(A.D. 64–66)
Rome prepared for the second Neronia, the arts festival instituted by Nero on a five-year schedule, in a very different mood than it had celebrated the first. In 60, the city had just completed what a later emperor, Trajan, termed the quinquennium Neronis, “Nero’s half-decade,” claiming it was the high-water mark of Roman history. By 65, the city was a burned-out shell and a construction site, above which towered a monstrous pleasure palace with a colossal statue of Nero at its entrance. In that intervening quinquennium, Rome had become Neronopolis, as Nero reportedly intended, in all but name.
Prompted by Trajan’s comment, historians have seen in Nero’s reign a diptych of good government followed by bad, and they have studiously sought the dividing line. For some, the murder of Agrippina in 59 forms the downturn; for others, it was the death of Burrus; for still others, including Tacitus, it was the first, partial retirement of Seneca in 62. But the path of Nero’s decline was less a V-shaped turn than an arc, paralleling the arc of his own maturation. In his teens, Nero deferred to his elders, but as he grew, he took the reins in his own hands—at times quite literally, by indulging his passion for chariot driving. He finally drove Rome’s chariot, and his own life, into the ditch.
Any Romans who still in 65 read Seneca’s De Clementia, ten years after it was written, had occasion for a bitter laugh. “That which is undergirded by truth, and grows out of solid ground, becomes better and greater with passage of time,” Seneca had proclaimed, reassuring his readers that their new princeps was innately good and could not deteriorate. It turned out that age seventeen had been a bit early for such certainty. Seneca must not have believed his own words, but perhaps he thought his influence could make them true. Over time he had lost that influence. Now only one of the restraints he had imposed was still in force: Nero had not yet sung in a public theater within the bounds of Rome.
Nero’s inaugural speech to the Senate, written by Seneca and later posted proudly on silver tablets, might also have evoked laughter a decade later—or tears. The emperor’s early reverence for the Senate had dissolved into paranoia and contempt, following a spiral pattern set by his two predecessors, Caligula and Claudius. Imperial anxiety had begotten senatorial fear, fear had bred opposition, and opposition had spawned cruelty. Seneca had tried to prevent the cycle from starting, and indeed he had succeeded in delaying its onset. Without his moderating influence, the quinquennium Neronis might have been a three-year span, or two, or only one.
But was the time he had bought worth the price he had paid? Nowhere in his prose works does Seneca reflect on his political successes or failures, beyond a few vague mutterings in the Letters suggesting the failures weighed on him heavily. Nowhere does he say, as the author of Octavia has him say, that he should have stayed on Corsica, beneath the benign stars of the open sky, and never seen Nero’s palace—now being fitted with a ceiling depicting that sky, a mechanical wonder that could be wheeled around by laboring slaves. Seneca tried, on at least two occasions, to leave that palace, realizing it had become his prison. But he had first entered it of his own free will. Unlike his great role model, Socrates, he had felt the pull of ambition, and he still felt it to the end of his life, if we believe an analysis he made in the Letters of his own moral state.
What could have prompted a committed Stoic, a man who thought happiness came from Nature and Reason, to also pursue wealth and rule? Seneca never referred this question to himself, but he pondered it in a mythic parallel, in his greatest verse tragedy, Thyestes.
Seneca almost certainly composed this play during his time at Nero’s court, or afterward in retirement. It is the most self-referential of his dramas, so much so that one doubts it could have been published in his lifetime. Here Seneca used the conflict between two royal brothers—Atreus, a bloody autocrat possessed by spirits of Hell, and Thyestes, a gentle sage trying to stay out of politics—to wrestle with questions that his own strange journey had raised.
When the drama begins, Atreus sits on the throne of Argos, enjoying sole power, though he and his brother Thyestes were meant to rule by turns. Thyestes has gone into an exile that Seneca depicts as a philosophic retreat, a communion with Nature such as he himself had claimed to enjoy on Corsica. But Atreus, infected by the demonic spirit of his grandfather Tantalus, is bent on destroying his brother, whom he regards as a threat. He sets out to lure Thyestes back to Argos, then enact a diabolic plan: to feed his brother a banquet of his murdered children’s flesh.
The conflict is neither a coded version of Seneca’s relationship with Nero, nor an allegory contrasting political ambition with philosophic detachment, but it contains elements of both. Atreus is challenged by a henchman to say how he will ensnare Thyestes from such a great distance. Atreus replies:
He could not be caught—unless he wants to be caught.
He yet covets my kingdom.
With the omniscient insight of the criminally insane, Atreus seems to look straight into the heart of his brother—and Seneca’s heart too. The will to power, Atreus implies, lurks in even the most detached, self-contented sage.
Thyestes now enters the scene, walking toward the trap we know is waiting. Seneca portrays him as a virtuous Stoic, disgusted by the world he long ago renounced:
to be in no one’s way, to eat safe meals
stretched out on open ground. Hovels don’t house crimes;
a narrow table holds a wholesome feast;
it’s the gold cup that’s poisoned—I’ve seen, I know.
It is as if Seneca has turned back the clock on his own life and given Thyestes the same choice he faced on Corsica, but also given him knowledge of what awaits. Thyestes lingers agonizingly on this precipice, unwilling to go forward, sensing danger ahead, unable to make up his mind—but then takes the fatal step.
Why does Thyestes return to Argos, while claiming to hate what he will find there? He makes his choice passively, almost fatalistically. As his children urge him onward, he appears to surrender: “I follow you, I do not lead,” he tells them. He has resisted long enough to satisfy his own conscience. He will resist further when Atreus offers him the scepter, but he accepts this as well; it was, as Atreus had divined and as Seneca finally makes clear, what he had wanted all along.
Accepting tainted power rather than staying in virtuous exile—this was Thyestes’ sin, and one familiar to Seneca. The impulse behind it was deeply rooted in Thyestes’ nature, perhaps in all human nature. “All of us have done wrong,” Seneca wrote in De Clementia; “some have stood by our good designs not firmly enough and have lost our guiltlessness, unwillingly, while trying to keep our grasp on it.” Trying is what Seneca depicts Thyestes doing, but not hard enough.
