by James Romm
7. suggest he wanted revenge: The 2010 volume issued by University of Chicago Press, edited by Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum, bears the title Anger, Mercy, Revenge, characterizing the principal thrust of the three works it comprises, De Ira, De Clementia, and Apocolocyntosis.
8. like a martial anthem: Underscoring the anomalous tone of this passage, Edward Champlin has argued that it is an insertion made five or more years after the rest of the work was written. See Champlin, “Nero, Apollo and the Poets,” Phoenix 57 (2003): 276–83, and Nero (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 116. It seems to me a difficult argument to make, and no other scholars have thus far endorsed it. Martha Nussbaum does not question the lines in her recent translation of Apocolocyntosis in Kaster and Nussbaum, Anger, Mercy, Revenge.
9. tried to have it suppressed: See here in this book and note.
10. a single Saturnalian banquet: Eden (Apocolocyntosis) endorses the idea in the introduction to her commentary.
11. vigorous portrait statues: Surveyed in Ulrich W. Hiesinger, “The Portraits of Nero,” American Journal of Archaeology 79 (1975): 113–24.
12. Seneca had had a dream: Reported by Suetonius, Nero 7.
13. widely disliked by the Senate: As attested by Apocolocyntosis, which constructs a doppelgänger of the Senate in the form of an assembly of gods, then uses it to denounce and reject Claudius.
14. both a writer and a courtier: Very little is known of Tacitus’ life or his role at the courts of various emperors, but he expresses (Agricola 44–45) what seems to be anguish at his own complicity in the crimes of Domitian (who reigned from 81 to 96). “Tacitus as a public servant during the reign of Domitian must have experienced many times the same kind of difficulties of conscience that beset Seneca, and on the whole he seems to have faced them in a similar way.” Denis Henry and B. Walker, “Tacitus and Seneca,” Greece and Rome 10 (1963): 108.
15. “My youth was not troubled”: There is some confusion among our sources as to when this inaugural speech was delivered. Dio (61.3.1) inserts it into the events of October 13, the day of Nero’s accession. Tacitus (Annals 13.4), more reliably, places it after the funeral of Claudius. That both historians refer to the same speech seems certain, since it was a landmark address setting out the program of the new regime. Such a forward-looking speech would have appeared presumptuous if delivered only hours after accession, as Dio would have it.
16. Seneca quoted on three occasions: De Ira 1.20.4, and De Clementia 1.12.4 and 2.2.2.
17. certainly in circulation: The terminal date for the composition of De Ira is established by the way it names its addressee. Novatus, Seneca’s older brother, became known as Gallio by 52 at the latest. So De Ira, addressed to Novatus, must precede that date, just as De Vita Beata, addressed to Gallio, must follow it. The need to rely on such arcane clues in establishing the chronology of Seneca’s works is a mark of how thoroughly their author avoided all mention of contemporary people and events.
18. merely wiped his face: The story, which turns on an untranslatable pun, is told at De Ira 3.38.
19. practiced a Zen-like exercise: On the famous passage (De Ira 3.36) in which Seneca describes this practice, modeled on that of the Roman philosopher Sextius, see James Ker, “Seneca on Self-examination: Re-reading On Anger 3.36,” in Seneca and the Self, edited by Shadi Bartsch and David Wray (Cambridge, 2009).
20. “Pull further back, and laugh!”: It is difficult to know at what point Seneca ceases to use “you” for himself talking to himself and applies it instead to a hypothetical member of the Roman upper class. By the end of De Ira 3.37, his “you” is certainly more than just himself, and I am assuming the same is true of the entire chapter.
21. “The one to whom nothing was refused”: De Ira 2.21.6. As Robert Kaster’s note to the passage (Anger, Mercy, Revenge, p. 115) makes clear, various social cues in the passage show that Seneca was thinking of childrearing among the elite.
22. poked fun at her: Agrippina’s response to Apocolocyntosis has been variously assessed, but most scholars assume it could not have been positive. “The institutions to which she had dedicated herself were made to seem ridiculous. The blow to Agrippina’s pride … must have been immense.” Barrett, Agrippina, p. 165.
23. optima mater, “best of mothers”: Tacitus, Annals 13.2, and Suetonius, Nero 9.
24. sculpture found in Aphrodisias: Discussed in Rose, Dynastic Commemoration, pp. 47–48, and in Wood, Imperial Women, pp. 301–2.
