor Griffin (Nero, p. 32) is willing to take a position on whether Claudius was murdered; Levick (Claudius, p. 77) inclines “on balance” to think that he was. See, however, the argument against this view by John Aveline, “The Death of Claudius,” Historia 53 (2004): 453–75. R. W. Pack points to malaria as a possible cause of death in “Seneca’s Evidence in the Deaths of Claudius and Narcissus,” Classical Weekly 36 (1953): 150–51.
62. the perfect time to strike: The same reasoning has persuaded T. E. J. Wiedemann, “Tiberius to Nero,” in Cambridge Ancient History, p. 10.241, that Claudius probably was murdered.
63. contradicted on details by other ancient historians: Suetonius (Claudius 44) notes that there was disagreement in his day about who administered the poison and what followed. Suetonius gives one account that says, as Tacitus does, that a mushroom poisoned the princeps at a family dinner, but also cites a second in which Claudius’ taster, a eunuch named Halotus, poisoned him while he was dining with a caste of priests. Dio (61.34) agrees with Tacitus up to the point where Claudius ingests the poisoned mushroom, but he has no report of the second poisoning by Xenophon. Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 20.151) reports a rumor that Agrippina caused Claudius’ death but gives no details and does not endorse it.
64. a dish of mushrooms: This is the position of Aveline in “Death of Claudius,” who goes so far as to correlate Claudius’ reported symptoms with the effects of a particular species of mushroom. It seems to me paradoxical to rely on Tacitus as a source for Claudius’ symptoms but not for the agent of his death. Nero reportedly (Suetonius, Nero 33; Dio 61.35.4) made a wisecrack later in life about mushrooms being “the food of the gods” because they had made Claudius a god, but this does not imply a deliberate poisoning.
65. a troupe of comedians: Seneca (Apocolocyntosis 4) refers to them
as though they had arrived while Claudius was alive, and in general he contradicts the notion that Claudius’ death was concealed for some eight to ten hours, giving the time of death as noon or shortly after on October 13.
66. Dio specifies that Seneca: Dio 61.3.1. The information in the same chapter, that Seneca also wrote the speech given to the Senate that day, and that it was later inscribed on silver tablets, seems to confuse two different speeches; see here in this book.
CHAPTER 3: FRATRICIDE (A.D. 54–55)
1. Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii: Most scholars agree on the title Apocolocyntosis, but a few dispute it, feeling that the work referred to by Dio (61.35.3) under that title is not the one we have. In manuscripts, the work is titled “Satire on the Death of Claudius” or “Deification of Claudius the God Told Through Satire,” neither of which sounds authentic.
2. a mystery: The problems are nicely outlined in the introduction to P. T. Eden’s edition of the Latin text, Seneca: Apocolocyntosis (Cambridge, 1984).
3. hauled up to heaven with a hook: Dio 61.35, the same chapter that informs us about the title of Seneca’s work.
4. a colossal new temple in central Rome: A small section of Claudius’ massive temple on the Caelian can be seen today in Rome. It was not completed until the 70s, work having stalled under Nero.
5. no one would ever think: A few scholars continue to doubt the attribution despite Dio’s testimony. G. Bagnani, in Arbiter of Elegance (Toronto, 1954), tried to assign it to Petronius.
6. Seneca’s motives: The various theories are summarized by Eden in his edition of Apocolocyntosis and by H. Macl. Currie, “The Purpose of the Apocolocyntosis,” Acta Classica 31 (1962): 91–97.