Dying Every Day Page 6

  Narcissus survived the Fucine Lake disasters, but they weakened him. Meanwhile Agrippina advanced Pallas, her own freedman partisan, to the lead position in the palace hierarchy. With the support of Agrippina, his patroness and—so the public believed—his lover, Pallas rose to heights never before reached at Rome by a foreigner or a former slave.

  In 52, the Senate, at Agrippina’s behest, awarded Pallas the insignia and powers of a praetor—one-upping Narcissus, who had received only those of a quaestor. Pallas was also offered a vast sum of 15 million sesterces from public funds. When he graciously refused the money—he was already wealthy beyond measure—the Senate ordered that fulsome praises be inscribed on a brass plaque and displayed in the loftiest of places, affixed to a statue of Julius Caesar in the Forum.

  To heap such honors on an ex-slave was an embarrassing show of the Senate’s servility. But one clever senator, Cornelius Scipio, devised a way to save face. An Etruscan prince, also named Pallas, had lived near Rome in mythic times, according to Vergil’s Aeneid, and had died in battle while fighting on the side of Aeneas. Speaking before the Senate, Cornelius addressed the freedman Pallas as “one sprung from the kings of Arcadia,” implying that the shared name indicated lineal descent. The man whom the Senate had just anointed was no mere freedman, but the progeny of an ancient hero.

  Elevating the lowborn or fallen, thereby making them dependent and loyal, was a time-honored strategy for Roman rulers, as it has been for autocrats everywhere. Agrippina had already used it to great effect with her recruitment of Seneca, whom, like Pallas, she had gotten appointed praetor. Their shared reliance on Agrippina gave Seneca and Pallas, the Roman moral philosopher and the Greek palace lackey, something in common. Both men, moreover, had seen their brothers promoted to coveted positions—another tactic by which Agrippina bound supporters to herself. For a man who had a brother in high office had two lives at stake, should the empress become displeased.

  By a curious coincidence, the careers of these two brothers—Seneca’s older brother Novatus, and Pallas’ brother Antonius Felix—are bound together by an unlikely thread: the travels of the apostle Paul.

  Paul was among the followers of a man whom the Romans knew as Christus or Chrestus, if any at Rome had yet even heard his name. In the 50s the movement begun by this man was still a minor and foreign disturbance, a doctrinal dispute among Jews in the East, especially in the territories that the Romans called Judaea (Israel, Palestine, and neighboring regions) and Achaea (Greece). As things turned out, Seneca’s brother Novatus—by this time he had taken the name of a wealthy aristocrat who had adopted him, and was called Gallio—was serving as proconsul, or governor, of Achaea in the early 50s, just when Paul arrived there.

  Felix, brother of Pallas, had taken up a parallel post in Judaea at the same time. Judaea was then a nominally independent kingdom, governed by its own monarchy, but Roman agents like Felix, called procurators, nonetheless helped keep the peace there.

  Paul’s travels through Greece resulted in his famous epistles to the Corinthians, in which he explained his new doctrines to skeptical Jews. The head rabbi of Corinth, Sosthenes, was in fact sympathetic to Paul and allowed him to teach in the city’s synagogue. But the congregants were angered by what they regarded as heresy. They brought Paul before Gallio, Seneca’s brother, and demanded punishment.

  Gallio had no desire to meddle in the doctrinal disputes of zealous monotheists. Since no crime had been committed, Gallio declared, a Roman proconsul had no role to play in Paul’s fate. Like Pontius Pilate, who had faced a similar situation decades earlier in Jerusalem, Gallio washed his hands of the matter. He even refused to intervene when the Jewish plaintiffs vented their frustration on Sosthenes and beat him to death outside Gallio’s chambers.

  The episode has earned Gallio a small, undistinguished place in the Bible, in chapter 18 of Acts of the Apostles. Meanwhile in Judaea, Felix, brother of Pallas, was having his own difficulties with the Jews. These too would be recorded in Acts of the Apostles, at greater length than Gallio’s because they had far greater repercussions.

