(A.D. 59–62)
The deed that Nero had yearned to achieve brought him no relief. Back at his Baiae villa, informed of his mother’s death, he could only peer vacantly into the darkness, starting up suddenly from time to time as though in fear. The enormity of the vacuum he had created was now becoming apparent. The central force in recent politics, the woman who had held sway in the palace for more than ten years, the last of the nine children of her great father, was gone. Nero, an insecure, self-indulgent twenty-three-year-old, had made himself an orphan.
Burrus tried to bolster the young man’s nerves by sending in Praetorians to greet him. The guard had been Agrippina’s most loyal partisans, and Nero had cause to fear them. Cued by Burrus, though, they made clear they would change sides, congratulating the young man on having escaped his mother’s “plot.” The pale pretext created by dropping a sword at a messenger’s feet was to be the official version of the night’s events. Nero, it was to be proclaimed, had been the intended victim, not the perpetrator, of violence.
At Bauli, meanwhile, Anicetus oversaw Agrippina’s cremation, done by the simple expedient of burning her body on a dining couch. No state funeral or pyre was held, and it is unclear whether Nero even came from Baiae to view the corpse. No burial was performed or monument constructed; Agrippina’s followers heaped only a low dirt mound over her ashes. (The grand Campanian ruins known today as Agrippina’s Tomb are in fact the remains of a theater built much later.)
The most important cleanup task in the wake of the messy matricide fell to Seneca. There were concerns that the senators back in Rome, to whom he remained principal liaison, might decry Nero’s deed in the Senate house or conspire with the Praetorians to remove the princeps from power. Seneca was charged with winning their acquiescence. Despite his decline at court, his verbal dexterity was still a vital asset to the regime, as was his high standing among the elite. Here, at least, was a job that toughs and parvenus like Anicetus could not do.
Seneca now undertook the most difficult writing assignment of his life. In the letter Nero would send to the Senate, under his own name but without pretense of authorship, Seneca had to justify as an act of policy a crime that was neither justifiable nor primarily political. He had to brazen out a family murder before the same body of men who had been promised, some five years earlier, an end to family murders. He had to win pardon for the princeps whose great virtue, as he had proclaimed in De Clementia—even then at risk of his own reputation—was not to have shed a single drop of human blood.
What clever turns of phrase, what sinuous rhetoric, could accomplish such a task? Only one sentence of the letter survives, in a chance quotation, but Tacitus preserves a record of its content and structure.
The letter began with the main cover story, the discovery of a weapon on Agerinus’ person. Agrippina had plotted a coup and, it was asserted, had taken her own life when the plot was uncovered. The letter went on to discuss the larger threat that Rome had been under while Agrippina lived: a usurper, and worse, a woman, had sought supreme power. Agrippina had pressured the Praetorians and the Senate to swear allegiance to her, the letter alleged; then she had withheld gifts and handouts from the guard if they refused—a subtle reminder that Nero was at this moment arranging gifts and handouts for that very body. Agrippina had tried to enter the Senate house, the letter went on, and to represent the Roman state in dealings with foreign ambassadors. Ever since marrying Claudius ten years before, she had grasped at the throne.
But even while claiming to have escaped a monster, Nero, as represented by Seneca, affected filial grief. To celebrate the death of a mother, even the nightmarish figure conjured up in the letter, would be unseemly. “I neither believe nor rejoice that I am still alive,” Seneca had Nero say, employing a parallel-with-contrast structure typical of his style.
The letter’s sternest challenge was how to present the bizarre events leading up to Agrippina’s death. The collapse of the rigged boat—witnessed by many and, in light of the later killing, clearly intentional—was a subject perhaps better passed over in silence. But Seneca must have felt that even a transparent lie was better than no explanation at all. His letter portrayed the collapse as a shipwreck, an accident that showed the gods themselves intervening to save the state. Nero’s troops had only completed the design of Providence.
This was going too far. For the second time in his political career, Seneca had overstepped the bounds of propriety with his ready support of the princeps. “It was not Nero—whose monstrosity precluded any complaint—but Seneca who was in a bad odor, because he had written a defense speech using this kind of rhetoric,” says Tacitus.
One senator in particular, a stiff-necked Stoic named Thrasea Paetus, silently walked out of the chamber after the letter had been read. Thrasea, like Seneca an admirer of Cato and other heroes of conscience, disliked the servility of his colleagues. The fictions of Seneca’s letter, and the Senate’s willingness to countenance them, finally pushed him past his breaking point. By modern standards, his was a mild protest, a simple declaration of nonsupport. But in the Roman autocracy, even such small gestures carried huge significance and incurred huge risks.
No senators followed Thrasea’s lead, though many no doubt wished to. Instead they declared their total acceptance of the account contained in the letter. They voted that annual games be held at the time of the Quinquatria to celebrate the salvation of the princeps. A gold statue of Minerva—the goddess to whom the spring festival was devoted—would be set up beside that of Nero in the Forum. There was to be no public reckoning for matricide.
But as they fawned, the senators silently pondered the new course on which Nero’s regime was set. They were getting a clearer view of the emperor’s emerging character. His matricide presented a strange admixture of cravenness and cruelty. Nero had lacked the courage to proceed openly against his mother or even to acknowledge that he had killed her. Instead he had shown himself nervous and needy, trying to win hearts and minds in the Senate before daring to enter Rome. Indeed, long after the senators had voted to honor him, Nero lingered in Campania, fretting over what reception he would get in the capital.
Such a man might be just as dangerous as Caligula, though for different reasons. He would want reassurance and flattery and even—though few in Rome had yet glimpsed his ambitions as a performer—the cheers of sycophantic crowds. His subjects would be required to show not just loyalty but something more, a sort of affection. He would hate anyone in a position to judge him, which meant the entire political class. The aristocracy might again be haunted by old specters—treason trials, banishments, executions, and forced suicides—arising this time not from the whims of a sadist but the demands of a petulant child.
