Dying Every Day Read online

  In fact, there is more than satire and holiday fun in Apocolocyntosis. Even in its first sentence, the work employs a complex mixture of serious and comic tones. The dateline includes the phrase anno novo, “in the first year,” as though Nero’s accession has begun the world anew, ushering in “a most blessed age.” In these phrases Seneca appears to be playing it straight; even while lampooning the recently deceased princeps, he lavishes praise on the current one. It’s a tricky balancing act—and it gets even trickier as the praise becomes more elaborate.

  Seneca describes the snipping of Claudius’ thread in lines of tragic verse, parodically grandiose in style. But the tone turns suddenly rapturous when the author’s attention turns to Nero. The Fates are seen spinning a new life, using an endless, and golden, thread. The god Apollo appears to proclaim that this golden life will bring a new golden age. He compares the man it represents to the sun rising up after long night. “That’s the kind of Caesar who’s come,” Apollo effuses; “that’s the Nero Rome will soon gaze upon.”

  The lines ring out like a martial anthem in the midst of an opera buffa. Seneca wrapped this flattery inside a comic, satiric package, just as he had wrapped praise of Claudius inside his philosophic Consolation to Polybius. That work of ten years earlier was patently out of date, now that Claudius was down and Nero was up, and Seneca, according to Cassius Dio, tried to have it suppressed. In another decade, he would have cause to regret these verses of Apocolocyntosis as well.

  With this weird combination of back-slapping levity and solemn fanfare, Seneca enacted for the public his close bond with the princeps. Together they could have a laugh kicking dirt on Claudius’ corpse. The work has the feel of an inside joke, shared in the clubby atmosphere of a palace back room. One theory holds that it was composed for a single Saturnalian banquet, with Nero himself enjoying the fun—and flattery—between goblets of Falernian wine.

  Rome now had the youngest ruler the Western world had ever seen. Even Alexander the Great, the paragon of precocity, had entered his third decade before assuming rule over Macedon and starting his conquest of the East. Nero was still sixteen, yet reigned over an empire larger than Alexander’s had ever been. And his talent for leadership, his inclinations toward command and rule, were nothing like Alexander’s. Lacking in self-assurance, easily seduced by fantasies and whims, Nero was going to be vulnerable to intimidation and control. So at least his mother might hope, for it was she who planned to control him.

  Nero’s youth, idealized for public consumption in the vigorous portrait statues of the day, posed a welcome contrast to the decrepitude of Claudius. Rome’s hopes for a bold new beginning were high. Poems and pamphlets—among them Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis—proclaimed the dawn of a new golden age. Such sentiments were by now de rigueur at the accession of an emperor, but they seemed more convincing when addressed to a trim, athletic, moderately handsome teenager.

  Beneath the celebratory mood lurked painful memories of the last youthful princeps, Caligula, installed at age twenty-five amid equally bright expectations. Within two years the energies of that youth had turned to sadistic caprice. No outward signs had forewarned of Caligula’s madness; just so, there was no way to know, at Nero’s accession, what weaknesses were lurking in the boy’s nature. The principate, that great magnifier of mental flaws, would bring them out in time—but few could have guessed how soon.

  Other than Agrippina, Seneca was closest to Nero and best able to gauge his fitness to rule. If the sage harbored fears for the future, he never expressed them—or at least, never more pointedly than his fervid depictions of a coming apocalypse. He must have harbored doubts, having seen in Caligula’s case that youthful arrogance and absolute power made an explosive combination. If we can trust a report by Suetonius, Seneca had had a dream, on the night after his appointment as Nero’s tutor, that he was in fact teaching Caligula. The story, perhaps spurious, supplies our only clue that Seneca, after one brief look into Nero’s soul, might have dreaded the path before him.

  Caligula was not the only nightmare that the Roman elite were trying to escape. Claudius, too, had murdered large numbers of them (or in a more generous mood, had forced them to commit suicide). He had used the vague charge of maiestas, treason, to arrest his enemies, then tried them in secret proceedings within closed chambers of the palace. Messalina and palace freedmen often joined him on these tribunals, sitting in judgment over men indicted on their say-so. Acting in concert with high courtiers, playing on Claudius’ fears and superstitions, his wife and her allies had often goaded the emperor into a guilty verdict.

