Dying Every Day Page 14

  Nero had brought with him his newly organized corps of thuggish cheerleaders, the Augustiani (“Augustus’ men”). Tall, strong, and fierce in their devotion to the princeps, they sent a clear message by their very presence—an implied threat against dissenters. Their number would eventually grow to 5,000, and Nero would take them on tour with him as his performance career expanded. He had them trained to use special clapping rhythms, though at the Juvenalia, in their first appearance, they merely shouted rapturous phrases like “Oh Apollo!”

  One man in the crowd that day distinguished himself by his unwillingness to applaud. For the second time that year, Thrasea Paetus, the senator least inclined to kowtow to the princeps, chose silence and dissent over noisy collusion. And for the second time, his recalcitrance did not go unnoticed.

  For Seneca, dissent was not an option. His position required him to show support for Nero’s singing debut, however much it disturbed him. Perhaps he even had to assist it, for Dio reports that the sage was enlisted to prompt Nero should he forget his lines. He was being used by the regime, exploited for his tarnished but still lustrous public image, and he knew it. If Seneca observed Thrasea Paetus in the crowd that day, he no doubt envied a man—a Stoic thinker and writer like himself—who could exercise the simple freedom of doing nothing.

  Nero had grown up. His moves at Baiae, undertaken without the help of his teacher and guide, served as his rite of passage, a perverse coming of age. He had committed the most audacious murder of the century and had gotten clean away with it. After his self-liberation, he could no longer be told what he could and could not do, least of all by a grave-faced man four decades his senior.

  Encouraged by the success of his singing debut, Nero sought to break yet another propriety barrier and race in a four-horse chariot. In earlier days, Seneca and Burrus had forbidden it as an insult to the office of princeps. Now they had too little control to prevent it, but the senior advisers did win a shift of venue. Across the Tiber and outside the city, on the Vatican hill, stood a little-used racecourse begun by Caligula. The track—today St. Peter’s Square, with its original Egyptian obelisk, erected as turning post, still standing—had by this time been completed. Nero was persuaded to do his racing in this more discreet location, with slaves and paupers for an audience.

  It was a humble victory for Seneca but perhaps a comforting one. He could still do some good for the principate, the institution that had required him to do much evil. If he ever argued to himself his reasons for clinging to power, as he argued in De Vita Beata his reasons for amassing wealth, it must have been on this basis: Nero would be a worse princeps, and Rome would be subject to worse abuses, were he to leave the scene.

  Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime’s behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul.

  There was of course another reason Seneca stayed by Nero’s side. He had described in De Ira how autocrats exerted control by their power to harm family members. He told the story there of Pastor, a victim of Caligula, who had to smile at the murder of his son because he had another son. By A.D. 60, Seneca had helped Nero acquire several hostages of this kind—including a remarkably gifted nephew, the closest thing Seneca had to a son of his own.

  Marcus Lucanus, son of Seneca’s youngest brother, Mela, had come to Rome to join Nero’s court. Though still in his late teens, the boy had already shown huge literary talent, outpacing in poetry his uncle’s immense prolixity in prose. In him, the fantastic wordiness of the Annaeus clan, passed down from its rhetorician patriarch Seneca the Elder, had reached its acme. He is known to the modern world as Lucan.

  Lucan was two years younger than Nero. He first came to the attention of the princeps when, at age fourteen, he gave an impressive recitation in both Latin and Greek. Nero was then newly installed on the throne, with Seneca at his side, and Lucan had an easy entrée to power. But the young man left Rome and landed in Athens, a serene place of study and contemplation. He seemed at that point to share his uncle’s literary gifts and passion for Stoic philosophy, but not his attraction to politics.

  Several years later, probably about the time of Agrippina’s death, Lucan received a summons to return to Rome and enter Nero’s service. Why the princeps called him back is unclear. Perhaps Seneca, troubled at his own prospects, had suggested the move as a way to bring the boy near him; for he had described, many years earlier, the release from sorrow he felt the moment his eyes lighted on his charming nephew. “There is no torment of the heart so great, or so fresh, that he will not soothe it with his embrace,” he had declared to his mother, Helvia, in a rare outpouring of familial affection. Lacking a child of his own, and increasingly estranged from Nero, Seneca must have greeted Lucan’s return with joy and relief—though no doubt also with some anxiety.