A waggish actor named Datus, star of the clownish performances called Atellan farces, highlighted the new dangers in a performance he gave shortly after Agrippina’s death. During a comic song that contained the line “Farewell father, farewell mother,” he mimed the motions first of drinking, then of swimming. Claudius had in fact died from a poisoned meal, not a drink, and Agrippina had escaped the waters to be killed in her bed, but the references were clear enough. Then when Datus came to another line, “Orcus guides your steps,” he pointed to the senators seated before him in the front rows of the audience. The god who had charge of souls of the dead, he implied, was awaiting them in the underworld.
After spending nearly three months in Campania, Nero and his court returned to Rome in June. The long delay, and the work done by handlers in the interim, had primed the populace well. Romans turned out in droves to welcome Nero home, even setting up bleachers along his route; the senators put on festal attire. The people strove to show their princeps that they would turn a blind eye to murder.
Beneath these displays, however, revulsion simmered. In anonymous pranks and graffiti, Nero was made to recall his crime. One wag hung a leather sack from a public statue of Nero, implying that the princeps belonged inside one—for Romans sometimes punished parent slayers by sewing them up in a sack, together with various wild animals, and casting the whole lot into the Tiber to drown. Meanwhile a different message appeared on a statue of Agrippina that had been draped in cloth, a temporary measure to conceal it until it could be pulled down. On the pretense that the cloth was a veil of modesty, someone affixed a sign that represented Agrippina speaking to Nero: “I have some shame; you haven’t.”
Nero bore all this with a degree of patience that bewildered the ancient chroniclers. Perhaps relieved to have incurred some penalty, or (as Dio speculates) not wishing to give substance to rumors by prosecuting them, he ignored all jibes. Even when informers, eager for advancement, reported the names of the graffitists, Nero refused to take action. He preferred to distract and cajole his public, and set about to mark the death of Agrippina with magnificent spectacles and games.
First came the Ludi Maximi, spread over many days and occupying multiple theaters. Bizarre new spectacles were staged for the crowds, including an elephant that walked down a sloping tightrope carrying a rider on its back. Ancient nobility, coerced into taking the stage, were seen dancing, acting, and even fighting as gladiators against wild beasts, roles that had long been considered out of bounds for aristocracy. Meanwhile commoners in the stands were showered with handouts and prizes. Live birds, valued as pets, rained down on them by the thousand. Vouchers in the form of inscribed balls were tossed out by the emperor’s troops, redeemable later for horses, slaves, precious metals, even whole apartment buildings. Nero was going all out, and digging deep into his own purse, to win his people’s love.
Another lavish event, the Juvenalia—a “youth festival,” marking the first time Nero shaved off his whiskers—followed soon after. Officially a private party held on imperial land, it was attended by large crowds of equites and plebeians, the classes whose favor Nero had chosen to court. As in the Ludi Maximi, aristocrats were made to perform in roles that defied social conventions. A noblewoman in her eighties, Aelia Catella, was shown dancing in a pantomime, the most risqué genre of popular theater. Other members of great houses were recruited for choral dances. When some came onstage in masks to hide their identities, Nero insisted the masks be removed. He meant to show all Rome that even the high and mighty were sharing his carnival fun.
At the culmination of the Juvenalia came an event that Nero’s advisers had long dreaded, though they had no choice but to take part. For the princeps no longer wished merely to practice his singing in private. He had determined to go on the stage.
Of many shocking firsts in the history of theater, perhaps none rivals the moment when a Roman emperor, the apex of the social pyramid, appeared in the long cloak and high boots of a Greek citharodist, saying “Please hear me graciously, masters.” It was no spontaneous whim but an entrance Nero had planned and prepared and for which he had written a musical ode, “Attis or the Bacchantes,” an ardent story of love-struck madness. He had also ensured that his reception would be favorable. Gallio, Seneca’s brother, an ex-consul, brought the emperor onstage and introduced him, while Seneca himself (according to Dio), together with Burrus, was stationed where he could be seen signaling approbation, waving his toga-clad arms high in the air.
Nero had brought with him his newly organized corps of thuggish cheerleaders, the Augustiani (“Augustus’ men”). Tall, strong, and fierce in their devotion to the princeps, they sent a clear message by their very presence—an implied threat against dissenters. Their number would eventually grow to 5,000, and Nero would take them on tour with him as his performance career expanded. He had them trained to use special clapping rhythms, though at the Juvenalia, in their first appearance, they merely shouted rapturous phrases like “Oh Apollo!”
One man in the crowd that day distinguished himself by his unwillingness to applaud. For the second time that year, Thrasea Paetus, the senator least inclined to kowtow to the princeps, chose silence and dissent over noisy collusion. And for the second time, his recalcitrance did not go unnoticed.
For Seneca, dissent was not an option. His position required him to show support for Nero’s singing debut, however much it disturbed him. Perhaps he even had to assist it, for Dio reports that the sage was enlisted to prompt Nero should he forget his lines. He was being used by the regime, exploited for his tarnished but still lustrous public image, and he knew it. If Seneca observed Thrasea Paetus in the crowd that day, he no doubt envied a man—a Stoic thinker and writer like himself—who could exercise the simple freedom of doing nothing.
Nero had grown up. His moves at Baiae, undertaken without the help of his teacher and guide, served as his rite of passage, a perverse coming of age. He had committed the most audacious murder of the century and had gotten clean away with it. After his self-liberation, he could no longer be told what he could and could not do, least of all by a grave-faced man four decades his senior.
Encouraged by the success of his singing debut, Nero sought to break yet another propriety barrier and race in a four-horse chariot. In earlier days, Seneca and Burrus had forbidden it as an insult to the office of princeps. Now they had too little control to prevent it, but the senior advisers did win a shift of venue. Across the Tiber and outside the city, on the Vatican hill, stood a little-used racecourse begun by Caligula. The track—today St. Peter’s Square, with its original Egyptian obelisk, erected as turning post, still standing—had by this time been completed. Nero was persuaded to do his racing in this more discreet location, with slaves and paupers for an audience.