25. new format: The closest parallel was a coin issued several decades earlier in the time of Drusus II, showing the heads of Drusus’ two sons facing each other atop cornucopias. See Charles Brian Rose, Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio-Claudian Period (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 47 and n. 17.
26. Nero was not involved: Tacitus (Annals 13.1.1) explicitly says that Nero did not even know of the plan to murder Silanus; at the end of the same chapter, he says that the killing of Narcissus was “contrary to his wishes,” which seems to imply that Nero found out about it only after the fact. Agrippina evidently had the right to issue orders to the Praetorians on her own authority.
27. compared a leader’s handling of the state: The passage referred to, De Ira 1.6.3, is extended at 1.16.2 of the same work, where the gradations of remedial punishment are once again laid out, progressing from least (private reproof) to greatest (mercy killing).
28. appeared on the emperor’s dais: See here in this book.
29. Some Romans fretted: The report of sentiment in the Roman street is given by Tacitus, Annals 13.6.
30. Seneca and Burrus sat beside Nero: The scene that follows incorporates details of Tacitus’ account (Annals 13.5) and Dio’s (61.3.3–4). The assumption that the move to block Agrippina was preplanned, not spontaneous, is my own.
31. “You did not make use of our influence”: Consolation to Helvia 14.3.
32. “womanly and childish vice”: De Ira 1.20.
33. composed concurrently: If the view advanced in this book (here) is correct, Medea was written not long after Claudius’ invasion of Britain, in the mid-40s. De Ira is dated by most between 41 and 49.
34. only a single volume: The work in question is James Ker, Ronnie Ancona, and Laurie Haight Keenan, eds., A Seneca Reader: Selections from Prose and Tragedy (Mundelein, Ill., 2011).
35. Interpreters have struggled: The literature on how Senecan tragedy relates to Senecan philosophy is vast and varied. Martha Nussbaum gives a brief rundown of some important recent discussions in Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994), pp. 448–49 n. 13, and her own reading of Medea in that book contributes to them. More recently, articles in Shadi Bartsch and David Wray, eds., Seneca and the Self (Cambridge, 2009), especially part 3, and in Katharina Volk and Gareth D. Williams, eds., Seeing Seneca Whole (Boston, 2006), have tackled this time-worn dilemma. The Middle Ages and Renaissance believed that the Seneca who wrote the tragedies was a different Seneca from the author of the prose works, and it is still possible today to suggest that the tragedies come from a different hand; see Thomas D. Kohn, “Who Wrote Seneca’s Plays?” Classical World 96 (2003): 271–80. The only evidence from antiquity linking “Seneca” (not necessarily Seneca the Younger) to one of the tragedies (Medea) is a single, and vague, sentence in Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.9.
36. inversions of his prose works: “What was Seneca trying to achieve with these portraits of disturbed and even deranged personalities? The most likely answer is that he was exploiting the emotional directness of dramatic poetry to make his audiences feel the appalling consequences of passion, that the shock and revulsion aroused by his most effective scenes were meant to be the stimulus to moral awareness and growth,” writes Richard Tarrant in Seneca’s Thyestes (Atlanta, 1985), pp. 24–25; but he immediately acknowledges the insufficiency of this approach to account for the power of the plays.
37. “compartmentalized mind”: The phrase comes from Henry and Walker, “Tacitus and Sene
ca,” p. 108. Less generous interpreters have attributed to Seneca a neurotically disorganized or even schizoid personality.
38. he craved the exotic and outré: Nero’s sex life was to take some bizarre turns in later years, such that it included bestial play-acting, cross-dressing, and a homosexual wedding ceremony. The evidence is collected and discussed in Champlin, Nero, pp. 161–70.
39. brought relief to many: Attested by Tacitus, Annals 13.12.
40. “A handmaid for a daughter-in-law!”: Tacitus, Annals 13.13.
41. “I made you emperor”: Dio 61.7.3.
42. threatened to abdicate: The time frame of this threat, reported by Suetonius (Nero 34.1), is not clear, but it seems to date from early in Nero’s reign since his mother was still exerting powerful influence at the time it was made.
43. his close friend Annaeus Serenus: I am supposing that Griffin (Nero, pp. 447–48) is correct in her dating of Serenus’ appointment to this post. Serenus, to whom Seneca addressed De Constantia Sapientis and De Tranquillitate Animi, was a dear friend whom Seneca bitterly mourned after his sudden death from accidental poisoning (Letters 63.14); see Pliny, Natural History 22.96.