  Felix was a violent and selfish man. He provoked Jewish ire from the moment he landed in Caesarea, Judaea’s administrative capital. When the Jews’ head rabbi, Jonathan, began carping at him, Felix hired thugs to stab the man to death with the short daggers they carried under their cloaks. These coldhearted assassins had a ruthlessly effective technique: they struck stealthily, then hid their daggers and, rather than run away, melded into the crowd surrounding their victim. The Sicarii, “dagger men,” became Felix’s personal hit squad and began terrorizing the province.

  Tensions in Judaea rose to alarming levels. An insurrectionist known as “the Egyptian” gathered thousands of followers for an attack on the Roman garrison in Jerusalem. Felix countered by unleashing his troops on the crowd. The walls of the holy city were drenched in gore. A man who did not belong in a sensitive post, put there because his brother had friends in high places, was trying to hold on to power by the brutal use of force.

  In the midst of this violent upheaval, the apostle Paul sailed from Greece to Judaea, continuing his mission to the Jews of the East. Despite numerous prophecies that he would meet disaster in Jerusalem, he made his way to the holy city, just as the Roman search for the insurgent “Egyptian” was in full force.

  One day a Roman officer in Jerusalem learned that someone was causing an uproar inside the Jews’ holiest shrine, the Temple. He thought it must be the Egyptian and had the man arrested and hauled away for torture. But then he heard his prisoner speaking in civilized Greek. It was Paul he had captured. The uproar had been caused by Jews outraged at Paul’s teachings, just as the Jews of Corinth had been outraged. Paul was thrown into prison by authorities who had no idea what to do with him, a pattern that was to prevail for the rest of his life.

  Eventually Paul was taken to Caesarea and brought before Felix and his wife Drusilla, daughter of the Jewish royal family. Felix was impressed by what he heard about universal love and salvation through faith. Over the next two years, Felix had Paul fetched from his cell on several occasions, and he and Drusilla listened raptly to his preachings. It was a strange confluence that brought a Jewish princess, a Christian apostle, and the brother of Claudius’ most powerful freedman together in the same room, but such were the complexities of the Roman world in the first century A.D. Stranger still was the fact that Paul, the only person in that room with no freedom, wealth, or power, was also the only Roman citizen.

  Felix was finally recalled from his procuratorial post in A.D. 60. His abuses of power would surely have incurred punishment, except that his connection to Pallas placed him beyond the law. He left Paul to rot in jail in Caesarea, but Paul invoked his legal right to an appeal before the emperor himself. Paul was shipped off to Rome, still a prisoner, but on arrival he was allowed enough freedom of movement that he was able to proselytize, crossing paths perhaps with his fellow apostle Peter.

  Almost nothing is known of Paul’s life in Rome. But a curious legend holds that while there, he struck up a warm friendship with Seneca.

  A collection of letters survives that purports to be a correspondence between Seneca and Paul, each expressing admiration of the other’s teachings and even arranging meetings to learn more. Almost certainly these letters are spurious, but the idea that the two great moralists of their age were in some kind of dialogue is hard to resist. Their two ethical systems, Stoicism and Christianity, had much in common, and early Church fathers would one day consider Seneca a kind of proto-Christian, based partly on the “evidence” of his correspondence with Paul.

  Felix’s departure from Judaea did not bring the troubles there to an end. Subsequent Roman procurators continued to use the Sicarii as hit men and squeezed the province badly with tax levies. Late in Nero’s reign, a second revolt would break out there, far more serious than that of the Egyptian. Rome would finally crush Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and destroy its Temple, leaving only one wall—today’s Wes
tern Wall—standing in place.

  But by that time, Paul would be dead—as would Seneca, Pallas, Gallio, and the entire imperial family. Felix alone, of all those who came to prominence in this treacherous era, would ride out its turbulent currents and survive into the next.

  While Felix was being taught by Paul in Judaea, Seneca was conducting lessons in a different classroom, in Rome. His student, heir apparent to rule the Roman Empire, was in dire need (as time would prove) of his teachings. But Seneca did not have a free hand in setting the curriculum, or in anything he did for that matter.