  Claudius’ regime was widely disliked by the Senate for these abuses. But Claudius was also the source of Nero’s legitimacy, since it was he who had adopted and promoted the boy. The first challenge facing the new princeps was what posture to take toward his predecessor. A balance had to be struck between the reverence befitting a son and protégé, and the reckoning up of past abuses.

  The task of navigating between these poles fell to Seneca, who now took up his official duties as speechwriter. In his first big assignment, however, Seneca stumbled.

  Claudius’ funeral was an elaborate ceremony held six days after the emperor’s death. Nero delivered the eulogy, before the assembled Roman elite. Seneca framed the speech in heroic language, seeking to reaffirm the power of the principate and the close bonds between Claudius and Nero. But he miscalculated and overshot his target. As Nero read out fulsome praises of Claudius, snickers could be heard in the crowd. Seneca had crossed the line—unintentionally this time—into satire.

  Nero in his late teens.

  The historian Tacitus, writing many years later, notes the sophistication of the funeral speech and remarks on Seneca’s “pleasing talent, well suited to the ears of that time.” Given the patent fictions the speech contained, this praise is ambiguous, one of Tacitus’ many multilayered comments on Seneca’s career. “The ears of that time,” after all, were accustomed to hearing doublespeak and empty flattery. Tacitus was himself both a writer and a courtier, who had survived the reign of the despotic Domitian only by carefully adapting his words. He had sympathy for Seneca’s plight—but a certain contempt as well.

  Whatever ground the new regime lost in this first address was quickly made up in the second. Nero’s inaugural speech to the Senate, again composed by Seneca, struck all the notes that the beleaguered senators longed to hear. The practice of holding closed-door trials would stop. The new princeps would not act as sole judge, nor delegate power to freedmen lackeys, as his predecessor had done. The Senate would have its ancient dignity, and many of its lost jurisdictions, back again. “My youth was not troubled by civil wars and family feuds,” Nero proclaimed, distinguishing himself from previous palace-raised emperors. “I bring with me no hatreds, no scars, no lust for vengeance.”

  The promise of a clean slate, a return to amity between ruler and aristocracy, coming from one so young and so seemingly sincere, stirred the senators deeply. They voted to have this speech inscribed on a column covered with silver plate and read aloud every year in the Senate house when incoming consuls took office. It was an unprecedented honor for a public address. A compact of mutual respect had been struck between Senate and princeps, as in the days of Augustus. The nightmare of Caligula seemed to be gone, the policies summed up in a slogan that Seneca quoted on three occasions, always with revulsion: Oderint dum metuant—“Let them hate, as long as they fear.”

  In framing this compact for Nero, Seneca was addressing his own former colleagues. A senator himself, though now working for the palace, he had a unique role to play, well suited to his diplomatic mien. He had been a victim of Claudian injustice, at first sentenced to death, then exiled to Corsica after the sentence was commuted. He knew abuse of power at first hand. No one had better credibility as an advocate of restraint.

  The ideas Seneca put into the inaugural speech share a common outlook with De Ira, which by now was certainly in circulation. That work taught the pow
erful and proud that it was better to ignore a wrong than stoop to anger. “To fight against an equal is risky; against a higher-up, insane; against someone beneath you, degrading,” Seneca wrote in De Ira. He gave the example of Cato, that Stoic nonpareil who, when spat upon in public by an adversary, merely wiped his face and returned a good-natured quip. If one could not turn a blind eye, one could at least forgive, knowing that all human beings are prone to do wrong.

  In both the inaugural speech and De Ira, Seneca was eager to banish discord and vengefulness, but he knew this took constant effort. He himself practiced a Zen-like exercise to restrain his own anger, if we can trust the self-portrait he paints in De Ira. Every night before bed, Seneca confides to his readers, he sat quietly beside his wife and took stock of his day, reviewing moments when he gave in to his passions. Perhaps he grew too hot during a dispute, or spoke more sharply to an underling than the man could handle. In each case, he tells himself: “See that you don’t do that again, but now I forgive you.”

