Dying Every Day Read online

  Word of the disaster reached Paulinus in Wales, and had he begun building ships for an evacuation, many of his troops would have thanked him. The situation was dire and about to get far worse, for Paulinus’ best hope of reinforcement—the ninth legion, stationed in the west of Roman Britain—refused orders to join him as he returned south. It seemed suicidal to enter the killing zone, where rebel forces, outnumbering Romans many times over, had already shown they were not interested in taking prisoners.

  Undaunted, Paulinus brought his men through hostile territory to Londinium (London). He arrived safe, without encountering Boudicca’s forces, but decided he could not defend the sprawling, unwalled trade mart on the Thames. Roman businessmen who could ride or fight were evacuated with the army column, but tens of thousands were left behind, begging Paulinus for aid even as he gave the order to march. The Britons soon visited the same horrors on these tradespeople as they had on the veterans of Camulodunum. They saw no point in holding hostages; should their revolt succeed, they would have gained all they wanted, and should it fail, Rome would not bother to negotiate.

  Failure did not seem possible to Boudicca as she closed in on Paulinus’ army. She had a string of massacres and one battlefield victory to her credit, and her forces had a numerical advantage of perhaps twenty to one. If there is any truth in the long speeches Dio assigns her, she regarded Romans as a decadent people, unable to stand up to Britons in war. Perhaps she had heard of Nero’s recent singing performance, as Dio represents, and saw it as proof of her adversaries’ mettle. “They are slaves to a lyre player—and a bad one at that,” she reportedly told her troops, improbably mixing diatribe and music criticism.

  But overconfidence had made Boudicca overbold. She accepted battle at a site that Paulinus had chosen, where the Romans had woods and high ground protecting their flanks and rear. She let her troops bring their wives along to watch the anticipated rout, parking them in a row of wagons encircling her own back lines. The Britons advanced; the Romans hurled javelins and charged.

  Boudicca launched her war chariots, the tanks of their day, but the drivers, unprotected by metal breastplates, were easily dispatched by well-aimed arrows. The discipline of Roman troops, always Rome’s greatest military asset, held up under the blows of British axes. The battle may have lasted all day, as Dio records, or only a short time, as Tacitus implies, but its outcome was decisive. Boudicca’s troops were turned, and as they tried to flee, they found themselves trapped by their own wagon train and by the corpses of those felled in the javelin volley.

  Before the end of the bloodletting, Boudicca’s army had lost a staggering 80,000, paying back life for life the fatalities inflicted on Rome. At one stroke, the rebellion was smashed and Roman control of Britain restored. Boudicca fled back to her home province, where she either poisoned herself, according to Tacitus’ account, or, in Dio’s, died of disease.

  Map of Roman Britain at the time of Boudicca’s revolt.

  Fresh Roman troops streamed across the channel to ravage rebel lands. The Britons were already depleted by famine, since warriors on the march had had no chance to sow next season’s crop. The Iceni had beaten their plowshares into swords, thinking they would soon dine on captured Roman provisions. All told, hundreds of thousands died in England within a year’s time, the worst cataclysm yet suffered under Roman imperial rule.

  In the aftermath, official Rome sought the causes of the disaster, and some held Seneca to blame.

  According to Dio’s account, before the rebellion began, Seneca had called in his loans to British tribal leaders, abruptly and on harsh terms. That put many Britons into bankruptcy, while others were broken by the corrupt finance officer in charge of the region, Decianus Catus. Together, Dio suggests, Catus and Seneca forced Britons into a corner where they had nothing to lose by revolt. Tacitus, by contrast, says nothing of Seneca’s moneylending in Britain, though he confirms that Catus had made enemies there by rapacity. For Tacitus, the principal spark of the conflict was the flogging of Boudicca and the rape of her daughters, committed by arrogant Roman troops grown scornful of British tribesmen.

  Dio’s hostility to Seneca is well known, yet some modern historians credit his account of the start of Boudicca’s revolt. One has even ingeniously linked it to a report by Suetonius that Nero at one time considered withdrawing from Britain and shrinking the empire. Suetonius gives no time frame, but Nero could have entertained such an idea only prior to the rebellion; during or afterward, Rome had too much at stake to let the island go. If Nero, in the late 50s, had indeed voiced doubts about keeping Britain Roman, those in the know would have hastened to call in their chips. On this theory, the rebellion was ignited by a shrewd piece of insider trading.

