CHAPTER 71

IN THE NINTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF NERO CLAUDIUS CAESAR AUGUSTUS GERMANICUS

Fifteen-year-old Mansuetus, my only son, dragged his crossbeam down the Appian Way alongside twenty-one of his classmates. I was now fifty-three, but the memories came flooding back as if it were yesterday. It helped that the weather was every bit as dry and miserable as I remembered it from my own childhood. My students and I choked on dust the entire way, and my skin was covered with a thin film of dirt. I kept the pace brisk, much faster than Seneca ever walked, and my students struggled to keep up. Of course, I was the only one not dragging a crossbeam.

Unlike my own class nearly forty years ago, Mansuetus and his schoolmates did not complain. My son was built like me —thin and wiry —but he had his mother’s nose and eyes. I kept an eye on him, watching as he grimaced and changed the crossbeam from one side to the other. I smiled to myself because my son was determined to stay a few steps ahead of his classmates, the same way I used to when I had followed so closely behind Seneca. The only difference was that Mansuetus was not self-conscious about it.

After a few hours of walking, we arrived at the same clearing, several miles outside Rome, where Seneca had taught my classmates and me about crucifixion. I had the boys gather around and sit on their beams. I kept glancing down the Appian Way, hoping that Seneca himself would soon appear as he had promised.

I let the boys get a drink of water and waited a few more minutes before I started. I told them about the rebellion of Spartacus and the slaves. How Crassus had crucified the rebels along the Appian Way from this clearing all the way to Rome. How the slaves had cried out for mercy, begging to be thrust through with a spear. I described the crucifixions I had witnessed myself in Judea and at the games in Rome.

Just when I was ready to engage the students in dialogue, I saw Seneca’s litter approaching in the distance. I strung out the story a little so he would have time to reach us.

It had been no small feat getting someone as famous as Seneca to address my school of rhetoric. But he owed me.

He had returned from exile during the eighth year of the reign of Claudius. The emperor’s notorious fourth wife, Agrippina the Younger, had requested that Seneca tutor her son, Nero. Five years later, Claudius died under suspicious circumstances, shortly after consuming a bowl of mushrooms. Nero became emperor, and Seneca served as his chief adviser.

Early in Nero’s reign, Agrippina lost favor with the spoiled young emperor. When she was bludgeoned to death, most Romans suspected that the emperor had ordered it done. But Seneca drafted a letter to the Senate claiming that Agrippina had first conspired against her son and that the men who killed her had saved the emperor’s life. Seneca’s letter carried the day in the Senate, though public suspicions against Nero never faded.

With Agrippina out of the way, the impulsive young emperor had proven impossible to control. Several months ago he had limited Seneca’s own influence by accusing him of embezzlement. Seneca turned to me, even though I hadn’t served as an advocate for years. I negotiated a deal that allowed Seneca to retire from public life peacefully with the embezzlement charges dropped. In exchange, he was required to publicly show his support for Nero in the final days prior to leaving office.

“How can I ever repay you?” Seneca had asked.

That’s when I first thought of having him address my students on the Appian Way.

When his entourage stopped at the clearing, Mansuetus and his schoolmates were enthralled. They knew somebody of great importance had arrived. The litter opened, Seneca stepped out, and I watched their jaws drop.

The reign of Nero had aged my old mentor noticeably. He was mostly bald with just a few tufts of gray hair over his ears and a ring of hair around the bottom of his head in the back. His teeth had yellowed, and he’d lost so much weight that I worried about his health. His skin was wrinkled and spotted, and excess amounts of it hung on his bones as a reminder that he was not the man he once was. Veins protruded in his forearms and legs and formed spiderwebs on the backs of his bony hands.

He apologized for being late.

I introduced Seneca to the students and told him where we were with the lesson. I asked if he would take it from there.

He began by detailing the horrors of crucifixion as only a man who had witnessed it up close could do. His grim descriptions and hollow eyes drove home the point in a way that I had failed to accomplish. Mansuetus soaked up every word.

When Seneca posed a question —“Was Crassus right to crucify the slaves?” —I was not surprised that Mansuetus was the first to raise his hand.

“I would side with Spartacus and the slaves,” he said. He stood ramrod straight and looked Seneca directly in the eye, just as I had taught him. “Why should we allow crucifixions of everyone except Roman citizens? It is either an effective form of punishment or it is not. If it is, Romans should be prepared to reap what we sow.”

Seneca’s lips formed a bemused grin. I knew what he was thinking. He was seeing me all over again —an idealistic young man, someone who had not yet been marred by evil, someone who saw the world in black-and-white.

“Spartacus and the slaves are the heroes in this story because they found a cause worth dying for,” my headstrong son continued. “The slaves fought for freedom and equality. In Rome today, Master Seneca, we have nothing that inspires us to sacrifice. We live for entertainment and pleasure. We value life for its own sake and prolong it at all costs.”

I almost felt sorry for Mansuetus because I knew what was coming next. Nobody could use the Socratic method of teaching more lethally than Seneca. He would ask a few pointed questions that would cut my fifteen-year-old son down to size. It would be a good lesson for the confident young man.

Instead, Seneca just nodded, his expression pained. “You have spoken well,” he said. “The real danger in life is not to die a painful and humiliating death while you are young. There is no shame in dying like the slaves did. The shame is dying young yet living to be old. That, my son, is a fate worse than any crucifixion.”