We do not know exactly when Seneca composed the Trojan Women: it may have been written before Nero came to power, or it may not. In either case, one can see the play as again a dark twin of On Clemency. In the prose treatise, we are shown how one-man rule can function well, if only the single ruler can act with mercy toward his inferiors. In the play, we see a transition from one government to another that is entirely violent, entirely lacking in either mercy or justice, and in which the innocent are slaughtered. Perhaps Seneca’s devastating depiction of children’s deaths in tragedy was a way of dealing with some of the guilt he felt at having helped to cover up the murder of young Britannicus. The slaughter of children was certainly on his mind and played out in an even more horrible way in the Thyestes.
Nero was apparently pleased with Seneca’s work as major spokesman for the ideology of his regime. He rewarded him lavishly, with gifts of money, villas, and other kinds of wealth. Tacitus comments that, after the elimination of Britannicus, Nero “loaded his best friends with gifts” (13.18), presumably referring primarily to Seneca, especially since he goes on to remark that there were “accusers” who objected to the fact that “men who claimed to be so self-restrained” were actually, “at such a time,” profiting by dividing up “town-houses and country-houses, like loot.” Ulysses in the Trojan Women—the clever strategist who is willing to say or do anything to please the king, win the war, and go home loaded with trophies and wealth—begins to look rather like his creator, Seneca.
SENECA’S WEALTH
Poison is drunk from gold.24
We turn now to one of the most fraught questions about Seneca’s life story: his vast accumulation of wealth under Nero.25 For our purposes, there are three central questions. First, how rich was he? Second, how exactly did he get his money? And third, how can we reconcile his accumulation of wealth and property with the overwhelmingly negative depiction of riches in his writings? The first is relatively easy to answer; the second is harder; the third is by far the most difficult.
It is clear that Seneca was extremely rich. Cassius Dio tells us that under Nero, he accumulated over three hundred million sestertii, a very large sum, as well as a great deal of property, including several houses in Rome and elsewhere, and apparently large areas of land in the prime real estate area of central Rome as well as in other parts of Italy. He may well also have owned land in Egypt (Epistle 77), an important source of revenue, since Egypt was the primary grain supplier to the Empire. It is impossible to translate Roman money with any accuracy into modern currency, since the relative values of different types of object, and the value of labor, was radically different: property values were proportionately less, and, as in any preindustrialized economy, manufactured goods cost more. The ubiquity of slave labor also made the service economy very different. But we can get some idea of the scale of Seneca’s wealth by knowing that a single sestertius could buy two loaves of bread or a jug of wine, and that a legionary in the Roman army, in Seneca’s lifetime, earned 900 sestertii per annum. By today’s standards, then, Seneca was at least a multimillionaire.
Roman society in this period had an enormous wealth and power gap: the elite class was, in general, vastly richer than the mass of the general population. It has been suggested that there was not really anything equivalent to a middle class in Rome in this period; there was nothing in-between the super-rich and the working classes or peasants.26 More recent studies suggest that there were middle-income Romans, but those constituted no more than ten percent of the population: the vast majority of people in the Empire lived at subsistence level or close to it, while the top one and a half percent controlled about a fifth of the total GDP (a proportion that is actually lower than in the contemporary United States but one that still represents a vast socioeconomic gap between rich and poor).27 But Seneca’s wealth went beyond the norms even for the elite. By the latest estimates, the average yearly income for a man in the senatorial class was around three hundred thousand sestertii, and for one in the equestrian class it was less than a tenth of that figure. In this context, Seneca’s wealth was far above the average even in his disproportionately rich social class. Only a tiny handful of people in this period would have had anywhere near this much money and property.28 Seneca’s assets were comparable not to the normal run of wealth enjoyed by the aristocracy, but to those acquired by the freedmen who were the favorite advisors under Claudius, Narcissus, and Pallas.
A detail that is mentioned by Dio, as a mark of his extraordinary conspicuous consumption, is that he ordered five hundred tables made of citrus wood, with legs of ivory, all exactly identical, and he served dinner parties on them. In a world where mechanical reproduction was impossible and everything had to be manufactured by hand, the ability to have matching furniture was a mark of extraordinary wealth. Seneca’s tables were also made of the most luxurious possible materials, ivory from elephant trunks and expensive citrus wood. Moreover, they were an item that only somebody who could afford to throw regular banquets would actually need. Seneca, as this detail suggests, spent much of his money on entertaining. He spent lavishly in order to acquire and maintain his social capital.
Some of the money may have been inherited, since Seneca’s family was already wealthy before his exile; Seneca the Elder, as we have seen, was a successful businessman. Moreover, Seneca’s estates were themselves a source of further revenue, since he would have rented them out while not in residence, and grew produce, especially grapes, on the land (or rather, had his slaves grow it, under his supervision). But a great deal of the wealth seems to have come fairly directly from Nero, who paid Seneca very generously for the work he did for him, as strategist, speechwriter, and spokesman for his regime.
How do we reconcile “Super-Rich Seneca” (Seneca Praedives), as Martial calls him, with Seneca the philosopher, the austere Stoic who sees riches as merely an indifferent thing, albeit a preferable one? Wealth is a common topic in Seneca’s writing, and he never has a good word to say about it; yet he enjoyed, or at least acquired, all its trappings (Fig. 3.5). The question was certainly posed at the time by Seneca’s contemporaries, including a man called Publius Suillius, an informant who developed a personal enmity against Seneca. One of the major ways in which financial corruption was exposed was by quasi-professional informants, who brought legal accusations against people they believed to be indulging in corrupt business practices—for instance, governors who stole funds from the provinces they were supposed to be regulating, a common form of malpractice.29 It is easy to imagine these people as tattletales or worse, but in a system where the gap between rich and poor was so vast, and where there were increasing opportunities for financial corruption, the informants played an essential role in acting as a check on abuse.