It was a humble victory for Seneca but perhaps a comforting one. He could still do some good for the principate, the institution that had required him to do much evil. If he ever argued to himself his reasons for clinging to power, as he argued in De Vita Beata his reasons for amassing wealth, it must have been on this basis: Nero would be a worse princeps, and Rome would be subject to worse abuses, were he to leave the scene.
Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime’s behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul.
There was of course another reason Seneca stayed by Nero’s side. He had described in De Ira how autocrats exerted control by their power to harm family members. He told the story there of Pastor, a victim of Caligula, who had to smile at the murder of his son because he had another son. By A.D. 60, Seneca had helped Nero acquire several hostages of this kind—including a remarkably gifted nephew, the closest thing Seneca had to a son of his own.
Marcus Lucanus, son of Seneca’s youngest brother, Mela, had come to Rome to join Nero’s court. Though still in his late teens, the boy had already shown huge literary talent, outpacing in poetry his uncle’s immense prolixity in prose. In him, the fantastic wordiness of the Annaeus clan, passed down from its rhetorician patriarch Seneca the Elder, had reached its acme. He is known to the modern world as Lucan.
Lucan was two years younger than Nero. He first came to the attention of the princeps when, at age fourteen, he gave an impressive recitation in both Latin and Greek. Nero was then newly installed on the throne, with Seneca at his side, and Lucan had an easy entrée to power. But the young man left Rome and landed in Athens, a serene place of study and contemplation. He seemed at that point to share his uncle’s literary gifts and passion for Stoic philosophy, but not his attraction to politics.
Several years later, probably about the time of Agrippina’s death, Lucan received a summons to return to Rome and enter Nero’s service. Why the princeps called him back is unclear. Perhaps Seneca, troubled at his own prospects, had suggested the move as a way to bring the boy near him; for he had described, many years earlier, the release from sorrow he felt the moment his eyes lighted on his charming nephew. “There is no torment of the heart so great, or so fresh, that he will not soothe it with his embrace,” he had declared to his mother, Helvia, in a rare outpouring of familial affection. Lacking a child of his own, and increasingly estranged from Nero, Seneca must have greeted Lucan’s return with joy and relief—though no doubt also with some anxiety.
Nero, for his part, was so enthralled by his new recruit as to immediately make him a quaestor, several years before he was eligible for the post. In the past, only members of the imperial family had been given such exemptions; Nero had launched Lucan on a very fast political track. Perhaps he felt a kinship with a precociously talented poet, since he increasingly fancied he was one himself. He had begun collecting at court those who seemed to embody his own idealized self-image—rulership perfectly harmonized with the gentle arts of music and verse. “Apollo’s lyre is plucked by the same hands that draw his bow,” wrote one contemporary poet, flattering Nero by extolling this ideal.
By this time, Lucan had begun work on a radically daring and ambitious epic poem, the De Bello Civili or Civil War. The plan for this work was unique in many ways, above all its focus on recent Roman history—the civil wars that had brought Augustus to power—where all previous epics had dealt with the mythic past. Lucan made many innovations in style and method to suit his subject matter. Civil War, which survives today in incomplete form, reveals the audacity of its author—a youth who had set out in his teens to reinvent the most revered of ancient genres, the medium of Homer and Vergil.
Though the Roman civil wars had taken place a century before Lucan’s time, they were hardly politically neutral, as Lucan himself understood. The characters who loomed large in his story—the assassins Brutus and Cassius; Cato, the Stoic suicide; and Julius Caesar himself—had by Nero’s day become potent ideological symbols. The birthdays of Brutus and Cassius were observed every year by stiff-necked Thrasea Paetus, in ceremonies that celebrated senatorial autonomy. Cato, too, was widely revered in contemporary writings, as has been seen. Lucan was going to have to walk a thin line in writing about such men while serving under Nero, a descendant of the man slain by them.
The only known portrait of Seneca’s nephew Marcus Lucanus, known today as Lucan.
Perhaps out of self-protection, Lucan chose to open Civil War with effusive praise of Nero, a passage so overwrought that some have read it as satire. All the bloodshed of the civil wars, Lucan claims, should be glorified, not regretted, since they made possible Nero’s reign. Then, turning from the past to the future, Lucan imagines the day when Nero will take his place in the heavens, among the gods. Take care not to seat yourself at either pole, Lucan cautions the princeps, lest your weighty presence tilt the cosmos out of balance. Stick to the middle, the zodiacal belt. The air is clearer there and clouds less frequent, so our view of your starry form will not be impeded.
The imperial favor Lucan enjoyed, and his willingness to court it, were vividly displayed in August 60. That month Nero introduced his Greek-style sport-and-arts festival, the Neronia. He had set prizes—gold wreaths, a lavish Roman adaptation of Greek laurel garlands—for recitations of poetry and oratory, as well as for music, song, and athletic events. Lucan took the stage in the poetry contest with a composition called Laudes Neronis, “Praises of Nero,” and won first prize. Nero looked on approvingly from his imperial dais, not yet willing to enter the contest himself. But Lucan, with touching deference, removed his crown and awarded it to the princeps. The winner of the rhetorical competition followed suit.
Lucan’s gesture underscored the tension inherent in his relationship to the princeps, a tension felt by other writers too, including Seneca. Nero was not just a patron of the literary arts but an artist himself. He liked to join his court bards as a fellow member of their guild. Lucan’s brilliance gratified Nero’s vanity; but the threat that such brilliance posed, the danger of a rivalry that the princeps would inevitably lose, was lurking below the surface. It would not be long before it emerged.
For Seneca, the close and rapid bonding between his nephew and the princeps was a mixed blessing. It augmented the dilemmas begun by his own entry into imperial service, followed by that of his brother Gallio. Three prominent Annaei now had their fates tied to the emperor’s favor. They had risen together, thanks to the reliance of Roman politics on family-based loyalties, but they might easily fall together as well.
The role Seneca had carved out for himself had become vastly harder to maintain, in the wake of Agrippina’s murder. But the cost of deviating from that role had also greatly increased.