  Seneca then broadens the scenario and writes as though all Romans are performing the same exercise. Perhaps one is offended by drunken jesting at a dinner party. Perhaps another is jostled at a rich man’s door by a self-important doorkeeper. A third is seated at a banquet table in a spot lower than he feels he deserves. Seneca urges his readers to forgive such slights and take themselves less seriously: “Pull further back, and laugh!”

  With an unerring eye for detail, De Ira caricatures the self-regard and self-importance of the Roman nobility. The work even explains these traits in a way that might look familiar to a modern psychologist. The wealthy and powerful indulge their children and give them no training in overcoming indignities. “The one to whom nothing was refused,” Seneca writes, “whose tears were always wiped away by an anxious mother, will not abide being offended.” The ability to laugh, he suggests, is an antidote to the petulance that comes with privilege.

  But not everyone was able to take the laughter cure. Seneca was about to confront a woman who, as far as evidence reveals, had not the slightest trace of a sense of humor. He had poked fun at her, indirectly, in Apocolocyntosis, for she considered herself the widow, and priestess, of a god. To her, apotheosis was no laughing matter.

  That woman was, of course, the imperious Agrippina, once Seneca’s greatest patron, but now looming as his greatest problem.

  While Claudius lived, the task of getting Nero onto the throne had kept Agrippina, her son, and her son’s tutor in close alignment. Now that this goal had been achieved, their relations had become far less stable. Much would depend for Seneca on how he negotiated the change in the troika. Stoicism had taught him much about managing emotion and keeping the rational mind in control. But how rational could he remain amid the wrath of a possessive, domineering woman, still vigorous in her late thirties, and the rebellious, impetuous urges of a seventeen-year-old boy?

  Nero started off by paying public tributes to Agrippina. When the captain of the guard asked the princeps, on the very first night of his reign, for the watchword that would give security clearance, Nero made it optima mater, “best of mothers.” It was a phrase from epic poetry, found once in Vergil’s Aeneid, and thus a gift of heroic stature for Agrippina. It was more than mere whimsy, for Nero knew that she had carefully cultivated the allegiance of the Praetorians for years. They were loyal more to her than to him. He had much to gain from seeming, in their eyes, a devoted son.

  Relief from Aphrodisias in modern Turkey showing Agrippina crowning her son.

  The reliance of the son on his mother was underscored in statuary, especially in a bas-relief sculpture found in Aphrodisias (a Romanized town in what is now Turkey). Uncovered only in 1979, this relief, part of a gallery of imperial portraits, depicts Agrippina gazing at Nero with maternal adoration as she places a laurel wreath on his head. Nero, dressed as a soldier, does not return her gaze but looks outward, coolly, impassively, at the tasks before him. The scene clearly configures Agrippina as the source of her son’s power. The image seems to have derived from an original displayed at Rome.

  In his first coin issues—always an emperor’s most far-reaching medium of communication—Nero gave his mother a prominent, virtually coregnant, role. Under Claudius, Agrippina had appeared in jugate arrangements, her husband’s profile stamped over hers, or else she was relegated to the reverse—“tails”—side. Now a new format appeared, never before seen at Rome: Nero and Agrippina were shown in symmetrical profiles, gazing at one another on the “heads” side. Neither profile was larger than the other. The image suggests an intimate conversation, a moment of perfect concord, with each partner unafraid to hold the other’s gaze.

  The message sent through these media was clear: Nero meant the public to see Agrippina as a sharer in rule. It was an obvious move for a youth who had been promoted to the principate in his teens, but it posed considerable risks. Romans who had witnessed the depredations of Messalina, or the machinations of Livia, Augustus’ wife, before her, were not eager to see another woman grasping the levers of power. The specter of impotentia, the will to power that Roman men demonized in Roman women, was again rearing its head. It did not help that Agrippina had already raised that specter in the reigns of Caligula and Claudius, seducing (so it was thought) the men from whom she could gain, and destroying those who opposed her.

