DYING EVERY DAY: THE SUICIDES OF SENECA AND NERO

1 R D Y I N G E V E R Y D A Y T H E S U I C I D E S O F S E N E C A A N D N E R O J A M E S R O M M Here is one way to describe the career of Seneca, writer, thinker, poet, moralist, and, for many years, top adviser and close companion of the emperor Nero: By a strange twist of fate, a man who cherished sobriety, reason, and moral virtue found himself at the center of Roman politics. He did his best to temper the whimsies of a deluded despot while continuing to publish the ethical treatises that were his true calling . When he could no longer exert influence in the palace, he withdrew to a philosophical retreat in Corsica and in solitude produced his most stirring meditations on virtue, nature, and death. Enraged by his departure, the emperor he had once advised seized a pretext to force him to kill himself. His adoring wife tried to join him in his sober, courageous suicide, but imperial troops intervened to save her life. And here is another way to describe the same life: A clever manipulator of undistinguished origin connived his way into the center of Roman power. He used verbal brilliance to represent himself as a sage. He exploited his vast influence to enrich himself, and touched o√ a rebellion in Britain by lending usuriously to its inhabitants. After conspiring in the palace’s 2 R O M M Y darkest crimes, he tried to rescue his reputation with carefully crafted literary self-fashionings. When it was clear that the emperor ’s enmity posed a threat, he sought refuge at the altar of philosophy, even while leading an assassination plot. His final bid for esteem was his histrionic suicide, which he browbeat his unwilling wife into sharing. These are the opposing ways in which Romans of the late first century a.d. regarded Seneca, the most eloquent, enigmatic, and politically engaged man of their times. The first is taken largely from the pages of Octavia, a historical drama written in the late decades of that century, by whom we do not know. The second is preserved by Cassius Dio, a Roman chronicler who lived more than a century after Seneca’s death but relied on earlier writers for information. Those writers, it is clear, deeply mistrusted Seneca’s motives. They believed the rumors that gave Seneca a debauched and gluttonous personal life, a Machiavellian political career, and a central role in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero in a.d. 65. Between these extremes stands Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians and by far the best source we have today for Nero’s era. Tacitus, a shrewd student of human nature, was fascinated by the sage who extolled a simple, studious life even while amassing wealth and power. But Seneca posed a riddle he ultimately could not solve. Tacitus made Seneca the principal character in the last three surviving books of his Annals, creating a portrait of great richness and complexity. But the tone of that portrait is hard to discern. Tacitus wavers, withholds judgment, or becomes ironic and elusive . Strangely, though aware of Seneca’s philosophical writings, Tacitus makes no mention of them, as though they had no bearing on the meaning of his life. And Tacitus passed no explicit judgment on Seneca’s character, as he often did elsewhere. Our most detailed account of Seneca, in the end, is ambivalent, and sometimes ambiguous. One other ancient portraitist has left us his image of Seneca. In 1813, excavations in Rome unearthed a double-sided portrait bust created in the third century a.d. One side shows Socrates, the other Seneca, the two sages joined at the back of the head like Siamese twins sharing a single brain. The discovery gave the modern world its first glimpse of the real Seneca, identified by a label carved on D Y I N G E V E R Y D A Y 3 R his chest. The bust shows a full-fleshed man, beardless and bald, who bears...