Dying Every Day Read online

  Seneca, with his father and brothers, had moved to Rome from Corduba, in what is now Spain, at a time when Greek sages were thronging to the world’s new imperial city. Attalus impressed young Seneca with his abstemious way of life, an asceticism that, he said, made him a king; by needing nothing—neither wealth, nor position, nor fine dress and food—he gained as much power and freedom as any monarch. “To me, he seemed even greater than a king, in that he was entitled to pass judgment on kings,” wrote Seneca many decades later—after he himself had tasted the same privilege.

  Attalus was only one of several whose wares young Seneca sampled in Rome’s bustling marketplace of ideas. Cynics preached an even sterner ascetic code than the Stoics, ranting against wealth and power while wearing threadbare cloaks and gnawing crusts of bread. Pythagoreans taught the mystical doctrine of transmigration of souls and avoided the eating of meat, which they regarded as cannibalism. Seneca briefly adopted their practice, but his father made him desist. In that year, A.D. 19, a surge of xenophobia had gotten Jewish rites banned from Rome, and a vegetarian diet looked uncomfortably similar to a kosher one.

  Most of the philosophers whom young Seneca heard were imports from Greece, but a native Roman school had also sprung up, and Seneca took a strong interest in it. Its founder, Quintus Sextius, had famously declined appointment to the Senate, a high privilege that had been offered to him by Julius Caesar. Sextius preferred to devote himself full-time to philosophy, though he at first found the work so difficult that he almost hurled himself out a window in frustration.

  Seneca liked the way Sextius, in his writings, used tough, vigorous Roman language to express Greek moral ideas, which in their native tongue often felt flaccid and effeminate. A passage from Sextius that he admired contained a military analogy, comparing a virtuous man’s resistance to evil to an infantry hollow square—a defensive formation that brought spearpoints to bear in four directions at once. The muscular image held for Seneca the appeal of the unattainable, for he suffered from respiratory ailments and never saw a day’s military service. In his own later writings, of the countless metaphors he employed, among his favorite and most frequent would be that of moral effort, or human life itself, as armed combat.

  In his writings, Seneca praised Sextius’ choice, to practice philosophy and forsake politics, but in his own career, he did not follow it. Somehow, by a thought process he never revealed to his readers, Seneca decided, in his thirties, to pursue both paths. Still practicing ascetic habits that he learned from Attalus—sleeping only on hard pillows, and avoiding mushrooms and oysters, Rome’s favorite delicacies—and studying natural phenomena, he nonetheless embarked on the cursus honorum that led, ladderlike, to ever higher offices. In his late thirties, after a sojourn in Egypt with a powerful uncle, Seneca, along with his older brother Novatus, entered the Senate—the very move Sextius had disdained.

  By family status, Seneca had no right to a seat in the Senate house. His clan, the Annaei, were equites, “knights,” well off but neither rich nor noble, and under Rome’s class-stratified constitution, they were excluded from high office. Seneca’s father—a tough-minded, rock-ribbed man of letters, still sharp as a tack in his late eighties—had once hoped for adlection, the magical process by which the princeps could elevate a knight to the Senate, if only so that he might hear Cicero declaim. His two elder sons would finally gain the rank that eluded him.

  As he neared the end of a long life, back in the family seat of Corduba, the elder Seneca gave a qualified blessing to the path on which these two had set out, while praising his cherished third son—young Mela, the quiet and studious brother—for avoiding it. “I see your soul shrinks back from public office and disdains all ambition, and desires only one thing: to desire nothing,” the crusty old man of letters wrote, urging Mela toward his own specialty, the study of rhetoric. “You were always more intelligent than your brothers.… They are all about ambition and are now preparing themselves for the Forum and for political office. In those pursuits,” he remarked, as though issuing a warning, “the things one hopes for are also the things one must fear.”

  At around the time those words were written, just after Seneca had made his start in the Senate, Agrippina the Younger (so known because her mother was also named Agrippina) gave birth to a son. The event had political meaning, for this Agrippina was great-granddaughter of Augustus and sister to the reigning princeps, Caligula, who was as yet childless himself. Official Rome marked the arrival of a promising heir—for every male who shared Augustus’ blood had promise, and young Domitius had a greater share than most.