  Agrippina did not think much of philosophy and did not want her son exposed to it. Intellectual musings, she felt, were not what a future emperor needed. She wanted her son taught the more practical arts he would need as princeps, above all rhetoric and declamation. The emphasis that these subjects got is attested by Tacitus, who imagined Nero giving credit to Seneca, later in life, for his eloquence. “You taught me not only how to express myself with prepared remarks, but how to improvise,” the princeps tells his tutor, a remark no doubt invented by Tacitus but based on primary research.

  Eloquence was still an essential concomitant of power in Rome, even under the autocracy. A princeps was expected to deliver speeches, in both Latin and Greek, before the Senate, the army, and the populace. His security might depend on how well he handled these situations and whether he could show confidence and control. The style of the speech mattered, too, for verbal elegance helped carry conviction and project power.

  At some point, possibly as early as Nero’s first public declamation at age thirteen, Seneca began serving not only as a speaking coach but as speechwriter. This was a new thing in the history of the principate. Earlier emperors had written their own public addresses, each in his own distinctive style. But Nero’s literary interests ran to poetry, especially plangent odes set to the music of the Greek lyre. He had little inclination toward the more sober medium of Latin prose. Beyond that, he was a passionate fan of the chariot races, a far more exciting diversion than could be found in forensic rhetoric.

  Early in his career, Seneca himself had had ambitions as an orator and had spoken well enough to draw the envy of Caligula. But chronic respiratory illness made public speaking hard for him. Looking back on this early period, he wrote that he had stopped wanting to speak in public and that he had stopped being able—presumably because of his weak chest. Now he had the chance to get his words heard across much of the globe. His partnership with Nero, in this arena at least, was highly complementary.

  There was another way in which Nero and Seneca complemented each other: the teenage boy lacked a father, and the fifty-year-old man lacked a son. Indeed, the infant son that Seneca had lost to illness, on the eve of his exile to Corsica, would have been just a few years younger than Nero, had he lived. Seneca had never had another child and never would. Nero, for his part, had lost his father at age three and had spent his life in the care of powerful women: his paternal aunt Domitia Lepida and the formidable Agrippina. For a boy just entering adolescence, the presence of a mature male teacher—even one whose temperament differed radically from his own—must have been a source of comfort.

  Tacitus, who knew far more about this relationship than we do, attests that it included bonds of affection. Imagining how Nero might have looked back on these years, the historian has the princeps say to Seneca: “You nurtured my boyhood, then my youth, with your wisdom, advice, and teachings. As long as my life lasts, the gifts you have given me will be eternal.” He goes on to call Seneca praecipuus caritate, foremost in the ranks of those he holds dear. The phrase is ironic, given that the two men had by this time come to hate each other. But Tacitus regarded them as words Nero might plausibly have used.

  Seneca never described what went on in these palace tutorials or discussed his in loco parentis role. He once wrote disdainfully, in general terms, about students who sought out teachers “for the sake of improving their talents but not their souls.” Perhaps he had the young Nero in mind.

  Seneca’s own education had been very different. At Nero’s age, he had “laid siege” to Attalus’ classroom, arriving early and staying late by the side of his great Stoic model. Now he was limited to practical instruction. But he had a chance, if only by way of his presence, to change the future princeps for the better. And by changing a princeps, he might change the world.

  In A.D. 53, under a bloodred sky that seemed to onlookers to be on fire, Nero was married to Octavia, daughter of Claudius. He was then sixteen years old, she a few years younger. The celebrations at Rome must have been intense, though no descriptions have survived. By the union of this pair, the two sides of the imperial family would be fused, and a half-century-old problem resolved. The principate’s future would be on a much sounder footing—provided the couple could have children.

  But Nero was not eager to impregnate his wife. Marriage to Octavia was an unwelcome prospect. He had known her for years as his adoptive sister, long enough to know she was not at all his type. Reserved and decorous, high-minded and proper, she was the last partner he would have chosen for himself, to judge by his later selections.

  According to Suetonius, some members of the court suggested to Nero, no doubt delicately, that he ought to show his wife more affection. Nero’s reply was imperious. “She should be content with uxoria ornamenta—the trappings of a wife,” he said, punning on the ornamenta consularia, the consular regalia sometimes awarded as a hollow show to men who were not in fact consuls.