Nero kept other authors at his court in these days, men who shared his table while indulging his artistic ambitions. He liked to bandy verses with this crowd, beginning a line of poetry in a meter of his own choosing, then challenging a dinner guest to finish it in the same meter. The game allowed him to enjoy the fellowship of poets but also make clear who was calling the tune.
But maintaining a literary coterie was an expensive undertaking, and this was only one of many cash drains Nero had taken on. Prodigality was becoming a hallmark of his reign and was soon to give rise to its deepest troubles.
Games and festivals were among Nero’s largest expenses. Even before Agrippina’s death forced him to fatten his entertainment budget, he had put on bizarre and inventive displays. The oval interior of his new wooden amphitheater could be filled with salt water to make an artificial sea, and he staged mock naval battles on it, with pelagic fish swimming among the ships for extra effect. Other beasts emerged after the water was drained off, sometimes appearing out of the floor by means of pulleys and trapdoors (stagecraft later expanded in the famous Colosseum). The opening ceremonies of this grand structure featured exotic creatures from far-off lands, including elks, hippopotami, and seals, the last chased by what appear to have been polar bears.
But Nero’s priciest innovation was the Neronia, instituted in 60 with the idea that it would repeat every five years. Fearing that conservative Romans might scorn this Greek-style event, Nero laid out liberal prizes to attract their participation. He built a new gymnasium and bath complex adjoining the grounds, with olive oil—the Greeks’ favorite skin-cleansing ointment—supplied at his own expense.
Games, shows, theaters to hold them in, handouts for the crowds—all this drained the state coffers, and since it was Nero who had to refill them, the expense was essentially his. In theory, the imperial treasuries were separate from the emperor’s property, but in practice, boundary lines were hard to draw. As the ultimate home-office worker—all Rome being his place of business—Nero could use public monies for private purposes and vice versa. Officials in charge of keeping accounts, by a reform enacted under his reign, were his own appointees.
Then, too, Nero spent wildly on private festivities, including lavish palace banquets and late-night parties. These fetes took on new energy in the 60s thanks to a man who dazzled Nero with his refined tastes and easy hedonism. Gaius Petronius, famous for sleeping all day and spending his nights in pleasure seeking, received an appointment as arbiter elegantiae, officer in charge of protocol and entertainment. A free-living, free-speaking aristocrat who took nothing seriously, Petronius made a huge impression on the young princeps. Nothing seemed à la mode to Nero unless it came from Petronius, Tacitus noted.
The swift ascent of Petronius pointed the way for other courtiers. Those seeking advancement found it politic to encourage Nero in his excesses or to furnish him with new pleasures and spectacles. Ofonius Tigellinus, the head of Rome’s safety and fire brigade, rivaled Petronius at this game, except that where Petronius was effete and devil-may-care, Tigellinus was tough, street smart, and determined. He too rose in Nero’s esteem and became a trusted insider—as Romans would soon learn, to their woe.
Most profligate of Nero’s expenditures were gifts to court favorites and pets, already outlandish enough in Nero’s teenage years to alarm his mother. When Agrippina heard that Nero planned to give 10 million sesterces to a freedman, she had the coins piled in a heap so that her son could behold his extravagance. Ever eager to defy his mother, he took one look at the pile and ordered it to be doubled, saying, “I did not realize I had given so little.” Ultimately more than 2 billion sesterces would be spent on such bequests, so much that Nero’s successors tried (with little success) to get most of it back. Acte the ex-slave, Menecrates the lyre player, Spiculus the gladiator, Paneros the moneylender, and many others walked away with fortunes.
Of a different order were the gifts Nero bestowed on his inner circle, including on Seneca. They allowed Nero to create bonds of obligation and collusion. Tacitus remarks on this kind of giving when discussing the distribution of Britannicus’ estate after the boy’s assassination. Many observers, says the historian, thought that Nero, conscious of his guilt in the eyes of the public, was trying to buy a kind of redemption. If good men were seen accepting the proceeds of crime, the crime became less heinous.
Seneca had been the recipient of many such gifts over the years. Gardens, villas, and estates, including some that had perhaps belonged to Britannicus, made him vastly wealthy. But accepting them had made him an accomplice in the rough methods by which they were obtained. That Seneca was struggling with this problem is clear from a treatise he published in the late 50s or early 60s, De Beneficiis, a long meditation on the topic of giving and receiving.
The Latin word beneficium includes notions of “gift,” “good turn,” and “favor.” Seneca used the concept as a prism through which to examine social relations of all kinds, including those of business, friendship, and politics. It was essential to him that giving be done well—meaning, in a spirit of generosity, even love. Again and again, he invokes the models of nature and of divinity, which provide nurture for humankind without reckoning up what is owed. Our goal in performing beneficia for our fellow men, Seneca insists, should be to emulate the gods.
De Beneficiis is a long work, Seneca’s longest treatment of a single topic. It weaves in and out of many themes, some of them touching closely on the author’s own circumstances—though the relevance, as always, remains implicit.
One problem Seneca deals with is that of gifts given by kings and tyrants, which cannot be refused, yet cannot be recompensed. He recalls that Socrates was invited to join the court of a Macedonian king but declined on the grounds that had he accepted, he would not have been able to return the royal largesse. Seneca admires Socrates for avoiding what he calls a life of “voluntary servitude.” One senses that in talking about Socrates, he is, as in De Vita Beata, talking about himself.
Here Seneca imagines an objection: “Socrates could have declined [the king’s gifts], if he had wanted to.” But, he responds as though on his own behalf, a king cannot abide such treatment, regarding it as a mark of scorn. “It makes no difference whether you refuse to give to a king, or refuse to accept gifts from him; he takes both, equally, as a rejection,” Seneca says. This was an important point for him, since his own wealth, much of it gained in service to Nero, had come under harsh attack. Refusing such rewards, he makes clear, would have been hazardous.
According to Seneca’s definition in the treatise, Nero’s giving had been not a beneficium, an act of generosity, but a means of asserting power and imposing obligation. In the early 60s, Seneca was feeling the weight of that obligation as never before, and he began searching for a way to unburden himself. In 62, he would make an attempt, as will be seen, to divest himself of all he had received and reclaim his autonomy. If Nero’s giving had made him a captive, perhaps he could free himself by giving back.
