Dying Every Day Read online

  In the spring of 62, at about the time of the death of Burrus, Nero learned that Poppaea was pregnant. The news jolted the princeps into action. He was now determined to get rid of Octavia and enthrone Poppaea as empress. The Romans hated Poppaea, as he well knew, but once she had borne a future princeps, they would accept her—and have new regard for him as well.

  But before he could divorce and remarry, Nero had some dynastic business to take care of.

  Do as I order. Send someone to bring me

  the severed heads of Plautus and Sulla.

  These are the words Nero utters as he comes onstage in Octavia, an entrance that rivals Richard III’s in Shakespeare for boldness of characterization. Nero was hardly as resolute a leader as he is shown in these lines, if we credit the account of Tacitus. Nonetheless, assailed by the urgings of Tigellinus, he decided in the spring of 62 to do away with his two most prominent cousins. It was to them that Romans would turn, as Nero knew, should he lose support, as he might well do by divorcing the adored Octavia.

  Rubellius Plautus, a descendant both of the emperor Tiberius and of the sister of Augustus, had long been regarded by Nero as a threat. In 55, as has been seen, a rumor that Agrippina was preparing to marry him had sent the princeps into a panic. Five years later, when a comet appeared, heralding (as Romans believed) a change of ruler, all eyes looked to Plautus. Nero wrote to Plautus then, asking him to leave Italy and go to his family’s estates in Anatolia. Plautus had obligingly complied. So he was off the scene by 62, but hardly off of Nero’s mind.

  Faustus Sulla was also descended from Augustus’ sister, as well as from the great Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a military legend whose surname was still potent more than a century after his death. Sulla too had long aroused Nero’s suspicions and, like Plautus, had been banished for it. He had lived at Massilia (Marseilles) for the past four years, exiled on a trumped-up charge. While abroad, he had done nothing to arouse alarm. But his lineage made him dangerous, Tigellinus now argued to Nero. The Gallic legions might feel inspired by this new Sulla and rise up.

  Nero had already watched a brother die at close range, and he had put his mother aboard the ship meant to kill her. The task of ordering assassinations from afar was comparatively easy, especially with Tigellinus as his new Praetorian prefect. A hit squad was sent to Massilia, on a ship fast enough to outstrip any forewarning. The soldiers covered the four-hundred-mile journey in only five days. Sulla was reclining pleasantly at his banquet table when they arrived, not expecting any harm. They struck him down and severed his head for shipment to Rome.

  The elimination of Plautus was harder, since the road into Asia was longer and the element of surprise was lost. Plautus’ father-in-law somehow got wind of the coming attack and sent a message to Plautus to take action. The armies of the East would rally to Plautus’ side, the message said—that is, by overthrowing Nero. It was a barely plausible scenario, but in the end, Plautus merely waited for death—a band of 60 armed men—to arrive. Perhaps he thought in this way he could safeguard his wife and children, or perhaps his Stoic preceptors, among them the great Etruscan sage Musonius Rufus, convinced him that a quiet end was better than a desperate and hazardous struggle.

  With two sword strokes, Nero dramatically strengthened his hold on power. He sent a report to the Senate that Sulla and Plautus were both dangers to the state; he did not say they were already dead. The senators pretended not to know more than that and voted the two men expelled from their ranks. Nero was once again given a free pass for murder.

  Now at last, after four years of waiting, Nero was ready to change wives. But he had not reckoned with the depth of popular sentiment on Octavia’s side. The empress he detested had become a kind of cult figure in the streets of Rome. In the minds of the crowds, she stood for a purer, nobler principate that might have been—or might be again.

  Nero justified divorce by leveling a charge of adultery. He had extorted, with help from Poppaea and Tigellinus, sworn testimony from an Egyptian flutist that he had slept with the empress. But mobs of Octavia’s outraged supporters began to gather in the public squares.

  Nero wavered. He appeared even to change his mind, or was rumored to have done so, and grateful throngs went wild, setting up statues of Octavia in the Forum while destroying those of Poppaea. Some revelers even approached the palace and had to be pushed back by Praetorians. This allowed Poppaea to argue that a revolution was at hand. Octavia’s continued survival, she insisted, was a danger to the state.