Seneca’s prose works offer forgiveness, but in the bleak world of the tragedies, the sin of weakness comes back on the sinner’s head a thousandfold. In a gruesome messenger speech, we hear how Atreus butchered, fileted, and stewed Thyestes’ children. Then we watch as Thyestes unknowingly consumes the horrid casserole.
In the play’s final act, a gleeful, drunken Thyestes revels over his meal and, significantly, curses his former poverty; he has gone over to the world of pleasure and power that he once renounced. Atreus now enters to deliver the crowning blow. He reveals the severed heads of the sons on whom Thyestes has feasted. No deities have intervened to prevent this atrocity, and none care that it happened, as Seneca suggests in his nightmarish closing lines:
THYESTES: Gods will come to avenge me;
To them I entrust your punishment.
ATREUS: And I entrust your punishment—to your children.
Thyestes can pray for justice as long as he likes, but the noisome contents of his guts are all that the play endorses as real.
There is nothing left for a cosmos that has beheld such horror except to fall and cease. In Thyestes, Seneca once again imagines the advent of apocalypse, the theme that had haunted his written works from their inception. In this case, a new kind of disaster is at hand—the disappearance of the sun, bringing darkness to Argos at daytime. No one in the play understands this phenomenon, but all are aware it portends something dire.
After Thyestes’ cannibal banquet, not only the sun but the stars, too, seem about to vanish. The play’s chorus members, the citizens of Argos, envision the zodiac tumbling into the sea, leaving only black void above:
Are we, out of all generations,
deserving of the sky’s collapse,
its axis knocked from beneath its dome?
Is it on us the last age comes?
A harsh destiny has brought us to this:
Wretches, either we lost our sun,
Or else we drove it away.
In these words we seem to hear Seneca’s own voice, speaking about his own time. Thyestes is a bleak cri de coeur, the most despairing Seneca ever allowed himself to utter. For him, the benign stars of Corsica had been extinguished. His sky had become blind, black, untenanted.
Death was the only route out of the diseased world in which he dwelled, yet he lived on. The last words of the play’s apocalyptic chorus sound the theme that preoccupied him in his last years, suicide:
Greedy for life is he who declines
to die, along with the dying world.
It is perhaps Seneca’s exhortation to himself—or his self-reproach.
While Seneca was writing Thyestes, Lucan was working on a masterpiece of his own, the epic poem Civil War—but writing in a very different spirit than his uncle. Lucan was not ready to despair or withdraw into fatalism. He was certainly not ready to die. The young lion of the Annaeus clan was in his midtwenties and at the height of his extraordinary literary powers. As the second Neronia approached, he began to employ the potent weapon of his poetry toward a goal that most thought out of reach: standing up to Nero.
It had been otherwise five years earlier, when Lucan first arrived in Rome. He had recited Praises of Nero at the first Neronia, and in the prologue to Civil War had—apparently without irony—cautioned Nero to step carefully when he took his place among the constellations. He had eagerly adopted the ways of the court, where poets rose in stature the more highly they exalted the princeps.
Adored by both Seneca and Nero, gifted with prodigious talent, Lucan had then seemed destined for political or literary glory, or both at once. But talent, at Nero’s court, was not always a blessing. The princeps, the more his own artistic ambitions grew, had become more jealous of his protégé. Relations went downhill, and Seneca’s fall from favor accelerated the decline. Lucan continued to publish and read sections of Civil War but no longer with Nero’s approbation. Indeed, the princeps broke up one recitation by abruptly calling the Senate into session, forcing most of the auditors, and Lucan himself, to go directly to the Senate house.
Lucan resented the emperor’s small-mindedness, and resentment began to infect his verse. The subject matter of Civil War—the era of Roman history that had brought Julius Caesar to power—was politically sensitive, though Lucan initially sought to avoid provocations. But as the poem progressed, its view of the house of Caesar became darker. By the time Lucan reached book seven—he completed ten books and intended at least two more—his verses had begun to border on sedition.
Acting either out of anger or envy, Nero banned Lucan from giving readings or publishing. Lucan only made his Civil War more polemical than ever. In book ten—the last book he was to complete—the murder of Julius Caesar was openly hailed as an exemplum for future generations. In private circles, Lucan began to circulate harsh verse lampoons of the princeps—the same crime, as he surely knew, that had nearly gotten Antistius condemned to death two years earlier.
Most likely it was now that Lucan uttered a bon mot that later became legendary. While using a public lavatory, he heard the sound of his own flatulence echoing through the hollow privy beneath him. His quick literary mind seized on an apt quotation—from the poetry of Nero. You might think it had thundered beneath the earth, Lucan intoned, gleefully spoofing the emperor’s verse about an eruption of Mount Aetna. Those who heard him hastened to leave the latrine, fearing that their presence there put them in danger.
Lucan finally chose a direct line of attack. He unleashed his De Incendio Urbis, “On the Burning of the City,” a work dealing with the still perilous topic of the great fire. It is now entirely lost, and its content is barely known—we cannot even say whether it was a poem or an essay—but one scant reference suggests that it held Nero to blame. In any case, merely to write publicly about the fire, an event that had deeply damaged Nero’s reputation, was certain to offend the princeps. Seneca, in all the reams of prose he wrote in 64 and 65, never once mentioned it.
Could Lucan, or any writer, hope to escape with his life after exercising such license? Was the young genius courting arrest? It seems rather that Lucan was hopeful that the current regime would soon be over and that he would emerge into the next era as a hero of the opposition. For by late 64 or early 65, he had become a leading member of a plot to assassinate Nero.
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Nero’s assumption throughout his reign was that only a member of the Julian or Claudian family could rule Rome. Starting with his brother Britannicus and proceeding through Agrippina, Plautus, Sulla, Octavia, and most recently, Decimus Silanus, he had systematically killed off those who shared the blood of Augustus or of Augustus’ wife, Livia. Now there was only one potential rival left: Junius Silanus, last scion of the doomed Silani, the great-great-great-grandson of Augustus. He remained untouched for the time being, but Nero watched him with unease.
