Dying Every Day Page 10

  Nero (left) and Britannicus, in a relief dating from before Nero’s accession.

  Locusta had done her job well. She received an imperial pardon for her prior crimes and an award of rich lands outside Rome. On these estates, according to Suetonius, she founded a kind of poisoning academy in the service of the princeps. Her drugs had so far carried off two of three surviving Claudians, slowly in the first instance, in the second with terrifying speed. Nero would have cause to call on her one more time, in the years to come.

  Somehow the poison given to Britannicus also got into the system of Titus, his best friend and dining companion, and made the young man ill for weeks (or so Suetonius reports). Titus would, after becoming emperor a quarter-century later, portray himself as Britannicus’ posthumous champion. In the short time he occupied the principate, from A.D. 79 to 81, he issued coins bearing Britannicus’ image and commissioned two costly statues: a gilded one that stood in the palace, and an equestrian portrait, plated with ivory, that was carried, alongside images of gods and heroes, into the Circus Maximus at the start of a yearly sports festival.

  By that time, a link to the Claudians had become an asset for reigning emperors, since Nero had trashed the reputation of the Julians. Britannicus came to stand as a shining symbol of what might have been.

  Postmortem rites for Britannicus had to be carefully stage-managed, just as they had been for Claudius. The young man’s death had to seem like a natural event, even if the palace knew otherwise. When it was discovered that Locusta’s toxin had darkened Britannicus’ skin, Nero reportedly had the body painted over with chalk to whiten it again. A cremation ceremony was held either that very night or the next, despite heavy rain. Later it was rumored that the rain washed away the makeup from Britannicus’ face, as though the gods themselves sought to reveal the truth.

  Britannicus’ ashes were interred, quickly and quietly, in the mausoleum of Augustus, formerly reserved for emperors and members of the Julian line. But despite the honorary resting place, haste and lack of ceremony aroused public resentment. Nero was forced to publish an edict the day after the interment. It was good Roman custom, Nero asserted, to forgo rites for those who had died in youth, lest the lingering presence of a young corpse bring bad luck to the family. This thin pretext was the best the regime could manage, even with Seneca’s ingenuity.

  Agrippina, according to two sources, went into open mourning for the young man whose cause she had espoused so recently and with such fatal consequences. Perhaps her tears were political theater, designed to arouse opposition to Nero, but she also had grounds for remorse. Her best means of restoring her waning power at court was gone. She had used Britannicus as a pawn in a high-stakes showdown, and her son had bested her with a lightning blow.

  Agrippina’s fortunes went into a steep decline, clearly signaled by imperial coinage. Her image was no longer shown facing that of Nero. For a brief time, she appeared in jugate, the profile of the princeps overlaying hers, as she had been portrayed under Claudius. Then she disappeared from state coinage entirely within the year. The “best of mothers” had been thrust from her son’s favor. Spurned, she gravitated toward another outcast at court, her stepdaughter Octavia, orphaned daughter of Claudius and Messalina, now Nero’s unloved teenage wife.

  Octavia’s plight, in the aftermath of Britannicus’ death, was truly piteous. In seven years, she had watched as her father killed her mother, her stepmother killed her father, and her husband killed her brother. She had somehow survived, along with her half-sister Antonia, in a regime run by strangers and enemies. Her husband rejected her and sought the embraces of an ex-slave instead. The loss of her brother Britannicus left her utterly alone, perhaps afraid even to grieve, as the author of Octavia imagined:

  My fear forbids me to weep for a brother,

  He in whom my last hope was lodged,

  He who gave a short respite from pains.

  Living only to mourn my kin

  I linger on, the shade of a once-great name.

  The historian Tacitus confirms the tragedian’s portrait: “Despite her youth, Octavia had already learned to conceal her sorrow, her love—all her emotions.”

  Britannicus had other partisans at court, and in the Senate and the street, but Rome stayed quiet. Though an earlier princeps, Tiberius, had once endured widespread outrage at the suspicious death of Germanicus, in this case no protests arose to trouble the new regime. The public was not even provoked by a disturbing report, of uncertain credibility, that Nero had raped Britannicus some days before the fatal dinner, to demoralize his enemy before striking him down.

