Here is one way to describe the career of Seneca, writer, thinker, poet, moralist, and for many years, top adviser and close companion of the emperor Nero:
By a strange twist of fate, a man who cherished sobriety, reason, and moral virtue found himself at the center of Roman politics. He did his best to temper the whims of a deluded despot, while continuing to publish the ethical treatises that were his true calling. When he could no longer exert influence in the palace, he withdrew and in solitude produced his most stirring meditations on virtue, nature, and death. Enraged by his departure, the emperor he had once advised seized on a pretext to force him to kill himself. His adoring wife tried to join him in his sober, courageous suicide, but imperial troops intervened to save her.
And here is another way to describe the same life:
A clever manipulator of undistinguished origin connived his way into the center of Roman power. He used verbal brilliance to represent himself as a sage. He exploited his vast influence to enrich himself and touched off a rebellion in Britain by lending usuriously to its inhabitants. After conspiring in, or even instigating, the palace’s darkest crimes, he tried to rescue his reputation with carefully crafted literary self-fashionings. When it was clear that the emperor’s enmity posed a threat, he sought refuge at the altar of philosophy even while leading an assassination plot. His final bid for esteem was his histrionic suicide, which he browbeat his unwilling wife into sharing.
These are the opposing ways in which Romans of the late first century A.D. regarded Seneca, the most eloquent, enigmatic, and politically engaged man of their times. The first is taken largely from the pages of Octavia, a historical drama written in the late decades of that century, by whom we do not know. The second is preserved by Cassius Dio, a Roman chronicler who lived more than a century after Seneca’s death but relied on earlier writers for information. Those writers, it is clear, deeply mistrusted Seneca’s motives. They believed the rumors that attributed to Seneca a debauched and gluttonous personal life, a Machiavellian political career, and a central role in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero in A.D. 65.
Between these extremes stands Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians and by far the best source we have today for Nero’s era. Tacitus, a shrewd student of human nature, was fascinated by the sage who extolled a simple, studious life even while amassing wealth and power. But ultimately Seneca posed a riddle he could not solve.
Tacitus made Seneca the principal character in the last three surviving books of his Annals, creating a portrait of great richness and complexity. But the tone of that portrait is hard to discern. Tacitus wavered, withheld judgment, or became ironic and elusive. Strangely, though aware of Seneca’s philosophic writings, Tacitus made no mention of them, as though they had no bearing on the meaning of his life. And he passed no explicit judgment on Seneca’s character, as he often did elsewhere. Our most detailed account of Seneca, in the end, is ambivalent and sometimes ambiguous.
One other ancient portraitist has left us his image of Seneca. In 1813 excavations in Rome unearthed a double-sided portrait bust created in the third century A.D. One side shows Socrates, the other Seneca, the two sages joined at the back of the head like Siamese twins sharing a single brain. The discovery gave the modern world its first glimpse of the real Seneca, identified by a label carved on his chest. The bust shows a full-fleshed man, beardless and bald, who wears a bland, self-satisfied mien. It seems the face of a businessman or bourgeois, a man of means who ate at a well-laden table.
Before the 1813 discovery, a different bust, now known as Pseudo-Seneca, had been thought to show Seneca’s face. It was gaunt, haggard, and haunted, its eyes seemingly staring into eternity. Its features had served as a model for painters depicting Seneca’s death scene on canvas, among them Giordano, Rubens, and David.
Once again there were two Senecas. Pseudo-Seneca corresponded to what the Western world wanted to imagine about an ancient Stoic philosopher. Its leanness seemed to represent a hunger for truth and a rejection of wealth and material comfort. The discovery of the true Seneca in 1813 dispelled that fantasy. The world that gazed into that fleshy face realized that Seneca was not who he was thought to be.
The recovery of the 1813 bust parallels, for many, the experience of learning about Seneca’s role in the history of Nero’s Rome. The man we meet in the pages of Tacitus, still more in Dio, is not the man we imagine Seneca to be, if we know him through his moral treatises, letters, or tragedies. He does not seem to match up well with those writings, especially in his relationship to wealth. The two Senecas stand side by side, with no label of authenticity assuring us that one is the true visage, the other an illusion.
What follows is an effort to bring those two Senecas together into a single personality. It is a task that I had long believed impossible, and perhaps I was right to do so. Seneca wrote much but made few clear mentions of his political career, and he played a role in politics that often ignored the principles of his writings. My goal has been to hold both the writer and the courtier in view at all times, despite their nonacknowledgment of each other.