Nero had tried to safeguard his rule by leaving Rome no alternatives. He, and the son he hoped to father with Poppaea, would be the only eligible members of the once-crowded imperial house. But the strength of this dynastic strategy had never been tested. The principate, after all, was not a monarchy. It was not clear that every princeps had to come from a single line. Acclamation by the Praetorian Guard was the best authority a new ruler could claim, and this potentially could be obtained by anyone.
Lucan and his fellow conspirators decided to test that possibility. They chose an amiable, flamboyant aristocrat, Gaius Calpurnius Piso, to be put in Nero’s place, should they succeed in killing the princeps. Strangely, they bypassed Junius Silanus, the only male Julian left. Perhaps they regarded him as too young to rule; other young men who had taken the throne, first Caligula and now Nero, had been driven by it into self-absorption, delusion, and fantasies of omnipotence. That pattern, it was felt, could not be repeated.
A dynastic marriage was arranged for Piso, such that the Julio-Claudian house would not be wholly extinguished. It was planned that he would divorce his wife, a commoner ill suited to the throne, and marry Antonia, Claudius’ daughter from an early marriage. Still in her midthirties, recently widowed by Nero’s execution of her husband Sulla, Antonia had shown she was capable of bearing children, though the son she had borne to Sulla had not survived.
No one among the band of plotters dreamed of restoring the republic. Lucan was glorifying that long-ago world in his Civil War, but the values of epic poetry did not often carry over into political reality. Most in the Roman elite accepted the view that Seneca had expressed in De Clementia: autocracy had won. To imagine otherwise was to court a new civil war and social chaos. The best Rome could hope for, as the men behind Piso judged, was a milder, saner autocrat and a return of dignity to the Senate.
The conspiracy gained strong military support. Faenius Rufus, coleader—with Tigellinus—of the Praetorian Guards, was a crucial convert to its ranks. Rufus had fallen from favor as Tigellinus rose, since he declined to feed Nero’s appetites and flatter his vanities as Tigellinus did. Nero had begun to treat Rufus with mistrust, even accusing him of having shared the bed of the hated Agrippina. A fall from grace, perhaps even a death sentence, was likely coming, unless Rufus struck first.
Other Praetorians joined the plot because Nero offended their soldiers’ honor. Some were disgusted by a stagestruck princeps or one who raced as a charioteer. Others suspected Nero of having set the fire that destroyed Rome. Still others resented him for the murder of Agrippina, daughter of the great Germanicus, or for the deepening bankruptcy of the Roman state, provider of their generous salaries.
On the civilian side, adherents of the plot spanned the social scale. At the top were senators, among them consul-designate Plautius Lateranus, son of a hero of the conquest of Britain. Among the equites, Claudius Senecio, who had long been one of Nero’s closest friends, vowed his support. At the bottom of the ladder was Epicharis, a clever Greek freedwoman and courtesan, at this time apparently the concubine of Annaeus Mela, Lucan’s father and Seneca’s brother. Despite her low station, Epicharis was among the most zealous conspirators, as the rest would soon learn—to their woe.
The plotters hoped to enlist Seneca in their cause. On several occasions, Piso, who had three years earlier been so close to Seneca as to bring suspicion on them both, wrote to the great sage requesting a parley. But Seneca put him off, claiming ill health and a desire to not be disturbed. Piso finally sent a go-between, Antonius Natalis, to persuade Seneca to meet with him in person.
The arrival of this messenger raised difficult questions for Seneca. At stake was the fate of a man whose life had intertwined with his own for nearly two decades. He had helped raise Nero from age thirteen and had been the closest thing to a father the princeps had. Clearly he had failed to instill in him any part of his own moral code. But had Nero become such a monster that Seneca wished him dead? Or would help kill him?
And what would become of the Roman state should the plot succeed? Seneca knew Piso well enough to see that he was no Augustus. Piso too might fall from favor, and the pattern of dislike leading to abuse, abuse leading to assassination, would set in all over again. In De Clementia, Seneca had described the Roman people as a mob needing to be controlled, liable to do itself much harm if it threw off its “yoke.” Perhaps the harm even Nero might do was less grievous than the alternative.
Then, too, Seneca faced the ethical questions surrounding regicide. In De Beneficiis, he had written that a ruler who went utterly insane could be justly removed; assassination would in effect be a mercy killing. But such cases, Seneca went on to say, were freaks of nature, as rare as fires mysteriously spewing forth from underwater caverns. Even Caligula, he elsewhere implies, did not meet this threshold; still less then did Nero. Was the princeps so far gone in mind, in his late twenties, as to deserve death?
Finally, Seneca had to consider his own fate, his tenuous hold on life. Were his chances of survival better if he joined the plot or stayed out of it? Nero, if we trust the report in Tacitus, had already tried to have his former tutor poisoned. If the plotters succeeded in killing Nero, Seneca had nothing more to fear, but they might well fail. If so, Nero would seize any evidence as a reason to arrest Seneca—something he had thus far been unwilling to do. The death that would follow would be more painful than any poison.
Throughout his political career, Seneca, a practiced diplomat, had hedged bets and navigated between extremes. Now, at his most important crossroads, he once again temporized. He would neither join the conspiracy nor oppose it. His reply to Piso was this: it would not be in his own interest or in Piso’s to meet or have further communication. But, he added, his own well-being depended on Piso’s safety. The remark was an elaborate pleasantry, but it carried a tone of approbation; he seemed to be signaling he would not stand in the plotters’ way. It was a sentence he would come to regret.
Perhaps one other consideration led Seneca to hold aloof. Tacitus reports a rumor that some of the Praetorians, led by one Subrius Flavus, intended to install Piso, then kill him in turn and put Seneca in his place. They regarded Seneca as a virtuous man who would command the respect of the public, while Piso, in their eyes, was a moral lightweight—a man who had demeaned himself by performing in tragic dramas. How would it ease Rome’s shame, they asked, if a lyre player were removed from power but replaced by an actor? Tacitus states, but again only as a rumor, that Seneca was aware of this subconspiracy.