  If Seneca joined his colleagues in hailing the birth, as he must have done, he could have little guessed how much his own fate hung on this boy’s future. There was as yet no clue that their two lives would, for almost two decades, be intertwined in a strange and tortuous partnership on which much of Rome’s destiny hung. Nor could Agrippina have divined from the portent she saw at her son’s birth—the rays of the rising sun falling full on the baby’s face—that someday he would seek to have her murdered, and seek Seneca’s help.

  A digital reconstruction of the interior of the Roman Senate, with benches on which senators sat.

  Agrippina was a spirited, beautiful twenty-two-year-old when her son was born, already well versed in the perils of dynastic politics. Her father, Germanicus, an adored war hero whom many had hoped would be princeps, died under mysterious circumstances in her childhood; his ashes, escorted home from abroad by her mother, had produced a national outpouring of grief. Over the next fifteen years, she lost that mother, and two of her three brothers, to political murders. The reigning princeps, Tiberius, resented the cultlike reverence the public felt for Germanicus, and looked with suspicion on the orphaned children who shared in it. But he nonetheless spared Agrippina and her sisters, as well as Germanicus’ last surviving son, Gaius—known to us by his nickname, Caligula—whom in the end he adopted.

  Tiberius had just died, and the four siblings had just come into their own, when Agrippina became a mother. Caligula was officially coruler, along with Tiberius’ grandson, but he quickly eliminated his partner and assumed sole rule. A dashing twenty-five-year-old, sound of body and—for the moment—of mind, Caligula was hailed as the bringer of a new golden age, and his three charming sisters added to his luster. Caligula even made his sisters sharers of his power, adding their names to the oath of loyalty sworn annually to the princeps. Agrippina, one of the cherished children of Germanicus, had gained stature unprecedented for a Roman woman; and she had wealth as well, thanks to her marriage, since age thirteen, to a rich aristocrat, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Nero’s father.

  Agrippina could not attend meetings of the Senate (though one day she would try to fix that), but she heard much about what went on in that fervid chamber, the Curia. An orator who had recently arrived there, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was attracting notice for his unique verbal style—seductive prose with short, punchy clauses and pithy epigrams. Agrippina formed a bond of friendship with Seneca, a man almost two decades older but, as an eques, well below her (and his fellow senators) in rank. So too did Agrippina’s sister Livilla—and that bond was said, by some, to go beyond friendship.

  Agrippina’s brother did not care for Seneca, nor for the epigrammatic style in which he spoke. “Sand without lime,” Caligula called those words, drawing an analogy from the building trade, where sand and lime were mixed to make mortar. Seneca’s speeches, to Caligula, seemed to lack solidity—ear-catching phrases strung together without binder to firm them up. (That critique has been repeated, in various forms, ever since. Lord Macaulay echoed it in the 1830s when he wrote: “There is hardly a sentence [in Seneca] which might not be quoted; but to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce.”) Or else they were “nothing but commissiones,” showy declamations like those put on for prizes at the start of public games.

  Senators like Seneca were, at the outset of Caligula’s reign, welcome visitors in the
imperial household, for the Senate had cheered the new princeps and rushed to grant him supreme power. But the lessons of Roman history suggested that amity would not last. The Senate, still cherishing memories of its central role under the republic, had never reconciled itself to the principate, even though the attempt to prevent it—the killing of Julius Caesar—had failed. A bloody civil war had decided the question, and Augustus had taken over. But both he and his successor, Tiberius, had struggled to find a modus vivendi with stiff-necked senators. When that effort failed, those necks often went under the sword.

  Over seven decades, the Senate had tried to assert its ancient prerogatives. But the princeps always had the final say, thanks to his personal army corps, the Praetorian Guard. These elite soldiers, encamped at the northeastern edge of the city, alone had the right to bear arms within Rome’s boundaries. Each emperor had been careful to ensure that these troops, and in particular their prefects or commanding officers, were well fed, well paid, and loyal to his cause. Though it was bad taste for a princeps to deploy Praetorians against the Senate, all parties were certain that, if so ordered, the troops would obey.

