There was a delicate balance of power among Nero, Agrippina, and their various advisors in the early years of Nero’s reign. Agrippina was aware that her own influence over her son was slipping and complained bitterly over his relationship with Acte, and (implicitly) his lack of obedience toward her, and the growing power of these new advisors, Seneca and Burrus—who were proving less malleable than she had hoped. Agrippina made a series of attempts to win Nero back. One strand in the ancient gossip suggests that Agrippina tried to seduce him back to her side by sleeping with him; others suggested that he himself initiated sex with her. Either or both or neither may be true.
Things went from bad to worse when Nero sent his mother the gift of an elaborate dress complete with jewelry. Agrippina protested that it was not a proper gift: her son was presenting her with only a small piece of property while keeping the whole treasure for himself. If true, the anecdote is revealing both about Agrippina’s assumptions (that she ought to have an equal share in the wealth and power of the imperial house) and the tensions at stake in the relationship, which focused on gifts and gratitude. Agrippina presumably felt that she herself had won the throne for Nero (and he ought therefore to pay her an undying debt of gratitude by sharing it); Nero himself wanted to be sole emperor, and his mother was beginning to get in his way.
He began to reduce Agrippina’s power, beginning by stripping her of her most important advisor: the freedman Pallas, who was the last vestige of the regime of Claudius, in which the most powerful imperial advisors had been freedmen. Pallas was certainly a person Agrippina had relied heavily upon for moral support and strategic advice, and some said they were lovers; certainly Pallas, who served as treasurer, acquired great wealth while in office, perhaps even more than Seneca (Dio puts the figure at 400,000,000 sesterces: 62.14). Nero granted Pallas the concession that the books would not be audited, so that he was allowed to keep the riches he had acquired in office, but in political terms, he was gone.19 Pallas was later put on trial, along with Burrus, for conspiracy; he was acquitted, but his name was further blackened (Tacitus 13.23). Agrippina retaliated at the loss of her favorite by threatening to switch sides and support Britannicus over her son. Nero expelled Agrippina from the palace, stripped her of her honors and powers, and took away her personal bodyguards (Suetonius, Nero, 34). He even, supposedly, threatened to follow the example of Tiberius and abdicate, to live out his life on the island of Rhodes—which would have left Agrippina entirely powerless.
As Nero began to slip out of the control of his mother, Agrippina took things badly. She spoke out against both Seneca and Burrus, dubbing them “the cripple and the exile”—one, Burrus, having a maimed arm, and the other, Seneca, a “rhetoric-teacher’s tongue” (Annals 13.14.3). But she also fought back against Nero and his new supporters, beginning to favor Britannicus as the true heir to the throne. Britannicus was about to reach the age of maturity or manhood, at fifteen.
All of a sudden, unsurprisingly, Britannicus dropped dead. It was February 12, 55 CE, immediately before his fifteenth birthday, when he would have become the obvious heir to the throne. The official story was that he died of an epileptic fit, but the universal opinion of the ancient sources is that Nero had him poisoned. He hired a woman called Locusta, a poison specialist, who put some toxic substance in a pitcher of water. Britannicus, being wary of poison, had his wine tasted, but it had been made too hot. He then added water to cool the mix, drank it without having the taster check it again, and immediately had a fatal seizure.
Soon after the murder, Nero ousted his mother from the palace, claiming that she had been plotting against his wife, Octavia. Now the young prince had dispensed of his only real competitor and had also freed himself from the clutches of his mother. In the future, he could act as badly as he wished.
A State Unstained by Blood
In late December of this same year, 55 CE, or early in 56, Seneca composed an essay addressed to the eighteen-year-old Nero on the topic of clementia—mercifulness. Seneca declares that the young emperor’s most striking quality is his innocence, his restraint from bloodshed:
You, Caesar, have given us the gift of a state unstained by blood. This proud boast of yours, that you have spilt not a drop of human blood in the whole world, is all the more remarkable and amazing, because nobody ever had the sword entrusted to him at an earlier age.
(On Clemency 1.11.3)
It was quite true that Nero was the youngest person to become heir to the whole Roman empire, but the other element in this fulsome praise—Nero’s gentleness—is harder to reconcile with reality, since this Caesar had, only a few months earlier, had his own stepbrother murdered. The dating of the treatise has sometimes been questioned for this reason: scholars have shrunk from believing that Seneca could have had the chutzpah to praise Nero for his astonishing mildness, innocence, and lack of cruelty at such a time. But the evidence that Seneca did indeed compose this work right after the death of Britannicus is incontrovertible.20 The question, then, is how exactly the De Clementia responds to Nero as murderer.
One can read the treatise as a gesture of abject flattery, 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. This is certainly a reading that seems tempting at the start of the essay. Seneca declares early on that “All your citizens are compelled to acknowledge that they are happy, and that nothing more can be added to these blessings, except for them to last forever” (1.1.7). Certainly there was quite a lot of optimism among the Roman elite in the early years of Nero’s rule, so this may not have seemed laughably false. It is also possible that aristocrats would have been less troubled by the murder of Britannicus than we might think.21 After all, their real fears would surely have been for their own safety; whether or not the emperor was prone to kill his own family members might be less important to them than whether or not he would kill the powerful men who were outside the imperial household.
But there is still a real ambiguity about whether the Seneca of De Clementia is telling Nero that he already has all possible virtues, or that he needs to acquire them. The text begins with Seneca announcing that he wants to write about mercy in order to act as Nero’s “mirror,” reflecting the emperor as somebody who will attain the greatest possible pleasure:
I have undertaken to write about clemency, Nero Caesar, in order that I may in some way fulfil the function of a mirror, and in order that I may show you to yourself as you are about to arrive at the greatest of all pleasures.
The notion of mirroring between the book and its addressee is handled here with great delicacy. On the one hand, the metaphor suggests that Nero is already in possession of all possible virtue, including amazing degrees of mercifulness; all the writer has to do is reflect back to him the things that he is already doing. But on the other, Seneca qualifies his use of the metaphor (he is not like a mirror, but “sort of” like a mirror); and he promises to reflect not simply what Nero is now, but Nero in the state that he will attain in the future. It is possible to read that state of maximal pleasure as the attainment of the maximum amount of power, in the position of being emperor. This interpretation seems to be confirmed by the speech Seneca puts into the mouth of Nero at the start of the treatise, in which the boy-emperor boasts and luxuriates in the enormous control he has over the whole world. But it is also possible to see the “maximum pleasure” in a more Stoic light, and imagine that Seneca is showing Nero a self that he has not yet attained but that he may grow into through reading the treatise. The mirror is not only an instrument of reflection but also an inspiration for change.