Before reaching that point, however, Seneca, and the rest of the palace staff, had a foreign policy crisis to deal with, the worst Rome had faced in decades. It was an acute crisis for Seneca, because many at Rome felt, rightly or wrongly, that he had caused it.
In the fog-bound glens of eastern England, Boudicca, warrior-queen of the Iceni, was gathering a mighty host determined to end Roman rule. At her hands, more than 80,000 Romans and their allies would soon be killed, and the Roman army would come within a hairsbreadth of an epic disaster. If not for the iron resolve of her opponent, Suetonius Paulinus, Rome would have likely disgorged Britain from its empire and never set foot there again, abandoning what Claudius had achieved, with such proud self-celebration, a generation earlier.
Boudicca’s rebels had chosen an opportune moment to strike. Paulinus had gone off on an invasion of Mona, the island off Wales now called Anglesy, with two of the four legions then serving in Britain. The town of Camulodunum (modern Colchester), settled by aged-out veterans and their dependents, had some warning that trouble was afoot but could do nothing; it had no walls or fortifications, having never needed them before. Some townsmen took refuge in the Temple of Divine Claudius, Camulodunum’s most secure structure, and held out there for two days. But Claudius was no better a warrior as a god than he had been as an emperor. Camulodunum was wiped out and its people put to the sword. A legion sent to relieve them from Lindum (Lincoln), 150 miles to the north, was smashed to pieces en route.
Word of the disaster reached Paulinus in Wales, and had he begun building ships for an evacuation, many of his troops would have thanked him. The situation was dire and about to get far worse, for Paulinus’ best hope of reinforcement—the ninth legion, stationed in the west of Roman Britain—refused orders to join him as he returned south. It seemed suicidal to enter the killing zone, where rebel forces, outnumbering Romans many times over, had already shown they were not interested in taking prisoners.
Undaunted, Paulinus brought his men through hostile territory to Londinium (London). He arrived safe, without encountering Boudicca’s forces, but decided he could not defend the sprawling, unwalled trade mart on the Thames. Roman businessmen who could ride or fight were evacuated with the army column, but tens of thousands were left behind, begging Paulinus for aid even as he gave the order to march. The Britons soon visited the same horrors on these tradespeople as they had on the veterans of Camulodunum. They saw no point in holding hostages; should their revolt succeed, they would have gained all they wanted, and should it fail, Rome would not bother to negotiate.
Failure did not seem possible to Boudicca as she closed in on Paulinus’ army. She had a string of massacres and one battlefield victory to her credit, and her forces had a numerical advantage of perhaps twenty to one. If there is any truth in the long speeches Dio assigns her, she regarded Romans as a decadent people, unable to stand up to Britons in war. Perhaps she had heard of Nero’s recent singing performance, as Dio represents, and saw it as proof of her adversaries’ mettle. “They are slaves to a lyre player—and a bad one at that,” she reportedly told her troops, improbably mixing diatribe and music criticism.
But overconfidence had made Boudicca overbold. She accepted battle at a site that Paulinus had chosen, where the Romans had woods and high ground protecting their flanks and rear. She let her troops bring their wives along to watch the anticipated rout, parking them in a row of wagons encircling her own back lines. The Britons advanced; the Romans hurled javelins and charged.
Boudicca launched her war chariots, the tanks of their day, but the drivers, unprotected by metal breastplates, were easily dispatched by well-aimed arrows. The discipline of Roman troops, always Rome’s greatest military asset, held up under the blows of British axes. The battle may have lasted all day, as Dio records, or only a short time, as Tacitus implies, but its outcome was decisive. Boudicca’s troops were turned, and as they tried to flee, they found themselves trapped by their own wagon train and by the corpses of those felled in the javelin volley.
Before the end of the bloodletting, Boudicca’s army had lost a staggering 80,000, paying back life for life the fatalities inflicted on Rome. At one stroke, the rebellion was smashed and Roman control of Britain restored. Boudicca fled back to her home province, where she either poisoned herself, according to Tacitus’ account, or, in Dio’s, died of disease.
Map of Roman Britain at the time of Boudicca’s revolt.
Fresh Roman troops streamed across the channel to ravage rebel lands. The Britons were already depleted by famine, since warriors on the march had had no chance to sow next season’s crop. The Iceni had beaten their plowshares into swords, thinking they would soon dine on captured Roman provisions. All told, hundreds of thousands died in England within a year’s time, the worst cataclysm yet suffered under Roman imperial rule.
In the aftermath, official Rome sought the causes of the disaster, and some held Seneca to blame.
According to Dio’s account, before the rebellion began, Seneca had called in his loans to British tribal leaders, abruptly and on harsh terms. That put many Britons into bankruptcy, while others were broken by the corrupt finance officer in charge of the region, Decianus Catus. Together, Dio suggests, Catus and Seneca forced Britons into a corner where they had nothing to lose by revolt. Tacitus, by contrast, says nothing of Seneca’s moneylending in Britain, though he confirms that Catus had made enemies there by rapacity. For Tacitus, the principal spark of the conflict was the flogging of Boudicca and the rape of her daughters, committed by arrogant Roman troops grown scornful of British tribesmen.
Dio’s hostility to Seneca is well known, yet some modern historians credit his account of the start of Boudicca’s revolt. One has even ingeniously linked it to a report by Suetonius that Nero at one time considered withdrawing from Britain and shrinking the empire. Suetonius gives no time frame, but Nero could have entertained such an idea only prior to the rebellion; during or afterward, Rome had too much at stake to let the island go. If Nero, in the late 50s, had indeed voiced doubts about keeping Britain Roman, those in the know would have hastened to call in their chips. On this theory, the rebellion was ignited by a shrewd piece of insider trading.