  The Praetorians were thus the ultimate weapon of a princeps. Caligula, as his sanity deteriorated and his hostility to the Senate grew, would test that weapon’s limits—and finally exceed them.

  The Praetorian Guard, depicted in a relief of the first century A.D.

  No one quite knows how the downturn began, but Seneca, an eyewitness, attests to the terrifying depths it reached. Caligula stalks through Seneca’s later writings like a monster in recurring nightmares, arresting, torturing, and killing senators, or raping their wives for sport and then taunting them with salacious descriptions of the encounters. “It seems that Nature produced him as an experiment, to show what absolute vice could accomplish when paired with absolute power,” Seneca said of Caligula’s madness.

  Among the first whom Caligula victimized, after his mind began to turn, were his sisters, Agrippina and Livilla. They had been his closest companions, along with a third sister, Drusilla, who was thought by some to have been his lover. Drusilla died of illness in A.D. 38, plunging Caligula into deep grief; he emerged from the catastrophe a changed man. Without warning, while passing time with his surviving sisters at a posh estate, he accused them of having affairs—both at once—with their widowed brother-in-law, Lepidus, and conspiring to put him on the throne.

  The Senate, asked to pass judgment, acceded to what the princeps desired. Agrippina and Livilla were branded state enemies and banished to the Pontine Islands, tiny patches of volcanic rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Probably Caligula meant for them never to return.

  At age twenty-three, leaving her infant son in the care of her husband and sister-in-law, Agrippina went into exile. Before she left, Caligula added degradation (his signature touch) to her sentence. He forced Agrippina to carry the ashes of her alleged lover Lepidus, now executed, in a public burial procession. It was a cruel parody of their mother’s heroic march, two decades earlier, with the ashes of their father, Germanicus. Ingenious in his sadism, Caligula had found a way to debase his sister, his dead brother-in-law, and the memory of his parents, all in a single spectacle. Then he auctioned off Agrippina’s property to bearded Germans, leaving his sister destitute.

  Exile to the Pontines had spelled death for most descendants of Augustus, and in this case, too, it seemed to be only a prelude. “I have swords as well as islands,” Caligula quipped as he sent his sisters away. But somehow, as the weary months wore on, no Praetorians arrived at the prison of either Agrippina or Livilla, and the food allotments were not stopped. For whatever reason, Caligula, for the moment anyway, let his sisters live on.

  Many Romans fell in the wake of the Lepidus conspiracy, among them aristocrats who had backed a different coup a generation earlier—that of a Praetorian prefect named Sejanus. Caligula had been but a boy when his adoptive father, Tiberius, put that plot down. But Caligula somehow grew suspicious that the remaining Seianiani, the supporters of Sejanus, were against him; the two plots, separated by fifteen years, seemed linked in his disordered mind. And that suspicion fell also on Seneca, whose family was linked to the Seianiani in ways that could not have escaped notice.

  Perhaps Seneca feared that the odor of the Sejanus conspiracy still clung to him, fifteen years later, and that Caligula would scent it out. That, at least, is one conclusion that has been drawn from a treatise he published at this time, his first extant philosophic work.

  Consolation to Marcia, written about A.D. 40, takes the form of a letter addressed to a mother grieving for a dead son, but it was meant to be read widely. Seneca would play the same rhetorical trick his entire life, allowing his readers to listen in on what seemed to be an intimate exchange. His addressee was often a family member—his elder brother Novatus on several occasions—or a close friend. In this case, Marcia, a middle-aged woman of senatorial rank, was not connected with Seneca in any recoverable way. She was, however, the daughter of a man who had been persecuted by Sejanus, Cremutius Cordus.

  In A.D. 25, Sejanus had deemed that Cordus, a senator and part-time historian, had committed treason by portraying Brutus and Cassius, Julius Caesar’s assassins, as valiant men. Cordus defended himself in the Senate, claiming that freedom of speech had never before been so harshly repressed. But the mood in the Senate chamber, and the frowning countenance of the princeps as he sat in on the trial, foretold what the sentence would be. Cordus went home, shuttered himself in his room, and began fasting to death.

