The De Clementia is a kind of debriefing, done in full consciousness of the truth about Britannicus. Seneca is telling Nero not to make a habit of such actions. He warns the emperor that the good hopes that people have about him would be based on nothing if his fine moral character were not innate: “No one, after all, can wear a mask for long. Pretence quickly lapses into its true nature.” Seneca carefully leaves it ambiguous which category Nero belongs to: is he a truly good person or a hypocrite wearing the mask of goodness? Paradoxically (and implausibly) it is only by maintaining the mask of reasonably good behavior that Nero will be able to “prove” that it matches his face. The teacher wants the student to feel inspired by the benign image he holds up to him. He hopes that showing him a reflection in an idealizing mirror will make the student want to become what the teacher tells him he already is, or soon will become.
But De Clementia was not written only to be read by Nero himself: the wider public must have been eager for any possible information about the future directions of the new regime. Seneca’s work both in the Apocolycyntosis and in the De Clementia combined to form a clear image of the ideology of Nero’s realm, insisting that this emperor would be a vast improvement on those who had gone before, thanks to the strong influence upon the young man of his Stoic teacher.22 The De Clementia works to reassure the elite Roman public that this act of bloodshed, the murder of Britannicus, would not be characteristic of the future behavior of the Neronian rule, and that the right-hand man of the new emperor, his old tutor Seneca, was strongly opposed to any kind of cruelty and was in full control of his moral education. Seneca insists that he is no flatterer to the emperor: “I would rather offend you with the truth than please you with flattery” (2.2.1). Readers could feel reassured that the young leader was in strong, moral hands.
Many might reasonably doubt whether philosophical teaching works quite so effectively as a cure for autocracy. The real ideological problem for many senators lay with imperial government itself, and Seneca’s treatise does nothing to allay the concerns of those who missed the days of the Republic. Rather, it presents the emperor as possessing absolute power, whose source is never explained or justified.23 Seneca addresses this problem by invoking the moral Roman values of mercy and of Stoicism, which will, he insists, enable the emperor to rule with something even better than justice: with virtue.
Clementia was in some ways a surprising topic for a self-confessedly Stoic piece of writing. Leniency was considered a bad thing among the Greek Stoic philosophers because the true wise man is just, so he always imposes precisely the right punishment on a wrongdoer. To punish with a milder sentence than the crime deserved would show a ruler’s injustice and would likely be a sign that he had been misled by emotional impulse rather than reason—not something a wise Stoic ought to do.
The fact that Seneca chooses to focus on clemency is thus a mark of his originality in the field of Stoicism, and also of his interest not in abstract philosophy but in the specifics of Roman politics. From the days of Julius Caesar, as one-man rule had taken hold in Rome, successive emperors had seized on the notion of personal mercifulness as a way of dealing with the people’s fear of, and hostility toward, the idea of tyranny. Seneca reconciles Stoic philosophy with the realities of Roman politics by redefining clementia, “mercifulness,” as something entirely different from misericordia, “pity.” The latter, in Seneca’s presentation, involves being misled by emotional impulse to pardon those who really ought not to be pardoned. It may lead one to excessive kinds of forgiveness, which may be bad even for those pardoned, as well as for society as a whole. But clementia is always rooted in reason. It is, we are told, “mental moderation in the power of revenge or leniency of a superior to an inferior in deciding on punishments” (2.3.1). It is thus not the opposite of justice, but the opposite of cruelty, and an essential component of the Stoic principle of humanitas.
Seneca’s treatise reassures those who might be worried about Nero’s regime that the new leader will act gently toward his inferiors. The emphasis on avoiding cruelty is a way of insisting that Nero will not resemble Caligula or Claudius, who killed multiple members of the Senate and other citizens. But from the perspective of those who still regretted the loss of the Republic, Seneca’s treatise is not reassuring at all. Clementia is presented as a virtue that can only be achieved by a person in a superior position of power. It only makes sense for the Princeps, who was the ultimate legal authority in the Roman state. Seneca’s work thus provides a theoretical framework for what was already true in practice, that the emperor was above the law—and therefore had need not of justice (which would imply obedience to a nonexistent higher law than himself) but of mercifulness toward his inferiors. These inferiors have no rights in relation to him and can only hope that he will treat them kindly.
Seneca’s treatise is a strong statement that Stoicism did not necessarily imply hostility to one-man rule. The point needed making, since some of the most famous Stoics of earlier generations had also been defenders of the Republic: the best known is Cato the Younger (95–46 BCE), who committed suicide by disemboweling himself rather than submit to the rule of Julius Caesar. Seneca often writes admiringly of Cato but obviously did not share his strict opposition to the principate. In Seneca’s own generation there were other Stoics in the Roman government who stood up strongly against Nero and in favor of Republican principles: the most important of these was Thrasea, to whom we shall return. Seneca’s nephew Lucan, too, seems to have been a Stoic or at least Stoic fellow-traveler and was eventually an adamant opponent of one-man rule. Stoicism was increasingly seen as a politically resistant movement, and a generation after Seneca’s death, in 95 CE, the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from Italy—a move probably targeted primarily at the Stoics. Seneca was doing important public relations work on his position within the court as well as with the elite general public, assuring the emperor that his philosophy is morally credible enough to give a patina of legitimacy to the new regime, but without posing any political threat to the principate.
Seneca’s tragedies include many scenes that parallel the discussion of clementia in this prose work. There are many Senecan tragic tyrants who describe themselves as above all laws. Our author uses the tragic stage to play out the other side of the story, to imagine exactly what happens, in gory detail, when all-powerful rulers operate without any thought for mercy toward their inferiors. A common sentiment is that the ruler’s power inevitably comes at the cost of being hated: “A man who fears to be hated doesn’t really want to rule,” declares Eteocles in the Phoenissae—a line that echoes the quote from Caligula that Seneca cites with disgust in the On Mercy and On Anger: “Let them hate, as long as they fear.” One of the most shocking examples of lack of clementia in the tragedies comes in the Trojan Women, set after the fall of the city, where Andromache, wife of the dead warrior Hector, is clutching their baby son in her arms and seeking sanctuary at her dead husband’s tomb. She begs the triumphant general, Ulysses (Odysseus), to show mercy toward herself, or if not that, then at least to spare her child. She suggests that a true hero and a true king ought to follow the example of Hercules, who showed mercy to a little boy—to Priam in his childhood. But after a series of heart-wrenching pleas from Andromache, Ulysses refuses: “I wish I could be merciful. I cannot” (763), he says. He gives brutally short orders to the men, who will lead Andromache to slavery and throw her baby from the city walls: “Seize her: she is holding up the Argive fleet” (812). The city has fallen, and the most innocent members of Trojan society—the little boy, Astyanax, and the little girl, Polyxena—are slaughtered without mercy.