Dying Every Day Read online

  Seeming contradictions between word and deed emboldened Seneca’s enemies. By now he had plenty of them, and not only in Agrippina’s circle. A principal foe was Suillius Rufus, who had himself gotten rich as a delator under Claudius and Messalina—a lackey who prosecuted those whom the princeps disliked, in exchange for reward. Suillius was not faring well under Nero; a move by the Senate threatened to fine or even punish those who took pay for legal services. His back against the wall, Suillius tried to deflect blame onto a new target. If the senators wanted to punish ill-gotten gains, he said, they need look no further than Seneca.

  “By what kind of wisdom, by what teachings of the philosophers has Seneca heaped up 300 million sesterces in four years as a palace insider?” Suillius ranted in the Senate. “The childless and their estates are being scooped up in his net; Italy and the provinces are being drained away by his outrageous moneylending. I will endure anything—any accusation or trial—rather than rank my long-standing honor, won by my own efforts, below his windfall profits!”

  The brazenness of this attack was breathtaking. The idea that Suillius had earned his money, albeit by slandering the innocent, whereas Seneca had merely got his handed to him, or that Claudian fortunes were more honorable than Neronian ones, relied on tortured moral logic. So too did a comparison that Suillius drew between his own courtroom rhetoric—which he described as “vigorous and blameless”—and the “indolent” discourse Seneca practiced on innocent youth. Suillius compounded the outrage by resurrecting the old charge of adultery with Livilla, Caligula’s sister, for which Seneca had once been exiled. After eight years in Corsica paying for a crime he may well have been innocent of, Seneca now had to suffer this from Suillius: “Should we deem mine a weightier offense—getting a reward for decent labor, paid by a willing defendant—than sullying the bedrooms of royal women?”

  Suillius’ charges went nowhere; Nero’s regime was not about to see its senior minister defamed. Instead, Suillius’ dirty deeds under Claudius were dredged up and used to discredit him. When he claimed he had merely followed orders, Nero dutifully checked his father’s papers and reported he could find no such orders. Suillius ended up exiled to the Balearic Islands with the loss of half his estate. But the caricature he had drawn of Seneca—a portrait of a venal upstart, an outsider conniving his way into power, money, and the beds of princesses—could not be so easily banished.

  Others besides Suillius attacked Seneca during these years. Some said he seduced the young men he pretended to teach, others that he had been seduced—by Agrippina. Some claimed he kept five hundred citrus-wood dining tables in his home for lavish dinner parties. The most damning charge of all, because it could not be refuted, stemmed from his close collaboration with Nero. “Even after denouncing tyranny, he had become a tyrannodidaskalos—a tyrant-teacher,” Dio quotes Seneca’s critics as saying, using a rare and potent Greek word. That charge has shadowed Seneca for two millennia.

  Seneca prided himself on his self-restraint, especially restraint of anger. In De Ira, he held up the model of Cato, who kept his cool even when a man publicly spat in his face. But the carping of those who took issue with his wealth got to him. In a portion of his treatise De Vita Beata, “On the Happy Life,” he hit back.

  In the main, De Vita Beata gives an exposition of Stoic values, enshrining Reason and Virtue as the sources of happiness. A sapiens or wise man—the perfect master of the Stoic creed—will require nothing more than these. But, Seneca concedes, those less perfect, those still making their way toward wisdom, can use some help from Fortune. That leads him to consider a philosopher’s relationship to money, and his essay takes a surprising turn.

  Seneca suddenly replies directly to his attackers, first restating their charges in scathing detail: “Why do you speak better than you live? … Why are your country estates farmed beyond what natural use requires? Why do you not dine as your own writings dictate? Why does your furniture gleam? Why is the wine drunk at your house older than you are? Why is gold on display there? Why are trees planted that will supply nothing but shade? … Why do you have land overseas? Why more land than you can even keep track of?” The questions go on and on, with Seneca mocking his accusers by exaggerating their taunts.