  Nero, it seems, was doomed to perform his crimes twice, so that no one could fail to observe them. Anicetus, the Greek freedman who commanded the naval base at Misenum, had had to attack Agrippina twice before finishing her off. Now Nero needed a second indictment of Octavia, and he turned again to Anicetus, most loyal of thugs. All Nero needed this time was a confession from Anicetus that he had shared Octavia’s bed. Anicetus would have to be punished, but Nero vowed to deliver only a mild rebuke, banishment to some comfortable place, and to soften it with a vast, covert reward.

  Because of Anicetus’ position, Octavia’s alleged infidelity was portrayed as a bid for power—an attempt to suborn the Misenum fleet. With blithe disregard for plausibility, Nero cast his wife as a usurper, a second Agrippina. It was enough to secure from the Senate a sentence of banishment.

  Octavia was sent to Pandateria, a wave-swept Pontine island only a mile square. Her best hope was to live out her life there, under house arrest in a sumptuous villa. But other imperial women who had landed on that grim rock had been killed, far from the eyes and ears of supporters. It was a place for the quiet disposal of wayward females.

  The author of Octavia ends his play with his heroine’s deportation. It is a stirring scene, modeled on Euripides’ famous portrait of Iphigenia, a young woman unafraid to die. As the ship arrives to bear Octavia away, she embraces her fate:

  Why do I tarry? Take me to my doom.…

  Rig the mast, spread sails to the winds

  and waves, hold the rudder straight

  and seek Pandateria’s shore.

  Octavia exits cursing neither Nero nor her captors but, strangely enough, her father Claudius. She seems to see, at the threshold of death, that Claudius, by marrying Agrippina, had set in motion the events that led her to this pass.

  Tacitus’ Annals provides a grimmer denouement to the drama. Executioners arrived on Pandateria only days after Octavia did. The sight of the troops made the girl desperate. As they bound her, she pleaded piteously, insisting she was no longer Nero’s wife but only his adoptive sister. She invoked her descent from the clan of Germanicus. Finally she begged the soldiers in the name of Agrippina, now three years dead.

  All entreaties were in vain. The soldiers opened Octavia’s veins, hoping to preserve the fiction of suicide. But she did not bleed out quickly enough. In the end they sealed her in a steam-filled room until she suffocated.

  At the request of Poppaea, the new empress of Rome, Octavia’s head was taken off with a sword and sent to join those of Plautus and Sulla in Nero’s palace.

  CHAPTER 6

  Holocaust

  (A.D. 62–64)

  Few were left from the clan that had gathered for Claudius’ marriage to Agrippina on New Year’s Day 49. Claudius himself was dead, as was his son Britannicus and now his daughter, Octavia. Agrippina too had gone to the underworld, to be forever tormented by the husband she had killed (or so her ghost declares in the play Octavia). Nero had stripped himself of immediate family, and with the assassinations of Plautus and Sulla, he had made inroads into the ranks of cousins—though two distant ones, Decimus Silanus Torquatus and his young nephew Lucius, still remained alive, the last direct descendants of Augustus besides Nero himself.

  The freedmen who had run the palace fourteen years earlier were also gone from the scene. Narcissus and Pallas had both been killed, the former by Agrippina, the latter poisoned for his estate by a cash-hungry Nero. Even Doryphorus, a special favorite with whom the princeps
enjoyed playing rough sex games, was dead, executed for showing too much favor to Octavia. New court pets had arisen to fill the empty places by Nero’s side: Spiculus the gladiator, Menecrates the lyre player, Pelagon the eunuch.

  The most consequential departure was that of Burrus, the stalwart Praetorian prefect, recently dead. The gruff old soldier had been one of few who stood up to Nero, speaking his mind and then, if asked to reconsider, saying to the princeps: “I’ve told you already, don’t question me twice.” But Burrus’ replacement, Tigellinus, had taken the opposite tack, indulging all Nero’s vanities and delusions. Tigellinus spent vast sums for the emperor’s pleasure and used his cruelty to serve the emperor’s power. Above all, he supported Poppaea, the bride whom Burrus had resisted and the people hated, but who made Nero happy, and was about to bear him a child.

