We can only speculate about what Seneca’s feelings might have been when he got the news that his long years of exile were over. Did he hesitate about the decision to return to Rome? Did he consider turning Agrippina’s offer down? One ancient suggests that Seneca’s real hope was not to go back to Rome but to be allowed to move to Athens, to live out his life among the philosophical schools there, studying and teaching—a choice that was no longer possible, ever, once he accepted Agrippina’s generosity.44 The trap closed in. Seneca—who had, after all, lived through the reign of Caligula and been exiled by Claudius already—could have had few illusions about how free or how safe his environment would be as a member of the imperial court. The recall must have seemed, from the start, fraught with terrible danger. Perhaps part of the reason Seneca went along was that Agrippina had made him an offer he could not refuse, or at least not without incurring even more imperial disfavor. If things were not that bad on Corsica, they could always become much worse. He could have been exiled to an island that was actually, rather than fictionally, barren and deserted. Or the emperor could have been goaded by his wife to order the philosopher’s death. The choice to return was perhaps hardly a choice at all. In the year 50 CE, when Nero was twelve, he was adopted as son by Claudius, and at the same time (so Suetonius tells us) Seneca became his official tutor.
But presumably Seneca felt hope as well as dread in returning to Rome. Like his own Medea, he needed an audience, a set of addressees if not friends. He needed the praise, love, admiration, and sense of achievement that could only come with a position in the big city of Rome, not in the backwater of Corsica. He needed a new challenge, new labors to take on. Perhaps, too, his fear and his ambition were less in tension than one might imagine: only once you reach the end can you be sure nothing else can happen. The final motive that must have played some part in his decision to return was a genuine desire to do good, by influencing for the better the person who might well become leader of the whole Roman empire. Like his own hero Hercules (the favorite mythical hero of the Stoics), he needed to have a sense of being useful, of benefiting humanity by engaging in society and destroying the monsters that threaten civilization. Seneca’s old tutor, Attalus, had claimed to be a king because he was a Stoic Sage: Seneca could now hope to outdo his old teacher by converting to Stoic sage-hood a boy who would also become, in the real political world, an emperor. After spending much of his adult life abroad, first in Egypt, then Corsica, this man from the provinces was finally back in Rome, where he would remain for the rest of his life—for good or ill.
III
“Vices Tempt You by the Rewards They Offer”
*
Exile is better for you than a return like this.1
Seneca’s play about the downfall of a victorious warrior king, the Agamemnon—in which, as in Aeschylus’ version of the same myth, the title character is murdered in his bath—begins with the Ghost of Thyestes, who has been dragged back from the underworld to portend doom for his descendants. He declares,
On this throne sit
those who bear in their hands the royal scepters.
Here is their council-chamber, here is where they feast.
I wish I could turn back! Would it not be better
to live by the grim, sad waters [of the underworld] … ?
(Agamemnon 9–13)2
The Ghost is reminded of the horrors he experienced in his own day, when he was forced to eat his own children. But he predicts that there is even worse to come: being back in Hell—a place of frustration rather than monstrosity—would surely be better. And yet he is compelled to glimpse this place of horror. Seneca himself likely had some of this sinking feeling when he returned from Corsica to the Rome from which he had been expelled and took up his position in the household of the emperor who had exiled him, along with his new wife Agrippina (sister of his now-dead, perhaps-erstwhile-lover, Julia Livilla) and Agrippina’s son by the dead Tiberius: Nero. Suetonius reports a rumor that the night after Seneca began tutoring Nero, he had a terrible dream: he imagined that he was the tutor of Caligula (Suetonius, Nero, 7). An unreliable ancient source tells us, “Seneca quickly realized that Nero was born savage and cruel and tamed him, often saying to his close associates that that savage lion had only to taste human blood once for his inborn savagery to return.”3
Perhaps Seneca hoped, in those early years, that he could turn things around. He also took over Nero’s education, serving as his main tutor from the time the young prince was twelve years old, to the time of his accession at the age of seventeen (Fig. 3.1). We know little about the details of his pedagogical methods; perhaps he soon abandoned hope of improving his charge, but perhaps not. At the same time, as a praetor, he had administrative duties in government; he would have had opportunities to intervene in the active running of the court and probably also played a role in judging criminal prosecutions.
Figure 3.1 Seneca was hired by Agrippina to teach rhetoric to her young son Nero. The teenager may well have been a resistant student, as this depiction suggests.
Seneca was hired by Agrippina to teach Nero rhetoric, not philosophy: she considered philosophy a drawback for a future leader (Suetonius, Nero, 52). The notion that philosophy in general, and Stoicism in particular, was incompatible with practical politics was a major target of Seneca’s writing during the next decade or two. But Agrippina clearly hoped that he would be able to take on a much more extensive advising role—not tutoring in the Stoic mode of expelling negative emotions and becoming a sage, but rather, political strategy and speechwriting, through which she could advance her own interests and those of her son, allowing Seneca himself some payback along the way.
Seneca trained the boy in the methods he had learned from his father and from his tutors of rhetoric at Rome, teaching him to give pretend legal speeches, as if in a court of law. The young student enjoyed the theatrical elements of rhetorical training: Nero thought of himself as a magnificent actor. But we are also told that Seneca limited Nero’s reading in early oratory “to perpetuate his admiration for his teacher” (Suetonius, Nero, 52). This may or may not be true; it seems quite likely that Nero himself wished to focus on poetry rather than rhetoric. We get conflicting accounts of how good or bad Nero actually was as a poet. Seneca quotes one rather overwritten line of his, claiming it is “so cleverly written”: “The moving necks of the Cytherean doves are shimmering” (NQ 1.5.6). Perhaps, as well as promoting his ward’s creative writing, Seneca also acted out scenes from his own tragedies with the boy. Whether the fault lay with the teacher or the student, or both, the results were not promising: Nero did not make much progress in rhetoric. Seneca acted as Nero’s speechwriter in later years, although all earlier emperors had been capable of composing their own speeches. Nero was resistant to teaching rather than lacking in all natural talent: he was an intelligent but willful boy, uninterested in buckling down to the rigors of either rhetoric or philosophy. We cannot tell how hard Seneca tried to counter these tendencies. Tacitus tells us that Nero focused on other pursuits, and Seneca could do little to keep his curriculum focused: he was a keen painter, actor, engraver, poet, singer, horseback rider, and charioteer (Annals 13.3.3).