  Many suspected foul play, but they bowed to the logic of history, according to Tacitus: in royal families, brother had ever been at war with brother; the principate could not be shared. “Death to the weaker; leave the stronger to reign in the empty throne room,” Seneca had written, probably only a few weeks earlier, in Apocolocyntosis, quoting Vergil’s advice on ending strife in a beehive with two “kings.”

  But in Apocolocyntosis, Seneca had also depicted Augustus, among the company of the gods, thundering disdain at Claudius for killing members of his family. And in De Ira, he had compared a princeps to a gentle physician, administering death only as a form of mercy when a patient was beyond cure. For the author of those two works, the murder of Britannicus raised disquieting questions.

  Was a moral principate, an administration compatible with Stoic precepts, going to be possible? Seneca had based his vision of good governance on the regime of Augustus; but the regime to which he belonged, dominated by an insecure, spoiled teenager and his unstable mother, seemed a long way off from that shining ideal. He stood closer to the moral universe of his tragedies, works like Medea and Phaedra, than to De Ira and his other prose works.

  Seneca had to consider not only his own principles but his reputation among the elite. He had crafted Nero’s inaugural speech to the Senate, an address that promised an end to abuses of power. That historic speech had been inscribed on silver tablets and hung on a column for all to see. But those tablets were now badly tarnished. The fresh start that the regime had enjoyed months earlier, its repudiation of Claudian paranoia and subterfuge, had been given the lie.

  Even if Seneca had played only a passive role in the murder—and some surely suspected it was more than that—he was nonetheless tainted by it. “Not stopping a wrong is the same as spurring it on,” Seneca had written in one of his plays, a line that, if any among the elite had heard it, might now have been spat back in his face. It did not help that in all likelihood, Seneca was among those to whom Nero gave shares of Britannicus’ property. This distribution caused revulsion in official Rome, according to Tacitus: “There was no lack of those who took issue with this: that men who affected moral seriousness were splitting up houses and estates like booty.”

  Not least of Seneca’s concerns, in the days after Britannicus’ death, was his own safety. Any illusion that partnership with Burrus, who controlled the Praetorians, would protect him had now been dispelled. In the balance-of-fear calculations that governed palace relationships, poison was a great trump card. Nero now had an expert poisoner in his service and, more important, the courage to deploy her weapons. The threat that Nero’s power posed must have been present to Seneca’s mind at every state dinner thereafter.

  In the tragedy Seneca wrote near the end of his life, Thyestes, the climactic scene shows a king destroying his brother by feeding him a toxic meal. On one level, the scene evokes the murder of Britannicus, for the victimized brother had been just on the verge of assuming joint rule. On another, the victim is Seneca himself, for the play portrays this man as a mild-mannered sage returning from exile. By the time he wrote Thyestes or soon afterward, Seneca’s life had also been threatened by poison, as we will see. In the play, he seems to recall Britannicus’ deadly last dinner but also to put a version of himself in the boy’s place at table.

  The dilemmas Seneca now faced—ethical, political, and deeply personal—wo
uld grow more complex and pressing through the decade he was to spend at Nero’s side. To judge by his few oblique references to them, he was never to find resolution. He would describe himself, near the end of that decade, as suffering from an incurable moral illness, able to gain partial relief but no cure. Perhaps that was the necessary outcome of his decision, long before, to enter politics even while pursuing his Stoic moral pilgrimage. He had attained both the wisdom of a sage and the power of a palace insider—but could the two selves coexist?

  Seneca was not ready to give up on the ideal of a moral principate. His greatest assets, virtuosic eloquence and literary ingenuity, were still as potent as ever. Twice before, he had used these gifts to accomplish feats of dexterity: preaching acceptance of death while also begging for recall from exile, in Consolation to Polybius; viciously lampooning a dead princeps while exalting a living one, in Apocolocyntosis. His command of words was such as to make any goal seem possible. Perhaps it could even hold together his swiftly diverging paths.