  Did Seneca indeed touch off Rome’s worst provincial uprising by carrying his profiteering too far? The answer depends on a choice between Dio’s desire to see the worst in Seneca and Tacitus’ more mixed appraisal—the same choice that faces us at many turns. We know Seneca lent money at interest and managed a far-flung financial empire; we also know that rebel Britons were hard pressed by debt. Whether there was a link between the two is ultimately a judgment call.

  In his extant works, Seneca makes no mention of the disasters in England. But in his De Beneficiis, a work possibly composed after the rebellion had begun, he seems unusually concerned with the topic of moneylending.

  Lending at interest, Seneca makes clear in De Beneficiis, is a special kind of giving-receiving relationship, subject to its own fixed rules. At certain points, he stresses the fairness of those rules or insists on the rights of the lender. He sounds content to be one of those lenders and, if necessary, to withdraw credit. But at other points, he castigates the whole project of lending at interest, using the voice of a newly created persona, Demetrius of Sunium.

  Demetrius was a Greek philosopher of the Cynic school who had come to teach at Rome in Seneca’s day. With his ready wit and fierce asceticism, he made a deep impression on Seneca, and the two became friends. (Demetrius noster, “our Demetrius,” is how Seneca often refers to him.) Seneca seems to have regarded Demetrius as a latter-day Socrates or Cato—a model for his own best self to aspire to, or else a sad reminder of the self that might have been.

  Near the end of De Beneficiis, Seneca assigns Demetrius two long speeches, using him as a mask the way he had earlier used Socrates. The second speech mounts a harsh attack on the evils of wealth, especially on riches got by lending. “What are these things—what is ‘debt,’ ‘ledger-book,’ ‘interest,’ except names supplied to human coveting that exceeds the bounds of Nature?” the outraged Cynic demands. “What are ‘accounts’ and ‘calculations’? And time put up for sale, and a bloodsucking rate of one percent of capital? These are evils we choose for ourselves … the dreams of useless greed.”

  Seneca’s use of masks and personae presents problems throughout his prose works, but nowhere more so than here. Demetrius, a man widely admired for contempt of wealth, viciously attacks a practice by which Seneca had increased his riches. Yet it was Seneca who had brought Demetrius onstage and given him voice. The choice of mouthpiece seems self-punitive, like the choice of Socrates, another famous pauper, in Seneca’s defense of his wealth in De Vita Beata, or the stretch of that work that trumpets the charges of Seneca’s enemies as if through a megaphone.

  How much does the rebellion in Britain, and the role that usury had played in it, stand behind the strange ending of De Beneficiis? The question puts us at the crossroads of politics and psychology, uncertain which path to go down. Was Seneca dodging blame by seeming to disdain moneylending just as much as his worst critics? Or was he giving himself a highly public flogging, to salve a conscience weighed down by two hundred thousand deaths?

  · · ·

  The British rebellion passed, and peace was restored in the empire—for a while. Only four years later a new uprising would flare, in the East this time, among Jews fed up by the abuses of Roman overseers. But by that juncture, most of Ner
o’s senior staff would be dead. The first to go was Afranius Burrus, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, who fell ill and began to fail in 62.

  For eight years, Seneca had worked hand in glove with Burrus, a political ally who esteemed his judgment and shared his values. It is easy to forget this partnership while reading Seneca’s prose works, for he mentions Burrus only once, in De Clementia, and then only tangentially. But Burrus was, without doubt, Seneca’s close collaborator in the palace. By supporting each other in conclaves with Nero, Seneca and Burrus had been able to manage the princeps, check his worst impulses, and in the estimation of some historians, run the empire in his name.

  Burrus became ill with a painful throat swelling, perhaps a tumor, that threatened to choke off his breathing. Nero sent a doctor to smear the swelling with a salve, a medicine it seemed, though some ancient sources charge that it was poison. They report that Burrus applied the drug and instantly recognized its toxic effect. When Nero came into his sickroom and asked after his health, Burrus turned his face away and answered gravely, “All’s well with me”—an implicit contrast with the depraved condition of his sovereign.

