Table Of ContentTHIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by James Romm All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred
A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romm, James S.
Dying every day : Seneca at the court of Nero / by James Romm. — First Edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-307-59687-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-38535172-0 (eBook)
1. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, approximately 4 B.C.–65 A.D.
2. Statesmen—Rome—Biography. 3. Philosophers— Rome—Biography. 4. Nero, Emperor of
Rome, 37–68.
5. Rome—History—Nero, 54–68. I. Title.
B618.R64 2014
188—dc23
[B]
2013020720
Jacket images (left) Seneca, bpk, Berlin. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany;
(right) Nero © RMN-Grand Palais / (both) Art Resource, NY
Front-of-jacket photo montage by Markley Boyer Jacket design by Jason Booher First Edition
v3.1
for Tanya
meae deliciae, mei lepores
Renaissance medallion, “Nero Watching the Dying Seneca.”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: The Two Senecas
CHAPTER 1 Suicide (I)
CHAPTER 2 Regicide
CHAPTER 3 Fratricide
CHAPTER 4 Matricide
CHAPTER 5 Maritocide
CHAPTER 6 Holocaust
CHAPTER 7 Suicide (II)
Epilogue: Euthanasia
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Amici vitia si feras, facias tua.
If you put up with the crimes of a friend,
you make them your own.
—ROMAN PROVERB
Introduction
The Two Senecas
Here is one way to describe the career of Seneca, writer, thinker, poet,
moralist, and for many years, top adviser and close companion of the
emperor Nero:
By a strange twist of fate, a man who cherished sobriety, reason, and
moral virtue found himself at the center of Roman politics. He did his
best to temper the whims of a deluded despot, while continuing to
publish the ethical treatises that were his true calling. When he could no
longer exert influence in the palace, he withdrew and in solitude
produced his most stirring meditations on virtue, nature, and death.
Enraged by his departure, the emperor he had once advised seized on a
pretext to force him to kill himself. His adoring wife tried to join him in
his sober, courageous suicide, but imperial troops intervened to save her.
And here is another way to describe the same life:
A clever manipulator of undistinguished origin connived his way into
the center of Roman power. He used verbal brilliance to represent
himself as a sage. He exploited his vast influence to enrich himself and
touched off a rebellion in Britain by lending usuriously to its inhabitants.
After conspiring in, or even instigating, the palace’s darkest crimes, he
tried to rescue his reputation with carefully crafted literary self-
fashionings. When it was clear that the emperor’s enmity posed a threat,
he sought refuge at the altar of philosophy even while leading an
assassination plot. His final bid for esteem was his histrionic suicide,
which he browbeat his unwilling wife into sharing.
These are the opposing ways in which Romans of the late first century
. regarded Seneca, the most eloquent, enigmatic, and politically
A.D
engaged man of their times. The first is taken largely from the pages of
Octavia, a historical drama written in the late decades of that century, by
whom we do not know. The second is preserved by Cassius Dio, a
Roman chronicler who lived more than a century after Seneca’s death
but relied on earlier writers for information. Those writers, it is clear,
deeply mistrusted Seneca’s motives. They believed the rumors that
attributed to Seneca a debauched and gluttonous personal life, a
Machiavellian political career, and a central role in a conspiracy to
assassinate Nero in . 65.
A.D
Between these extremes stands Tacitus, the greatest of Roman
historians and by far the best source we have today for Nero’s era.
Tacitus, a shrewd student of human nature, was fascinated by the sage
who extolled a simple, studious life even while amassing wealth and
power. But ultimately Seneca posed a riddle he could not solve.
Tacitus made Seneca the principal character in the last three surviving
books of his Annals, creating a portrait of great richness and complexity.
But the tone of that portrait is hard to discern. Tacitus wavered,
withheld judgment, or became ironic and elusive. Strangely, though
aware of Seneca’s philosophic writings, Tacitus made no mention of
them, as though they had no bearing on the meaning of his life. And he
passed no explicit judgment on Seneca’s character, as he often did
elsewhere. Our most detailed account of Seneca, in the end, is
ambivalent and sometimes ambiguous.
One other ancient portraitist has left us his image of Seneca. In 1813
excavations in Rome unearthed a double-sided portrait bust created in
the third century . One side shows Socrates, the other Seneca, the two
A.D
sages joined at the back of the head like Siamese twins sharing a single
brain. The discovery gave the modern world its first glimpse of the real
Seneca, identified by a label carved on his chest. The bust shows a full-
fleshed man, beardless and bald, who wears a bland, self-satisfied mien.
It seems the face of a businessman or bourgeois, a man of means who ate
at a well-laden table.
Before the 1813 discovery, a different bust, now known as Pseudo-
Seneca, had been thought to show Seneca’s face. It was gaunt, haggard,
and haunted, its eyes seemingly staring into eternity. Its features had
served as a model for painters depicting Seneca’s death scene on canvas,
among them Giordano, Rubens, and David.
Once again there were two Senecas. Pseudo-Seneca corresponded to
what the Western world wanted to imagine about an ancient Stoic
philosopher. Its leanness seemed to represent a hunger for truth and a
rejection of wealth and material comfort. The discovery of the true
Seneca in 1813 dispelled that fantasy. The world that gazed into that
fleshy face realized that Seneca was not who he was thought to be.
The recovery of the 1813 bust parallels, for many, the experience of
learning about Seneca’s role in the history of Nero’s Rome. The man we
meet in the pages of Tacitus, still more in Dio, is not the man we
imagine Seneca to be, if we know him through his moral treatises,
letters, or tragedies. He does not seem to match up well with those
writings, especially in his relationship to wealth. The two Senecas stand
side by side, with no label of authenticity assuring us that one is the true
visage, the other an illusion.
What follows is an effort to bring those two Senecas together into a
single personality. It is a task that I had long believed impossible, and
perhaps I was right to do so. Seneca wrote much but made few clear
mentions of his political career, and he played a role in politics that
often ignored the principles of his writings. My goal has been to hold
both the writer and the courtier in view at all times, despite their
nonacknowledgment of each other.
The resulting book is part biography, part narrative history, and part
an exploration of Seneca’s writings, both prose and verse. It does not
give a comprehensive account of those writings, nor of the history of the
Neronian era. My pursuit of a unified Seneca has forced me to be
selective in both arenas.
I have focused on those Senecan texts, and passages of texts, that
connect most clearly with Seneca’s life at court. That has meant passing
in silence over much of what a student of philosophy would look for.
Indeed, it has meant omitting completely those works that cannot be
dated either before or after the accession of Nero. The reader will thus
find no mention here of four important treatises—for the record, they
are De Otio, De Providentia, De Constantia Sapientis, and De Tranquilitate
Animi—that fall into this category.
