Seneca’s appointment under Nero was largely unofficiaclass="underline" he was termed the emperor’s “friend” or “teacher” or “advisor,” with no specific legal or administrative title attached. Seneca seems to have succeeded in pulling strings to make sure his friends and family advanced within the social ladder and his enemies fell. Lucan, Seneca’s nephew, the son of his brother Mela, was brought back from his studies in Athens and, although he was five years younger than the usual age and had not done the usual prerequisite of military service, he was given a quaestorship, an official rank on the career ladder or cursus honorum, which brought social credit and involved working as a financial overseer. Mela himself became a respectably ranking financial officer (a procurator). Seneca’s new wife’s brother, Pompeius Paulinus, became an imperial legate in Germany. And Seneca’s dear friend Annaeus Serenus was given command of the night watch. All this suggests that Seneca had plenty of influence behind the scenes to choose who did well or poorly under the Neronian regime, and that he used it to promote the people he knew.
Roman elite male society in this period depended on a complex set of networks, favors, and obligations exchanged between men of the equestrian and senatorial classes. One important social practice that tends to seem alien from a modern perspective is the adoption of adult young men by a new father.14 The practice was not unusuaclass="underline" it has been estimated that some four percent of men in the equestrian class in the Julio-Claudian period were adopted into another family. This happened in Seneca’s family when an old friend of Seneca the Elder, a senator named Junius Gallio, adopted our Seneca’s older brother, Novatus. Novatus then, as was standard practice, took on the name of his adoptive father, becoming Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeus. In modern Western society, childless couples usually adopt children very young, with the purpose of nurturing them to adulthood. In Roman society, however, the main purpose of adoption was not nurture but social networking and securing one’s estate: elite men wanted to increase their bonds with their peers and to have an heir to whom they could pass on their wealth and name and social status. Gallio had been widowed at a fairly young age, had no sons, and apparently was unwilling to get married, despite being urged to do so by Ovid.15 Seneca the Elder, who had three male heirs, was in a good position to pass one of them off to a friend, thereby increasing his own social credit within his circle as well as increasing the son’s opportunities and the whole family’s position within the Roman aristocracy. In purely financial terms, too, the practice allowed elite men to share their wealth in ways that were mutually beneficiaclass="underline" through being adopted, Novatus could expect to inherit his adoptive father’s wealth. The adoptive father, Gallio, was a well-known orator, poet, and declaimer of Seneca the Elder’s generation, who had been a friend of the poet Ovid and who had been exiled to the island of Lesbos under Tiberius, though soon recalled. Perhaps the adoption improved the status of the Annaeus family in literary circles as well as their finances.
Our Seneca was, as we have seen, close to his elder brother and seems to have worked hard to promote his career, although Novatus was managing well in any case by his own diligence. Novatus had been appointed as the Roman magistrate (“proconsul”) in charge of Achaea and is most famous for having dismissed charges brought by the Jews against the apostle Pauclass="underline" “and Gallio cared for none of these things” (Acts 18.12–16). Gallio thus seems to have followed the usual Roman practice in the provinces of refusing to intervene in local quarrels whenever possible. Novatus, like his brother, suffered from a medical condition in his lungs, involving coughing up blood; perhaps he terminated his post in Achaea for medical reasons, although the condition cannot have been so debilitating as to prevent him from further life in office.16 After he returned to Rome, Novatus was appointed in 55 as a suffect consul—perhaps through the help of his powerful younger brother. After his appointment, Novatus seems to have traveled to Egypt for his health’s sake, as his brother had done before him.17
Seneca was less close to his younger brother, Mela, but he was certainly attached to Mela’s son, his nephew Lucan. Lucan may well have seemed like a surrogate son to Seneca, who had no surviving children. The boy was almost the same age as Nero (just two years his senior), and they seem to have gotten along very well, at least in the early years. Lucan shared with Nero a keen interest in poetry and the arts; Seneca helped both of them develop their rhetorical and literary skills. Lucan wrote an extempore “Praise of Nero” for the celebration of the realm in 60 CE, as well as an extempore poem on Orpheus for the same occasion.
Seneca’s quick thinking and social tact were instrumental in reducing the power of Agrippina—who hoped to manage things behind the scenes during her son’s principate. Agrippina used to lurk behind a curtain for official meetings with ambassadors so she could hear the proceedings, hoping to be able to intervene in the affairs of state. Early on in Nero’s reign, she tried to claim a more public role and emerged from hiding—potentially creating a state scandal, since women were not supposed to participate in politics at this level. We are told that on one occasion, when Armenian ambassadors were pleading with Nero on behalf of their country, she was actually getting ready to climb up the emperor's tribunal and preside with him; everybody else was paralyzed by fear, but Seneca gestured to Nero to go and meet his mother. Appearances were maintained, by a show of filial affection (Tacitus, Annals, 13).
Burrus and Seneca helped restrict Agrippina’s tendencies toward killing as many of her enemies as possible. They maintained their influence on Nero by allowing him to indulge his pleasures (Annals 13.2). Seneca’s service to Nero was not as a policy advisor beyond the palace, but rather as chief speechwriter and public relations officer, as an advisor both in the selection and dismissal of other government officials and in helping Nero consolidate his position in the palace—for instance, by working with him against his mother.
Nero’s arranged marriage to Claudius’ daughter Octavia was one of the building blocks by which Agrippina had ensured her son’s claim to the imperial throne, but Nero was not interested in his wife and treated her badly. He embarked on a public affair with a freedwoman called Acte. Agrippina regarded this as scandalous and tried to put a stop to it—which only encouraged Nero in the relationship (Tacitus 13.12). Seneca intervened on the side of Nero and Acte, arguing the ruler had a right to his own decisions about his personal life—and thereby increasing his own intimacy with the boy.18 Seneca even helped out in the practicalities of the affair, persuading his friend Annaeus Serenus to pretend to conduct an affair with Acte and give her the presents that actually came from Nero.
This story is a useful indicator of the kind of influence Seneca exerted over the young emperor. It was mostly not “moral” influence; rather, Seneca was interested in extracting Nero from the control of his mother and increasing his own power with the boy and on the wider social scene. Seneca was a pragmatist: it was unrealistic to expect the young emperor to be faithful to a wife he had not even chosen, when all Rome was available; the philosopher saw no harm in gaining some political capital for himself out of something that was bound to happen anyway.
Distinguishing himself from Agrippina was particularly important for Seneca, since it would have been easy for Nero to perceive him as her tool—which would have meant that, once Agrippina fell from favor, Seneca would have fallen also. Seneca owed his recall from exile to Agrippina, and there were (predictably) rumors that he had at some point been having an affair with her. It was therefore important for Seneca to prove, both to Nero and to the public, that he was on a different side from that of Agrippina: his political and literal survival depended on it.