Did Seneca indeed touch off Rome’s worst provincial uprising by carrying his profiteering too far? The answer depends on a choice between Dio’s desire to see the worst in Seneca and Tacitus’ more mixed appraisal—the same choice that faces us at many turns. We know Seneca lent money at interest and managed a far-flung financial empire; we also know that rebel Britons were hard pressed by debt. Whether there was a link between the two is ultimately a judgment call.
In his extant works, Seneca makes no mention of the disasters in England. But in his De Beneficiis, a work possibly composed after the rebellion had begun, he seems unusually concerned with the topic of moneylending.
Lending at interest, Seneca makes clear in De Beneficiis, is a special kind of giving-receiving relationship, subject to its own fixed rules. At certain points, he stresses the fairness of those rules or insists on the rights of the lender. He sounds content to be one of those lenders and, if necessary, to withdraw credit. But at other points, he castigates the whole project of lending at interest, using the voice of a newly created persona, Demetrius of Sunium.
Demetrius was a Greek philosopher of the Cynic school who had come to teach at Rome in Seneca’s day. With his ready wit and fierce asceticism, he made a deep impression on Seneca, and the two became friends. (Demetrius noster, “our Demetrius,” is how Seneca often refers to him.) Seneca seems to have regarded Demetrius as a latter-day Socrates or Cato—a model for his own best self to aspire to, or else a sad reminder of the self that might have been.
Near the end of De Beneficiis, Seneca assigns Demetrius two long speeches, using him as a mask the way he had earlier used Socrates. The second speech mounts a harsh attack on the evils of wealth, especially on riches got by lending. “What are these things—what is ‘debt,’ ‘ledger-book,’ ‘interest,’ except names supplied to human coveting that exceeds the bounds of Nature?” the outraged Cynic demands. “What are ‘accounts’ and ‘calculations’? And time put up for sale, and a bloodsucking rate of one percent of capital? These are evils we choose for ourselves … the dreams of useless greed.”
Seneca’s use of masks and personae presents problems throughout his prose works, but nowhere more so than here. Demetrius, a man widely admired for contempt of wealth, viciously attacks a practice by which Seneca had increased his riches. Yet it was Seneca who had brought Demetrius onstage and given him voice. The choice of mouthpiece seems self-punitive, like the choice of Socrates, another famous pauper, in Seneca’s defense of his wealth in De Vita Beata, or the stretch of that work that trumpets the charges of Seneca’s enemies as if through a megaphone.
How much does the rebellion in Britain, and the role that usury had played in it, stand behind the strange ending of De Beneficiis? The question puts us at the crossroads of politics and psychology, uncertain which path to go down. Was Seneca dodging blame by seeming to disdain moneylending just as much as his worst critics? Or was he giving himself a highly public flogging, to salve a conscience weighed down by two hundred thousand deaths?
· · ·
The British rebellion passed, and peace was restored in the empire—for a while. Only four years later a new uprising would flare, in the East this time, among Jews fed up by the abuses of Roman overseers. But by that juncture, most of Nero’s senior staff would be dead. The first to go was Afranius Burrus, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, who fell ill and began to fail in 62.
For eight years, Seneca had worked hand in glove with Burrus, a political ally who esteemed his judgment and shared his values. It is easy to forget this partnership while reading Seneca’s prose works, for he mentions Burrus only once, in De Clementia, and then only tangentially. But Burrus was, without doubt, Seneca’s close collaborator in the palace. By supporting each other in conclaves with Nero, Seneca and Burrus had been able to manage the princeps, check his worst impulses, and in the estimation of some historians, run the empire in his name.
Burrus became ill with a painful throat swelling, perhaps a tumor, that threatened to choke off his breathing. Nero sent a doctor to smear the swelling with a salve, a medicine it seemed, though some ancient sources charge that it was poison. They report that Burrus applied the drug and instantly recognized its toxic effect. When Nero came into his sickroom and asked after his health, Burrus turned his face away and answered gravely, “All’s well with me”—an implicit contrast with the depraved condition of his sovereign.
Nero ended up the owner of Burrus’ house, which perhaps supports the poisoning theory. His need for cash to subsidize the empire, and his own extravagant lifestyle, made it difficult for him to wait for his testators to die a natural death. Dio and Suetonius report that he had done much the same three years earlier in the case of a wealthy aunt, Domitia. Old, frail, and suffering from a blockage of her digestive tract, Domitia had lingered on, until Nero ordered the doctor treating her to give her a lethal overdose. Her estate would have come to him soon enough, but his expenses were mounting swiftly.
Whether or not Nero caused it, Burrus’ death was a disaster for Seneca. Command of the Praetorian Guard was split in two, as it had been under Claudius, and awarded to Faenius Rufus and Ofonius Tigellinus. The first was an honorable public servant with a spotless record, but the second was a man Seneca had reason to fear.
A former horse trader of questionable character, Tigellinus had risen in favor because he shared Nero’s flamboyance, self-indulgence, and love of the chariot track. Playing up both to the emperor’s love of pleasure and to his dread of usurpers, Tigellinus demonized Seneca and other Stoics as high-minded scolds whose arrogance made them dangerous. In Tigellinus, Seneca had a new enemy at court, one who was allied with the emperor’s libido, against those who embodied his superego.
Emboldened by this change of prefects, Seneca’s enemies roused themselves for fresh attacks. The charge brought ineffectually by Suillius four years earlier, that it was unseemly for Seneca to get so rich, now gained more traction. Seneca’s wealth was set in a larger portrait of political and personal ambition, a desire to rival Nero himself. Was not Seneca a poet, just as Nero now hoped to be? Did he not advance his own art while trying to quash Nero’s singing? Did he not beautify his gardens and estates so that they outshone those of Nero?
Seneca’s position at court was eroding badly—but so was Nero’s capital. The emperor’s constant need for cash suggested to Seneca a way out of his palace prison.
Seneca’s estate was huge, far bigger than he needed, given his modest lifestyle. It was more of a danger now than an asset, for it offered a fat prize to accusers. Seneca would lose at least half in the end anyhow, for men of his station customarily deeded that portion to the princeps, in hopes he would allow the rest to pass, unplundered, to their heirs.