  Seneca alone remained, of the old guard who had helped usher in Nero’s age of gold. Isolated and vestigial, he lingered on, with no clear role to play in the regime but no hope of leaving it. The job Agrippina had given him long ago, that of rector, “steersman,” of the emperor’s youth, had ended. So too had the roles he had subsequently taken on—senior counselor, speechwriter, caretaker of government, voice of Nero’s conscience. He lived now in twilight, a prisoner chained to the palace by the very moral stature that had brought him there to begin with.

  There was no precedent for this plight amid the galleries of historical exempla in which Seneca often roamed. In the Greek world, philosophers had been banished, outlawed, or even killed by rulers they had sought to instruct; none had been retained at court against his will. Only Octavia, before her fall, furnished an analogue to Seneca’s situation: an outsider whom the princeps did not like or trust yet could not set free. But Octavia’s grim end did not bode well for Seneca. And her absence now made it harder for him to withdraw, for Nero could ill afford to lose both his most visible badges of moral authority.

  Escape was out of the question; Seneca had no place to hide. Besides, he had his brother Gallio and his nephew, the adored Marcus Lucanus, to think of. Lucan, the young poet so full of promise, was especially vulnerable. By this time, he had published the first three books of his epic poem Civil War, but the brilliant debut was having a strangely adverse effect on Nero. Since the princeps, too, now fancied himself a bard, the luminous talent of his protégé no longer inspired pride but jealousy and mistrust. Lucan was going to need his uncle’s protection—if Seneca still could provide any.

  The danger that now lurked for the Annaei, and for all the political elite, had been made clear earlier in 62. Abandoning his restraint toward the Senate, Nero had come close to executing a Roman praetor, Antistius Sosianus, for a minor offense. That offense, as Seneca and his nephew must have noted, had been a literary one—composing poetry of the wrong kind.

  The “crime” took place at a dinner party given by a certain Ostorius Scapula. Antistius, no doubt emboldened by drink, recited some scurrilous verses poking fun at the emperor. He had no reason to fear retribution; Nero had thus far preyed only on his own family. But now Nero had Tigellinus at his right hand, a man who believed in the principle oderint dum metuant, “Let them hate, as long as they fear.” It was Tigellinus’ son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito, who in the aftermath of the dinner party brought a charge of maiestas, treason, against Antistius. The authorities who screened such charges allowed the case to proceed.

  Not since the bad old days of Claudius had a trial on maiestas charges gone forward. The very word evoked memories of that regime’s abuses and of the far worse predations of Caligula before that. Maiestas had served those emperors as a catchall with which to destroy their enemies, or to allow their adherents to destroy theirs. Almost any gesture or word could be portrayed as treasonous if a princeps was willing to listen. Once, under Tiberius, a senator had been indicted for picking up a chamber pot while wearing a ring on his hand that bore the emperor’s image.

  Ostorius, host of the “treasonous” dinner party, made a brave effort to protect Antistius, swearing he had heard nothing untoward. This effort was in vain. To the horror of official Rome, Antistius was sentenced to die by an ancient and cruel method, his neck to be fixed in the fork of a tree and his naked body beaten with rods.

  Under the hierarchical structure of the principate, no such sentence could have been passed without the emperor’s approval. Tacitus says that Nero agreed to the death penalty because he planned to step in and prevent it, thereby winning points for clemency. The story is plausible, but it’s also just what an emperor would say when caught overplaying his hand. As things turned out, it was not the princeps but a senator who intervened to save Antistius’ life, in a move that had large implications.

  Thrasea Paetus at last broke the silence with which he had thus far snubbed Nero’s excesses. He argued before the Senate that Antistius deserved exile and loss of property, not death. Moved by his courage, the entire Senate fell in behind Thrasea, voting to rescind the death penalty and impose exile instead. The consuls feared to ratify the decision without Nero’s consent, so they asked the emperor what to do. Nero sent a petulant letter telling the Senate to act as it pleased; he would not interfere. His pride had suffered a blow, whether his own plan to show leniency had been usurped, or whether—perhaps more likely—he had been denied his show of force.