44. “It’ll be a daughter of Germanicus”: Agrippina’s words are quoted by Tacitus at Annals 13.14. Barrett (Agrippina, p. 240) says “the passage is hardly believable,” but this seems to me a misunderstanding of Tacitus’ method, which is to provide speeches—admittedly, in some cases, invented ones—that exemplify the cast of mind of his characters as he understood it from his sources. Indeed, Ronald Mellor (Tacitus’ Annals, p. 167) quotes this precise speech and comments: “This rant has the ring of truth—a mother who feels she sacrificed all for her son only to be pushed aside.”
45. Britannicus had made plain: Tacitus, Annals 13.15.
46. a deadline in the literal sense: The ancient accounts of Britannicus’ death are unanimous that Nero was to blame. Tacitus (Annals 13.15–17), Dio (61.7.4), and Suetonius (Nero 33.3) are in this case joined by Josephus (Jewish War 2.250, Jewish Antiquities 20.153). The testimony of the sources is more univocal and has raised fewer questions among historians than that concerning the death of Claudius, but there is, as always in poisoning stories, room for doubt. Barrett (Agrippina, p. 172) inclines toward the view that Britannicus died of an epileptic seizure and asserts, wrongly in my view, that “modern authorities are generally skeptical about the notion that Britannicus died from foul play.” Levick (Claudius, p. 77) regards the poisonings of Britannicus and Claudius as equally unprovable. Griffin (Nero, p. 74, and Seneca, pp. 134–35) expresses doubts about the latter but accepts the former as historical fact.
47. so agitated that he struck her: Suetonius, Nero 33.3. Tacitus (Annals 13.15) has Nero threaten the tribune who was overseeing the operation and vow to have Locusta executed.
48. “So I’m afraid of the Julian law”: Suetonius, Nero 33.3. Many laws were known as “Julian” because of their adoption under Julius Caesar or Augustus. It is not clear which one is referred to here; K. R. Bradley thinks that Suetonius, or his source, erred in the name. K. R. Bradley, Suetonius’ Life of Nero: An Historical Commentary (Brussels, 1978), p. 199.
49. Did Seneca help Nero: That Seneca at least knew the “inside story” later in life is suggested by Tacitus, Annals 15.62, where Seneca adverts to the murder of Britannicus in his last hours. Griffin (Seneca, p. 135) also notes that the involvement of a Praetorian tribune in the plot (asserted by Tacitus, Annals 13.15.4–5) suggests that Burrus was a party. Wiedemann (“Tiberius to Nero,” in Cambridge Ancient History, p. 10:245) asks, as though this were a natural question, “whether or not Seneca and Burrus were personally responsible” for Britannicus’ death.
50. the imperial family dined together: The details here and in what follows are taken from Tacitus, Annals 13.16.
51. “the need of seeing into the minds of others”: A. Wallace-Hadrill, “The Imperial Court,” Cambridge Ancient History, p. 10.295.
52. a kind of poisoning academy: Unique information found at Suetonius, Nero 33.3. Locusta would survive into the reign of Galba, who had her put to death in a general purge of Nero’s associates in A.D. 68 (Dio 63.3.4).
53. got into the system of Titus: Suetonius, Titus 2, is the sole source. It is not clear how Titus’ meal could have been contaminated, if the poison was delivered in the manner Tacitus reports.
54. darkened Britannicus’ skin: Unique information in Dio (61.7.4), and therefore open to graver doubts than the rest of the tale. Barrett (Agrippina, p. 172) asserts—probably seconding an offhand comment by Alexis Dawson, “Whatever Happened to Lady Agrippina?” Classical Journal 64 (1969), p. 256 n. 2—that no poison known to the ancient world could have caused this effect, but I am not familiar with any thorough toxicological investigations.
55. Her image was no longer shown: The sequence of Agrippina’s imagery on imperial coins is laid out by Barrett (Agrippina, pp. 226–27) and discussed by Rose (Dynastic Commemoration, p. 47) and Wood (Imperial Women, pp. 293–95).
56. another outcast at court, her stepdaughter Octavia: Tacitus, Annals 13.18.
57. My fear forbids me: Octavia, lines 66–71. Octavia is here comparing her own situation to that of the mythic heroine Electra, who lived in fear at the court of a murderous mother.
58. disturbing report, of uncertain credibility: Tacitus, Annals 13.17, attributed to anonymous primary sources.
59 “Not stopping a wrong”: The line is spoken by Agamemnon, whom Seneca constructed as an embodiment of restrained monarchic power, in Trojan Women (line 291). Interpreters have raised the possibility that Agamemnon in this play is a spokesman for Seneca’s own political ideals; see Elaine Fantham, Seneca’s Troades (Princeton, 1982), 252.