Rather than wait for those outcomes, Seneca chose preemptive action. He could cash in all his chips—offer Nero his entire fortune—in exchange for a trouble-free exit from the imperial household. He could buy his way out of politics, even if it cost him half a billion sesterces.
The conversation in which Seneca proposed this bargain has been narrated by Tacitus. What source Tacitus drew on, and how much he embellished that source, are impossible to know. The entire scene might have been invented out of whole cloth. But Tacitus in any case made something unforgettable out of the encounter. The cold formality of both men, the cautious flattery employed by Seneca and the feigned deference of Nero, the mistrust lurking behind every word—these elements combine into a brilliant piece of political theater.
Seneca began, in Tacitus’ account, by invoking historical precedent. Augustus had allowed Agrippa and Maecenas, his two closest adjutants, to retire from his service. They had performed great deeds on an emperor’s behalf and earned great rewards; “but what else can I give, in return for your generosity, but learning, a thing trained in the shadows?” Then Seneca surveyed all he had gained in Nero’s service: an equestrian from Corduba, he had risen to the first ranks of power and wealth. But, he said, he had grown old, and his fortune was a wearisome burden. The hours he gave to gardens and villas would be better spent on care of his soul. Nero’s rule was secure, his strength equal to any challenge. He could afford to let Seneca go.
Nero began his reply by deferentially noting that he owed his eloquence to Seneca, his former tutor. But he did not accept Seneca’s reasoning. Agrippa and Maecenas, the retirees from Augustus’ court, had outlived their ability to serve, unlike Seneca, who still had much to offer. And they had never given back Augustus’ bequests. Nero modestly claimed to still need his tutor’s help: “Why not call me back, if the path of my youth anywhere descends and gets slippery?”
Then Nero turned to a more salient point. “If you return money to me, it won’t be your moderation spoken of by every mouth, but my greed; if you leave your princeps, it will be chalked up to fear of my cruelty. Your self-restraint would earn great praise; but it doesn’t befit a wise man to get glory for himself while bringing ill repute on a friend.”
If Nero really did speak like this, he expressed what had been implicit from the start: Seneca’s dignity and stature were vital assets to his regime. Seneca could not now withdraw those assets, or buy them back with cash, without doing the regime grave harm. He was shackled by chains forged of his own moral virtue. He must see the drama through.
The interview ended as it began, according to Tacitus: with insincere efforts to keep up appearances. Nero embraced and kissed the man he had just condemned to a joyless old age. Seneca, says Tacitus, with chilling insight into the courtier’s predicament, “expressed his thanks, as he did at the end of every conversation with his master.” Then the two men parted. Their friendship, if any of it was still intact before this, had come to an end.
Tigellinus had already taken Burrus’ place as head of the Praetorian Guard. Now he also replaced Seneca as amicus principis, the unofficial post that combined the roles of top adviser, chief of staff, and best friend. The shift was to have grave consequences, not only for Seneca but for Nero’s long-suffering and unloved, nearly discarded wife, the daughter of Claudius, Octavia.
Nero hated his marriage to this high-minded woman, now in her early twenties. For three years, he had made love to Poppaea instead, a woman far better suited to his tastes. But his senior advisers, adopting the line once taken by Agrippina, had always forbidden him to switch wives. Whenever he had consulted Burrus about divorcing Octavia, the blunt-spoken soldier only scoffed. “Sure, and be certain to give back her dowry,” he said, meaning the principate itself. Marriage to Octavia, as Burrus had understood, brought Nero precious legitimacy.
Octavia had by this time attained new luster in the eyes of the Romans. The girl’s plight won sympathy from onlookers, as did her temperament, which conformed to their standards of virtuous womanhood. Unlike other imperial brides, Octavia had sought neither power nor adulterous lovers but seemed content to stick to her role—thus far unfulfilled—of begetting an heir.
Seneca too urged Nero to stay in the marriage, if we can judge by Octavia, the anonymous Roman play that centers on the young girl’s tragedy. The author offers startling insight, perhaps based on firsthand knowledge, of what was going on behind closed doors in the palace in 62. A crucial scene brings Seneca and Nero onstage together, for an intimate, even tender, exchange.
Nero has begun to detest Octavia, but he admits to Seneca that he had not always done so. Speaking with surprising candor, he reveals that his hatred was born of rejection, while Seneca attempts to move him past his hurt feelings.
NERO: Never was my wife joined to me in her heart.
SENECA: But devotion is hard to spot in childhood years,
when love, vanquished by shame, conceals its fires.
NERO: So I too believed, for a long time—but no.
Her cold, rejecting heart, the looks she gives,
Have one clear message: she despises me.
But the burning pain I feel will have its vengeance.
Seeing the danger of an irreparable breach, Seneca tries gamely to champion Octavia’s cause. But the lure of Poppaea, whom the playwright links to primal forces of fertility and lust, proves too strong for his arguments. The two women are contrasted like the two roads to happiness in a famous philosophic allegory, one steep and arduous but leading to lasting rewards, the other smooth, easy, and ephemeral. Nero never was one for choosing the harder path.
As the scene ends, the petulant princeps rejects Octavia and Seneca in the same breath. He has had enough of restraint:
Stop pressing me; you’re too severe already.
What Seneca condemns, let me enjoy.
The dialogue is invented, but the insights ring true. Seneca had always defended the gravitas of the principate, keeping Nero out of chariots and off the stages of theaters. Octavia, with her sober bearing and high birth, represented the same gravitas, especially by contrast with Poppaea. Seneca is bound to have stuck by her, but doing so put him on the same side as the ghost of Agrippina. Nero had already shucked off his mother; he was done listening to his surrogate father as well. And that spelled danger for his beleaguered wife.
In the spring of 62, at about the time of the death of Burrus, Nero learned that Poppaea was pregnant. The news jolted the princeps into action. He was now determined to get rid of Octavia and enthrone Poppaea as empress. The Romans hated Poppaea, as he well knew, but once she had borne a future princeps, they would accept her—and have new regard for him as well.
But before he could divorce and remarry, Nero had some dynastic business to take care of.
