Dying Every Day Page 3
Consolation to Marcia ends with a bizarre flourish, Stoic in origin but crafted into something all Seneca’s own. Greek Stoicism held that the world would be burned away, then created afresh, in a recurring cycle. The doctrine was largely obsolete by Roman times, but Seneca gave it new life, in this work and others. He asks Marcia to picture her father, the heroic suicide Cordus, now dwelling in a place very much like Heaven (though Christianity had just begun at this time, half a world away in Jerusalem, and had only barely reached Roman ears). From his all-seeing seat in the sky, Cordus foresees what is to come:
Nothing will remain where it now stands. The old age of the world will level all, carry all away with itself. Not just mankind, but places, regions, continents—all these will be its sport. It will push down the mountains and toss new peaks to the sky. It will suck up the seas, turn rivers aside, and dissolve the congress of peoples that binds the social order of man. Cities will it drag down into deep chasms, shatter with earthquakes, infect with plague-bearing winds summoned up from its depths. It will swallow up with floods every inhabited place; it will kill every living thing on the submerged earth; it will burn and destroy mortal life with immense tongues of flame. And when the time comes for the earth to snuff itself out, in order to make itself new, all this will destroy itself by its own power; stars will crash into stars, and whatever now shines in an ordered array will burn up in a single flame in which all matter is consumed.
He offers all this to comfort Marcia, showing her that individual losses—like the death of Metistius—will soon be insignificant. But the ecstatic intensity of the passage goes well beyond this goal. It appears that Seneca, as he endured the horrors of Caligula, found something deeply stirring in the nearness of the world’s end.
It was not apocalypse but redemption that arrived, soon after Seneca published his Consolation.
One day in early 41, when he was in his fourth year as princeps, Caligula awoke from a strange dream. He had been sitting at the feet of Jupiter on Mount Olympus, when the god pushed him with his big toe and sent him hurtling downward. It was a prophetic image, for before the next day ended, Caligula was dead.
His mad behavior had gone so far as to turn even his Praetorians against him. If they let him continue in power, he would destroy the principate itself, the institution that was their sinecure and raison d’être. They made common cause with the senators, his principal victims. A squad of soldiers cut him off in a tunnel leading out of a theater and stabbed him to death. His body was cremated unceremoniously, and his ashes were buried beneath a low mound of earth.
As the fatal strokes fell, they changed forever the unwritten definition of the principate. Caligula’s experiment in absolute power had proved that there was, finally, a check. The Praetorians had imposed it. And in the hours that followed the murder, they also seized a central role in the question of succession. While the Senate dithered vaguely over a hoped-for return of the republic, soldiers collected Caligula’s sickly paternal uncle, Claudius—found trembling behind a curtain, according to legend, though more likely well briefed on what was to happen—and brought him to the Praetorian camp, where he was hailed with cries of “Imperator!”
Claudius, in turn, thanked the guard with a huge bequest of five years’ salary per man. Setting a precedent that was to endure for centuries, the Praetorians had dispatched one emperor and installed another—and got rich for their efforts. They had transformed themselves from honor guard and security force to Rome’s behind-the-scenes kingmakers. Except that Claudius was not a king, but something vaguer and less substantial. Rome had abjured hereditary monarchy centuries before and could not admit to itself that a rex—even the word was considered toxic—was once again head of state.
The Senate, which had formally acclaimed three previous emperors, took no part in this transfer of power. The swiftness with which Caligula had imploded had allowed them no time to align behind the new ruler. Claudius, aware that the Senate mistrusted him, did not enter the Curia for a solid month—and then only with a bodyguard. He was a creature of the Praetorians, selected by none but them. He acknowledged it candidly on his coins, some of which depicted the gates to the Praetorian barracks or a soldier taking Claudius by the hand.