Of all the tantalizing but ambiguous clues to the mind of Seneca, this is surely the most tantalizing and the most ambiguous. It has no more substance than a story heard and recorded, several decades after the fact, by a man who was not sure he believed it. Yet Tacitus was not willing to dismiss it; nor are many modern historians. It raises the awesome possibility that Seneca, while holding back from action, had hopes of ending up the new princeps, the Western world’s first philosopher king.
But it remains only that, a possibility, not subject to proof or refutation. Here is the greatest measure of how little, in the end, we understand Seneca, the man who tried his whole life to reveal his soul yet left so much opaque. After all his discussions of how and why to withdraw from political life, we cannot declare that the rumor Tacitus reported was groundless. We cannot know that Seneca, if Rome had acclaimed him, would have declined to rule.
Though it had many notable members, the conspiracy against Nero lacked leadership. Piso, with his charm and affability, stood high in the group’s affections but proved unable to guide it toward action. Much time passed as the plotters debated when and where to carry out their deed. They had complacency on their side, for Nero had no cause to suspect an attack, but the odds of detection increased each day. In the end, it was Epicharis, the Greek freedwoman belonging to Seneca’s brother’s household, who, in an excess of zeal, forfeited the element of surprise.
Epicharis, weary of the constant debates and delays of her fellow conspirators, took it upon herself to push the plot forward. While in Campania on other business, she visited the naval squadron at Misenum, the sailors who had served Nero loyally and killed his mother for him. One of those assassins, a midlevel officer named Proculus, felt he had not gotten the rewards he deserved. He grumbled loudly about Nero to all who would hear, including Epicharis. She seized on the chance to recruit him. If Proculus would bring his sailors into the plot, she said, he would get his just rewards and more.
But Epicharis had misjudged Proculus’ disaffection. He had only meant to vent his grievances, not avenge them. Appalled at Epicharis’ suggestion, he took word of the interview straight to Nero.
Epicharis was brought in for questioning but denied everything. She had given Proculus no evidence of the plot nor disclosed any names, so the investigation went no further. But Nero had been put on alert. He kept Epicharis in his custody.
The plot that had moved so slowly now went into high gear, for the plotters expected to be betrayed. It was the middle of April; a yearly planting festival sacred to Ceres was set to begin. Though reclusive at other times, Nero would attend the closing ceremonies in the Circus Maximus, a structure already rebuilt after the fire nine months earlier. It was planned that Lateranus, a consul-designate who could get close to Nero, would take the emperor’s knees as if making an appeal on some personal matter, then immobilize him. A similar strategy had been used against Julius Caesar more than a century earlier, with devastating effectiveness.
A senator named Flavius Scaevinus asked for the privilege of striking the first blow. He was hardly the obvious choice, as his life to that point had been marked by self-contentedness and soft living. But Scaevinus felt that his moment was at hand. He even procured a sacred dagger with which to stab Nero, an ancient relic that had been enshrined in a nearby temple, and he cherished this object with fetishistic care. On the night of April 18, just before the close of Ceres’ festival, Scaevinus asked his freedman Milichus to sharpen and polish the dagger for him, and also to procure bandages and tourniquets for stanching blood.
Imperial freedmen had played many consequential roles over the past decades, but never before a senator’s freedman, still less a senator’s freedman’s wife. The wife of Milichus, a woman whose name has gone unrecorded, became alert to Scaevinus’ preparations. She convinced her husband that something was afoot, and that the rest of the household knew it. Milichus would lose a great reward if he were not first to give information to the palace, she argued. Indeed, merely by sharpening the dagger, Milichus had put his own life in danger.
At dawn on April 19, Milichus and his wife, bearing the sharpened dagger as evidence, made their way to the emperor’s residence and gained an audience with Nero. Scaevinus was immediately seized and brought in to explain himself. Scaevinus defended himself with such vehemence that Milichus almost retracted his charge. But his wife was not going to let slip the prize that Fortune had dropped. She produced new information: that she had often seen Scaevinus in parleys with Antonius Natalis, a known associate of the doubtful Piso.
Now Natalis too was brought to the palace for questioning, and he and Scaevinus were taken to separate rooms. Both were asked for details of their recent conversations, and the details did not agree. Both were put in shackles, and implements of torture—used routinely on slaves and noncitizens, but only illegally, and in crises, on men of senatorial rank—were made ready. Following a pattern that has served tyrants well in every age, both men quickly confessed, each fearing that the other, when flayed or burned with hot irons, was bound to do so.
The most urgent task of the interrogation was to obtain names of accomplices. The accused gave them selectively, hoping to betray only enough confederates to secure their own safety. Scaevinus implicated Lucan and Senecio, both members of Nero’s inner circle, along with several others. Natalis was the first to name the ostensible leader of the plot, Gaius Piso. Then, in an effort to gain Nero’s favor—for he knew how the princeps would be pleased—he named Seneca as well. Natalis himself had carried Seneca’s strangely florid message to Piso, and he now repeated it to Nero: My well-being depends on your safety.
Meanwhile, word had leaked out to Piso and the other plot leaders that their plan had been betrayed. Piso’s associates urged him to go at once to the Praetorian camp, or mount the speaker’s platform in the Forum, and rally the city to his cause. Hatred of Nero was widespread; Piso might succeed in igniting an uprising. In any case, what did he have to lose? His life was forfeit; he could at least go out as a martyr, making a public show of resistance.
Piso wandered out into the streets of Rome, where, for most citizens, the day had begun like any other. The quiet and unconcern he found there must have struck him as cruel indifference. The effort needed to rouse this inert populace, the risk that torture might be inflicted on himself or his beloved wife, were too much to contemplate. He went back inside his home and waited for soldiers to arrive, then opened his veins. Like so many others of his class, senators whose will to fight had been ground down by a century of autocracy, Piso found it easy to give up. The slow oblivion of blood loss overcame him, and then all was peace.
