In fact, Nero was no Apollo, and his claim to the throne was questionable, since he became emperor only through his right as adoptive son of Claudius—over the head of the legitimate blood son, Britannicus. At this stage, the young emperor was impressionable, and there was a struggle between two different sets of influence upon him. On one side, his mother, Agrippina, was trying to increase her own power over the new imperial regime, drawing the powerful allies she had already cultivated under Claudius’ rule, including the freedman Pallas, who had been her husband’s favorite advisor. On the other side, we are told, were Burrus and Seneca.10
THE FIRST FIVE YEARS
Seneca’s speech for Nero on his accession to the principate had involved a vow that the new emperor would be different from Claudius. Claudius had won enmity through a reputation for cruelty and a failure to keep distinct the affairs of the palace from those of the empire. Nero promised that he would do neither of these things. In what Tacitus tells us of his promises at the time of his accession, he insisted that he came to power with no sense of enmity or desire for vengeance against the friends of his predecessor. He vowed to be guided by his good counselors (meaning, primarily, Seneca and Burrus) and to allow the Senate and the army to retain all their old powers. He also swore to make sure that “his private establishment and the State should be kept entirely distinct” (Tacitus 13). Tacitus suggests that for a while, the influence of Burrus and Seneca was strong enough to restrain Nero’s worst impulses; it was only once he began to assert his own autonomy, against the moral guidance of his early tutors, that he began to turn into the monstrous Nero of legend (Fig. 3.4).
Figure 3.4 Nero became emperor at the young age of seventeen in 54 CE.
Many historians have insisted that the first five years of Nero’s reign, in which Burrus and Seneca supposedly guided the young emperor, were much better than the subsequent period, in which Nero freed himself from their guidance and got out of control. The good five years have been dubbed the Quinquennium Neronis, the Five Years of Nero. But (as Miriam Griffin has shown) we should not exaggerate the impact of these advisors or the difference between these five years and the time that followed: there is no reason to believe that there were any institutional or legal changes initiated by the new regime. Moreover, the notion that the emperor’s private establishment and the state should be kept entirely distinct was simply not possible given the structure of the Roman principate in this period.11
One real change created by the accession of Nero was in the social class of the main advisors to the emperor. Claudius had notoriously relied heavily on a group of freedmen as his main advisors, whom he endowed with enormous wealth and, supposedly, treated as the most important influences on his political decisions. These included Polybius, to whom Seneca had written to try to plead for his reprieve. Polybius was put to death by Messalina for crimes against the state (or, some said, because she was bored of sleeping with him). But other powerful freedmen, such as Pallas and Narcissus, retained their hold on power. The Senate particularly hated the presence of the freedmen, which drove home all too obviously the fact that the emperor relied heavily on advisors who had no official position. With the accession of Nero, Seneca and Burrus took on many of the functions of the freedman advisor under Claudius: they advised the emperor, massaged his public image, and received large sums of money and other wealth in return. Seneca and Burrus were both from the equites (“knightly”) class, not the senatorial class, and they seem to have been always at a certain distance from the world of the senators. Most of Seneca’s close friends, even during his years in power, came from the knight’s class. But these knights were far more able than the freedman had been to communicate with the Senate in ways that the latter found relatively congenial. The aristocratic, senatorial-class historian Tacitus treats the early years of Nero’s realm as relatively successful, because they marked a period of relatively good communication between emperor and Senate. The secret of the perceived success in these years lay in Seneca’s skills in public relations.
There was a fairly long tradition in Greco-Roman antiquity of philosophers advising monarchs or tyrants. Plato acted as temporary advisor to Dionysius of Syracuse, trying unsuccessfully to persuade the tyrant to turn into a Platonic philosopher-king. In the Hellenistic period, there was a series of treatises and counter-treatises, discussing the proper relationship of kings and philosophical advisors; Stoics and other intellectual schools were keen to combat the Epicurean notion that the philosopher ought really to have nothing to do with a monarchy.12 These treatises made the case that kingship was actually a natural form of government, and that kings could avoid tyranny by learning virtue from the lips of the philosopher in residence. Seneca was deeply aware of this tradition and helped to reshape it for a Roman context.
Seneca served for part of a year as consul, in 56, the highest official political office in Rome. He took over partway through the year for someone else who dropped out. Serving just a partial term was known as being “suffect consul.” Seneca’s tenure as consul lasted only a few months, but even a short stint as consul was hugely important in symbolic terms: it meant that Seneca had—like Cicero before him—reached the highest official rank in Roman government. After service as consul, a Roman man, and all his male descendants after him, had attained the rank of the aristocracy: he now counted as a “nobleman,” nobilis, on a level with the oldest Roman families.13
It was probably in this period that Seneca married a woman called Pompeia Paulina, daughter of a man from the equestrian class named Pompeius Paulinus (his daughter being named for him, as was the Roman custom). We know frustratingly little about this relationship, although there is every reason to believe that Seneca loved his wife: he calls her “my Paulina” (Epistle 104.1.2.5) and Tacitus describes her as “especially beloved by Seneca” (Annals 15.63.2). They seem to have had no children, but there is no evidence that this was a source of grief or anxiety to Seneca. As well as providing love and companionship, the marriage solidified Seneca’s relationships with his wife’s male relations.