  Octavia could not have cared much for Nero either. The author of Octavia thought the union broke down thanks to her dislike of him, not the other way around. “The soul of my wife was never joined to mine,” he imagines Nero complaining to Seneca, almost petulantly, some eight years down the road.

  It did not matter much how the young couple felt about each other, for imperial unions were hardly love matches. Their function was to produce an heir and to win Roman hearts by showing them a model of virtuous womanhood. From this second perspective, Octavia made an ideal empress. The Romans liked what they had seen thus far of her sobriety and self-possession. As time went on, Octavia’s popularity would rise ever higher, and Nero’s mistreatment of her, as will be seen, would provoke riots in the city’s streets.

  Seneca’s marriage was very different—a true partnership, if we judge by his rare mentions of it in his extant works. In one of them, he describes his wife’s tender fretting when he insists making a journey while ill. “Her life’s breath depends on mine,” Seneca wrote to his friend, a man named Lucilius. “I can’t ask her to be any braver in her love for me, so she asks me to love myself more carefully” (that is, to take better care of himself). It’s one of few candid glimpses we have of Seneca’s family life—if even this one can be taken as authentic.

  The woman who was so anxious over Seneca’s safety was Pompeia Paulina, the daughter of an eques from Gaul. Seneca had been married to her since at least 49 but possibly a good deal earlier. We don’t know whether it was Paulina, or an anonymous first wife, who bore him a short-lived son in 41 or who sat beside him later in the 40s, as pictured in De Ira, while he reckoned up his moral failings each night. He does not name the spouse with whom he shared those moments. If it was indeed Paulina, she must have been less than twenty years old when he married her, for he makes clear in the letter to Lucilius that Paulina was a good deal younger than he.

  For Paulina and her family, marital connection to a palace insider brought swift political advancement. Pompeius Paulinus, Seneca’s father-in-law, attained the high office of praefectus annonae, superintendent of Rome’s grain supply, at around the time Seneca became Nero’s tutor. Seneca’s rising fortunes were lifting those of his entire family—but the effect could be reversed if those fortunes fell. In fact, Paulinus seems to have suffered just such a reversal in 55, in an episode reflected in one of Seneca’s moral treatises.

  In 55, Seneca suffered a setback at court at the hands of Agrippina, who by then had
become his determined rival. Agrippina flaunted her victory by installing one of her partisans, Faenius Rufus, as praefectus annonae—which meant that Paulinus, Seneca’s father-in-law, had to step down. Demotion would embarrass both Seneca and Paulinus, unless it could be portrayed as something voluntary and noble: a philosophic retreat. Such, it seems, was in part the purpose of Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae, “On the Shortness of Life,” a treatise addressed to Paulinus and urging him toward just such a retreat.

  “Withdraw yourself into calmer, safer, and greater things,” Seneca told his wife’s father. “Do you think these tasks are comparable: to see that grain is transferred to storehouses without being pilfered or neglected in transit, that it’s not damaged by moisture or exposed to heat, that it tallies up by weight and measure; or to approach these holy and lofty matters: to learn what substance God is made of, what experience awaits your soul, what it is that holds the heavy matter of this earth in the middle of the cosmos, raises lighter things above it, and drives the fiery stars to its highest point?”

  De Brevitate Vitae is much more than a call to one man to retire. It roams over a wide turf and addresses a wide audience. Seneca here expounds some of his central ideas about time, mortality, and the quest for a good life. Only philosophic contemplation, he argues, can fulfill that quest. Only those who study philosophy are truly alive, in that they move outside the prison of time into the realm of eternals. All others, those who follow worldly pursuits, are squandering their time, merely running out the ever-ticking clock of mortality.

  The final address to Paulinus stands out from the treatise, and from Seneca’s other works, by its pointedness and detail. Nowhere else did Seneca deal with the unique circumstances of his addressee. The anomaly has struck many readers, including Miriam Griffin, a leading Seneca scholar. It was Griffin who first proposed that De Brevitate Vitae—which cannot on other grounds be dated—was written soon after Paulinus’ dismissal from office. On this theory, the work’s final segment is an ingenious face-saving device, a loftier version of the modern cliché about wanting to spend more time with family.