The Empire of the Self: Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronius

Epilogue

We must now take leave of our two travelers in the knowledge that because both the Satyricon and Seneca’s Epistles have come down to us in incomplete form, we will never know what conclusions they scripted for themselves. The Satyricon ends with a cliffhanger. Yet given the episodic nature of the surviving fragments, as well as the first-person narrative, it seems safe to assume that Encolpius at least escapes from Croton’s legacy hunters and continues on with his travels.1 Whether he is able to develop any deeper wisdom about himself and others is also a matter of speculation. The potential for travel to lead to revelation and discovery is a theme that continues throughout Seneca’s Epistles. His journey through the Crypta Neapolitana is followed by his consideration in the next letter of the Platonic concepts of being and the forms.2 It seems as if Seneca’s travels have led him through the cave to enlightenment. Nevertheless, these famous Platonic theories are rejected; they cannot improve the self (Ep. 58.25–26). Seneca prefers to look to the tradition of Plato’s biography for inspiration (Ep. 58.30). Thus, Seneca travels again.3 He opens letter 70 by saying that he is seeing Lucilius’ native Pompeii again after a long time (70.1).4 In letter 77 he is back in Puteoli Epilogue (likely the home of Trimalchio) watching the arrival of boats carrying mail from Alexandria. Seneca describes himself as happily lazy and not following the crowd down to the shore to get news about his estates as quickly as possible . Here we see Seneca looking back on his former, less enlightened self, who was unable to brook any delay in learning about the status of his family, friends, and finances (77.1–3).5 In the final letters, Seneca restlessly visits his own villas, which, as John Henderson points out, are on sites famous from the early days of Roman history: Nomentum (Ep. 104), home to Seneca’s fabulously expensive and successful vineyards, and Alba (Ep. 123). He advises Lucilius to take care of his health at his country estate at Ardea (Ep. 105.1).6 In letter 123, the penultimate of the letters that survive, Seneca writes of arriving at his Alban villa to find that nothing has been prepared for him to eat (123.1). Instead of growing angry at his cook and his baker, and instead of refreshing himself with food, Seneca turns to writing and self-dialogue (123.1). He will not eat until hunger commands (imperat, 123.2). He comes to the realization that a great step on the way to freedom is developing a good-natured stomach that can endure rough treatment (magna pars libertatis est bene moratus venter et contumeliae patiens, 123.3). Although they speak about the problem from different directions, one from surfeit and the other from lack, here Trimalchio and Seneca achieve a level of common ground. Control of the body and its metabolic functions are also a necessary part of achieving “freedom.” If we can believe Tacitus, both Seneca and Petronius received their death sentences from Nero while traveling. In Tacitus’ account, there is a tension between Seneca’s self-presentation and Tacitus’ ultimate control of the narrative . Tacitus says that he does not preserve Seneca’s final dictations to his scribes, because they have already been published (Ann. 15.63.3). This omission silences Seneca’s final moments of eloquence. Seneca’s first attempt at suicide links him with Cato. Yet unlike the republican hero, who reopened his wounds after the first attempt was thwarted, Seneca picks another exemplar for his second attempt. According to Tacitus, Seneca had also planned to model his death on that of Socrates. Why else would he have hemlock lying around the house?7 To some degree he may have achieved this goal, as the oldest image of Seneca to survive from antiquity is a double herm of the two philosophers .8 Yet Tacitus’ narrative does not simply link Seneca’s death with that of his ideals, Cato and Socrates. Rather, like Seneca’s own polygeneric corpus, his death cycles through various possibilities and ends with an echo of Trimalchio ’s villa, as Seneca finally expires in the heat of his private bathhouse.9 210 The Empire of the Self Epilogue 211 Whatever his final wishes, thanks to a large degree to Tacitus, Seneca...