Dying Every Day Page 4

  Livilla was married, so it was an easy matter to charge her with adultery, a criminal offense. No hard evidence was needed, only a demonstrably close tie to a man other than her spouse. Livilla had such a tie—to Seneca. She was charged, tried, convicted, and sent back to the Pontine Islands, less than a year after leaving them. She had survived most of Caligula’s reign on those obscure rocks, but this time her persecutors were more diligent. Within a few months, she was dead.

  As her alleged partner in crime, Seneca was tried in the Senate, and one would give a lot to read the speech he made there. Perhaps Tacitus, that great chronicler of noble futility, recorded it in the now-lost portion of the Annals; he recorded many other speeches made by senators forced to defend themselves before colleagues forced to convict them. Seneca’s case was particularly hopeless. The Senate not only condemned him but voted a death sentence, a harsh measure showing that someone, perhaps Messalina, considered him a threat. Claudius, however, wary of going too far, stepped in and commuted the sentence to exile, on Corsica.

  Agrippina somehow escaped Messalina’s wrath. It perhaps helped her cause that she was related to the empress; her sister-in-law Domitia was Messalina’s mother. But aid from that quarter ended in 42, when Domitia’s rich husband, Passienus Crispus, divorced her to marry Agrippina instead.

  Probably Agrippina survived because her sister had died before her. She was now the last of a revered line, and she had borne a son. Domitius, now five years old, was a precious dynastic asset, the only male alive descended from both Germanicus and Augustus. Claudius and Messalina, sprung from a collateral line, thrust into power without support of the Senate or the people, reliant on the Guard and on Greek freedmen staffers whose loyalty was born of total dependence, were too weak to kill this mother and son—much though Messalina might have wished to.

  Stripped of half his property, drummed out of the Senate, and having just buried an infant son—the only child he and his wife would ever have—Seneca made his weary way to Corsica.

  The island on which he landed was no barren Pontine crag. Corsica had two Roman towns and many smaller settlements; among its diverse population, which included Ligurians, Spaniards, and Greeks, Seneca could find cultured countrymen. But in his first essay written there, a consolatory letter to his mother Helvia, Seneca transformed the place into an island fit for a Crusoe. He gloried in the role of unaccommodated man, living happily on what Nature provided.

  “It is the mind that makes us rich,” he told his mother, to dissuade her from mourning his fate. “The mind enjoys a wealth of its own goods, even in the harshest wilderness, so long as it finds what is enough to keep the body alive.” These words might have been written by Thoreau at Walden Pond, although the terms of Seneca’s exile, which allowed him to keep half his estate, gave him access to ready cash.

  Corsica, as Seneca conjured it in Consolation to Helvia, was an ideal proving ground for the main Stoic tenet: true happiness comes from Reason, a force allied with Nature and with God. All that Seneca had left behind—senatorial rank, half his property, and what he called gratia, the public esteem he had won as a writer, a thinker, and a decent, fair-minded man—were “indifferents” in Stoic terms, inconsequential to the search for a good life. Of far greater consequence were the beauties that now surrounded him, especially the clear sky above—the sacred source from which, for the Stoics, the reasoning mind was sprung.

  In his open letter to his mother, Seneca described in rapturous terms his observations of that sky, especially at night. He tracked carefully the phases of the moon and the motions of stars and planets. “So long as I can dwell with these, and lose myself—to the degree allowed to humans—in celestial things, what does it matter where I set my feet?” Closeness to the night sky was a kind of union with the Divine.

  Rome, the city that had blocked the sky with walls and ceilings, appears in this letter as a monster of arrogance, ransacking the world to satisfy its gluttony. Edunt ut vomant, vomunt ut edant (“They eat to vomit, and vomit to eat”), writes Seneca in Consolation to Helvia. He describes the case of Apicius, Rome’s greatest gourmand, who squandered a fortune on exotic shellfish, game birds, and delicacies. When his money began to run out, Apicius drank poison and killed himself. “His last draught was the most healthful he ever took,” Seneca says, combining one favorite theme, overconsumption, with a second, suicide.