  Nero, for his part, was so enthralled by his new recruit as to immediately make him a quaestor, several years before he was eligible for the post. In the past, only members of the imperial family had been given such exemptions; Nero had launched Lucan on a very fast political track. Perhaps he felt a kinship with a precociously talented poet, since he increasingly fancied he was one himself. He had begun collecting at court those who seemed to embody his own idealized self-image—rulership perfectly harmonized with the gentle arts of music and verse. “Apollo’s lyre is plucked by the same hands that draw his bow,” wrote one contemporary poet, flattering Nero by extolling this ideal.

  By this time, Lucan had begun work on a radically daring and ambitious epic poem, the De Bello Civili or Civil War. The plan for this work was unique in many ways, above all its focus on recent Roman history—the civil wars that had brought Augustus to power—where all previous epics had dealt with the mythic past. Lucan made many innovations in style and method to suit his subject matter. Civil War, which survives today in incomplete form, reveals the audacity of its author—a youth who had set out in his teens to reinvent the most revered of ancient genres, the medium of Homer and Vergil.

  Though the Roman civil wars had taken place a century before Lucan’s time, they were hardly politically neutral, as Lucan himself understood. The characters who loomed large in his story—the assassins Brutus and Cassius; Cato, the Stoic suicide; and Julius Caesar himself—had by Nero’s day become potent ideological symbols. The birthdays of Brutus and Cassius were observed every year by stiff-necked Thrasea Paetus, in ceremonies that celebrated senatorial autonomy. Cato, too, was widely revered in contemporary writings, as has been seen. Lucan was going to have to walk a thin line in writing about such men while serving under Nero, a descendant of the man slain by them.

  The only known portrait of Seneca’s nephew Marcus Lucanus, known today as Lucan.

  Perhaps out of self-protection, Lucan chose to open Civil War with effusive praise of Nero, a passage so overwrought that some have read it as satire. All the bloodshed of the civil wars, Lucan claims, should be glorified, not regretted, since they made possible Nero’s reign. Then, turning from the past to the future, Lucan imagines the day when Nero will take his place in the heavens, among the gods. Take care not to seat yourself at either pole, Lucan cautions the princeps, lest your weighty presence tilt the cosmos out of balance. Stick to the middle, the zodiacal belt. The air is clearer there and clouds less frequent, so our view of your starry form will not be impeded.

  The imperial favor Lucan enjoyed, and his willingness to court it, were vividly displayed in August 60. That month Nero introduced his Greek-style sport-and-arts festival, the Neronia. He had set prizes—gold wreaths, a lavish Roman adaptation of Greek laurel garlands—for recitations of poetry and oratory, as well as for music, song, and athletic events. Lucan took the stage in the poetry contest with a composition called Laudes Neronis, “Praises of Ne
ro,” and won first prize. Nero looked on approvingly from his imperial dais, not yet willing to enter the contest himself. But Lucan, with touching deference, removed his crown and awarded it to the princeps. The winner of the rhetorical competition followed suit.

  Lucan’s gesture underscored the tension inherent in his relationship to the princeps, a tension felt by other writers too, including Seneca. Nero was not just a patron of the literary arts but an artist himself. He liked to join his court bards as a fellow member of their guild. Lucan’s brilliance gratified Nero’s vanity; but the threat that such brilliance posed, the danger of a rivalry that the princeps would inevitably lose, was lurking below the surface. It would not be long before it emerged.

  For Seneca, the close and rapid bonding between his nephew and the princeps was a mixed blessing. It augmented the dilemmas begun by his own entry into imperial service, followed by that of his brother Gallio. Three prominent Annaei now had their fates tied to the emperor’s favor. They had risen together, thanks to the reliance of Roman politics on family-based loyalties, but they might easily fall together as well.