The resulting book is part biography, part narrative history, and part an exploration of Seneca’s writings, both prose and verse. It does not give a comprehensive account of those writings, nor of the history of the Neronian era. My pursuit of a unified Seneca has forced me to be selective in both arenas.
I have focused on those Senecan texts, and passages of texts, that connect most clearly with Seneca’s life at court. That has meant passing in silence over much of what a student of philosophy would look for. Indeed, it has meant omitting completely those works that cannot be dated either before or after the accession of Nero. The reader will thus find no mention here of four important treatises—for the record, they are De Otio, De Providentia, De Constantia Sapientis, and De Tranquilitate Animi—that fall into this category.
… and the real one. Roman portrait busts of the first century B.C. and the third century A.D.
Similarly, I have dealt with only the portion of Nero’s life and reign in which Seneca was involved. I follow Nero’s story only up to early A.D. 66, omitting the final two and a half years of his reign. By a happy coincidence, that is exactly the point at which our surviving text of Tacitus’ Annals leaves off (if the loss of that work’s final segment can be in any way called happy). I deal very little with the foreign affairs of Nero’s regime, or even its domestic achievements. Instead, I have put the personal relations of Seneca and Nero at the forefront, as well as the interactions of both with Agrippina, Nero’s mother. My story is thus in large part a family drama, to the extent that this threesome formed a peculiar sort of nuclear family.
Family dramas are always compelling, but the turbulence within Nero’s palace also held huge historical importance. The future of a dynasty, even of Rome itself, hinged on whether a mother could get along with a son, whether a husband could stay married to his wife, and whether a tutor could get his student to respect and heed him. Nero’s extreme youth at the time of accession, and his growing derangements afterward, made the task of managing him, or the failure to do so, critical to the fortunes of the empire and of the world—for the empire, as Romans liked to believe, had by Nero’s era nearly reached the confines of the world that contained it.
My sources of information include the three works already mentioned, the Annals of Tacitus, the anonymous play Octavia, and Cassius Dio’s Roman History (preserved only in fragments and summaries in the segments that cover the Neronian era). Additionally I have relied on Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, various texts by Plutarch, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder, and the anonymous ancient biographies of Lucan. My most important and richest resource, naturally, has been the writings of Seneca himself—though these have also posed immense problems, as they do for all ancient historians.
Seneca wrote voluminously throughout Nero’s reign but hardly ever discussed that reign in print. He rarely mentioned the people with whom he worked hand in glove for years—Claudius, Nero, Agrippina, Burrus, and Tigellinus. Perhaps a code of honor explains his reticence, or perhaps a sense that any disclosure would imperil his safety. In either case, he created a body of work filled with yawning chasms of silence. Even the great fire of 64, an event that destroyed much of Rome and caused massive upheaval, goes unmentioned.
Yet in the case of a writer so reflective, so alive to the world around him, the thought that the life had no influence on the work is implausible. Scholars have long tried to “feel out” that influence, some investing great effort in this inquiry, others willing only to raise a speculative question or two. I have borrowed from their insights in this book and also, I hope, contributed a few of my own. I do not claim Seneca’s texts should be read as coded historical documents. But they do, I believe, reflect history, if only in the distorting mirrors of myth, metaphor, and analogy.
The debate begun in antiquity over who Seneca was, and whether to admire him, has never been resolved. In the year that this book was written, a scathing paragraph appeared in a popular history of Rome. The author, the art historian Robert Hughes, suggests that Seneca’s contemporaries despised him as a patent fraud. “Seneca was a hypocrite almost without equal in the ancient world,” Hughes claims. “Few can have mourned him.” In the same year, a news item appeared about a man in his fifties, an immigrant from Eastern Europe who, while pushing a broom as a janitor at Columbia University, also managed to earn his degree there. In an interview, this man said that Seneca’s letters had inspired him to pursue this rigorous path. To him, Seneca was no humbug.
My greatest challenge in writing this book has been how, or whether, to judge its central figure. I oscillated many times between opposing assessments, sometimes in the course of a single day. I did not feel, even as I completed the book, that I had settled in my own mind its central questions. I only hope that I have presented the problem of Seneca’s character in some of its depth and complexity, and that I have not been unfair.
Seneca admitted in various ways that he had not lived up to his own ideals. He can be faulted for envisioning a better self than the one he was willing to settle for. Yet his vision is nonetheless beautiful, compelling, and humane. It has inspired great writers and thinkers through the ages, and janitors as well.
In the end, Seneca was human, all too human, with the flaws and shortcomings that the human condition entails. As he himself implied in one of his several apologias, he was not equal to the best, but better than the bad. And that, for many readers, will be good enough.