  Why would any devoted Stoic, having found a paradise of Reason beneath a benign firmament, ever return to the cesspool called Rome?

  The question goes to the heart of the enigma of Seneca’s life. Seneca’s friends and supporters recognized its importance, for they suggested, in the play Octavia and elsewhere, that his return to Rome from Corsica, eight years after leaving the city, was not voluntary. But Seneca gives them the lie in his own writings. In a second open letter from exile, probably written a year or two after the first, Seneca showed, obliquely but urgently, that he was desperate to be recalled by the emperor Claudius.

  Claudius had firmed up his rule in those years, especially with an important military victory, the conquest of southern Britain. The princeps himself had symbolically led the final assault on Camulodunum, the center of resistance, though he spent only sixteen days on the other side of the Channel. It was enough for the Senate to grant him a triumphal parade in 44 and to dub him Britannicus, a title he humbly handed down to his son. As the date of his celebration approached, Claudius felt strong enough to pardon a few of his enemies. Seneca, who was no doubt following events from Corsica, hoped to be one of them.

  The poet Ovid, banished from Rome decades earlier, had tried to win recall by barraging Augustus with groveling, flattering poems. Seneca took a different route. He addressed not the princeps himself but one of his highly placed staffers, a freedman named Polybius. Polybius had recently lost a brother, and Seneca seized the opportunity to send him a consolation, as he had earlier done with Marcia. His Consolation to Polybius survives nearly intact—though Seneca might wish it had not.

  The shining Arcadia of the soul that Seneca had described in his first letter from Corsica has collapsed into dust in the second. His island is no longer a healthful bounty of Nature but a brutal, sterile rock. Seneca suggests, without saying so directly, that a man of refined mind must not be left to rot in such a place. Borrowing a trick from Ovid, he apologizes for the clumsiness of his style, claiming that hearing only the rude clamor of barbarian speech has damaged his ear for Latin.

  Seneca’s letter to Polybius repeats Stoic remedies for grief that he earlier preached to Marcia. But he has added a new one, tailored to the needs of a courtier. “When you wish to forget all your cares, think of Caesar,” he wrote, referring to Claudius. “So long as he is safe, your family is well and you are in no way harmed.… He is your everything.” A courtier’s joy flows from the princeps he serves; and this particular princeps, Seneca goes on to say, brings joy supreme. “Whenever tears well up in your eyes, turn them toward Caesar; they will be dried by the sight of his greatest, most glorious godhead. His radiance will dull them so that they can behold nothing else, but will keep them fixed on himself.”

  Repugnant though this flattery might be, one can still be impressed by the ingenious way it is framed. Seneca could have fawned like Ovid, but instead he cleverly wove his plea into a high-minded work of philosophy. He measured out his obsequies with an expert eye. The right amount might do the trick yet not destroy his image or his self-esteem, should Claudius turn a deaf ear. Literary art, that supremely supple tool of which he was a supremely subtle master, could advance him in two ways at once, both as a political player and as a moral thinker.

  But in this case, he failed on both scores. The effusions of Consolation to Polybius proved such an embarrassment that later, according to Dio, Seneca sought to have them suppressed. Nor was the work effective in winning him favor at court. Whatever Polybius made of it, Claudius passed Seneca by when inviting back other exiles to share his British triumph. For the next five years,
he showed no concern for the Stoic languishing on Corsica. Seneca, to our knowledge, did not try again to beseech him.

  Thus things might have remained, except that impotens Fortuna—Fortune that cannot be resisted, in the phrasing of the play Octavia—played its hand. A bizarre series of events in the year 48 put Agrippina into Messalina’s place as empress and gave her the means to return Seneca, her old friend and ally, to Rome.

  For almost seven years, Messalina continued as Claudius’ wife but without the title Augusta that would have sealed her dynastic position. During those seven years, Agrippina, an attractive woman with a better lineage, had haunted the palace, and at some point she became a widow for a second time, inheriting a second fortune. Perhaps because of Agrippina’s availability, or her own mental instability, Messalina felt her position deteriorating. In 48 she elected to try a new tack.