  Nero ended up the owner of Burrus’ house, which perhaps supports the poisoning theory. His need for cash to subsidize the empire, and his own extravagant lifestyle, made it difficult for him to wait for his testators to die a natural death. Dio and Suetonius report that he had done much the same three years earlier in the case of a wealthy aunt, Domitia. Old, frail, and suffering from a blockage of her digestive tract, Domitia had lingered on, until Nero ordered the doctor treating her to give her a lethal overdose. Her estate would have come to him soon enough, but his expenses were mounting swiftly.

  Whether or not Nero caused it, Burrus’ death was a disaster for Seneca. Command of the Praetorian Guard was split in two, as it had been under Claudius, and awarded to Faenius Rufus and Ofonius Tigellinus. The first was an honorable public servant with a spotless record, but the second was a man Seneca had reason to fear.

  A former horse trader of questionable character, Tigellinus had risen in favor because he shared Nero’s flamboyance, self-indulgence, and love of the chariot track. Playing up both to the emperor’s love of pleasure and to his dread of usurpers, Tigellinus demonized Seneca and other Stoics as high-minded scolds whose arrogance made them dangerous. In Tigellinus, Seneca had a new enemy at court, one who was allied with the emperor’s libido, against those who embodied his superego.

  Emboldened by this change of prefects, Seneca’s enemies roused themselves for fresh attacks. The charge brought ineffectually by Suillius four years earlier, that it was unseemly for Seneca to get so rich, now gained more traction. Seneca’s wealth was set in a larger portrait of political and personal ambition, a desire to rival Nero himself. Was not Seneca a poet, just as Nero now hoped to be? Did he not advance his own art while trying to quash Nero’s singing? Did he not beautify his gardens and estates so that they outshone those of Nero?

  Seneca’s position at court was eroding badly—but so was Nero’s capital. The emperor’s constant need for cash suggested to Seneca a way out of his palace prison.

  Seneca’s estate was huge, far bigger than he needed, given his modest lifestyle. It was more of a danger now than an asset, for it offered a fat prize to accusers. Seneca would lose at least half in the end anyhow, for men of his station customarily deeded that portion to the princeps, in hopes he would allow the rest to pass, unplundered, to their heirs.

  Rather than wait for those outcomes, Seneca chose preemptive action. He could cash in all his chips—offer Nero his entire fortune—in exchange for a trouble-free exit from the imperial household. He could buy his way out of politics, even if it cost him half a billion sesterces.

  The conversation in which Seneca proposed this bargain has been narrated by Tacitus. What source Tacitus drew on, and how much he embellished that source, are impossible to know. The entire scene might have been invented out of whole cloth. But Tacitus in any case made something unforgettable out of the encounter. The cold formality of both men, the cautious flattery employed by Seneca and the feigned deference of Nero, the mistrust lurking behind every word—these elements combine into a brilliant piece of political theater.

  Seneca began, in Tacitus’ account, by invoking historical precedent. Augustus had allowed Agrippa and Maecenas, his two closest adjutants, to retire from his service. They had performed great deeds on an emperor’s behalf and earned great rewards; “but what else can I give, in return for your generosity, but learning, a thing trained in the shadows?” Then Seneca surveyed all he had gained in Nero’s service: an equestrian from Corduba, he had risen to the first ranks of power and wealth. But, he said, he had grown old, and his fortune was a wearisome burden. The hours he gave to gardens and villas would be better spent on care of his soul. Nero’s rule was secure, his strength equal to any challenge. He could afford to let Seneca go.

  Nero began his reply by deferentially noting that he owed his eloquence to Seneca, his former tutor. But he did not accept Seneca’s reasoning. Agrippa and Maecenas, the retirees from Augustus’ court, had outlived their ability to serve, unlike Seneca, who still had much to offer. And they had never given back Augustus’ bequests. Nero modestly claimed to still need his tutor’s help: “Why not call me back, if the path of my youth anywhere descends and gets slippery?”