In his will, composed in an effort to save his wife and family, Piso left behind exorbitant praise of Nero.
As he supervised the questionings and watched the list of accused grow, Nero saw his deepest misgivings confirmed. The political elite of Rome, high-minded senators and aristocrats, hated him as he had always sensed they did, hated him enough to kill him. Their moralizing had oppressed him for years. They seemed to share a single disapproving mind, a mind nurtured by the severe Stoic school that taught men to scowl and scold—the school of his former high counselor, Seneca.
Nero resolved to hit back with full force. He would sweep the board clean of his critics, the guilty along with the innocent. For as the circle of suspects widened, the line between guilt and innocence became blurry. Huge numbers of the upper class were known to be friends of those accused or had conversed with them recently. Even Seneca, though he had carefully avoided direct contact, had sent a message to Piso that seemed, to Nero at least, to imply collusion. Nero dispatched a Praetorian tribune, Gavius Silvanus, to find Seneca and confront him with this message.
Nero did not at this point realize that much of the military, including this same Gavius Silvanus, was involved in the plot. He still trusted the Praetorians, even their coprefect Faenius Rufus; he had assigned this man, who was in fact a conspirator, to head important interrogations. Faenius, clinging to the hope of evading detection, maintained a pretense of loyalty and cruelly abused his fellow plotters. Those he was now obliged to torture declined to denounce him, thinking Faenius could engineer their release, or even carry out the planned coup, if he stayed undercover.
That second goal was very nearly achieved. During one torture session, Faenius was assisted by another closet conspirator, Subrius Flavus, while Nero himself looked on. At a certain point, Flavus realized the absurdity, the bizarre futility, of what was taking place: of three men in the room who wanted Nero dead, two were attacking the third, while Nero stood by and watched, unarmed and outnumbered. Flavus used covert gestures to suggest to Faenius that they kill Nero then and there; he even began to draw his sword. But Faenius passed up the plot’s unexpected second chance. He shook his head to Flavus and turned back to his work. The crackdown had gone too far, and he had too little nerve, for a sudden reversal of direction.
Meanwhile guards were spreading through the city to put the populace in a chokehold. Watches were posted on the old Servian wall, their presence visible to everyone, and at points along the Tiber where ships might try to enter—or leave. Squads of Praetorian toughs, their ranks strengthened by strapping Germans, shouldered their way through the Forum and broke into private homes, dragging away those wanted for questioning. Shackles and chains were no longer held in reserve but were slapped instantly onto all suspects. A great stream of manacled men surged toward Nero’s residence, so many that the suspects had to be detained outside, near the gates, for lack of rooms to torture them in.
Immunity was promised to those who would implicate others, and many grasped at the slender hope that this bargain would be honored. The poet Lucan was one of them. Though he had been among the fiercest of the plotters, even offering Nero’s head as a gift to several of his friends, the chance to preserve his own life, so young and full of promise, turned him compliant. He confessed his guilt and gave names of several accomplices, even throwing in that of his own mother, Acilia. If we believe Suetonius’ cruel analysis, he hoped to please Nero, the killer of Agrippina, by joining him in matricide. Luckily, as Tacitus reports, Acilia was forgotten in the confusion and ultimately left alone.
One brave holdout refused to implicate anyone.
The freedwoman Epicharis, a member of Lucan’s household and a fellow firebrand, was still in custody after denying her recruitment of Proculus at Misenum. Now Nero ordered torture—burning with red-hot plates and stretching on the rack—trusting that a woman’s resolve could be easily undone. Epicharis, however, endured her ordeal in silence for the better part of a day. The next day her body was so badly broken that she had to be carried into the torture chamber on a chair. Nonetheless she managed, when left alone in the locked room, to undo her breastband, tie it in a noose, and hang herself, half naked, from the bars supporting the chair’s canopy.
It was an episode that Seneca might have enshrined in Letters to Lucilius, amid his galleries of heroic suicides. A concubine and former slave, seemingly the lowest thing of Fortune, had found the ultimate freedom and power, the choice of her own death. Perhaps Epicharis’ cause had utterly failed. But in Seneca’s moral scheme, where self-destruction granted escape from oppression, this proud woman had won, defeating the aggregate might of the Roman state.
But Seneca was never to learn of Epicharis’ end. Even as his brother’s bedmate was being stretched on the rack, Praetorians, led by Gavius Silvanus, were surrounding the villa outside Rome where he was taking dinner with his wife, Paulina.
Seneca had arrived at this villa earlier in the day, returning from Campania to the outskirts of Rome. His movements, for once, are clear thanks to the detailed report of Tacitus, but his motives are as inscrutable as ever. Doubtless he knew the plot to kill Nero would go into motion that day. Was he hoping to be on hand to serve the new government, even to be hailed as princeps? Would he, like his mythic avatar Thyestes, have gone back to his Argos and drunk again from the poisoned chalice of power? Tacitus did not know and did not speculate. We too can only guess.
Seneca shared a simple meal with Paulina that night, for he had been avoiding foods that might conceal poison. Paradoxically though, even while he sought to elude Nero’s toxins, he had collected some of his own, a cup of hemlock prepared as if for an Athenian state execution. One venom might have been thought as good as another, but the manner and mood of death mattered intensely to Seneca. For years he had contemplated and anticipated, in Letters to Lucilius, the last scene in the vivid drama of his life. Now his chance to play that scene, before an audience of friends and household staff, was at hand.
Fortunately for Seneca, a great dramaturge would immortalize that scene, using a report passed on by an admiring eyewitness. Tacitus, ever fascinated both by Seneca and by the ways great men met their dooms, made it one of the longest, most detailed, and most intense episodes of the Annals. He shaped it into a tour de force but left its tone ambiguous, reserving judgment on Seneca right up to the end. It is unclear whether he cast the man’s final drama as tragedy or as satire, or as a modernistic melding of the two.