These are the words Nero utters as he comes onstage in Octavia, an entrance that rivals Richard III’s in Shakespeare for boldness of characterization. Nero was hardly as resolute a leader as he is shown in these lines, if we credit the account of Tacitus. Nonetheless, assailed by the urgings of Tigellinus, he decided in the spring of 62 to do away with his two most prominent cousins. It was to them that Romans would turn, as Nero knew, should he lose support, as he might well do by divorcing the adored Octavia.
Rubellius Plautus, a descendant both of the emperor Tiberius and of the sister of Augustus, had long been regarded by Nero as a threat. In 55, as has been seen, a rumor that Agrippina was preparing to marry him had sent the princeps into a panic. Five years later, when a comet appeared, heralding (as Romans believed) a change of ruler, all eyes looked to Plautus. Nero wrote to Plautus then, asking him to leave Italy and go to his family’s estates in Anatolia. Plautus had obligingly complied. So he was off the scene by 62, but hardly off of Nero’s mind.
Faustus Sulla was also descended from Augustus’ sister, as well as from the great Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a military legend whose surname was still potent more than a century after his death. Sulla too had long aroused Nero’s suspicions and, like Plautus, had been banished for it. He had lived at Massilia (Marseilles) for the past four years, exiled on a trumped-up charge. While abroad, he had done nothing to arouse alarm. But his lineage made him dangerous, Tigellinus now argued to Nero. The Gallic legions might feel inspired by this new Sulla and rise up.
Nero had already watched a brother die at close range, and he had put his mother aboard the ship meant to kill her. The task of ordering assassinations from afar was comparatively easy, especially with Tigellinus as his new Praetorian prefect. A hit squad was sent to Massilia, on a ship fast enough to outstrip any forewarning. The soldiers covered the four-hundred-mile journey in only five days. Sulla was reclining pleasantly at his banquet table when they arrived, not expecting any harm. They struck him down and severed his head for shipment to Rome.
The elimination of Plautus was harder, since the road into Asia was longer and the element of surprise was lost. Plautus’ father-in-law somehow got wind of the coming attack and sent a message to Plautus to take action. The armies of the East would rally to Plautus’ side, the message said—that is, by overthrowing Nero. It was a barely plausible scenario, but in the end, Plautus merely waited for death—a band of 60 armed men—to arrive. Perhaps he thought in this way he could safeguard his wife and children, or perhaps his Stoic preceptors, among them the great Etruscan sage Musonius Rufus, convinced him that a quiet end was better than a desperate and hazardous struggle.
With two sword strokes, Nero dramatically strengthened his hold on power. He sent a report to the Senate that Sulla and Plautus were both dangers to the state; he did not say they were already dead. The senators pretended not to know more than that and voted the two men expelled from their ranks. Nero was once again given a free pass for murder.
Now at last, after four years of waiting, Nero was ready to change wives. But he had not reckoned with the depth of popular sentiment on Octavia’s side. The empress he detested had become a kind of cult figure in the streets of Rome. In the minds of the crowds, she stood for a purer, nobler principate that might have been—or might be again.
Nero justified divorce by leveling a charge of adultery. He had extorted, with help from Poppaea and Tigellinus, sworn testimony from an Egyptian flutist that he had slept with the empress. But mobs of Octavia’s outraged supporters began to gather in the public squares.
Nero wavered. He appeared even to change his mind, or was rumored to have done so, and grateful throngs went wild, setting up statues of Octavia in the Forum while destroying those of Poppaea. Some revelers even approached the palace and had to be pushed back by Praetorians. This allowed Poppaea to argue that a revolution was at hand. Octavia’s continued survival, she insisted, was a danger to the state.
Nero, it seems, was doomed to perform his crimes twice, so that no one could fail to observe them. Anicetus, the Greek freedman who commanded the naval base at Misenum, had had to attack Agrippina twice before finishing her off. Now Nero needed a second indictment of Octavia, and he turned again to Anicetus, most loyal of thugs. All Nero needed this time was a confession from Anicetus that he had shared Octavia’s bed. Anicetus would have to be punished, but Nero vowed to deliver only a mild rebuke, banishment to some comfortable place, and to soften it with a vast, covert reward.
Because of Anicetus’ position, Octavia’s alleged infidelity was portrayed as a bid for power—an attempt to suborn the Misenum fleet. With blithe disregard for plausibility, Nero cast his wife as a usurper, a second Agrippina. It was enough to secure from the Senate a sentence of banishment.
Octavia was sent to Pandateria, a wave-swept Pontine island only a mile square. Her best hope was to live out her life there, under house arrest in a sumptuous villa. But other imperial women who had landed on that grim rock had been killed, far from the eyes and ears of supporters. It was a place for the quiet disposal of wayward females.
The author of Octavia ends his play with his heroine’s deportation. It is a stirring scene, modeled on Euripides’ famous portrait of Iphigenia, a young woman unafraid to die. As the ship arrives to bear Octavia away, she embraces her fate:
Why do I tarry? Take me to my doom.…
Rig the mast, spread sails to the winds
and waves, hold the rudder straight
and seek Pandateria’s shore.
Octavia exits cursing neither Nero nor her captors but, strangely enough, her father Claudius. She seems to see, at the threshold of death, that Claudius, by marrying Agrippina, had set in motion the events that led her to this pass.
Tacitus’ Annals provides a grimmer denouement to the drama. Executioners arrived on Pandateria only days after Octavia did. The sight of the troops made the girl desperate. As they bound her, she pleaded piteously, insisting she was no longer Nero’s wife but only his adoptive sister. She invoked her descent from the clan of Germanicus. Finally she begged the soldiers in the name of Agrippina, now three years dead.
All entreaties were in vain. The soldiers opened Octavia’s veins, hoping to preserve the fiction of suicide. But she did not bleed out quickly enough. In the end they sealed her in a steam-filled room until she suffocated.
At the request of Poppaea, the new empress of Rome, Octavia’s head was taken off with a sword and sent to join those of Plautus and Sulla in Nero’s palace.