  In the wake of Britannicus’ death, Seneca set out to write his most eloquent, most audacious, most ingenious prose work yet. This time he would not only ventriloquize Nero, he would preach to him, asserting the privilege of a teacher to lecture his pupil. He would erase the recent assassination and start the regime over again, on a firmer ethical footing this time. He would show that if Nero went down the road of Claudius or, worse, of Caligula—banishments, executions, rigged trials held in the emperor’s bedroom—he, Seneca, would not stand by idly, or at least could not be held to blame.

  Such thinking, at any rate, is one way to explain the genesis of De Clementia (“On Mercy”), the most inspiring political treatise produced under the Roman principate—or, perhaps, the cleverest piece of propaganda.

  CHAPTER 4

  Matricide

  (A.D. 55–59)

  “Have I, out of all mortals, found favor, and have I been chosen to take the role of gods here on earth? Am I the judge who marks out nations for life or for death?” Such are the awestruck words of eighteen-year-old Nero looking out upon his realm, as Seneca imagines them. Seneca opens De Clementia, “On Mercy,” by giving voice to Nero’s thoughts, a new device for allowing Rome once again to hear his words issuing from the emperor’s mouth.

  Seneca depicts Nero as an omnipotent but morally serious adolescent. Like a modern teenage superhero, the princeps knows that great powers confer great responsibilities. Principles of justice, mercy, and restraint guide his every move. Whether dealing with foreign foes or the troublesome mob of his fellow citizens, he keeps “harshness sheathed, but mercy battle-ready,” an instance of Seneca’s favorite metaphor, moral effort as hand-to-hand combat. “If the gods today ask me for an accounting, I stand ready to tally up the whole human race,” Seneca/Nero concludes—meaning that, as shepherd, he has not allowed his flock to diminish by even a single head.

  Of course, the flock had been diminished, and recently, by one very important head, and those reading Seneca’s treatise knew it. The death of Britannicus casts a long shadow over De Clementia, especially since Seneca goes on to proclaim, in his own voice this time, the spotlessness of Nero’s record. He affirms Nero’s boast of “never having shed a drop of human blood anywhere on earth”—a claim that rings all the more hollow for being literally true; Britannicus had been poisoned rather than put to the sword. Seneca willfully wipes the slate clean, as though allowing the year-old regime a do-over. If Nero could be given a pass for that one life, Seneca must have reasoned, many more might be spared.

  By his own account, Seneca was moved to write De Clementia after witnessing a behind-the-scenes moment of palace life. Burrus, the Praetorian prefect and Seneca’s own staunch ally, needed the emperor to make out warrants for the execution of two robbers. Nero kept postponing the unpleasant task, until Burrus finally drew up the papers and presented them for signing. “If only I were illiterate!” Nero reportedly sighed, as he validated the warrants. Seneca effuses that this should be the quip heard around the world, that it bespeaks the guiltlessness of a golden age when all men are brothers. It shows Nero already in possession of perfect clementia, Seneca claims, ingeniously concealing instruction behind a screen of flattery.

  The essay claims not to teach Nero anything but to show him his own moral brilliance, as if in a mirror. Its real goals, of course, are more complex.

  Seneca’s target audience in De Clementia was not so much the emperor but the senatorial class, the Roman political elite. The treatise sought to reassure these aristocrats that Nero’s character, on which much of their own safety depended, was in good hands. Despite the red flag that Britannicus’ murder had raised, Seneca showed that he was still restraining the young emperor, keeping him off Caligula’s path. It would be Seneca’s humane principles, here superimposed onto Nero by rhetorical sleight of hand, that would guide the regime.

  Seneca expounded those principles more fully in De Clementia than he had in De Ira. (The two treatises are in a sense complementary, since ira seeks to impose punishment while clementia remits it.) Both essays take the position that all humankind is prone to err and therefore all deserve mercy. But De Clementia is more emphatic on this point. “We have all of us done wrong,” Seneca intones here, in words that would not be out of place in a modern Christian sermon, “some seriously, some lightly, some intentionally, some pushed into it by accident or carried away by the wrongdoing of others; some have stood by our good designs not firmly enough and have lost our guiltlessness, unwillingly, while trying to keep our grasp on it.” That last case sounds strikingly like Seneca’s own.

