The Deaths of Seneca (review)

How does one begin to talk about Seneca the Younger? He had a voluminous literary output spanning numerous generic boundaries; a long and prominent career in Roman imperial politics; and a complex afterlife as a literary persona that began only a few years after his death, with the tragedy Octavia. The task seems overwhelming, and indeed has deterred all attempts at an English-language biography since Miriam Griffin’s in 1976. James Ker has had the inspired idea of using a single thematic thread, death, to bind together discussions of Seneca the man, Seneca the author, and Seneca the myth. Death is, as Ker puts it in his introduction, “the lingua franca in which most things of value for Seneca can be expressed”—whether by Seneca himself, who wrote about death to a point that has been called obsessive, or by those who narrated, painted, or staged his famous suicide.

Ker begins his discussion at the point a biographer would end, with the descriptions of Seneca’s death by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio. Ker is less interested in the historical circumstances than in the construction of a Senecan character, especially by Tacitus, for whom (as for many ancient writers) manner of death often serves to define and illuminate the moral dimensions of prominent figures. Seneca’s forced suicide in Tacitus is especially long and complex, the capstone to a complex and ambivalent portrait constructed in various passages of the Annals. Ker’s discussion of Tacitus and the other historians opens up new windows on this portrait, and on the subgenre of exitus-writing as a whole.

The central portion of Ker’s book follows the theme of death through the great multiplicity of Seneca’s writings. The task of discussing Seneca’s many genres in a unified way is a daunting one, as Ker himself has previously noted in an important article. Merely bringing the prose works and tragedies together has bedeviled many interpreters, and some, especially in the Renaissance, preferred to assign these bodies of work to different Senecas. Ker’s focus on death serves him well in his effort to keep Seneca whole (though the Apocolocyntosis largely escapes the net, as it must inevitably do). His readings of Seneca’s works—amply illustrated by quotations in Latin, accompanied by Ker’s own vibrant translations—are original and filled with insight.

Two final segments of the book deal with the Nachleben surrounding the death of Seneca, including a strong pictorial tradition featuring Rubens, Giordano, and Charles Le Brun. Ker here advances arguments about the process he calls Senecanization: the evolution of “a symbiotic relationship between Seneca the man and Senecan discourse.” Adaptations and critiques of Seneca by Petrarach, Montaigne, Diderot, and others also play a role in this process.

Ker’s book is ambitious and extremely original. It will be of great interest to readers of Seneca from many different disciplines, but it is not for the faint of heart, and probably not for undergraduates. The extensive bibliography is thorough and up-to-date, not an easy feat to achieve in a field that has burgeoned with new publications over the past decade.