Dying Every Day Read online

  Socrates’ rebuttal plays out over the remaining nine books of the Republic. Under the guidance of a master teacher, Glaucon comes to realize that justice brings far greater happiness than injustice. It was precisely the outcome Seneca might have hoped for in his tutelage of Nero. But Nero was no Glaucon, and Seneca, as time would reveal, was no Socrates.

  Nero had in fact set out on exactly Gyges’ path. He regarded the principate as his ring of invisibility, a license to do what he pleased.

  Nero began sallying out of his palace incognito on rapacious nighttime jaunts, helping himself to merchant goods, drinking and carousing, assaulting passersby. Caught up in the exuberance of power, he wilded in the streets of the city, sexually molesting women and boys alike. It was an early sign of the troubles that awaited Rome. The new princeps was turning out to be a lawless teen with no moral compass.

  Nero feared no legal consequences, but the drubbings he might take while in disguise posed a problem. One incident did indeed end badly. A young man of senatorial rank, Julius Montanus, enraged by the rape of his wife, viciously beat a man whom he failed to recognize as the emperor. Nero went home and hid from sight until his bruises healed. He was disinclined to punish a man for an honest mistake—but Montanus somehow learned who his victim was and sent a letter of apology, which changed everything. Nero could not abide a subject who knew he had beaten up the princeps. Montanus, informed of the emperor’s displeasure, forestalled the inevitable by taking his own life. Thereafter Nero was careful to bring soldiers along on his forays, ordering them to stand at a distance but come to his aid when called.

  Seneca did not interfere with Nero’s Hyde-like escapades; nor did Burrus, Seneca’s close ally. These two men might have reined in the wild energies of Nero’s youth, but, according to Cassius Dio at least, they had been cowed by the murder of Britannicus. The princeps had struck a blow for independence, not only from his mother but from his two senior advisers as well.

  Nero’s young friends, companions of his wilding sprees like Marcus Otho and Claudius Senecio, egged on the princeps to defy these two father figures. “Are you afraid of them?” they asked, knowing they would score points by irreverence. “Don’t you realize that you are Caesar—that you have power over them, not they over you?” The slow unraveling of Nero’s trust in Seneca had begun—a process that would take ten years to play out and would result in disaster for both men.

  Nero extended his newfound license to the commoners: he removed the armed details that kept order in Rome’s open-air theaters. Fans of various pantomime dancers—balletlike performers whose sensuality made them the sex symbols of their day—used this freedom to start factional fights in the stands. Nero went to the theaters in disguise and watched these frays with delight, or even took part, throwing stones or broken bits of bench along with the most rabid brawlers. Finally the disorder became so grave that even Nero felt it had to be stopped. He ordered all pantomimes out of Italy, to give the fevered audiences a chance to cool off, and reinstated military patrols of the theaters.

  It was not a dancer but a musician who most fascinated young Nero: a Greek singer and lyre player named Terpnus (“Delight”). The emperor installed this man in the palace and had him perform after dinner, often staying up late to listen, enraptured, to his languorous, passion-filled songs. Terpnus’ art form was imported from Greece, like the pantomime dance, and Romans found it seductive and sensuous—an effect mistrusted by the elite, though the mob adored it. Nero, too, was captivated and soon undertook to learn the art himself. His voice was not naturally musical, but he took every measure taught by Terpnus to beautify it, including purgatives, enemas, special diets, and an exercise for the diaphragm done while lying under lead plates. He had taken his first steps on the path that would lead him, over the next decade, from princeps to performing artiste.

  Amid Nero’s experiments in anomie and cultivations of his voice, Rome somehow had to be governed. It was becoming clear that the princeps had little interest in statecraft, and no talent for it. His one big initiative in these early years, a proposal to abolish all indirect taxes—customs duties, tolls, and the like—had to be scuttled by embarrassed advisers, on the grounds that it would cause financial ruin.

  Seneca and Burrus seem to have kept Rome in order to a large degree, though just how large is a matter of debate. Our sources have little to say about governance during these years, preferring personal dramas and court intrigues—the events that, for them, defined Nero’s reign. Tacitus merely implies that the state was being run, without Nero doing much to run it. Seneca and Burrus, aided by a staff of Greek freedmen inherited from the days of Claudius, most likely had their hands full.