  The role Seneca had carved out for himself had become vastly harder to maintain, in the wake of Agrippina’s murder. But the cost of deviating from that role had also greatly increased.

  Nero kept other authors at his court in these days, men who shared his table while indulging his artistic ambitions. He liked to bandy verses with this crowd, beginning a line of poetry in a meter of his own choosing, then challenging a dinner guest to finish it in the same meter. The game allowed him to enjoy the fellowship of poets but also make clear who was calling the tune.

  But maintaining a literary coterie was an expensive undertaking, and this was only one of many cash drains Nero had taken on. Prodigality was becoming a hallmark of his reign and was soon to give rise to its deepest troubles.

  Games and festivals were among Nero’s largest expenses. Even before Agrippina’s death forced him to fatten his entertainment budget, he had put on bizarre and inventive displays. The oval interior of his new wooden amphitheater could be filled with salt water to make an artificial sea, and he staged mock naval battles on it, with pelagic fish swimming among the ships for extra effect. Other beasts emerged after the water was drained off, sometimes appearing out of the floor by means of pulleys and trapdoors (stagecraft later expanded in the famous Colosseum). The opening ceremonies of this grand structure featured exotic creatures from far-off lands, including elks, hippopotami, and seals, the last chased by what appear to have been polar bears.

  But Nero’s priciest innovation was the Neronia, instituted in 60 with the idea that it would repeat every five years. Fearing that conservative Romans might scorn this Greek-style event, Nero laid out liberal prizes to attract their participation. He built a new gymnasium and bath complex adjoining the grounds, with olive oil—the Greeks’ favorite skin-cleansing ointment—supplied at his own expense.

  Games, shows, theaters to hold them in, handouts for the crowds—all this drained the state coffers, and since it was Nero who had to refill them, the expense was essentially his. In theory, the imperial treasuries were separate from the emperor’s property, but in practice, boundary lines were hard to draw. As the ultimate home-office worker—all Rome being his place of business—Nero could use public monies for private purposes and vice versa. Officials in charge of keeping accounts, by a reform enacted under his reign, were his own appointees.

  Then, too, Nero spent wildly on private festivities, including lavish palace banquets and late-night parties. These fetes took on new energy in the 60s thanks to a man who dazzled Nero with his refined tastes and easy hedonism. Gaius Petronius, famous for sleeping all day and spending his nights in pleasure seeking, received an appointment as arbiter elegantiae, officer in charge of protocol and entertainment. A free-living, free-speaking aristocrat who took nothing seriously, Petronius made a huge impression on the young princeps. Nothing seemed à la mode to Nero unless it came from Petronius, Tacitus noted.

  The swift ascent of Petronius pointed the way for other courtiers. Those seeking advancement found it politic to encourage Nero in his excesses or to furnish him with new pleasures and spectacles. Ofonius Tigellinus, the head of Rome’s safety and fire brigade, rivaled Petronius at this game, except that where Petronius was effete and devil-may-care, Tigellinus was tough, street smart, and determined. He too rose in Nero’s esteem and became a trusted insider—as Romans would soon learn, to their woe.

  Most profligate of Nero’s expenditures were gifts to court favorites and pets, already outlandish enough in Nero’s teenage years to alarm his mother. When Agrippina heard that Nero planned to give 10 million sesterces to a freedman, she had the coins piled in a heap so that her son could behold his extravagance. Ever eager to defy his mother, he took one look at the pile and ordered it to be doubled, saying, “I did not realize I had given so little.” Ultimately more than 2 billion sesterces would be spent on such bequests, so much that Nero’s successors tried (with little success) to get most of it back. Acte the ex-slave, Menecrates the lyre player, Spiculus the gladiator, Paneros the moneylender, and many others walked away with fortunes.