  The sequel is related by Seneca in Consolation to Marcia. After her father had been locked away for four days, Marcia entered his room and discovered he was starving himself. He begged her not to prevent him. Meanwhile, in the Senate, word had gotten out that Cordus was trying to cheat Sejanus of his prey. Sejanus’ partisans argued that a defendant on trial could not evade judgment in this way and pressed for an arrest and execution. While the debate proceeded, Cordus managed to achieve the death he sought. Angry officials ordered the burning of his histories, but a copy survived, and Marcia helped bring the work back into circulation twelve years later, after both Tiberius and Sejanus were dead.

  It is an odd ploy Seneca uses—reminding Marcia of these painful details of her father’s arrest and suicide, in a letter meant to offer her consolation. Perhaps he was merely maladroit. But perhaps, as one modern scholar suggests, he was pointedly putting himself on the right side of a political fault line. If to be friends with the friends of Sejanus was dangerous, then safety lay in being friends with his enemies—and in displaying that friendship to the world. On this reading, Seneca chose to console Marcia out of savvy self-interest.

  Nothing can be proven, but the theory fits with a pattern of opportunism in much of Seneca’s work. His command of the written word was so deft, his rhetorical skills so subtle, that it was easy for him to help himself while also helping others. The challenge for modern readers is deciding which motive is foremost in any given work. Perhaps Seneca himself often did not know.

  In its larger goals, Consolation to Marcia uses Stoic ideas and methods to deal with the greatest of human griefs, the loss of a child. Seneca portrays himself as a doctor cleansing a patient’s wounds. Those wounds have begun to fester: Marcia is still grieving more than two years after the death of her son Metistius. In Stoic terms, she has dangerously lost touch with Reason, the element that makes her fully a person. The Divine enthroned this element within the human soul, just as surely as it put a thinking brain atop the human body. If Reason cannot be restored to its proper primacy, Marcia will lose her personhood and any hope of happiness.

  Seneca does not deny Marcia the right to grieve, for that would be cold—and coldness was often charged against the Stoics, as he was well aware. Seneca’s version of Stoicism was softer, more adaptable to human frailties. Mourning is natural for a bereft parent, Seneca allows, but Marcia’s grief has surpassed the bounds of Nature. Nature, for him as for all Stoics, was the master guide an
d template; it was allied with Reason and with God. Indeed these three terms, for Stoics, were close to synonymous.

  Marcia’s grief, for Seneca, exemplifies a universal human blindness. We assume that we own things—family, wealth, position—whereas we have only borrowed them from Fortune. We take for granted that they will be with us forever, and we grieve at their loss; but loss is the more normal event—it is what we should have expected all along. Our condition, could we see it aright, is that of an army assaulting a well-defended town: every moment might bring the bite of a barbed arrow. Then, shifting metaphors, Seneca compares our lot to that of a condemned criminal: “If you lament a dead son, his crime belongs to the hour in which he was born. A death sentence was passed on him then.”

  Is life on a battlefield, or on death row, worth living? Seneca seems to be of two minds. At one point, he extols the beauty of the world, the joys that outweigh all suffering. At another, he reckons up the pains of mortal life and claims that, were we offered it as a gift instead of being thrust into it, we would decline. In either case, life, properly regarded, is only a journey toward death. We wrongly say that the old and sick are “dying,” when infants and youths are doing so just as certainly. We are dying every day, all of us. To finish the job early on, as Marcia’s son did, is a fate to be envied.

  Some of Seneca’s comforts ring hollow or seem in dubious taste. When he tells Marcia to be grateful that she had joy of rearing her son, just as a breeder has joy of raising a puppy but then parts with the adult dog, we hear him reaching too far for analogies. Throughout his career, Seneca would struggle with the curse of the facile writer—not knowing when to stop. But his Consolation to Marcia is on the whole an inspiring work, impassioned in its tone and grand in the scope of its goals. Seneca aims, as he would do throughout the next quarter-century, to change the way humanity thinks about our greatest crisis, death.