  Then there was Agrippina, eager to do whatever she could—which was considerably more than what most Romans wanted.

  Though the poisoning of Britannicus had deprived her of her ultimate weapon, Agrippina was attempting to regroup. She had begun amassing money to buy influence and cultivate support among the disaffected. Nero preemptively bribed many of his courtiers with lavish gifts—rewards for their complicity in Britannicus’ death—but Agrippina had a large estate and could hope someday to outbribe him.

  More disturbing to Nero were the bonds Agrippina was forging with Octavia, his unloved bride. Concord between these two outcast women portended no good to him. Agrippina could use Octavia to play the succession card, as she had once done with Britannicus, rallying support to the Claudian banner. She could promise Octavia as a marital prize, a guarantee of legitimacy, to a usurper.

  The warning shot that Nero had fired had clearly not humbled his mother, and sterner measures were needed. Nero ordered Agrippina stripped of her bodyguard, the band of German toughs who had been a visible marker of her status (only the princeps was similarly attended), and of the Praetorians who patrolled her quarters. Finally he turned her out of the palace altogether, claiming—an obvious pretext—that daily gatherings of her dependents were crowding the halls of state.

  Agrippina.

  Agrippina at once became marked as persona non grata in the eyes of Nero’s regime. Her friends made haste to abandon her, fearing that any association might be held against them. When Nero went to visit her new abode, he took a conspicuous armed guard with him. He wanted to convey to all observers that she was a dangerous woman.

  Then one night, as Nero was relaxing over drink and song, news arrived that seemed to confirm his worst fears about his mother.

  By A.D. 55, there were four men alive whose lineage made them potential rivals to Nero. Two belonged to the ill-fated Silanus family, direct descendants of Augustus as Nero was (a distinction that had already brought death to two of their kin). A third was Rubellius Plautus, the only child of Tiberius’ granddaughter and therefore connected to the line of Augustus by adoption. The last was Faustus Sulla, not descended from any emperor but a Julian nonetheless, great-grandson of Augustus’ sister Octavia.

  These men could not simply challenge Nero to some Arthurian trial by combat. But they could be backed by rebellious foreign legions, as Germanicus once had been, or by a mutinous Praetorian Guard, like Claudius. Or their cause could be embraced by the third of Rome’s kingmakers, Agrippina.

  In Nero’s eyes, Plautus gave the most cause for concern. He had a high reputation for strength of character; he lived a simple, unambitious life, in accord with his Stoic beliefs. His wife, Antistia Pollitta, was also well respected and had good political pedigree, being the daughter of a consul serving that very year. Sulla was almost as worrisome as Plautus, having married Antonia, Claudius’ daughter by his second wife (the predecessor of Messalina). And Sulla’s name linked him to a formidable ancestor of an earlier century, Lucius Cornelius Sulla—a military strongman whose memory could still stir restive troops.

  The messenger who knocked on Nero’s door that drunken evening was a freedman named Paris, an actor, one of Nero’s favorite performers and perhaps (so Tacitus implies) a visitor to his bed. Paris carried information he had receive
d from Julia Silana, a woman who had continued talking to Agrippina even after her fall from grace. According to Julia’s report, Agrippina was planning a coup that would put Rubellius Plautus in power. She would get him divorced from Antistia, then marry him herself and become coruler of the empire, as she had been in the days of Claudius.

  There were reasons to doubt this tale, since Julia, its source, bore an old grudge against Agrippina. Nonetheless Nero went into crisis mode. The specter of his mother’s power to undo him, so recently suppressed, sprang back out with terrifying force. He wanted his mother put to death immediately, and he also, according to one of Tacitus’ sources, demanded a new Praetorian prefect—he now mistrusted Burrus as Agrippina’s appointee. Only Seneca’s intervention, according to this source, prevented the second move, but Nero seemed intent on carrying out the first.