  Of a different order were the gifts Nero bestowed on his inner circle, including on Seneca. They allowed Nero to create bonds of obligation and collusion. Tacitus remarks on this kind of giving when discussing the distribution of Britannicus’ estate after the boy’s assassination. Many observers, says the historian, thought that Nero, conscious of his guilt in the eyes of the public, was trying to buy a kind of redemption. If good men were seen accepting the proceeds of crime, the crime became less heinous.

  Seneca had been the recipient of many such gifts over the years. Gardens, villas, and estates, including some that had perhaps belonged to Britannicus, made him vastly wealthy. But accepting them had made him an accomplice in the rough methods by which they were obtained. That Seneca was struggling with this problem is clear from a treatise he published in the late 50s or early 60s, De Beneficiis, a long meditation on the topic of giving and receiving.

  The Latin word beneficium includes notions of “gift,” “good turn,” and “favor.” Seneca used the concept as a prism through which to examine social relations of all kinds, including those of business, friendship, and politics. It was essential to him that giving be done well—meaning, in a spirit of generosity, even love. Again and again, he invokes the models of nature and of divinity, which provide nurture for humankind without reckoning up what is owed. Our goal in performing beneficia for our fellow men, Seneca insists, should be to emulate the gods.

  De Beneficiis is a long work, Seneca’s longest treatment of a single topic. It weaves in and out of many themes, some of them touching closely on the author’s own circumstances—though the relevance, as always, remains implicit.

  One problem Seneca deals with is that of gifts given by kings and tyrants, which cannot be refused, yet cannot be recompensed. He recalls that Socrates was invited to join the court of a Macedonian king but declined on the grounds that had he accepted, he would not have been able to return the royal largesse. Seneca admires Socrates for avoiding what he calls a life of “voluntary servitude.” One senses that in talking about Socrates, he is, as in De Vita Beata, talking about himself.

  Here Seneca imagines an objection: “Socrates could have declined [the king’s gifts], if he had wanted to.” But, he responds as though on his own behalf, a king cannot abide such treatment, regarding it as a mark of scorn. “It makes no difference whether you refuse to give to a king, or refuse to accept gifts from him; he takes both, equally, as a rejection,” Seneca says. This was an important point for him, since his own wealth, much of it gained in service to Nero, had come under harsh attack. Refusing such rewards, he makes clear, would have been hazardous.

  According to Seneca’s definition in the treatise, Nero’s giving had been not a beneficium, an act of generosity, but a means of asserting power and imposing obligation. In the early 60s, Seneca wa
s feeling the weight of that obligation as never before, and he began searching for a way to unburden himself. In 62, he would make an attempt, as will be seen, to divest himself of all he had received and reclaim his autonomy. If Nero’s giving had made him a captive, perhaps he could free himself by giving back.

  Before reaching that point, however, Seneca, and the rest of the palace staff, had a foreign policy crisis to deal with, the worst Rome had faced in decades. It was an acute crisis for Seneca, because many at Rome felt, rightly or wrongly, that he had caused it.

  In the fog-bound glens of eastern England, Boudicca, warrior-queen of the Iceni, was gathering a mighty host determined to end Roman rule. At her hands, more than 80,000 Romans and their allies would soon be killed, and the Roman army would come within a hairsbreadth of an epic disaster. If not for the iron resolve of her opponent, Suetonius Paulinus, Rome would have likely disgorged Britain from its empire and never set foot there again, abandoning what Claudius had achieved, with such proud self-celebration, a generation earlier.

  Boudicca’s rebels had chosen an opportune moment to strike. Paulinus had gone off on an invasion of Mona, the island off Wales now called Anglesy, with two of the four legions then serving in Britain. The town of Camulodunum (modern Colchester), settled by aged-out veterans and their dependents, had some warning that trouble was afoot but could do nothing; it had no walls or fortifications, having never needed them before. Some townsmen took refuge in the Temple of Divine Claudius, Camulodunum’s most secure structure, and held out there for two days. But Claudius was no better a warrior as a god than he had been as an emperor. Camulodunum was wiped out and its people put to the sword. A legion sent to relieve them from Lindum (Lincoln), 150 miles to the north, was smashed to pieces en route.