James Romm - Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

Renaissance medallion, Nero Watching the Dying Seneca.

Amici vitia si feras, facias tua.

If you put up with the crimes of a friend,
you make them your own.

ROMAN PROVERB

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 palaces darkest crimes, he tried to rescue his reputation with carefully crafted literary self-fashionings. When it was clear that the emperors 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 A.D . regarded Seneca, the most eloquent, enigmatic, and politically 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 Senecas death but relied on earlier writers for information. Those writers, it is clear, deeply mistrusted Senecas 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 A.D . 65.

Between these extremes stands Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians and by far the best source we have today for Neros 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 Senecas 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 Senecas 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 A.D . One side shows Socrates, the other Seneca, the two 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 Senecas face. It was gaunt, haggard, and haunted, its eyes seemingly staring into eternity. Its features had served as a model for painters depicting Senecas 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 Senecas role in the history of Neros 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.