60. “There was no lack of those”: Tacitus, Annals 13.18. The sneering reference to “men who affected moral seriousness” has been taken as a hit at Seneca, for example by Erich Koestermann, Cornelius Tacitus: Annalen (Heidelberg, 1967), p. 3:268.
61. On one level, the scene evokes: See Tarrant, Seneca’s Thyestes, p. 48 n. 164.
62. an incurable moral illness: See here in this book on De Vita Beata, where Seneca compares himself to a gout sufferer. In Letters to Lucilius 8.3, Seneca says he is suffering from skin lesions that will not heal.
CHAPTER 4: MATRICIDE (A.D. 55–59)
1. “harshness sheathed, but mercy battle-ready”: De Clementia 1.1.4.
2. death of Britannicus casts a long shadow: Some scholars have even been tempted to revise the traditional dating of De Clementia to make it precede the death of Britannicus, and thereby exonerate Seneca from gross doublespeak; see Braund, Seneca’s De Clementia, pp. 16–17, and Griffin, Seneca, pp. 407–11. The date is in fact rendered certain by Seneca’s statement at 1.9.1 that Nero has recently passed his eighteenth birthday, which fell in December 55. Braund’s own solution (p. 17) to the problem of doublespeak—the claim that Nero in effect had a “pass” to commit murder within his family—is unconvincing, given that Seneca had made clear, in Augustus’ speech in Apocolocyntosis, that he considered dynastic family murder an atrocity.
3. “If only I were illiterate!”: De Clementia 2.1.2. Suetonius records much the same anecdote at Nero 10.2.
4. Seneca’s target audience: “The law of this genre was to give advice only to those ready to accept it”—a group that excluded Nero himself, observes Paul Veyne in Seneca: Life of a Stoic (New York, 2003), p. 17.
5. “We have all of us done wrong”: De Clementia 1.6.3.
6. strikingly like Seneca’s own: “He is accusing himself … with sad distress,” comments Elisabeth Henry on this passage, in The Annals of Tacitus: A Study in the Writing of History (Manchester, 1968), p. 224. Braund (Seneca’s De Clementia, p. 237) comments on the particularly personal and emphatic tone of the sentence but understands its relevance in a different way.
7. “He was never again the target”: De Clementia 1.9.11. The Cinna conspiracy and Augustus’ pardon were also dealt with by Dio (55.14–22) and, much later
, by Montaigne in Essays 1.24.
8. He compares Nero to a mind: De Clementia 1.3.5. The two texts that are often adduced as Seneca’s models for this analogy, Aristotle’s Politics (1254a34–b9) and Cicero’s Republic (3.37), are not nearly as fully developed; it seems to me that Seneca should get more credit than he has for an original turn of thought.
9. rapacious nighttime jaunts: Tacitus, Annals 13.25; Suetonius, Nero 26; and Dio 61.8–9, all in close agreement. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 13.126) reports that Nero used a special remedy to heal his bruises and scrapes.
10. cowed by the murder of Britannicus: Analysis unique to Dio 61.7.5, though nothing in our other sources contradicts it.
11. Marcus Otho and Claudius Senecio: Named as Nero’s closest friends by Tacitus (Annals 13.12), with the additional information that Otho came from a consular family while Senecio was a humble freedman’s son. Otho was about five years older than Nero; Senecio’s age is unknown.
12. “Are you afraid of them?”: Quoted in Dio 61.4.5, as the remarks of court insiders generally.
13. he took every measure taught by Terpnus: Described in Suetonius, Nero 20.1, and Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.166, 19.108. Edward Champlin’s (Nero, pp. 52–83) discussion of Nero’s artistic ambitions is highly revealing.
14. a proposal to abolish all indirect taxes: Tacitus (Annals 13.50) is our only source for this bizarre initiative. He specifies that Nero’s seniores (text emended from the erroneous reading senatores), or elder counselors—a group that no doubt included Seneca—had to dissuade him.
15. just how large is a matter of debate: The issues are laid out admirably by Griffin (Seneca, pp. 67–128). The key question is whether to trust Dio’s report (61.4.1–2) that in Nero’s early years Seneca and Burrus were virtually in charge of the state. Griffin makes a persuasive case that Seneca’s role in government was far less prominent than that. His contribution was “not proposals in the Senate or plans for financial reform, but personal influence on the emperor’s public behavior and pronouncements” (p. 128).