  In a strangely unconcealed ritual, Messalina “married” a handsome, aristocratic lover, Gaius Silius, while her real husband, Claudius, was away from Rome. Silius had vowed to adopt Britannicus, son and heir of Claudius, as his own son. It was a kind of marital coup d’état. But without strong military backing, which Messalina seems not to have secured, it was doomed to fail. Soldiers confined Messalina in her private estate, the Lucullan gardens—today the grounds of the Villa Borghese—and, on orders issued by the palace, forced her to take her own life.

  For the first time in eight decades of the principate, a widower with young children occupied the throne. The question of remarriage was a thorny one. Claudius wanted a new wife, but did he want a new heir? The public and the army had hailed Britannicus, but all were aware of his lack of Julian blood, and perhaps some also knew he had epilepsy. Descended through a collateral line going back only to Augustus’ sister, he fell short of full legitimacy. Would not Britannicus forever struggle, as Claudius himself had struggled, with rivals who could claim descent from Augustus himself?

  At some point, Claudius decided to scrap all previous dynastic assumptions and start his family over. He would marry Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus and great-granddaughter of Augustus. And even more significantly, he would betroth his daughter Octavia to Agrippina’s son, Domitius. His own son Britannicus might thereby lose his chance at succession. But the chance that he himself could hold on to rule, and that his future grandsons would enjoy it, would be greatly enhanced. As had often been true in the Julian clan, what the male side lacked in legitimacy could be made up by the female.

  Obstacles, however, stood in the way of this scheme. First, Agrippina, though widowed, available, and wealthy to boot, was, inopportunely, Claudius’ niece. A decree had to be obtained from the Senate to allow the incestuous union. Second, Octavia, the emperor’s daughter, now perhaps eight years old, was not free to marry Domitius. For years, she had been promised to Lucius Junius Silanus, who was, like Domitius himself, a direct descendant of the mighty Augustus.

  Claudius had already built up high expectations for Silanus’ future. He had put on a set of gladiatorial games in the man’s honor and allowed him to wear a gold coronet and the toga picta, a purple-dyed garment suggesting royalty. Getting such an esteemed man dismissed from the imperial family would not be easy. Claudius and Agrippina called on Vitellius, their most trusted senatorial lackey, for help in blackening Silanus’ name. Vitellius was father-in-law to Silanus’ sister, giving him access to inside information—or at least, the right to pretend so.

  Vitellius told the Senate that Silanus had been sexually intimate with his sister Junia. The allegation of incest must have struck many as ironic, under a regime headed by an uncle who was going to marry his niece. But the charge was nonetheless scandalous and damning. Silanus was thrown out of the Senate, and his sister was banished. His engagement with Octavia was null and void.

  Rome watched the disbanding of one union and the forging of another—and registered the new course that the palace had set out on. To highlight this fresh start, Claudius set his wedding for New Year’s Day, of the year we know as A.D. 49. For Romans, January 1 was inauguration day, when high officials began their term of office. Agrippina made ready to take the highest office available to a Roman woman, that of Augusta—the title that was long withheld from Messalina but that Claudius would confer on her soon after their marriage.

  On December 29, Lucius Junius Silanus was removed from his praetorship by senatorial decree. He had but two days left in his term, but Claudius meant to make a point. A man polluted by incest could not be left in office even a moment longer than necessary, lest he contaminate the state.

  Lucius had joined what would be a long line of victims from the doomed clan of the Junii Silani. Another Junius Silanus, Appius, had preceded him. Afraid of Appius’ popularity, Claudius had had him executed on no more pretext than a bad dream reported by Messalina and one of his freedmen. When justifying his act to the Senate, Claudius, apparently without irony, thanked these two for keeping watch over the state even while asleep.

  Was life under such arbitrary power worth living? It was the question Seneca had posed in De Ira and, in a different way, in Consolation to Marcia. For Lucius Junius Silanus, the answer—no—was clear enough. Three days after his dismissal, on the same day Claudius wed Agrippina, he took his own life.

  It was about this time that Agrippina brought about Seneca’s recall from Corsica. The Stoic sage returned to a Rome that had been shaken by yet another high-level suicide of a political victim. Some things had changed while he had been away, notably the regime’s attitude toward him. But the powerlessness of those oppressed by the princeps, leaving only one avenue of escape, had not.