  Coin issue of 54 showing Nero and Agrippina. Significantly, her name and titles are seen on the “heads” side of the coin, his on the reverse.

  It was not long before Agrippina began playing her folktale role all too close to type. She used her new power to order two assassinations, eliminating one potential threat and one long-standing enemy. According to Tacitus, Nero was not involved in either move.

  Marcus Junius Silanus, brother of the suicide who had spoiled Agrippina’s wedding day, now forty years old, was serving as governor of western Turkey and doing no one any harm. But his blood made him dangerous. His descent from Augustus marked him as a likely alternative, should the Romans decide someday to oust Nero. Agrippina dispatched two envoys who gave him the same poison used on Claudius—“too openly to be missed,” according to Tacitus. Apparently she wanted other Julian males to know whom they were dealing with.

  Next Agrippina did away with Narcissus, Claudius’ devoted freedman, who had remained in custody since the death of his master. Not only did Agrippina bear him an old grudge, but the man knew too much. She ordered Narcissus to commit suicide, a more benign fate than execution since he could still pass on property to his heirs. Before his death, perhaps in exchange for this privilege, he burned the private papers he had amassed—documents that could have done Agrippina much harm.

  Agrippina’s purge might have gone further, but Seneca moved to curb it. He could not stand by and watch as these Claudian tactics resumed, tactics that Nero, speaking Seneca’s words, had promised the Senate were over. Tacitus, who otherwise loved to dramatize scenes involving either Seneca or Agrippina, does not show us how this confrontation played out. But he does say that Seneca’s policy of restraint was seconded by a crucial ally at court: the new prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Afranius Burrus.

  Burrus and Seneca made an odd pair, one a career soldier, the other a moralist and writer who had never borne arms. But they had by now built a bond of mutual trust. Together they worked to guide the young Nero and counter the sway of his mother. “They exercised different but equal influence [on Nero],” Tacitus comments admiringly, “Burrus by his soldierly sense of duty and his gravity of character, Seneca by his instruction in eloquence and his upright civility.” It was a rare instance when men who might have been rivals became collaborators, aided by shared goals and, increasingly, a common enemy.

  Seneca explained his philosophy of executive restraint in De Ira. There he compared a leader’s handling of the state to a physician’s care of the body, an analogy he would often return to. Just as a good doctor seeks the least aggressive cure, a leader should use the gentlest methods of correction. He shoul
d chastise with only words if possible, then proceed to the mildest of blows. Execution should be only a last, desperate resort, for those who are so morally “ill” that death is, in effect, euthanasia.

  Had Agrippina been permitted her own turn on this medical metaphor, she might have argued the benefits of prophylaxis. Sometimes tumors had to be excised before they turned malignant. Or she might have fired back at Seneca the line he had recently quoted himself, from Vergil’s guide to beekeeping: “Death to the weaker; leave the stronger to reign in the empty throne room.”

  · · ·

  For the moment Agrippina did not proceed with her purge. But she soon created a new problem when she claimed a role in privy councils of state.

  As Claudius’ wife, Agrippina had once appeared on the emperor’s dais, dressed in military garb, to receive the surrender of British insurgents. Now she wanted to be present at even more important occasions. The Senate’s chambers were barred to all outsiders, but Agrippina contrived to move its meetings to a room in the palace and to listen in on deliberations from behind a curtain. Everyone knew she was there, taking note of every word that was said.

  Another defining moment in the palace power struggle came early in 55, when Nero’s reign was a few months old. A foreign policy crisis had presented itself. On the empire’s eastern frontier, Rome’s ancient enemy, the Parthians, had decided to test the new emperor’s mettle. An uprising in Armenia had pushed a Roman puppet off the throne there, and the Parthian king seized the opportunity. He installed his brother, Tiridates, as ruler of Armenia, in effect claiming this crucial buffer state as his own.