Among the scene’s ironies was the fact that Silvanus, the captain of the squad sent to confront Seneca, was, like Faenius Rufus, an as-yet-undiscovered conspirator. That very morning, perhaps, he had anticipated coming to this villa to hail Seneca as princeps. But now, to avoid detection, he had to play his part, that of a steadfast Nero loyalist. On orders, he questioned Seneca about his recent exchange with Antonius Natalis. Had Natalis indeed tried to get Seneca to meet with Gaius Piso? And had Seneca sent him back to Piso bearing the strangely portentous message “My well-being depends on your safety”?
It mattered little how Seneca replied, for mere accusation gave Nero license to do as he liked. Nonetheless, Seneca gamely mounted a defense. He still might win clemency from the regime or at least respect from the two friends dining with him—witnesses who would transmit his last acts to the world. It was true that Piso had sought meetings, he told Silvanus, but he had rejected these requests. As for the fateful sign-off, Seneca had intended nothing by it, for he had no reason to so highly value the health of any man—except, he added significantly, that of a princeps. He had no reason to flatter Piso, for flattery was not his way, as Nero could himself attest. Indeed, he grandly claimed, the emperor had seen more of freedom than slavery in Seneca’s behavior.
Silvanus returned to the palace and reported Seneca’s words. Nero was closeted with his two closest advisers, Poppaea and Tigellinus. He asked whether Seneca was preparing to commit suicide. No doubt he hoped for a positive answer, for evidence was slight, and in the end evidence would be needed. Silvanus, however, said that Seneca showed no awareness of peril. Nero told him to return to the villa and deliver the emperor’s verdict: death.
Silvanus did not obey. Though he knew the plot had collapsed, the actions required for Nero’s reign to continue were more than he could endure. He made his way to his commanding officer and fellow conspirator, Faenius Rufus, to ask whether he should carry out his mission. Rufus ordered him to do so, but still Silvanus demurred. He could do nothing to save Seneca, but he could at least spare himself the taint of collusion. He asked another soldier to carry his fatal message and went on his way.
The double role Faenius Rufus was playing had helped none of the conspirators. They were getting weary of concealing it. Scaevinus, the first plotter to confess, was under interrogation by Faenius when his patience ran out. With witnesses standing by, Scaevinus replied knowingly to one of Faenius’ questions: “No one knows better than you yourself; why don’t you step forward and help out your great princeps?” Taken by surprise, Faenius turned white and began spluttering incoherently. The game was up, and he was soon under arrest.
After that, the military’s huge role in the plot was unmasked. This led to some remarkable exchanges, as Nero questioned Praetorians who, with nothing left to fear, were blunt in their replies. Subrius Flavus explained to the emperor the origins of his disaffection. “No one in the army was more loyal to you than I—when you deserved our love,” Flavus said. “But I began to hate you, after you became the murderer of your mother and wife, a chariot driver, an actor, and an arsonist.” Tacitus remarks that nothing Nero heard during the crisis wounded him more than this terse catalogue of crimes.
A centurion named Sulpicius Asper was equally forthright in addressing Nero. Asper framed his defense in philosophic terms. Asked why he had joined the conspiracy, he replied, in Tacitus’ account, “Because there was no other remedy for your atrocities” (or according to Dio, “It was the only way I could help you”). Seneca was not alone in seeking an ethical imperative for assassination.
One by one the soldier-conspirators were betrayed, arrested, and beheaded, willingly stretching their necks for their comrades’ blades. Flavus is said to have looked impassively at his own grave as he went to the block, finding it too shallow. “Not even this is up to code,” he sneered. The Rome he had been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neronopolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.
The roll of accused civilians kept growing as well. Nero lengthened it by adding long-standing enemies, guilty or no. A sitting consul and close friend of the princeps, Atticus Vestinus, got onto the list, though he was implicated by no one. He had shown, with his abrasive jokes, that he knew too much about Nero and was not afraid of him. A squad of soldiers was sent to bring Vestinus in for questioning. Vestinus was feasting with friends when they arrived, making a good show of fearlessness. But one word of summons was enough to dispel the charade. He immediately opened his veins and retired to his bath to die. His dinner guests were detained at the table for hours, their terror furnishing sadistic amusement for Nero.
Soldiers bared their necks and senators slit their arms, all going passively, peacefully, resignedly to their dooms. Some even took their own lives after they were out of peril. Gavius Silvanus, who had refused to deliver Seneca’s death sentence, was acquitted by Nero’s inquisition but killed himself nonetheless. Perhaps the guilt of surviving a horrific purge was too much to live with, or else fear of retribution from the kin of the unlucky.
In the great catalogue of deaths that ends the extant text of Tacitus’ Annals—a list so long that Tacitus fears it will bore and disgust his readers—only one man is said to have gone down fighting. Junius Silanus, the last male descendant of Augustus other than Nero himself, was in detention in the town of Barium when a soldier arrived to kill him. Though unarmed, Silanus fought back with all the strength he had, quipping to his assassin that he would not get a free pass for his job. He alone died in combat, wounds on the front of his body, rather than fading slowly away in the warm, languid waters of his bath.
In his prose treatises and in Letters to Lucilius, Seneca examined suicide from every angle, especially the question of when it was called for. Wasting disease might justify it, or the abuse of a cruel tyrant, or the certainty that death was coming soon in any case. As he awaited word from Nero’s palace, Seneca might have reflected that though he was approaching a critical threshold in all three areas, he had not crossed it in any. He still might hope that banishment, not death, would be Nero’s verdict. His philosophic stature might protect him, as it later shielded his fellow Stoic sage Musonius Rufus.
Seneca was also in mind of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, whose life in exile—if that was to be her fate—would be much harder without him. “Her spiritus depends on mine,” he had written in one of the Letters, using the Latin word for the breath of life. “The spiritus must be called back as it flees—though in torment—out of reverence for our dear ones, and held on the tip of our lips. For a good man must live not as long as he wants, but as long as he ought.” Those words might have recurred to him as he sat with Paulina, a woman who had never offended Nero but, if familiar patterns prevailed, would be considered guilty by association.