  Seneca’s line of defense relies on his earlier distinction between the sapiens, complete in Stoic wisdom, and others still striving. “I am not a sapiens, nor—let me give you food for your malice!—will I ever be,” he replies to his accusers. “Demand from me not that I be equal to the best, but better than the bad.… I have not attained good health, nor will I; I mix only pain-killers, not cures, for my gout.” Riches do not befit a wise man, Seneca concedes, but since he is not one, the rule doesn’t apply. He argues, in effect, that he need not practice virtue until he has attained it—even if, as his critics would no doubt counter, such practice might advance him toward his goal.

  Seneca asks his critics to see the glass of his character as half full, not half empty, and to pardon his moral failings. More arguments follow. Seneca says he has less interest in money than his accusers. He does not depend on riches for happiness; why should he not then possess them, since he is immune to their toxins? Finally he channels Socrates, imagining, in a long speech, what his great forerunner would say in a similar position. It is not the first time, nor the last, that he fuses himself with this most exalted of models, though it is strange that he does so in a discussion of wealth—an area in which he and Socrates had little in common.

  The last sentences of the treatise as we have it—spoken by either Seneca or the ventriloquized Socrates, or both at once—contain a disturbingly dark message to Seneca’s accusers: “Looking down from on high, I see the storms that are looming, ready to break on you with their black clouds, or even drawing near, right next to you, about to whisk away you and all you possess.” Seneca seems, inescapably, to be issuing threats—referring obliquely to his ability to pull imperial strings.

  After one more fist-shaking sentence, De Vita Beata breaks off. An accident of transmission—a leak or infestation of worms that destroyed part of an early manuscript—created the break. But the resulting text gives the impression of an author suddenly realizing he has gone too far.

  Seneca had allowed his critics to get under his skin. His outrage at being attacked by lesser men made him zealous in his rebuttal. Though he invoked Socrates as his spokesman, he seems not to have learned from his great forerunner about staying above the fray. The rough and tumble of politics, and the intoxicant of proximity to power, were taking their toll on his Stoic serenity.

  While Seneca was battling his critics and adding to his huge estate, Nero was occupied with a different distraction. He had fallen in love.

  The princeps had continued sleeping with Acte during his four years in power, while also maintaining his sham marriage to Octavia. But recently a woman eight years his senior, the wife of his best friend, had roiled his emotions. She was among the most beautiful, desirable, and sexual women of her day, and above all, she was fertile—an important point for Nero who, though only twenty, had much to gain by siring an heir. Her advent would provoke the third and greatest mother-son crisis to rock the imperial household, destroying the uneasy concord of the past three years. Her name was Poppaea Sabina.

  A haughty whore, bedecked with what she despoiled from my house—so Octavia, portrayed as the virtuous wife par excellence, characterizes Poppaea in the play Octavia. Ancient historians concurred, painting Poppaea as a ruthless, scheming seductress—the perfect match, it would seem, for a boy raised by Agrippina. No doubt the Roman dread of female impotentia, the same dread that colored male views of Agrippina, was at work again here, distorting Poppaea into a caricature. But Poppaea and Agrippina did have much in common. As might be expected, each quickly formed a deep-seated hatred of the other.

  Poppaea Sabina.

  Poppaea was already married, divorced, and remarried when Nero fell for her, and she had a young son from her first marriage. It seems that Ot
ho, her second husband and Nero’s close friend, first brought Poppaea and the emperor together, though just how is unclear. Tacitus gives two different reports, one making Otho the instigator of the affair—he boasted of Poppaea’s beauty so ardently that Nero had to see for himself—the other suggesting that Nero wanted Poppaea all along and got Otho to marry her as a cover. Whatever the circumstances, Otho ended up far from Rome, dispatched to a provincial post in Lusitania, while Poppaea, now his ex-wife, stayed behind.

  Nero seems to have intended from the start to marry Poppaea and make her empress—an outcome Poppaea must have demanded, if ancient reports of her ambitiousness have any bearing on truth. To accomplish this, however, Nero would need to divorce Octavia, against the express and urgent wishes of his mother. Fidelity to Octavia had already been a flashpoint in Nero’s incendiary relations with Agrippina, years earlier when Acte first came on the scene. The prospects of a fresh blowup, now that Nero was contemplating not just a new lover but a new wife, were very real.