  CHAPTER 2

  Regicide

  (A.D. 49–54)

  Some said the world would end in fire; some said, in water.

  Seneca’s Stoic masters had taught that fire would bring to a close the present age of the world. Tongues of flame arising from the outer cosmos would rise in intensity until they scorched away all living things and all traces of humanity. Then, like a phoenix rising from its predecessor’s ashes, life, and civilization, would begin again. Seneca adapted the cyclical scheme in Consolation to Marcia by making water, not fire, the agent of destruction. This made the apocalypse more imminent, for the fatal waters could arise from beneath our very feet, at any moment.

  The Stoic cycle of death and rebirth was a purely natural event; it was not caused by an angry or punishing god. Yet because it always set human development back to zero, it raised the implicit question of how far that development could go. As in the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, the very complexity of civilization seemed to carry the seeds of its own destruction—or at least to have a fixed terminus, reached at a regular point every few thousand years.

  To Seneca, who lived in a city that had reached unimagined levels of sophistication, that terminus seemed not far off. Wealthy Romans could not only obtain snow and ice from mountain summits to cool their drinks and bathing pools—a practice Seneca deplored—they could dine on rare birds and shellfish and watch the combats of wild animals brought from all corners of the world. The reach and scope of the empire in the mid-first century A.D., its ability even to cross the English Channel and seize territory beyond, struck Seneca’s mind not merely as a triumph of power and technology but as a sign that apocalypse was near.

  That, at least, seems to be the message of his play Medea, written perhaps not long after Claudius conquered southern Britain in A.D. 43.

  The story of Medea, as told by Seneca—retooling the more famous Greek drama by Euripides—was a parable about the perils of progress. Before Jason’s voyage to Colchis (modern Armenia), there had been no ships and no seafaring. Earth’s peoples had simply stayed in the lands where they were born. Then the Argo was built, a ship with supernatural powers. Jason crossed the Black Sea, seeking the golden fleece, and brought Medea home to Corinth along with that treasure. A fiery barbarian princess landed in a Greek city, and years later, when Jason’s affections turned, a royal line was destroyed in
a savage killing spree.

  The breakthrough wrought by Jason’s voyage had since increased a thousandfold, Seneca observes in his play’s most famous passage. Where once a single ship had disturbed the natural order, Rome had now filled the seas with traffic, scrambling the races and dissolving global boundaries. Because of Rome, the Persians, dwellers on the river Euphrates, now drank the Rhine instead, while the sun-baked Indian sipped the frozen streams of Siberia. “The all-traveled earth leaves nothing in the place it once was,” laments the chorus of Corinthians, speaking, as their obvious anachronisms reveal, with Seneca’s own voice.

  At the climax of this rush toward chaos, Seneca places the Roman invasion of Britain, an event he refers to obliquely by invoking the legendary island of Thule. Thule was thought to lie in the icy waters west of Britain—some have identified it with Ireland, the Hebrides, or even Iceland—and to form a natural limit to human travel. Attempts to reach it by Roman fleets had been blocked, according to one writer, by the slushiness of northern seas. Vergil, in the epic poem Aeneid, completed about 19 B.C., had given Thule its famous epithet ultima, implying it could never be surpassed.

  But in Medea, Seneca imagined that it would be:

  An age will come, in later years,

  when Ocean will loose the bonds of things,

  and earth’s great breadth will stand revealed;

  Tethys will disclose new worlds,

  and Thule no longer be last among lands.

  These lines close the ode in which Seneca charts the parabolic progress of seafaring. That arc will end with Ocean and his wife Tethys—gods who represent the waters surrounding the world—bringing an epoch of history to a close. The smashing of the barrier formed by Thule, Seneca predicts, will bring a revelation of novos orbes, “new worlds,” a phrase that has rung with unintended meaning since 1492. (Renaissance scholars quoted these lines as a prophecy of the discovery of America, and Columbus’ own son scrawled a memo to that effect in the family copy of Seneca’s plays.)