Then a centurion arrived from Rome, and all hope vanished.
Seneca asked the soldier if he might have access to his will. Apparently he wanted to deed part of his wealth—most of it was already in Nero’s hands—to the two friends who were dining with him, sharers of his last hours. Nothing he might write now could stop Nero from seizing the whole estate, if he pleased, but the centurion nonetheless refused the request. Seneca explained to his friends, in the words of Tacitus, that he could thus leave them only the imago of his life, the one legacy over which he had control.
Imago is a multilayered word. Like its English derivative image, it can mean simply “shape” or “form.” But it can also mean “illusion,” “phantom,” or “false seeming,” something “imagined.” Tacitus, a superb ironist and verbal artist, chose this word with care. Seneca, too, as Tacitus was aware, was a consummate ironist—an author who had painted his self-portrait in half a million words yet had never, in all his treatises, plays, and epistles, addressed the truths of his life in power. He had created an imago of himself since the day he began writing. He was shaping it still in his last hours, hastily revising an incomplete work and taking steps to ensure its survival.
But perhaps it was not too late to speak truth. In an effort to comfort his friends, who now had begun weeping and lamenting, Seneca pointed out that the current crisis had been predictable. “What was left to Nero, after the murders of his mother and brother, except to add that of his teacher and mentor?” he said. Seneca himself had helped conceal those two murders and had colluded in at least one of them. His blunt words, spoken (in Tacitus’ phrase) as if to Rome generally, seemed intended both to expose them and to lay them squarely at Nero’s feet.
The death of Seneca, as depicted by Rubens in the early seventeenth century. The philosopher’s idealized features were taken from the bust known today as Pseudo-Seneca (see here).
Seneca had a cup of hemlock prepared for this moment, so that he could die as Socrates had done five centuries earlier. But for some reason, he declined to use it, choosing instead a more Roman death, by slow blood loss. Paulina, the wife who shared Seneca’s peril, now said she wanted to share his fate, and he acceded to this. He and Paulina opened their veins, laying arms side by side so that one stroke of the knife could cross both. To one observer, this was a moment of moving marital harmony, but to another, it appeared that Seneca was forcing his wife to die. Thus do reports diverge, in this last and most extreme case, in the works of Tacitus and Dio.
When the blood didn’t run fast enough from his arms, Seneca gashed himself behind the knees and around the ankles as well. He was in considerable pain, and he and Paulina dragged themselves to separate rooms to be spared the sight of each other’s suffering. Attended by slaves, freedmen, and his two close friends, Seneca waited for death.
But death would not come. Seneca’s aging veins, attenuated by meager diet, were not allowing enough blood to escape. His slow decline gave him time to dictate a last work to his scribes, presumably a moral essay, though Tacitus did not specify. Then he asked his friend Statius to bring him the long-reserved cup of hemlock, and swallowed it. The noxious drink had paralyzed Socrates within minutes, but somehow it had no effect in Seneca’s case.
At last Seneca made his painful way to the baths of his villa and immersed himself in hot water. Still conscious enough to seek kinship with Socrates—who had died, according to Plato, vowing an offering to Asclepius, the god of healing—Seneca sprinkled some bathwater on the ground, saying he did so as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He was either beseeching, or thanking, the god for deliverance. Then, weakened by blood loss and sickened by hemlock but finally suffocated by hot vapor, Seneca breathed his last.
The most complex life of the Neronian age had ended fittingly, with the most complex death. Seneca’s protracted, three-stage suicide had not gone at all according to plan, a plan he had contemplated for years. Yet it was his own distinctive construction, composed without interference from the soldiers. In the end, he must have been pleased with the autonomy and single-mindedness of his exit. It was the one thing he owned that Nero couldn’t touch.
His body was cremated and the ashes interred without rites or ceremony, as he had requested in his will.
Miraculously, Paulina survived the night of April 19. Her arms were bound up by her slaves and her bleeding arrested. Some said it was on Nero’s order, to lessen the infamy of Seneca’s death; others said it was by her own wishes, after she realized Nero did not hate her and that her life as a widow might not be harsh. She survived a few years longer, pale and depleted by her ordeal.
She was, it would turn out, a rarity. All Seneca’s other kin and associates were consumed in the inferno of Nero’s wrath.
Lucan’s death followed close on the heels of his uncle’s. Though the young man had been promised amnesty in exchange for information, Nero was thoroughly sick of the poet who outshone him, and ordered his suicide. Lucan opened his veins and bled to death, retaining his literary gifts even as his limbs grew cold. It occurred to him at some point that he had written in Civil War about a soldier dying from blood loss, and as he expired he recited the verses from memory, perhaps these:
He fell, with all his veins burst open;
No life ever fled by such a broad route.…
The lowest part of his trunk surrendered its limbs to death,
But where the lungs swelled, where organs were yet warm,
the fates held on a long time.
Lucan’s father Mela, bereft now of his son and brother, soon found himself sucked into the fire’s backdraft. The youngest of the Annaei had always steered clear of politics, preferring wealth to influence, but that preference led to his downfall. After inheriting Lucan’s estate, he tried, perhaps too hard, to collect debts owed to his son. This irked a certain Romanus, probably one of the debtors, and Mela found himself denounced. A forged letter, tricked up to look like Lucan’s, suggested that Mela had been part of his son’s plot. Mela opened his veins as Lucan had done, after deeding most of his carefully hoarded estate to Nero’s dreaded henchman, Tigellinus.
The oldest of the Annaei, Gallio, nearly escaped with his life, thanks to a sudden reversal of sentiment. The purge had almost run its course when Gallio was attacked by a senatorial foe, Salienus Clemens, as an enemy of the state. The senators present in the Curia sensed that things were going too far; public safety was being used as a pretext to act on private hatreds. Clemens was shouted down. Gallio got a reprieve but could not shake the ill fame that the charge had brought. He too became a victim of Nero’s violence in the end.