  Poppaea dared Nero to stand up to his mother and reject Octavia, playing on his male pride. She sneeringly called him a pupillum, a helpless dependent, lacking both power and freedom. Or perhaps, she taunted, he was afraid to marry a woman who would show him what Agrippina really was: a greedy, arrogant shrew despised by the public. Poppaea threatened to abandon Nero and return to Otho, her previous husband. Above all she worked on him with her erotic charms, which by all accounts were considerable.

  Agrippina recognized the threat from Poppaea and took countermeasures. In the days of the Acte crisis, when faced with a similar challenge, she had at first cozied up to her son, offering him money, gifts, and affection. It seems she tried this ploy again now in more extreme form, offering him herself. According to most ancient accounts, Agrippina, fighting Poppaea’s sexual fire with fire, tempted Nero toward incest, visiting him in alluring outfits after he had gotten drunk at his midday banquets. Tacitus, quoting his sources, does not say that consummation occurred—if it did, could anyone have witnessed?—but he does speak in lurid tones of “erotic kisses and endearments that are forerunners of sin.”

  Incest rumors were a powerful smear tactic in Rome, but this one came, according to Tacitus, from Cluvius Rufus, a court insider with no ax to grind. Tacitus claimed that it was well supported and contradicted by just one dissenter—who took issue only by claiming that Nero, not Agrippina, initiated the affair. Suetonius endorsed this alternate version, while Cassius Dio preserved a bizarre third variant in which Nero made love to a prostitute dressed to look like Agrippina, then boasted in jest that he had slept with his mother. The truth lies beyond our grasp, as with many turning points in this strange mother-son saga. But Cluvius’ story cannot be dismissed.

  Cluvius also made an interesting claim about Seneca’s part in the drama. He reported that Seneca used Acte, Nero’s ever-adoring bedmate, as a counterweight to Agrippina, who was herself trying to counter Poppaea. Sending Acte in to visit the princeps at opportune moments, Seneca tried to divert the young man’s lust to a more appropriate object. Seneca reportedly asked Acte to bear a message on her seductive missions: the Praetorian Guard, Nero’s guarantors of rule, would never stand for an incestuous affair within the royal household.

  Cluvius gives us a painful picture of Seneca’s role at court, five years into the reign of Nero. The high-minded Stoic, who had begun by setting Augustan goals and guidelines for the regime, had been sucked ever deeper into the mire of family intrigue. He was struggling to hold on to his influence over Nero, believing he could still do some good. But the methods he now had to use were expedient in the extreme. To act as imperial panderer, dispatching an ex-slave to the princeps to stop him from sleeping with his mother, brandishing Burrus and the guard as an implicit threat—these were hardly roles he had envisioned when he returned to Rome from Corsica, his trunk full of ethical treatises.

  Seneca and Nero had been together for ten years now. Nero had grown up, and Seneca had grown old. The princeps had found new allies, among them another former tutor, a Greek freedman named Anicetus (“Invincible”). Nero had elevated this man to admiral of the Misenum fleet, a naval force he was grooming to be his own corps d’élite—the Praetorians being more devoted to his mother. Other freedmen, slaves, and foreigners had begun to rise at court, men whose complete dependence and subservience gratified Nero. The voices that whispered against Seneca and Burrus had grown in number and stridency, and Nero had shown more willingness to listen.

  It was to Anicetus, not to Seneca or Burrus, that Nero turned as he approached the great crisis of his reign, in the summer of 59. By that time, the young man’s love for Poppaea had brought him to a pitch of dire resolve. He had decided on a crime that the future will believe with difficulty, and ages to come, with reluctance, as the play Octavia forecast—correctly. He had decided to kill his mother.

  · · ·

  It was what he had wanted to do years before but was prevented by Seneca and Burrus. Now, abetted by Anicetus, Nero found the courage to act. Perhaps Poppaea goaded him on, as Tacitus claims, by insisting she could never be his wife as long as Agrippina lived. But Nero needed no Lady Macbeth to harangue him into crime. He had already killed his adoptive brother on his own initiative; his mother posed a greater threat and caused him greater psychic torment.