Seneca watched the bloody fall of Caligula from near at hand but seems to have taken no part. In his writings, at least, he kept a cool distance from the conspiracy. Regicide was a sensitive matter to discuss in print, for every princeps was threatened by it, and none could allow it to be praised. In one hypothetical discussion, Seneca advocated a final solution for a princeps who was incurably insane, but then went on to say—prudently, for a minister of state—that such freaks of nature were as rare as chasms gaping in the solid earth, or underwater volcanoes. Not even the case of Caligula, perhaps, would qualify under such strict guidelines.
An early coin of Claudius, showing his own image on one side and the Praetorian camp on the other. The abbreviated words Imperatore recepto, “The commander received,” recall the moment of Claudius’ accession.
Though he could not write openly about Caligula’s fall, Seneca could at least survey the wreckage of the Roman political class. Victims of torture and rape stirred his pity, but also, perhaps more so, onlookers forced to accept those crimes without protest—the regime’s moral casualties. The harrowing stories of De Ira (“On Anger”), probably written soon after Caligula’s fall, show the young senator reckoning up the spiritual cost of despotism: the psychic wounds suffered by those forced to capitulate. It was the defining problem of Seneca’s age, and he was to grapple with it as no one else did, both in his writings and in his own life.
De Ira is Seneca’s first in a string of treatises, each dealing with a single ethical topic announced in the title (De Clementia or “On Mercy,” De Brevitate Vitae or “On the Shortness of Life,” and so on). Anger leads the series of topics because anger poses such an immense threat to Reason. Seneca shows first why ira must be avoided, then how it can be. If we exert strenuous effort—Seneca uses the analogy of a sponge diver learning to hold his breath for ever-longer intervals—we can master anger and prevent it from infecting our souls. Along the way, Seneca discusses some disturbing cases in point.
De Ira, for instance, tells of Pastor, a wealthy eques, whose son Caligula had marked as an enemy merely because he had nice hair. (The princeps himself was going bald.) Pastor begged the princeps to spare his son, prompting the peeved Caligula to immediately have the boy killed. After the murder, Caligula brought Pastor to the palace and ordered him to drink wine and put on festive garlands; a soldier stood nearby, watching for signs of discontent. Pastor steeled himself and cheerfully drank the health of his son’s killer. How could he bring himself to do it? asks Seneca, then gives the answer: Pastor had another son (and Caligula knew it).
Not only in Rome, but everywhere and in all times, good men have knuckled under to despots. Elsewhere in De Ira Seneca calls to mind the sufferings of Asian viziers in old Greek legends. Harpagus served as chief minister to a Persian king but offended his master by disregarding an order. The king took a gory revenge: he served Harpagus a stew of his own children’s flesh, then showed him the severed heads to reveal what he had eaten. How did Harpagus like his dinner? the king asked, with Caligulan cruelty. Harpagus’ choking reply was “At a king’s table, every meal is pleasant.” The flattery at least gained him this, Seneca says grimly: he did not have to finish his meal.
De Ira teaches its readers to avoid anger by disregarding injuries. But the cases of Harpagus and Pastor test the limits of this doctrine. It is one thing for a great Stoic to ignore a man who jostled him in the public bath, or even one who spat in his face (two other tales told in De Ira). To accept the murder of one’s children goes beyond anger management, into the realm of moral self-annihilation. Yet Seneca suggests, initially, that this is indeed what his teaching requires. “That’s how one eats and drinks at the tables of kings, and that’s how one replies,” he comments on the tale of Harpagus.
“One must smile at the slaughter of one’s kin.”
Then abruptly, as though shocked at where his own argument has led him, he changes track:
But is life really worth so much? Let us examine this; it’s a different inquiry. We will offer no solace for so desolate a prison house; we will encourage no one to endure the overlordship of butchers. We shall rather show that in every kind of slavery, the road of freedom lies open. I will say to the man whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones, and to him whose master makes fathers banquet on their sons’ guts: “What are you groaning for, fool? … Everywhere you look you find an end to your sufferings. You see that steep drop-off? It leads down to freedom. You see that ocean, that river, that well? Freedom lies at its bottom. You see that short, shriveled, bare tree? Freedom hangs from it.… You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body.”
