Lucius Annaeus Seneca - Letters from a Stoic. Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

NERO asked if Seneca was preparing for suicide. Gavius Silvanus replied that he had noticed no signs of fear or sadness in his words or features. So Silvanus was ordered to go back and notify the deathsentence. According to one source, he did not return by the way he had come but made a detour to visit the commander of the Guard, Faenius Rufus; he showed Faenius the emperors orders asking if he should obey them; and Faenius, with that ineluctable weakness which they all revealed, told him to obey. For Silvanus was himself one of the conspirators and now he was adding to the crimes which he had conspired to avenge. But he shirked communicating or witnessing the atrocity. Instead he sent in one of his staff-officers to tell Seneca he must die.

Unperturbed, Seneca asked for his will. But the officer refused. Then Seneca turned to his friends. Being forbidden, he said, to show gratitude for your services, I leave you my one remaining possession, and my best: the pattern of my life. If you remember it, your devoted friendship will be rewarded by a name for virtuous accomplishments. As he talked and sometimes in sterner and more imperative terms he checked their tears and sought to revive their courage. Where had their philosophy gone, he asked, and that resolution against impending misfortunes which they had devised over so many years? surely nobody was unaware that Nero was cruel! he added. After murdering his mother and brother, it only remained for him to kill his teacher and tutor.

These words were evidently intended for public hearing. Then Seneca embraced his wife and, with a tenderness very different from his philosophical imperturbability, entreated her to moderate and set a term to her grief, and take just consolation, in her bereavement, from contemplating his well-spent life. Nevertheless, she insisted on dying with him, and demanded the executioners stroke. Seneca did not oppose her brave decision. Indeed, loving her wholeheartedly, he was reluctant to leave her for ill-treatment. Solace in life was what I commended to you, he said. But you prefer death and glory. I will not grudge your setting so fine an example. We can die with equal fortitude. But yours will be the nobler end.

Then, each with one incision of the blade, he and his wife cut their arms. But Senecas aged body, lean from austere living, released the blood too slowly. So he also severed the veins in his ankles and behind his knees. Exhausted by severe pain, he was afraid of weakening his wifes endurance by betraying his agony or of losing his own self-possession at the sight of her sufferings. So he asked her to go into another bedroom. But even in his last moment his eloquence remained. Summoning secretaries, he dictated a dissertation. (It has been published in his own words, so I shall refrain from paraphrasing it.)

Nero did not dislike Paulina personally. In order, therefore, to avoid increasing his ill-repute for cruelty, he ordered her suicide to be averted. So on instructions from the soldiers, slaves and ex-slaves bandaged her arms and stopped the bleeding. She may have been unconscious. But discreditable versions are always popular, and some took a different view that as long as she feared there was no appeasing Nero, she coveted the distinction of dying with her husband, but when better prospects appeared lifes attractions got the better of her. She lived on for a few years, honourably loyal to her husbands memory, with pallid features and limbs which showed how much vital blood she had lost

Meanwhile Senecas death was slow and lingering. Poison, such as was formerly used to execute state criminals at Athens, had long been prepared; and Seneca now entreated his well-tried doctor, who was also an old friend, to supply it. But when it came, Seneca drank it without effect. For his limbs were already cold and numbed against the poisons action. Finally he was placed in a bath of warm water. He sprinkled a little of it on the attendant slaves, commenting that this was his libation to Jupiter. Then he was carried into a vapourbath, where he suffocated. His cremation was without ceremony, in accordance with his own instructions about his death written at the height of his wealth and power.

(Translated by Michael Grant)