  Then Nero turned to a more salient point. “If you return money to me, it won’t be your moderation spoken of by every mouth, but my greed; if you leave your princeps, it will be chalked up to fear of my cruelty. Your self-restraint would earn great praise; but it doesn’t befit a wise man to get glory for himself while bringing ill repute on a friend.”

  If Nero really did speak like this, he expressed what had been implicit from the start: Seneca’s dignity and stature were vital assets to his regime. Seneca could not now withdraw those assets, or buy them back with cash, without doing the regime grave harm. He was shackled by chains forged of his own moral virtue. He must see the drama through.

  The interview ended as it began, according to Tacitus: with insincere efforts to keep up appearances. Nero embraced and kissed the man he had just condemned to a joyless old age. Seneca, says Tacitus, with chilling insight into the courtier’s predicament, “expressed his thanks, as he did at the end of every conversation with his master.” Then the two men parted. Their friendship, if any of it was still intact before this, had come to an end.

  Tigellinus had already taken Burrus’ place as head of the Praetorian Guard. Now he also replaced Seneca as amicus principis, the unofficial post that combined the roles of top adviser, chief of staff, and best friend. The shift was to have grave consequences, not only for Seneca but for Nero’s long-suffering and unloved, nearly discarded wife, the daughter of Claudius, Octavia.

  Nero hated his marriage to this high-minded woman, now in her early twenties. For three years, he had made love to Poppaea instead, a woman far better suited to his tastes. But his senior advisers, adopting the line once taken by Agrippina, had always forbidden him to switch wives. Whenever he had consulted Burrus about divorcing Octavia, the blunt-spoken soldier only scoffed. “Sure, and be certain to give back her dowry,” he said, meaning the principate itself. Marriage to Octavia, as Burrus had understood, brought Nero precious legitimacy.

  Octavia had by this time attained new luster in the eyes of the Romans. The girl’s plight won sympathy from onlookers, as did her temperament, which conformed to their standards of virtuous womanhood. Unlike other imperial brides, Octavia had sought neither power nor adulterous lovers but seemed content to stick to her role—thus far unfulfilled—of begetting an heir.

  Seneca too urged Nero to stay in the marriage, if we can judge by Octavia, the anonymous Roman play that centers on the young girl’s tragedy. The author offers startling insight, perhaps based on firsthand knowledge, of what was going on behind closed doors in the palace in 62. A crucial scene brings Seneca and Nero onstage together, for an intimate, even tender,
exchange.

  Nero has begun to detest Octavia, but he admits to Seneca that he had not always done so. Speaking with surprising candor, he reveals that his hatred was born of rejection, while Seneca attempts to move him past his hurt feelings.

  Octavia, wife of Nero.

  NERO: Never was my wife joined to me in her heart.

  SENECA: But devotion is hard to spot in childhood years,

  when love, vanquished by shame, conceals its fires.

  NERO: So I too believed, for a long time—but no.

  Her cold, rejecting heart, the looks she gives,

  Have one clear message: she despises me.

  But the burning pain I feel will have its vengeance.

  Seeing the danger of an irreparable breach, Seneca tries gamely to champion Octavia’s cause. But the lure of Poppaea, whom the playwright links to primal forces of fertility and lust, proves too strong for his arguments. The two women are contrasted like the two roads to happiness in a famous philosophic allegory, one steep and arduous but leading to lasting rewards, the other smooth, easy, and ephemeral. Nero never was one for choosing the harder path.

  As the scene ends, the petulant princeps rejects Octavia and Seneca in the same breath. He has had enough of restraint:

  Stop pressing me; you’re too severe already.

  What Seneca condemns, let me enjoy.

  The dialogue is invented, but the insights ring true. Seneca had always defended the gravitas of the principate, keeping Nero out of chariots and off the stages of theaters. Octavia, with her sober bearing and high birth, represented the same gravitas, especially by contrast with Poppaea. Seneca is bound to have stuck by her, but doing so put him on the same side as the ghost of Agrippina. Nero had already shucked off his mother; he was done listening to his surrogate father as well. And that spelled danger for his beleaguered wife.