  Burrus was summoned to Nero’s chambers and ordered to kill Agrippina. Only with difficulty could the prefect persuade the princeps to wait until morning, when the wine would have worn off and the matter could be weighed in full. At dawn the next day, Burrus was sent to interrogate Agrippina, accompanied by a worried Seneca.

  Neither man wanted this showdown between mother and son. Not many months had elapsed since the murder of Britannicus. The public had accepted one apparent assassination, but a second one, of a far more powerful figure—the daughter of Germanicus—would not sit well. Then too Seneca and Burrus had their own futures to consider. They had risen in Nero’s graces by opposing Agrippina, but if that great counterweight were removed, the emperor’s trust might disappear as well. Already it seemed to be slipping away: Nero had sent his own freedmen along to witness the questioning of Agrippina, as though he were suspicious of collusion.

  Agrippina’s self-defense speech, as preserved by Tacitus, relied on chopped logic and feigned maternal affection. All her accusers had ulterior motives, she pointed out, and the principal one, Julia Silana, was childless; she could not know the warmth of a mother’s love. “Parents don’t switch children the way a cheap adulterer changes lovers,” Agrippina argued, ignoring the fact that, a few months earlier, she had done exactly that—threatening to advance Britannicus over her own son. Then, changing tack, Agrippina called to mind all she had done to put Nero into power. She claimed she had no hope of survival were Plautus, or anyone else, to take the throne. Only her own flesh and blood could keep her safe, she said, again ignoring patent facts: it was because of her flesh and blood that she was now fighting for her life.

  The speciousness of these arguments did not matter. Seneca and Burrus knew that they must bring about a reconciliation between mother and son or face a very uncertain future. They persuaded Nero to meet his mother face-to-face, and somehow—Tacitus does not say what took place in their closed-door meeting—the crisis was defused.

  The price of reconciliation was steep. Knowing he must find a modus vivendi if he was not going to kill Agrippina, Nero had to make highly visible concessions. The court hierarchy had to be rebalanced so that Agrippina’s accusers were banished and her partisans promoted. Recent appointees had to be deappointed, and not even Seneca’s family was spared: his wife’s father, Pompeius Paulinus, now lost his post as prefect of Rome’s grain supply, to make room for Faenius Rufus, a protégé of Agrippina. This may have been the occasion, as seen earlier, for Seneca’s plea to Paulinus to retire into philosophy—the essay De Brevitate Vitae, “On the Shortness of Life.”

  Whatever ground Seneca had lost in l’affaire Plautus, Burrus had lost more. On the panicky night when the rumor first broke, Burrus had perhaps narrowly escaped dismissal; then he had been forced to decline a direct order from Nero. In the wake of the crisis, an opportunist named Paetus, a man who made a disreputable living buying and selling bad debt, tried to curry favor by tying Burrus to a new conspiracy, this one centered on Faustus Sulla. To make the charge more convincing, and a conviction more appealing, Paetus accused Agrippina’s former lackey, the freedman Pallas, of being Burrus’ accomplice.

  It was a probe of the new rifts in the palace, but Nero, perhaps at Seneca’s urging, stood by Burrus. As though to belittle Paetus’ charges, Nero empaneled Burrus as one of the judges deciding the case, thereby ensuring acquittals all around. The tempests passed, and court hierarchy was restored.

  Nero went on with his nighttime diversions: mayhem in the city streets, singing lessons with Terpnus, the warm embraces of Acte. But his mind was more troubled than before by Rubellius Plautus and Faustus Sulla. No evidence had been found against either, but loose talk alone gave grounds on which to mistrust them. By the twisted logic of autocracy, a man cast as usurper in a fictional conspiracy became an enemy in reality. Whomever rumor settled on, this logic ran, was the man the public would turn to if they ever demanded a change of princeps.

  Rumor had also cast Agrippina as a foe of the regime, ascribing to her a plan to marry Plautus. Though there may have been no substance to the accusation, its plausibility gnawed at Nero’s mind. Nero had already watched his mother remake the imperial family from top to bottom, after marrying Claudius. She might pull off the same trick a second time. She might even—she was just now reaching forty—bear a second son to some new Julian husband, an heir to displace Nero from his throne and from her affections.