  Everyone should be merciful, given the universal guilt of humankind; but, Seneca claims, emperors—and kings—have even greater reason to do so. Remarkably, he does not blush to dust off the old, vilified word rex as a virtual synonym for princeps. For more than five centuries, Rome had held reges in contempt, which meant that emperors had to conceal their true status. The Roman state was, in theory, still a republic, with the Senate gently guided by a “first citizen.”

  In De Clementia, Seneca drops the veil of pretense. Rome has become an autocracy, he grants—and a good thing, too, for the alternative is chaos. Should the mob ever throw off its “yoke,” he asserts in the essay’s opening words, it would harm itself and everyone else—an assessment that had propped up the Caesars for a century but that no one had yet dared admit.

  Seneca begins De Clementia, then, by ceding Nero absolute power; but then he shows why his power should be restrained. Kindness from rulers wins adoration from subjects and results in a long, secure reign; severity breeds fear, and from fear springs conspiracy. The divine Augustus is brought forward, as in other Senecan works, to exemplify the former approach. Augustus, Nero’s great-great-grandfather, found out that a trusted subordinate, Lucius Cinna, was plotting against his life. After a long, tense parley with Cinna, Augustus, far from imposing punishment, awarded him an appointment as consul—the highest political honor. “He was never again the target of anyone’s conspiracies,” Seneca concludes.

  Nero’s role, as defined by De Clementia, is absolute monarch in law but pious servant of moral principle. He can choose—or already has chosen, under the conceit that Seneca is only showing Nero his own perfection—to rein in power voluntarily. If his fellowship with the all-fallible human race does not compel him, self-interest will.

  To highlight that fellowship, Seneca uses a novel analogy to illustrate the role of the princeps. Roman writers had often portrayed their leader as a father raising his children or, in more effusive moods, as the sun shining down on the earth. Seneca introduces a new model. He compares Nero to a mind, controlling the limbs of the citizen body. The analogy virtually embodies Reason, the Stoic school’s greatest good, in the person of the emperor.

  The second section of De Clementia has not survived intact, but here Seneca went in for theory: defining what clementia is, how it arises and functions. Notionally he was still addressing Nero, but readers knew that the prin
ceps had not the slightest interest in such things. De Clementia, like most of Seneca’s writings, targets multiple audiences and strives for multiple goals. It shows that pure ethical philosophy, the source of Seneca’s high repute, was an ongoing project, though not part of his official brief.

  De Clementia is a hugely ambitious effort to hold together a fragmenting life. Perhaps Seneca could accomplish what Aristotle, four centuries earlier, had attempted (in popular legend at least) with Alexander the Great: to bring enlightenment to a global ruler. Perhaps Stoic virtue could after all march hand in hand with power; perhaps the principate could in fact be built on a moral foundation. At least he, Seneca, could be seen making the attempt—a point that would be crucial, should the experiment fail.

  What Nero thought of getting such instruction in public is not known. It’s unlikely he cared much for philosophy during his late teenage years, or ever afterward for that matter. Had he tried, Seneca would have had trouble finding a student who was less apt for his lessons. Nero was busy exploring the possibilities that his new powers had brought him—to commit murder, for one, but also lesser crimes, illicit pleasures, and carefree assaults on Roman society. If any philosophic text caught his attention, it was not one of Seneca’s high-minded treatises but Plato’s Republic, with its famous story of Gyges’ ring.

  In the Republic, Plato portrayed Glaucon, a youth about Nero’s age, in conversation with Socrates, a man about Seneca’s. At one point, Glaucon relates to Socrates how a Lydian named Gyges found a magic ring. If twisted a certain way on the finger, the ring would make its wearer invisible. Glaucon then asks Socrates, What would prevent Gyges from donning the ring to steal from the marketplace, to rape women, and to beat or kill whomever he chooses? Surely, Glaucon says, any man would do these things if invisible, no matter how seemingly upright his nature.