Like the great fire that had preceded it, Nero’s conflagration of killing appeared to die down but blazed up again with renewed force. A second round of executions, extending many months past the first, fell on men who could be tied to the Piso plot only by hearsay evidence. Gaius Petronius went down, according to Tacitus, merely because Tigellinus, jealous of a court rival, suborned testimony from a slave. This bon vivant made his death, like his life, that of an antiphilosopher, chatting merrily and trading light verse and jests with friends as he bled to death. His final composition, dictated in his last hours, was no moral treatise but an insider’s guide to Nero’s bizarre sex romps.
The fires raged on, consuming prose writer and poet, senator and soldier, moralist and merry hedonist. Rome was scorched clean of all whom Nero or Tigellinus considered threats. It was as though the ekpyrosis, the world-ending conflagration of the Stoics, had arrived but in a different form than expected. Rather than cleansing the world of a corrupt human race, the blaze claimed only the best and the brightest, the flowers of Rome’s literary elite and military officer class.
Among the last to go into the inferno was Thrasea Paetus.
Noble Thrasea, so much revered for his effort to preserve dignity and avoid servility, had, like Seneca, stayed clear of the plot against Nero. Indeed, he had stayed out of public life entirely for the preceding three years. But that very withdrawal could be used against him. Cossutianus Capito, Tigellinus’ son-in-law, caricatured Thrasea’s proud solitude in a brutal Senate speech. The man was a new Cato, he claimed, a scowling secessionist using Stoicism to rally dissent. Moral gravity—the same quality that had helped bring Seneca low—could easily, in the carnival world of Neronopolis, be portrayed as a crime.
Thrasea was condemned by a Senate that met in the presence of Nero’s armed troops. In a private room of his estate, accompanied by his son-in-law Helvidius and his Cynic guru Demetrius—the same man Seneca had admired and lionized in De Beneficiis—Thrasea had his veins opened. As his blood flowed onto the ground, Thrasea echoed Seneca’s words—already well known by this time—and declared a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.
Tacitus quotes the final prayers of the two men in precisely the same language. Did he mean to link the two great Stoics, one who colluded with absolute power and one who opposed it, in an eternal bond of amity? Or was he contrasting a meaningful sacrifice, made in blood, with a more facile one done with bathwater?
Only one man, according to Tacitus, sought to stop the purge before it claimed Thrasea’s life. An ardent young tribune named Arulenus Rusticus offered to use his power of veto to overturn Thrasea’s conviction. But Thrasea himself forbade it. He pointed out that the veto would be overridden and would likely cost Rusticus his life. “You’re only at the beginning of your career in office,” he counseled the young man. “Consider well what path you will walk, in times like these, through politics.”
After all the deaths he had witnessed, on the verge of meeting his own, Thrasea could advise only nonresistance. Rome was better off, he felt, with good men like Rusticus compromising their principles. Better they stay in public life, and lend it some shred of moral dignity, than hurl themselves into the flames.
The time of the second Neronia was at hand. The nightmares of April—the month now known, by decree of the Senate, as Neroneus—had passed, and Rome was slowly stabilizing. Nero had achieved an annihilation of his aristocratic opponents, guilty and innocent alike. But there was one victory he still hungered for, a prize that had eluded him for years, largely because Seneca had kept it from him.
Nero had by now sung in Neapolis and on other regional stages, but he longed for the acclaim that only Rome could grant. He planned to make his Roman debut at the Neronia, but the prospect horrified the Senate, even a Senate stripped of the noncompliant. The senators tried to forestall the debacle by voting the princeps first prize in advance. But Nero turned this diplomacy aside, vowing to defeat all comers in a genuine, unbiased musical contest.
Nero took the stage of Pompey’s Theater and recited a poem of his own composition, a miniepic about the Trojan War. Then he tried to exit, but a faction of the crowd, coached in advance, shouted their demand to hear the “divine voice.” Nero offered them a private performance in his gardens, but the crowd kept chanting, and Praetorians approached Nero to beseech him on its behalf.
Finally Aulus Vitellius—son of Claudius’ most supple courtier, now following his father’s profession—made himself spokesman for the crowd and, in a carefully choreographed sequence, demanded aloud that Nero enter the citharode contest.
Feigning reluctance, Nero cast his token into an urn, signifying he would compete. When his turn to perform arrived, the crowd beheld the strangest spectacle yet of the many Nero had provided. There was the princeps, dressed in a long flowing robe and high boots, with the two Praetorian prefects carrying his lyre, and a file of soldiers and senators behind them. An ex-consul, Cluvius Rufus, stepped onto the stage to announce the emperor’s aria. The princeps, he said, would sing Niobe, the lament of mythology’s most tragic woman, a mother bereft of her children.
With the focus and earnestness of a diva, Nero launched into his song. Observing competition rules, he declined to clear his throat, to use a cloth to wipe sweat from his brow, or to sit down, though the song went on for hours. When he finally concluded, late in the afternoon, he humbly bent down upon one knee in a gesture of deference. The crowd raised a mighty cheer, employing the applause cadences first introduced and now led by the Augustiani, the emperor’s hired claque.
Among the crowd walked Nero’s soldiers, newly confirmed in their loyalty. Some had helped execute their comrades, even commanders, in the recent purge; all had received a bonus of two thousand sesterces, plus a lifetime allowance of cost-free grain. The imperial treasuries were already exhausted, but Nero had to go deeper in debt if his regime was to stay in power.
The Praetorians observed carefully who in the crowd failed to applaud and who had fallen asleep while Nero sang. They beat and struck the commoners who did not clap loudly enough and those who disrupted the fine rhythms of the Augustiani by clapping out of time. Men of higher rank had their names taken down so that punishment could be enforced later on. At the theater entrances, panicked throngs were trying to shove their way in—now aware that absence from the performance might be a criminal offense.
Buoyed up by the wild cheering, Nero gazed into the stands and savored the fruits of victory. He was rid of Seneca, and the old moralist’s tiresome restraints, forever. He had killed off his enemies and rivals, along with his mother, wife, and stepbrother; he had terrorized Rome into adoring him. He could at last take center stage in the greatest city on earth. His new golden age had begun.