  It was not entirely a heroic moment, for Thrasea carefully larded his Senate speech with praise of the princeps. Nonetheless a threshold had been crossed. The calm that had prevailed in politics thus far in Nero’s reign, the compact between Senate and ruler proclaimed in the inaugural speech, had been broken. Maiestas had again been unsheathed as an instrument of repression. But the thrust had been parried; Nero’s will had been thwarted. The princeps began to look with greater mistrust on the Senate, and it upon him.

  Whose side was Seneca on, as he watched this drama unfold? Thrasea was a kindred spirit, a committed Stoic like himself, yet the two men stood on opposite sides of a constitutional chasm. Seneca had embraced the absolutism of the principate, had virtually proclaimed Nero a king, while Thrasea was a senator to the core. Thrasea celebrated the birthdays of the tyrant-slayers, Brutus and Cassius, as though they were independence days. Both Seneca and Thrasea revered Cato, the steely-spined Stoic who had chosen suicide over surrender a century earlier. But Thrasea seemed more inclined to take Cato as a guide for action.

  Seneca and Thrasea, two moral men who might have been close allies either in politics or in philosophy, were bound on separate paths, headed toward separate perils. Both would surely have been surprised to learn that those paths would converge and that a single cataclysm would one day consume them both.

  For Nero, Thrasea Paetus had begun to loom as an enemy, and he put the Roman world on notice, in early 63, that he regarded him so. In January of that year, he celebrated the birth of his first child, a daughter whom he named Claudia. Brimming with exuberance, Nero brought the entire Senate to Antium, some twenty miles south of Rome, where Poppaea was caring for her newborn. True to his free-spending ways, he staged athletic games and laid out elaborate banquets for all present. He excluded only one senator—Thrasea Paetus—from the celebrations.

  The prospect of an heir—Poppaea had not yet borne a son, but the couple had proved they were fertile—had greatly strengthened Nero’s position, and a maiestas charge against Thrasea might not have been long in coming. Tigellinus, the new Praetorian prefect, no doubt urged such a move, for his family bore a long-standing grudge against Thrasea. Five years earlier Tigellinus’ son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito—now serving the regime as a delator who brought legal charges against enemies—had incurred a rebuke from the Senate for mismanaging an eastern province. Thrasea had aided the prosecution.

  Cossutianus was to have his revenge, but not yet. Claudia, Nero’s adored daughter, did not survive past her fourth month. Thrasea’s fate took a different turn. Nero was overcome with grief and also humbled by his loss of a trump card. He suddenly felt the need to shore up relations wi
th the Senate. In a deferential gesture, he reached out to Thrasea Paetus. The two men agreed to a rapprochement—for the moment.

  This prompted a bitter exchange between Nero and Seneca, recorded by Tacitus in one of his many snapshots of this tortured relationship. Nero boasted at court of his new entente with Thrasea, making certain that Seneca would hear. It was a cruel taunt, suggesting that the princeps would now bestow his favors elsewhere, even on another Stoic sage. But Seneca did not take the insult lying down. He replied that Nero deserved congratulations for this new friendship—as though the princeps, not Thrasea, was the one who gained by it.

  “Thus increased the glory, and the danger, of these exceptional men,” Tacitus observes, looking ahead to the parallel dooms that would end the unparallel lives of Seneca and Thrasea Paetus.

  Unable to resign even at the price of his huge estate, Seneca had nonetheless withdrawn from court to the degree that was safe. He no longer kept up the routine of a powerful statesman, no longer saw crowds of clientelae, friends in need of favors, in his chambers each morning. He rarely went out in public, and when he did, he no longer had a large retinue of attendants. He was trying, within the limits Nero had set, to reduce his visibility.

  His pace of writing increased. He had more time now for moral reflections and a greater need to publish them, for his reputation had suffered badly as Nero had spiraled downward. From 62 on, he produced an astounding body of work, some of it now lost, much still extant. His longest and most ambitious prose works were composed at this time and, almost certainly, his most harrowing tragedy, Thyestes. Seneca, now at the peak of his literary powers, was writing like a man running out of time—as indeed he was.