  A mother who could seduce and control powerful men, who hated her son for not bending to her will, who had threatened in a heated moment to advance Britannicus—such a woman seemed capable of anything. There would be a reckoning between Nero and Agrippina someday, though none could tell as yet what form it might take.

  In 55 or (more likely) 56, Seneca attained the highest constitutional office in the Roman state, that of consul. The post carried less power than his unofficial role as amicus principis, friend of the princeps, but it was a towering achievement nonetheless. Seneca’s elder brother Gallio, returned to Rome from his proconsular post in Greece, attained the same honor at about the same time. The two boys from Corduba, provincials born into the equestrian class, sons of a crusty rhetorician who had never made it to the Senate, had come far indeed—a mark of what the emperor’s favor might bring, in Rome’s winner-take-all political system.

  High office was not the only way Seneca’s fortunes had changed. During the six or seven years since his return from Corsica, he had gotten rich.

  Exile to Corsica had stripped Seneca of half his estate, but Agrippina’s recall had restored it, and thereafter his closeness to Nero had made good the loss many times over. Some gifts came from the emperor himself; others were from those who sought favors or access. By the late 50s Seneca owned estates in Egypt, Spain, and Campania, the fertile and fashionable region centered around Neapolis (Naples), as well as others in unspecified locales, along with plenty of cash. His gardens were famed for their size and magnificence. In the early 60s he would add another property, a choice vineyard, to his holdings, at Nomentum, north of Rome. Both Tacitus and the satirist Juvenal called him praedives, a milder term than our filthy rich but certainly not an epithet Seneca would have been proud of.

  These estates brought in a modest income from the sale of produce, especially wine. Seneca counted himself an expert vintner and was said to have gotten more than 180 gallons of wine to the acre. But better profits could be gained from lending money at interest, and Seneca pursued this revenue stream as well.

  Provinces newly added to the empire were hungry for capital—the wherewithal to develop trade and begin tapping Roman markets—and willing to pay high rates. Seneca invested in Britain, the newest and hungriest province. This was good foreign policy, for Roman funds helped to make British warlords tractable, but it was also good business. Cassius Dio’s estimate of Seneca’s British stake, 40 million sesterces, is perhaps an exaggeration. But whatever the amount involved, it is clear that Seneca’s portfolio was targeting aggressive growth.

  The paradox of a moral philosopher who was rich and getting richer raised concern in Seneca’s time, as it has in ours. Other sages had enjoyed royal subsidie
s—Aristotle, for one, had profited handsomely from his friendship with Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father—but none had been quite so intent on building a fortune. Indeed, the two Greek thinkers most admired for their lifestyles, Socrates and Diogenes, were famous for their disregard of wealth. Socrates had been poor by birth and remained so through inattention to his trade; Diogenes the Cynic was an ascetic by choice. He rejected his family’s bourgeois status, got himself exiled from his native city, and went about in a threadbare cloak with only the barest possessions, a bag for his crust of bread and a cup for scooping water from fountains. When one day he saw a boy drinking from his hands, he smashed the cup, disgusted by his own love of luxury.

  Seneca was a Stoic, not a Cynic like Diogenes, and for the Stoics wealth did not present so grave a problem. They counted it as one of several “indifferents” that contributed neither to happiness nor to unhappiness. Moderate Stoics even conceded that wealth could add to happiness, not least because it made possible virtuous deeds. But Seneca had been attracted, from his earliest writings, by a harder, tougher regimen, bordering on Cynicism in its disdain for wealth.

  In his letters from exile, Seneca had celebrated life as an unaccommodated man, his view of the open sky unblocked by mansions and banquet halls. He had praised a member of Claudius’ court who “pushed riches away, and sought no better profit from his ease in acquiring them than contempt of having them.” He had sworn, in De Ira, that all the world’s gold mines, heaped up into a single pile, “would not be worth the frown on the face of a good man”—the frown that owning them would surely cause. “No one excelled this millionaire in singing the praises of poverty,” writes his biographer Miriam Griffin.