In 54 AD, roughly five years into Seneca’s employment at court, Agrippina had her husband, Claudius, killed by way of poisoned mushrooms. Nero was made emperor at age sixteen, and Seneca was asked to write the speeches that Nero would give to convince Rome that it wasn’t totally insane to give this dilettante child nearly godlike powers over millions of people.*
As if absolute power wasn’t corruptive enough, Nero had clearly witnessed some nasty early lessons from his mother and adoptive father. As his teacher and mentor, Seneca attempted a course correction. One of the first things he gave the new emperor was a work he composed, entitled De Clementia, which laid out a path “for the good King” and that he hoped Nero would follow. And while clemency and mercy might seem like obvious concepts to us today, at the time this was quite revolutionary advice.
Robert A. Kaster, the classics scholar, writes that there was no Greek word for clemency. Philosophers had spoken of restraint and mildness, but Seneca was talking about something more profound and new: what one does with power. Particularly, how the powerful ought to treat someone without power, because this reveals who they are. As Seneca explained, “No one will be able to imagine anything more becoming to a ruler than clemency, whatever sort of ruler he is and on whatever terms he is put in charge of others.”
It was a lesson aimed at Nero, as well as every leader who might read the essay after. The world would be a better place with more clemency in it—only a cursory look at history confirms this. The problem is getting leaders to understand it.
The dynamic between Seneca and Nero is an interesting one because it clearly evolved—or rather devolved—over time. But the essence of it is perhaps best captured in a statue of the two done by the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Barrón in 1904. Even though it depicts a scene some eighteen centuries after the fact, it manages to capture the timeless elements of the two men’s characters. Seneca, much older, sits with his legs crossed, draped in a beautiful toga but otherwise unadorned. Spread across his lap and onto the simple bench is a document he’s written. Maybe it’s a speech. Maybe it’s a law being debated by the Senate. Maybe it is in fact the text of De Clementia. His fingers point to a spot in the text. His body language is open. He is trying to instill in his young charge the seriousness of the tasks before him.
Nero, sitting across from Seneca, is nearly the opposite of his advisor in every way. He is hooded, sitting on a thronelike chair. A fine blanket rests behind him. He’s wearing jewelry. His expression is sullen. Both fists are clenched, and one rests on his temple as if he can’t bring himself to pay attention. He is looking down at the ground. His feet are tucked behind him, crossed at the ankles. He knows he should be listening, but he isn’t. He’d rather be anywhere else. Soon enough, he is thinking, I won’t have to endure these lectures. Then I’ll be able to do whatever I want.
Seneca can clearly see this body language, and yet he proceeds. He proceeded for many years, in fact. Why? Because he hoped some of it—any of it—would get through. Because he knew the stakes were high. Because he knew his job was to try to teach Nero to be good (he would literally die trying). And because he was never going to turn down a chance to be that close to power, to have that much impact.
In the end, Seneca made little progress with Nero, a man whom time would shortly reveal to be deranged and flawed. Was it always a hopeless mission? Was Seneca’s steady hand a positive influence—one that Rome would have been worse off without? We cannot know. What we know is that Seneca tried. It’s the old lesson: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You control what you do and say, not whether people listen.
All a Stoic can do is show up and do their work. Seneca believed he had to, and clearly, he wanted to also. As he would later write, the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans was that the Stoics felt that politics was a duty. “The two sects, the Epicureans and the Stoics, are at variance, as in most things,” Seneca wrote. “Epicurus says: ‘The wise man will not engage in public affairs except in an emergency.’ Zeno says: ‘He will engage in public affairs unless something prevents him.’”
Nothing was preventing Seneca—least of all his own ambitions—so he kept trying.
Sources tell us that for the first several years, Seneca was the steady hand. While he was working with Burrus, the military leader also chosen by Agrippina, Rome was, for the first time in some time according to contemporaries, well run. In 55 AD, Seneca’s brother Gallio was made consul. The following year, Seneca himself held that position.
Like the poem Seneca wrote about fate said, however, this was not to last. In fact, that seems to be the constant theme of Seneca’s life—that peace and stability are fragile and punctured, quite capriciously, by events outside his control. Nero, driven by paranoia and the cruel streak he inherited from his mother, began to eliminate his rivals, starting with his brother Britannicus, who was dispatched with poison, just like Claudius. He forced out his mother and began to make designs to kill her too—failing several times to deliver a fatal dose of poison. One account has Nero attempting to have his mother killed in an elaborate boating accident. Finally, by 59 AD, the deed was done.
That early, restrained-but-waiting Nero captured in the Barrón statue was now released. In Tacitus’s words, he deferred no more on long meditated crimes. With his power matured, and oxidized into his soul, he could do what he liked, no matter how depraved. It was a turning point noticed by Seneca, for sure. While Arius had advised Augustus to eliminate the other, “too many Caesars,” Seneca had to remind Nero that it was impossible for even the strongest king, in the end, to kill every successor. Eventually someone would come next. But Nero didn’t listen, and ultimately murdered every male in the Julio-Claudian line.
When Nero wasn’t killing, it’s not as if he was dutiful in attending to the business of the empire. He was racing chariots at a special track he liked outside Rome, with slaves dragooned into watching and clapping for him. He neglected the state so that he could perform onstage, singing and dancing like some cut-rate actor—a fact of which his attendants prevented him from knowing by, according to Suetonius, not allowing anyone “to leave the theatre even for the most urgent reasons.”
Seneca was horrified, so why didn’t he leave? How could he be a part of such an embarrassment?
One explanation is fear. His whole life he had watched emperors murder and banish with impunity. He had felt the hard hand of their injustice himself more than once. Imperial vindictiveness loomed over him. As Dio Cassius relates, “After the death of Britannicus, Seneca and Burrus no longer gave any careful attention to the public business, but were satisfied if they might manage it with moderation and still preserve their lives.” Perhaps he thought, as people think today with flawed leaders, that he could do good through Nero. Seneca had always looked for the good in people, even someone as obviously bad as Nero. “Let’s be kind to one another,” he once wrote. “We’re just wicked people living among wicked people. Only one thing can give us peace, and that’s a pact of mutual leniency.” Maybe he saw something in Nero up close, a goodness despite the flaws, that has been lost to the historical record.
Or maybe his very real fear and these blind spots were compounded by the tempting self-interest of Seneca’s position. It’s hard to get someone to see, the expression goes, what their salary depends on them not seeing.