This rhapsodic hymn to suicide stands as a second landmark in Seneca’s thought, like the equally fervent apocalypse scene in Consolation to Marcia. Stoics had long considered suicide to be a remedy for inescapable ills, including abuse by a cruel despot. But what had been a minor topic among the Greek Stoics became all too central in Rome in the age of the Caesars. Indeed, for Seneca, it became a kind of fixation. In writings throughout his career, he recurs again and again to agonizing questions of how, why, whether, and when to take one’s own life. Later ages decided he had been aptly named, deriving Seneca from the Latin phrase se necare, “to kill oneself.”
The template for Roman political suicide had been set in the previous century, by a man named Marcus Porcius Cato. The last in a long line of famous Catos, an ascetic who trained himself to endure hunger and cold, Cato found himself ranged against Julius Caesar in a civil war of the 40s B.C. The city he governed, Utica in North Africa, was one of the last anti-Caesar strongholds, and after it fell, no hope was left. Cato and a small band of followers fled and took refuge in a friend’s villa, where Cato—who had been reading a serene account of Socrates’ death, Plato’s Phaedo—retired to a private room and fell upon his sword. His companions heard his struggles and rushed to help him; a doctor among them tried to reinsert his viscera and sew up the wound. But Cato, briefly regaining consciousness, ripped out stitches and organs with his own hands and expired.
Bronze portrait bust of Marcus Cato, the legendary Stoic suicide.
The gruesome self-disemboweling came to be seen as an exemplary act of lived philosophy. It showed a heroic devotion to autonomy—the personal freedom that Caesar’s victory had threatened—and a superhuman defiance of pain and fear. As the Caesarean system took hold, Cato’s suicide took on new meaning to those who mourned loss of liberty, shining ever brighter as a moral exemplum. In Seneca’s works, it glows incandescent—as does nearly everything Cato did or said.
But political suicide in Seneca’s day was a different gesture than it was in Cato’s. Often it signaled acquiescence to autocracy rather than defiance. A bizarre compact had been struck between aristocracy and ruler: the princeps would allow his victims to pass on their wealth to their heirs, rather than forfeiting it to the state, if they executed themselves rather than force him to use his Praetorians. They could save self-respect, and avoid the horror of decapitation, if they took their own lives. Their bodies would be accorded due rites of burial. The princeps could then present their death to the public as evidence of guilt, or at least of surrender.
The system had become formalized by the time of Caligula, who kept two notebooks of enemies’ names, titled “Sword” and “Dagger.” The first listed those whom the soldiers would behead; those on the second would open their own veins (an operation requiring a much shorter blade). The state had a vital interest in keeping these categories distinct. In at least one case, a man attempting suicide and on the point of succeeding was rushed as he expired to a place of execution. He managed to die en route, cheating the princeps of an estate.
Even as their lifeblood ebbed away, political suicides knew that the princeps held the power to harm their wives and children. Their last words and gestures were carefully restrained. Wills were altered to give the princeps a sizable share of the property, lest he concoct a pretext to seize it all. The prudent might even insert flattery of the emperor into their suicide notes.
Seneca’s hymn to suicide is thus very much of its time. By his day, suicide had come to signify, for aristocratic victims of the emperors, an inability to fight back; the best one could hope for was to embarrass the princeps by a highly public exit. In De Ira, accordingly, Seneca portrays suicide as an escape route, a way to gain release from the power of kings. What he doesn’t acknowledge, or isn’t aware of, is that suicide can also be a means of fighting back—even though an example was right before his eyes.
Prexaspes was another vizier like Harpagus, a right-hand man to a Persian monarch. His master, Cambyses, a notorious drunk, set out one day to prove to his court that wine did not affect him. He set up an archery course, with Prexaspes’ son as the target; then, good as his word, he shot the boy through the heart. The story is related in De Ira just before the hymn to suicide above (in which Prexaspes is recalled as “the man whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones”). But Seneca leaves the sequel to the story curiously untold.