  Did Seneca take part in Nero’s matricidal plan? Tacitus wondered but didn’t know. Dio made Seneca chief instigator, though like much of his testimony on Seneca, this seems little more than slander. The question of collaboration is indeed hard to resolve. A princeps could not have easily hid such a plot from a high-ranked counselor, but perhaps Seneca no longer ranked very high. If Nero kept him in the dark, declining to consult his old ally against Agrippina, then relations between teacher and pupil had truly gone downhill. If Seneca was consulted, he may have seen he could not prevent Nero from acting but could at least help him succeed. Under that scenario, he may have consented to murder if it could be done cunningly, so as to look like an accident.

  Cunning was indeed what was needed, for a daughter of Germanicus could not be attacked either with blades or legal writs. Poison too was out of the question; Agrippina, having long suspected Nero’s intentions, had taken precautions, perhaps even fortifying herself with antidotes. A technologically savvy method was called for, and Nero was a great lover of technology. One day he saw in the theater, according to Dio, a collapsible boat that fell apart when a lever was worked, simulating a shipwreck. The idea took root in his obsessed mind. With a move as clean and remote as the proverbial push of a button, Nero could crush his mother, or drown her, or both, far out in the water and away from the public’s eyes. He delegated the mission to Anicetus.

  Constructing the trick ship in secret was no simple task. Anicetus no doubt recruited his best shipwrights at Misenum and also trained loyal sailors who would crew on the fateful voyage. Meanwhile Nero set about making up with his mother. The two had become estranged of late—some breakup had followed their overly intimate union—but Nero hastened to repair the breach. He had to regain Agrippina’s trust enough to get her on that boat.

  Writing in jocular tones, admitting to having lost his temper, Nero cajoled his mother into joining him at Baiae, the sumptuous resort surrounded by lakes and a quiet bay, for the celebration of that year’s Quinquatria, a rite of Minerva held at the spring equinox.

  Both Nero and his mother had villas at Baiae, as did many of the Roman elite. The place was famous for high living, loose morals, and easy pleasures, a den of vice that good men should shun, in the eyes of Seneca—though he did sometimes go there. In his disdain, Seneca painted a vivid picture: “Why do we need to see drunken men wandering the beach and boaters on riotous pleasure cruises, and the lakes resounding with songs of musicians? … Do you think Cato would ever have lived there, to count the adulteresses as they sail past, the many kinds of boats painted with vivid colors, the roses bobbing everywhere on the lake’s surface?” No was of course his answer, though h
e perhaps made the high season at Baiae sound more appealing than he meant to.

  Boating was the great thing at Baiae. Because most of the villas stood along a curving shore, or across a small bay at Puteoli, partiers could get from house to house by boat, putting in at small private docks. In her grander days, Agrippina had plied these waters in a state warship rowed by picked sailors. Just down the coast from her villa, an estate called Bauli, was the naval station at Misenum, where such ships and crews stood ready. Now, though, it was a different boat that arrived from Misenum for her use, a luxury yacht fitted out with regal ornaments, manned by a special crew—many of them Anicetus’ trained assassins.

  Nero had this boat moored at a Baiae villa, where he had arranged a grand dinner party in Agrippina’s honor. He presented the boat to his mother after dinner as a gift. It was only one of the many filial gestures he made that night, in an effort to overcome her distrust. Agrippina had her guard up, for she had long suspected her son might seek her life. But the splendidly arrayed ship appealed to her vanity, and Nero’s kisses, as he put her on board, seemed sincere.

  It was a cloudless, windless night, “with a calm that seemed sent by the gods to reveal the crime,” as Tacitus says in one of his most memorable sentences. The ship slipped along through shallow water, on its coasting voyage from Baiae to Bauli. Agrippina reclined with a friend, Acerronia, on a special couch on the vessel’s rear deck. The two women talked warmly of the evening’s entertainment and of the fond attentions of Nero. Nearby stood another of Agrippina’s entourage, her procurator—manager of her estates—Crepereius Gallus.

  Without warning, a section of roofing above these three collapsed, slamming onto Gallus with the full force of its lead-reinforced weight. The man was immediately crushed to death.

  Had Agrippina not been reclining on her couch, or had Acerronia not been sitting lower still as she bent over her friend’s feet, both would have died with Gallus. But the couch saved them. Its back and arms extended high enough to block the force of the falling lead. The two women got out from under the lethal weight and emerged into a frantic scene.