When Seneca was in his thirties, his writing against “chattels, property, and high office” began to attract admiring notice from those with lots of chattels, property, and high office. Among his rich and powerful friends was Julia Livilla, a sister of the emperor Caligula.

In 41 A.D., Caligula was assassinated and replaced by his uncle Claudius. The new emperor accused Julia Livilla of adultery with Seneca. Whether the two were actually lovers or whether they were just unlucky is not known. (Claudius was, all evidence suggests, less benign than Robert Graves makes him out to be.) Julia Livilla was exiled to an island—probably Ventotene, off Naples—where she died within a few years. Seneca was sent to Corsica.

Most of Seneca’s works can’t be dated; two essays that must have been composed during his years of exile are the “Consolation to Helvia” and the “Consolation to Polybius.” In the first, Seneca addresses his mother, who is heart-stricken over his banishment. Exile, he tells her, is no big deal—basically just a change of address. Wherever we go, he writes, “two most excellent things will accompany us, namely, a common Nature and our own especial virtue.” In the second, he addresses one of Claudius’ top aides, who has recently lost a brother. Polybius should stop grieving, Seneca says, because his brother, like everyone else, was destined to die: “The seven wonders of the world, and any even greater wonders which the ambition of later ages has constructed, will be seen some day leveled with the ground. So it is: nothing lasts forever.”

The two “consolations” are exemplary Stoic works. Both advise indifference toward what might seem, to the untrained mind, terrible misfortunes. But they also betray a certain lack of stoicism. Already in Seneca’s day, Corsica was a spot renowned for its beauty and was home to a community of sophisticated Romans. (A contemporary analogue would be, say, banishment to Martha’s Vineyard.) And yet, Seneca laments to his mother, “What other rock is so barren or so precipitous on every side? . . . Who is more uncultured than the island’s inhabitants?” Even as he consoles Polybius, Seneca makes a point of buttering up Polybius’ boss. As long as Claudius “is safe all your friends are alive, you have lost nothing,” he writes to the grief-stricken brother. “Your eyes ought not only to be dry, but glad. In him is your all, he stands in the place of all else to you: you are not grateful enough for your present happy state . . . if you permit yourself to weep at all.”

“Say hello to my little friend.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Romm and Wilson read Seneca’s posturing as a failed effort to get himself recalled to Rome. Seneca ended up spending the better part of a decade in exile, and he would have spent even longer were it not for one of those episodic mate swaps which make the imperial family tree such a thicket. In 48 A.D., Claudius had his third wife killed and took as his fourth bride Agrippina—Caligula and Julia Livilla’s sister, and Claudius’ niece. It was she who persuaded Claudius to bring Seneca home.

The scheming wife is a fixture of Roman history. As bad as the men are, the women are worse—ruthless, cunning, and often sex-crazed. Many of the stories that come down to us are difficult to credit; for example, before Claudius had his third wife, Messalina, whacked, she was reported to have held a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a hooker. (According to Pliny, she won.)

Agrippina, a classic of the type, was married off at thirteen to Domitius, a notorious creep in his own right. (Domitius, who was three decades older, became Nero’s father.) After Domitius’ death, Agrippina found a new husband, a very rich man, whom, it was rumored, she then poisoned for his estate. She was thirty-three when she wed Uncle Claudius. He already had a son, Britannicus, as well as two daughters. Though a few years younger than Nero, Britannicus seemed well positioned to succeed his father. Agrippina set about promoting Nero ahead of him. She pushed aside (or had executed) anyone loyal to Britannicus and spread the rumor that he was an epileptic.

Agrippina had Seneca recalled nominally so that he could educate the adolescent Nero. (At the back of her mind may have been the model of Aristotle and Alexander the Great.) But she also found other uses for his talents. In 53 A.D., Agrippina arranged for Nero to marry one of Claudius’ daughters. A year after that, the story goes, she had Claudius murdered, using a poisoned mushroom. (Tacitus reports that Claudius recovered from the initial poisoning after his bowels “were relieved.” The quick-thinking Agrippina then had him poisoned again, using a feather that was stuck down his throat, ostensibly as an emetic.) Within hours of Claudius’ death, Nero claimed power in a speech to the Praetorian Guard. The speech, which promised the loyal soldiers a huge bonus, was written for him by Seneca.

Claudius’ murder set off a round of bloody housekeeping. Anyone whom the new regime perceived as a threat was polished off. Britannicus met his end within six months of his father. This time, the poison was delivered in a pitcher of water. When the boy dropped dead at the dinner table, Nero told the other guests that he was having a fit and they should just keep eating. According to Tacitus, most did.

Britannicus’ murder prompted one of Seneca’s most famous moral treatises, “On Mercy.” The work is addressed to Nero, who is also its subject. Seneca’s conceit is that the philosopher has nothing to teach the emperor about clemency; the essay is merely a “mirror” to show the young ruler his own virtues. He is beneficent and kindhearted, and can honestly say that he has “spilt not a drop of human blood in the whole world.”

Romm and Wilson acknowledge that the juxtaposition of the adulation and the murder looks pretty bad. “On Mercy,” Wilson observes, can be read as a sign that Seneca was “willing to praise this violent, dangerous, and terrifyingly powerful young ruler even to the extent of absolutely denying the reality of his behavior.”

And what looks even worse is that Seneca grew rich from Nero’s crimes. Following Britannicus’ murder, the boy’s wealth was divvied up, and Seneca, it seems, got a piece. By the end of the decade, the philosopher owned property not just in Rome but also in Egypt, Spain, and southern Italy. And he had so much cash on hand that he loaned forty million sesterces to Rome’s newest subjects, the British. (The annual salary of a Roman soldier at that time was around nine hundred sesterces.) The recall of the loans purportedly prompted the British to revolt.

Seneca’s fortune made possible a life style that was lavish by Roman or, for that matter, Hollywood standards. According to Dio, at one point the Stoic ordered “five hundred tables of citrus wood with legs of ivory, all identically alike, and he served banquets on them.” In an essay entitled “On the Happy Life,” composed around 59 A.D., Seneca addresses the strains between his philosophical commitments and his conspicuous consumption.

“Why do you drink wine that is older than you are?” he demands of himself. “Why does your wife wear in her ears the price of a rich man’s house?” Seneca’s answer, if it can be counted as such, is metaphorical: “The wise man would not despise himself, even if he were a midget; but he would rather be tall.” Around the time that Seneca composed “On the Happy Life,” a former consul named Publius Suillius had the temerity to accuse him in public of hypocrisy and of sucking the provinces dry. Shortly thereafter, Suillius found himself exiled.