Years later Prexaspes found himself in possession of dangerous information. He knew that a group of plotters had murdered Cambyses’ heir and put an impostor on the throne. He had colluded with the plot’s leaders, who valued his high standing among the Persian people. When the people became uneasy about their king’s legitimacy, the plotters asked Prexaspes to reassure them.
Prexaspes climbed a high tower in a central square of the capital. From a window at the top, he called out to the populace below—but not as instructed. He denounced the impostor and revealed the plot, confessing that he himself had killed the true heir to the throne, on Cambyses’ orders. Then he launched himself off the tower and fell to his death. Inspired by his deed, the Persians rallied against the conspirators and soon overthrew them and their false king.
Prexaspes’ model was one Seneca never contemplated, though he examined suicide in many forms. In De Ira, he configures the act as something private, passive, nonpolitical. He takes as implicit that regime change cannot happen at Rome, even if good men are willing to die.
That premise would govern the choices Seneca made in his own life and his own political career—which was soon to follow that of Prexaspes all too closely.
The fall of Caligula meant that Agrippina and Livilla, the two exiled sisters of the princeps, could return to Rome. Both now in their twenties, adored by the public as children of Germanicus and victims of their hated brother, these women enjoyed a stature that had never been higher. For some, it was too high.
Both women were beautiful, and one—Agrippina—was known to be fertile. Both were therefore suspected of using sex to gain power. Caligula, when getting them exiled, had accused them not just of backing the usurper Lepidus but of sleeping with him—a charge that played on the entrenched fears of Roman men. For decades, the women of the Caesars had held them in a cathectic spell, appearing to their mind’s eyes as sexual sirens, manipulators, incestuous monsters, or some mixture of these frightening roles.
The sexuality of this sisterly pair was the special worry of Valeria Messalina, the sixteen-year-old wife of the newly installed Claudius (soon to become herself a huge source of male anxiety). From the moment they returned, she regarded the daughters of Germanicus as rivals, even though they were her husband’s nieces. She had already borne Claudius two children, including a son, Britannicus, but she feared the lineage of these two trophy women. Either one could solve a grave problem facing Claudius’ regime, a problem that could be traced back decades earlier to Augustus, the principate’s founder.
Messalina holding her infant son, Britannicus.
Rome’s first princeps had been unlucky in the engendering of sons. Augustus’ line had been carried forward through his sister Octavia
, and through his only natural child, his daughter Julia. Claudius, and Messalina as well—she was his cousin, for the family was narrowly inbred—were descended from Augustus’ sister, as they emphasized by naming their firstborn child Octavia. But Agrippina and Livilla were descended from his daughter. Their direct lineage trumped that of all collaterals.
The principate was not a monarchy—Rome had rejected that institution five centuries earlier and still officially reviled it—and so had no guidelines for succession. Nonetheless, a blood link to the holy figure of Augustus conferred innate legitimacy. The reign of Augustus’ successor, his stepson Tiberius, had taken the throne outside that bloodline, while that of Caligula had restored it. With the accession of Claudius—who had not even been adopted by his predecessor, as Tiberius was adopted by Augustus—the office of princeps and the “royal” line had again parted ways, a situation that made all Rome uneasy.
Messalina had wed Claudius before he became princeps, when it seemed there was no chance he would be one. She had acceptable dynastic stature, but Claudius, significantly, had not allowed her to take the title Augusta, the ultimate mark of female dominion. Her lack of that title meant that Messalina was dispensable. In the imperial family, as she well knew, inconvenient marriages were easily broken so that new ones could be contracted. And the children of such broken unions, especially the males, had a peculiar habit of dying young.
Messalina had two assets with which to defend her place in the palace. The first was her youth, beauty, and warmth, which had a powerful hold on her husband (even if they did not enslave him as our sources represent). The second was her alliance with a canny Greek ex-slave, Narcissus, Claudius’ private secretary. This highly placed staffer knew every trick in the political playbook. Messalina and Narcissus had discovered that if they worked on Claudius in tandem, she in the bedroom and he in offices of state, they could accomplish almost any goal. Their primary goal, in A.D. 41, was to get Livilla and Agrippina off the scene.